[
animals
random thoughts
]
2002-04-30
Lots of outside work today: David and I did various things outside today. He wheedwacked the path from the deck to the spa, and I scooped another five gallons worth of doggie doo (I also did the same amount yesterday).
David looked for some motors in the barn, so that he can set up one of the remote cameras to pan left & right. He hasn't found the one he was looking for yet, though.
I scrubbed out some old bins and things, including a thing I call the shoe ladder, which is a wooden box with four shelves perfectly sized for our shoes.
Eventually, we want to organize all of our stuff into appropriate bins so that we won't lose track of anything, and we'll be able to find it when we need it. Part of this effort involves saving useful packaging, such as the square buckets that the kitty litter comes in.
I let Minnie into the greater house area today so she could do some exploring. It went quite well, actually. She seemed to enjoy herself quite a bit. I decided to set up another litter box so that the cats will have somewhere to go when we do this (since the cat flap to the outside will be closed (so Minnie doesn't get out and get pregnant)).
I procured a box, cut a small hole in it, and inserted a freshly-cleaned litter pan with new litter in it. We plopped Minnie in there so she'd know where it was and what it was. She wasn't too thrilled, but I hope the clue stuck.
I gave out some tuna to everyone today. They were quite pleased indeed. :)
I've also been doing a lot of laundry, tidying up, and making notes of future stuff to do. Oh yeah, and we ordered a new digital camera for me today. We decided that the mini pencam I got wasn't really worth it, so we'll take it back to Best Buy tomorrow.
That's about it. We're getting a lot accomplished, and it feels good. Lots and lots of projects on the horizon. I'm taking it a day at a time and enjoying the positive progress that I'm making.
[
consume
rants
]
2002-04-29
I got a new digicam! It's a mini pencam, and it can supposedly take much better pictures than the one I've got. I say supposedly because we haven't gotten the thing to work yet.
The manufacturers, in their infinite wisdom, elected not to include a driver file with the thing. Gee. Hmm...
Oh yeah, and if you download the file from their website that claims to have drivers in it, you will find to your dismay (as I did) that there are not, in fact, any drivers located therein.
Sigh.
Anyway, David is a knight in shining armor when it comes to this kind of thing, and he's bravely fought the thing and managed to get it to work on one of his Win2K boxen. He'd rather that it worked on a different box, but we're not quite there yet - it's not working on the second box, not sure why. Somehow, we'll figure it out.
And if it sucks, meaning the picture quality is too lame, we'll take the damn thing back.
It's a bummer that in all this wrangling to try to get the thing to work, we managed to delete all the test pictures we had in it, which is a shame because I had snapped a couple pictures of this HUGE centipede that David unearthed in the yard when he tipped over one of the dog tubs. The thing was like eight inches long, and took many savage blows from a very large rock for David to kill it (I'm so glad I have him around for this kind of thing).
Ah well.
[
animals
]
2002-04-29
Today, we instituted a new punishment: We now have what I call the Kitty Time-Out Box. Junior has been hassling Silver to no end, and we've decided to get more serious about trying to bang some manners into his little triangular head.
The other day, we were sitting watching Planet Of The Apes (new dvd we got) on the couch, and Silver was in my lap. Junior came up, and I thought he was going to sit calmly next to her in my lap. Stupid me - he instead came up, sniffed her, and then *bit* her on the neck. Right in my lap!!! So he was busted for sure.
Anyway, today, when Junior chased and haranged her, I put him in the Kitty Time-Out Box for five minutes. I hope the boredom of his imprisonment had some effect on him. I don't know.
Are any of you experts in successfully disciplining cats? I'd be happy for some pointers.
[
school
]
2002-04-27
Note to self: build chroniclerizerthingie...
that is, a program to keep track of what goes on during my day.
Okie dokie.
[
design
good
]
2002-04-26
Materials science is *cool*: From metafilter, I came across
this bit about a substance called aerogel. It's made by NASA, and is 99.8% air. The photos of it look freaky, as though they were photoshopped. The stuff looks truly ethereal.
Anyway, they're using it to catch comet particles. Way, way cool.
[
design
my site
]
2002-04-24
Daniel is spiffy: He made this thing called
slug so that I can post entries to my weblog from its own application. An interesting thing, I believe...
[
animals
design
my site
]
2002-04-24
New kittens! Yes, that's right, we've got four new freshly-minted
kittens!
One's calico, one's black (or tabbyish) and white, and two are white. No idea on the genders, we're trying to leave them and their mom alone.
Except for the infrared spy-cam we've got trained on her and her latest litter, that is.
Anyone want one?
