Any question answered...

So, I have another ridiculous illness? Awesome

Yes, there is a whole range of diseases which can have reduced lung function as a symptom. The most common is COPD, which is an umbrella term covering a variety of causes of reduced lung function. You may get a definitive diagnosis from X-Ray, but you can also have clear X-Rays and still have COPD. On the other hand, if you can significantly restore your peak flow using bronchodilators, you almost certainly have boring old asthma, as COPD is only marginally affected by asthma drugs. As Wikipedia says,

COPD usually gets gradually worse over time and can ultimately result in death

But you can substitute "life" for "COPD" in that sentence :-)

That's only work expenses.

My mum had asthma as a child not as an adult. She grew out of it apparently.

I'm a medical Dorian Gray.

I should've guessed. No doubt you have a separate loyalty card for each of your chosen manufacturers :)

(and @KT_Bee ) try and get referred to the Royal Brompton if poss. Think it's the UK centre for respiratory issues (?), my dad was sent there after getting appalling service from his GP out in the sticks, and they are very good

Can anybody tell me which cranks are these, please:

Thanks.

My university is currently being DDOSed, according to our IT managers' email list - or rather JANET, which provides access to external websites for a lot of universities, is being DDOSed. How come I can still connect to LFGSS when nearly every other domain returns a DNS error?

It all depends on the peering.

Wow I was just thinking the same thing!

Its like internet hackers said - 'no neil, today you shall not work'.

Same problem here. Not sure why they've picked this time to launch an attack, exams are still a few weeks away yet, would have been far more disruptive...

Thanks. I'll see what happens with the x-rays.
I hold most GPs in low regard after previous failures so I tend to seek out private treatment if I have the slightest doubts about their conclusions.

It's probably just the IT guys have fucked up a switch somewhere and are blaming a DDOS attack while they run around frantically trying to fix it. :)

Makes sense, started on Friday ~4pm, pretty sure everyone would have been at the pub...

Sounds very familiar.

FWIW my asthma was controlled by salbutamol from mid twenties to early fifties - I appear to have grown out of it, which coincides with retirement and reduced exposure to students and an inadequately cleaned workshop environment. Got any new potential triggers in your life recently?
As a separate issue, my GP will only prescribe Ventolin, not generic salbutamol - he claims that although the ingredients and dosage are the same, the particle size is smaller, making it more effective.

Riding through the Cali desert in the middle of the night in a skinsuit with the temp near 0 degC. Other than that, not really. Stress, new office perhaps a factor but seems unlikely - it's not like I'm down a mine. My GPs are generally idiots. I never see the same one twice and I typically use them to send me to someone who knows what they're doing rather than their opinion. I had to set up the electronic flow tester for her, for example.

Oddly, I was down a coal mine from age 18 - 27.
In the last decade or so it seemed to be workshop dust (mostly wood and MDF) that was the issue - worse when the cleaning contract was reduced and the daily wet cleaning became once a term.

Can you explain this with a bit more detail (but so much that I don't understand!)?

I had to wait for a damp commute to test this, I didn't expect it to make a difference but it seems to have fixed it.

I had the brake setup so there was fairly little lever throw, I slackened the cable a bit, giving more throw, and it seems to have resolved it.

But there are other variables, I rode the bike down a very big hill during the week dragging the brake a bit, which may have served to bed it all in and could have also been what fixed it.

Either way, relieved.

I'm probably getting most of my harmful stuff from cycling in London air.
I haven't worked with wood or metal since I was early twenties back in Oz.
I've sat in a climate controlled office for the last 10ish years.

Time to inspect the filters in the 'new' office air conditioning unit?

How would I do that? Hmm, maybe an email to a building manager..

Can you explain this with a bit more detail (but so much that I don't understand!)?

The Internet isn't just one big thing. It's lots of smaller networks that talk to each other (by peering with each other) with rules about how to route traffic between them all.

Your university (via JANET) may be peering more closely with the site hosting LFGSS (very likely given the owner's employer which specialises in DDoS protection).

So the traffic between your computer and the LFGSS server(s) may not go anywhere near any of the links/peers that have been saturated by the DDoS. Whilst most other sites you want to visit involve being routed via somewhere that's saturated by the DDoS, and you just get timeouts or DNS lookup failures.

A shit analogy would be the UK road network. If the nearby motorway is hosed then traffic to most of the country is shagged, but you could still get to the house next door easily (=> the local network is ok), a house in the next road (a computer in the office next door), a house in the same town (another computer on campus), maybe the next town (a computer at a company that is served by the same network provider or someone that peers directly with your network provider), but anything further than that (which requires the main roads) is impossible.

(Plenty of people will be along to correct me on this and/or give better explanations. Feel free everyone.)

Thanks! That is interesting.

... a building manager who should at least know if there is a service contract?

Pure speculation on my part.