Shoe Money Tonight

Occasional ramblings by an anesthesiologist/mother (and sometimes her husband).

Monday, December 24, 2007

In search of a clue

In a blog post on Wired, here is the money quote:

"When I am President, I will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content."

If you can't figure out the difference between legitimate federal authority and the job of a fscking parent, you don't belong withing 1,000 gorram parsecs of the White House.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Quiz

Harder than you think.









Take the Sci fi sounds quiz I received 85 credits on
The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz

How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quizdigital camera ratings

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Sunday, December 16, 2007

Good Working Relationships

Right now I am rotating at a hospital where I spent time working in the ICU. More specifically, I was the ICU resident for two consecutive months covering the surgical patients and vented medical patients in a Med/Surg ICU. I took care of the day-to-day stuff with the surgical patients while the surgeons were in the OR, rounded with the surgical team, talked with the families, helped with vent issues in the medical patients and put in/supervised line placements. I responded with the Rapid Response Team and the code team. I got to know the nurses there very well (12 hr days, five days a week, plus at least 6 hr saturdays for two months will do that). I treated them with respect and earned theirs by the way I treated my patients. Recently, I reaped the benefits of that relationship.

I had a case in the OR, the patient was elderly (over 80 yrs) and was having a routine but not minor procedure. There was a larger than expected blood loss (almost 2L) and the patient required large amounts of fluids and blood products. Given the patient's age, type of surgery and the fluid resuscitation required, the surgeon and I decided that the patient would be better served by spending the night in the ICU rather than on the surgical floor. So as the surgeons started closing, I got on the phone to ICU and asked for the charge nurse. I told her we needed a bed and why. She said to give her five minutes, send someone over for the bed, and call report. As I was wheeling the patient over, I saw the charge nurse. I thanked her and told her I wouldn't have asked if the patient didn't really need the bed. Her response was "I know, that's why I didn't argue with you."

And that is why it pays to treat the nurses with respect. If you do that and they respect you, better patient care can be had by all.

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Monday, December 10, 2007

Christmas in Africa

Too cool to not share.



HT: K-Lo at The Corner

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Perspective; Or, Trusting the Mac Web

For as long as I can remember, Mac users have always been a bit of a close-knit community. Part of this might be because of the Mac's low market share compared to Windows.*. As mainstream companies for years pretty much forgot that the Mac existed, Mac users turned to each other for support. Between a common preference for the care and craftsmanship put into Apple's products, and the camaraderie that stems from talking to other people who also "get it," the Mac community, and now the Mac web, have been a pretty close-knit group.

Combine this with the fact that there are astronomically smaller numbers of system configurations on the Mac side, and you have a Mac web that will catch any bug or issue almost immediately, and probably have a fix for you by the time you've gotten back from refilling your cup of coffee.

When Leopard was released, I waited. Yes, me. I waited. I, who actually ran OS X v. 10.0 as my primary os on my PDQ 266 actually waited. I'm almost never an early adopter on hardware. I am, however, on software. It's easier to do that because: a) Software is cheaper; and b) Any problems will be fixed in a downloadable update.

With Leopard, however, I was forced to wait for an update to The Missing Sync for Palm OS. What I did spend my time doing, however, was reading Apple's discussion forums to see how people had been doing with it.

When you read post after post of people detailing issues and offering fixes, it tends to sour you on it. Then you realize that you are reading the experiences of perhaps a few dozen people. Leopard sold 2 million copies that weekend. In other words, the issues were there, but very few people were having them.

The result of all of this is that if I read about an issue in a "mainstream" tech place before hearing about it on the Mac Web, I get suspicious.

Enter this column in InformationWeek. It talks about Leopard's "Green Screen of Death."

The problems with the article? Well, there are two major ones right from the get-go.

Problem 1: It's not a screen of death. It's a brief flash.

Problem 2: The biggie: This whole article is based on one fsking forum thread on Apple's discussion forums! The "quotes" are just copies from the discussion thread. They didn't even bother getting any actual names or asking any actual questions!

I guess instead of doing journalism now, I could just hang around an auto dealership's service department and write articles on the problems people bring in. Or I could hang around the returns department of Target or some other store like that! Wowee!

The gist of the article is that sometimes weird things happen. The headline, however, is designed to attract attention and get traffic from the Mac Web. And, of course, like idiots, we take the bait. We blog about how stoopid they are, and their traffic goes up. And then we complain that we're doing it while we're doing it.

And then, we start doing juvenile things like TYPING IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE OF COURSE THINGS IN CAPTIAL LETTERS ARE MORE IMPORTANT AND THEY'RE TOO IMPORTANT TO USE ANY SORT OF PUNCTUATION OR EVEN BOTHER USING A SPEL CHEKK BECAUSE WE IS THE SHIZNIT AND U IS JUST 2 DUM FOR ME TO...

...er, yeah.

Whatever.

Did I mention I still haven't caught up on sleep from last week's road trip?

What was I saying?

I'm going to have some cookies now.

/post.




*Although their market share of sales has been hovering from 3-6% (now approaching 12%ish in notebooks), the actual user base has never dropped below about 10 - 12%. Sales figures, after all, include computers that will only ever be used for cash registers or other such devices. Combine this with the fact that Apple's computers also have a much longer useful lifetime. I've never felt the need to replace even a lowest-of-the-low end mac in less that 4.5 years. There have always been a lot more macs in use than people have thought[back]