[
family
]
2002-04-19
Busy. Mom visiting. Elena's birthday party tomorrow. Lots of stuff to do. Headache. Tired.
[
music
]
2002-04-14
Love makes the world go round: ...at least, according to the Powerpuff Girls, it does.
I'm introducing a new feature that I call MP3 O The Moment. I'll be posting an mp3 file now and then, available only for a short time. Eventually I plan to feature all the songs that have ever been my favorite.
The first one is The Powerpuff Girls - Love Makes The World Go Round. It's a cute little song done by cartoon characters, so don't bother downloading it if that isn't your bag.
My favorite part of the song is Buttercup's solo. Maybe I'll change that to be my Windows start sound file. Hmm...
Anyway, I know the sound is kinda tinny. We wrestled with a couple different computers and connections trying to get it to sound better, and we couldn't. I'm tired, and I'm sick of struggling. So it's not great, but it's serviceable.
[
humor
]
2002-04-14
Creepy: I was messing around in CoolEdit (the audio software I used to cut the Elena interview into snippets) and just for fun I tried lowering the pitch of one of the snippets.
This is the result.
It's Elena's voice, but it sounds like an old lady. Bizarro.
[
beauty
design
]
2002-04-14
My crayons arrived! I won the eBay auction for the Crayola Color Mix-Up crayons that I mentioned before in my log. They arrived a couple days ago.
I made a sample sheet of all the colors, and created a crayon page on my website that shows what they look like.
My crayon collection is slowly growing...
And you can be sure that I carefully keep mine separate from Elena's!
[
design
]
2002-04-12
Flash! Aaaaah! Behold and beware, for I have discovered FLASH! Yes, that's right, tonight I created my first monstrosity using flash.
The Elena Sound Generator will cause many seconds of mirth for those who enjoy listening to 2-year-old speech (well, she's *almost* three).
The sound snippets are from a little "interview" I did with Elena a couple weeks back. Enjoy!
[
design
]
2002-04-11
I never knew: that cd's came in
so many funky shapes. Wow.
[
design
]
2002-04-11
All kinds of writing systems: are on display at
Omniglot.
Daniel sent me this link, and it's very cool!
I learned a new word there already: an "abjad" is a consonant-only alphabet.
They have some really neat samples of various alphabets. I particularly like Tai Lue, perhaps because it's so fluidly curvy.
Whoa, they even have the Standard Galactic Alphabet!
There's lots more, go check it out! :)
[
humor
]
2002-04-11
Clever slashdot comment: This is from the thread:
Blizzard/Vivendi Files Suit Against Bnetd Project.
I thought it was funny, and couldn't pass it up:
Once this law is passed pockets in clothing will be made illegal because it's clear (even though I know nothing about clothing) that their main purpose is to help people steal things and these pockets really have no legitimate purpose besides that that I can see.
[
cognition
good
]
2002-04-11
Oliver Sacks in Wired: I'm a big fan of Oliver Sacks, so I was happy to come across
this article in Wired about him. It's kind of long, but pretty good. (via Follow Me Here)
[
rants
]
2002-04-11
Confusion: Daniel has alerted me that I'm confusing residents with medical students. Okay, they're different. My point is still the same.
Let me clarify: it is unfair to use people as teaching objects without their INFORMED consent. As in, identify to the person that you've never, say, performed a spinal tap before, and give them the option of having someone more experienced do it.
Some may say that no one will ever consent. I have two rebuttals to that: A) bullshit, and B) so what if they do? That just means you have to be more creative... it doesn't justify practicing on unwilling people. And a person who doesn't know they're being used for practice by a person who isn't adequately skilled, CANNOT be willing if they do not know.
It doesn't matter if the practitioner involved is an experienced doctor, a resident, a medical student, a nurse, a nurse aide, or other allied health professional. The patient has a right to know the skill level of the practitioner. PERIOD.
And no, you don't have to be ridiculous about it - "Hello Mr. Patient, I'm about to take your blood pressure. I've only done this 7,348 times before. Are you comfortable with me doing this procedure on you?".
I'm talking about procedures that carry a significant risk of pain or having to be re-done by a more skilled person anyway. Like things involving puncturing, or vaginal exams, for instance.
My hands are tired and I'm cold. I'll stop there.
[
mammalog
]
2002-04-11
A milestone: Yesterday, Elena called me a dork.
She's not even three yet. Geez.
Her new thing is to say "no way" instead of just "no". At one point several months ago, she went through a brief "nope/yep" phase, too. Odd.
I sent out some invites for her birthday party yesterday, and gave most of the rest to Spencer to hand out to people he sees in person.
I got balloons, too, and party hats, and paper plates, and some party favors. And candy for the piñata.
The birthday party theme is the Powerpuff Girls, by the way, which Elena calls "the Powerguff Girls". I'm going to make the piñata in the shape of the big villain from the show, a green monkey named Mojo Jojo.
I also ordered the cake. We were at Walmart last yesterday, and after I ordered the cake, the bakery lady just kept talking and talking and talking.
It was bizarre - we couldn't escape the vortex! Minutes passed. She decorated like five separate cakes while we were standing there. I worked at making my nonverbal "please let us go" gestures as obvious as possible, but she didn't pick up on it. The ice cream was starting to melt...
Finally, we escaped, but SHEESH!!! What's with these people who are totally incapable of telling when you're ready to end the conversation and are starting to sidle away from them, and they just jabber along, never stopping until you have to be rude or make up an excuse for why you have to leave *now*.
And the thing was, she's a nice lady. She just doesn't know when to quit, is all. Sigh.
[
my site
]
2002-04-11
Er. I redid my website. That is,
the home page. Not this page yet, obviously.
In the void, you can see some ideas of things I'm thinking of adding to my site later.
First I have to work on my database content management thingie, though.
I'm tired. I've been wrestling with those dang tables and I actually even used a style sheet this time.
I think I'll go outside and warm up for awhile. Yeah.
(yes, I still have tons more updating to do)
[
books
rants
]
2002-04-09
Doctors aren't perfect: Obvious as this may be, sometimes people need to be reminded. The new book
'Complications': An Uncompromising Look at Medical Fallibility (link is to an NYTimes review thereof) covers this subject well, according to the review.
This looks like something I should read. I hope that it doesn't turn out to be just a collection of the author's pieces for the New Yorker, only longer. Feh. I don't think I'll buy it - I'll just read it in the bookstore...
And what's with the florid prose of the book reviewer? Yeesh. It's not so much the fancy words, it's that the same person used the word "milleniums". It's "millenia", dude. C'mon, get with the program. (I suppose the lesson is that writers are fallible too?)
Here's a quote that kind of gets to me:
Thus, in ''Fallibility,'' the reader confronts the sobering fact that physicians must learn, and that learning, even in the best organized, most expertly supervised environment, involves mistakes. Alas, some patients will be harmed. Worse yet, the poor, the uninsured, the most disadvantaged populations suffer the most, since it is for these that physicians in training bear the greatest amount of unsupervised responsibility. All this we may find revolting, but in the current system no viable alternative is in sight. ''We want perfection without practice,'' Gawande writes. ''Yet everyone is harmed if no one is trained for the future.''
I sense resignation that this is the way things are and such they shall ever be. This just doesn't strike me as acceptable.
If the current level of supervision for new physicians is inadequate, why do we not increase it?
Isn't this an obvious way to decrease the unnecessary suffering of patients?
For some reason, I can't see that anyone is thinking this way, besides me. It all comes down to money, I suppose. Essentially, some lives are worth more than others.
I've heard some horrible stories about really idiotic mistakes that are made with patients, and often the patients don't even know. Those that know many times don't bother to sue.
This is ridiculous. Is a standard of care so damn difficult to formulate? The stakes are pretty high - we're talking professionals who have people's lives in their hands on a daily basis.
And sometimes a "bad result" of death, it could be argued, is more merciful than a lifetime of debilitating pain and suffering.
I don't know what the answer is. But I'm wondering... could computers help?
Wouldn't it be spiffy if doctors were able to quickly look up the success rates for various treatments that they're considering? If they could quickly and unobtrusively consult with others in their field with more experience?
What if you had a set of weblogs, chatrooms, and such where questions could be (anonymously) posed, where other physicians could be listening and offering clueful feedback?
Oh, sorry, that would tend to dent the theory of doctor as God. Ok, yes, I'm getting a bit snarky here, but I don't think I'm out of line in suggesting that the profession suffers from an overdose of arrogance in too many cases.
You know what I want to do? I want to do *something* to help the average person get the kind of care that relatives of doctors get. (Guess how many mistakes are considered "acceptable" for one Inside the Circle in such a manner?)
I want to sit in waiting rooms of public hospitals and hand out flyers with the Patient's Bill of Rights on them, with the part about the right to refuse care by residents highlighted. If people knew they were being practiced on (as in "not fully skilled"), do you think they'd stand for it?
Hey look, this turned into a rant. The point is that the current system isn't working, but no one has a vested financial interest in making it work.
The people who are damaged unnecessarily by the system as it stands now deserve more than a shrug and a "Sucks to be you".
If saying that makes me a radical, then I guess I just hope that I have some company.
[
rants
]
2002-04-07
Humans were not meant to have litters: I feel sorry for
this family. Geez. Another mega-litter of babies, six this time.
Just for the record, when I run the world, people who refuse to consider selective reduction will only be allowed to get tiny, tiny amounts of fertility medicine. This is crazy - they *had* to have been able to tell that she had six follicles ripening eggs (with ultrasound). There's a big difference between one ripening follicle and six...
If people are going to go headlong into such idiocy, I don't want *my* tax money to go to help cover their hospital bills (or my insurance premiums). There are too many people struggling along with the number of kids they can have naturally (sometimes _zero_), to justify subsidizing these aberrations.
It's like a freaking circus show.
[
humor
]
2002-04-07
Heh, cool. I just noticed that
a thread on a discussion site about what grosses nurses out reached a rating of 7.7 points on blogdex. Woo hoo! That one's mine, baby.
That is, I stumbled across it, loved it, and posted it to metafilter. And people liked it. And now it's propagating. Cool!
[
the net
]
2002-04-05
Add to rotation: The Vocabula Review is a spiffy journal about English usage and such.
[
weblogs
]
2002-04-05
Nother nifty blog: Lagniappe is about science, business, and culture. Lots of stuff about medicine, it looks like so far. Cool!
Here's a quote I just found that I really like:
As for the second reason, really big discoveries usually start out as an odd or irritating thing you can't explain. Many people ignore these, and that's usually the thing to do if you're trying to get something else done. But it's also the thing to do if you never want to win a Nobel. Hitting the right anomalous result, realizing it for what it is, and having the nerve and tenacity to follow up on it are the things the really great scientists do. It's what Pasteur meant by fortune favoring the prepared mind.
This one's ripe to add to my regular rotation.
[
mammalog
]
2002-04-02
Elena amazes me yet again: She's not quite three (will be in three weeks, though), but she's brilliant and she picks stuff up *really* quickly.
Yesterday we had a really nice visit. We worked on several tool-using and building skills, to wit:
- she helped me put together two tables, learning quickly and becoming adept at unscrewing the nut on each leg, then removing the washer, putting the leg bolt through the holes, and attaching the washer and screwing on the nut
- she learned how to use a hammer to help me re-hammer some nails in the deck that had popped up. It was hilarious watching her giggle and bounce with glee every time she found a nail that needing hammering. Her aim wasn't so good, but she did very well overall.
- she pushed the buttons on the microwave to heat up her mac & cheese. She can't read yet, but soon she'll figure out what the numbers are...
- she helped me fill up the bird feeders. She loves doing anything involving a scoop.
Okay, it may not seem that monumental. But overall, I have noticed that she is much more directable (meaning she'll listen and do what you ask instead of just whining / screaming / getting pissed off), and when she gets frustrated and says "I can't do it", she will try again (and often succeed) if you gently encourage her.
I'm just really impressed and proud of her. I look forward to teaching her how to use power tools and create her own projects when she gets older. I'm already sort of planning a big playhouse for her in the back of my head. I'm sure there's lots she can do to help...
(Don't worry, I'm paranoid about safety - I won't let her get hurt. Well, I'll do my absolute best, which is pretty damn good.)
It struck me how vociferous she is about protecting her job when she's got a specific task that's *hers*. I wonder if this is a general survival tactic of young children - this powerful yearning to make themselves useful.
I mean, thinking in evolutionary terms I imagine that in a tribal group, children who make a point of being as useful and helpful as possible probably ensure that they get fed well. Maybe. I dunno. Just brainstorming.
Some notes on how she speaks now: she says "gotfer" instead of "forget" or "forgot". I think she got this from a kid at school, because she used to say it correctly. It's kind of cute (I know, I know, I go *gaaaaaaack* inside my head when I realize I've turned into one of _those_ parents - one who thinks their child's mispronunciations are cute. How insufferable! Ugh. Anyway, I'm confident it will pass. I will not encourage it, that's for sure).
She also uses "don't" as a universal negator. She'll say "He don't wants it". When I correct her, she says it properly, but I don't want to hammer on her every time she speaks that way - she'll internalize the rule eventually.
In general, things are going well with Elena & me, and I'm really looking forward to her birthday. We're going to have lots of fun! My mom is coming into town to visit for the occasion, and I'm really *really* looking forward to it.
[
humor
]
2002-04-02
Daniel's latest misadventure: He took a weekend in the Poconos at the
Penn Hills Resort, which turned out to be, uh, less than what he imagined.
He didn't really stay there - he got his money back after taking those pictures...
[
humor
]
2002-04-01
Google's new technology! Daniel sent me a link to Google's April Fools' Day joke -
all about their PigeonRank [tm] system. Snicker, snicker.
