Category: observations

modern medicine

pacemaker_hand.jpg My father had one put in this morning and after a numbing shot and a local anesthetic, they cut a flap of skin, inserted the device, threaded the wires through a vein into the heart, and closed it up…. My father-in-law had his tonsils removed on the deck of the carrier he was serving on (the Lexington, the Yorktown, or the Franklin, I don’t know which) and washed it down with a cup of coffee.

Did you know that pacemakers were installed under local anesthetic? Me neither. pacemaker_hand.jpg

My father had one put in this morning and after a numbing shot and a local anesthetic, they cut a flap of skin, inserted the device, threaded the wires through a vein into the heart, and closed it up.

Wow. My father-in-law had his tonsils removed on the deck of the carrier he was serving on (the Lexington, the Yorktown, or the Franklin, I don’t know which) and washed it down with a cup of coffee. I’m not made of that kind of stuff.

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a comment

It’s really slow (I have an old machine, true, but I suspect GS is not asking as much as the nth tab in Safari or a QT movie and those work OK).

…It might be worth talking to one or more of the big seed companies (Territorial or Burpee) and get an SKU listing that you can convert to XML.

I wanted to leave some comments on a software program to manage garden planning but couldn’t, for some reason.

I’d like to try something like this, but I’m not sure if this is the right app. Couple of observations:

  • It’s really slow (I have an old machine, true, but I suspect GS is not asking as much as the nth tab in Safari or a QT movie and those work OK). Even text entry is slow. And those fonts . . . . yuck. I feel like I’m back in OS 9/Classic mode.
  • I had trouble getting the app to work with even the simple tutorial. I found I had to enable internet access before the selection menus would work
  • I would like to organize/manage a garden with 3 raised beds (4′ x 10′) but I don’t see how I do that. What kind of garden has height as a measurement?
  • It might be worth talking to one or more of the big seed companies (Territorial or Burpee) and get an SKU listing that you can convert to XML. Or maybe one exists thru USDA?

I would like to make this work, and if I was a coder, I would take a look at fixing some stuff. But alas, that is not an area where my many gifts are apparent 😉

Good luck and let me know how it goes.

your free press at work

CAFFERTY: Interesting, isn’t it, all those 11,000, 12,000 pages of documents released today…. The fact that Hillary Clinton was in the White House the day Monica Lewinsky got the stain on her dress.

Calling it panty-sniffing doesn’t begin to cover it.

It doesn’t quite come through in the transcript, but the disgust was palpable.

CAFFERTY: Interesting, isn’t it, all those 11,000, 12,000 pages of documents released today. What’s the first thing that the press corps satisfied their curiosity about? The fact that Hillary Clinton was in the White House the day Monica Lewinsky got the stain on her dress. That moved on one of the wires that I read about at 3:00 this afternoon. Amazing.

[From Cafferty]

The public was never as interested in that story as our constitutionally-protected journalists were.

why would you say a thing like that?

In case you missed it, Hillary Clinton (D-Entitlement) thinks that she and Sen McCain (R-Whichever Way the Wind Blows) are qualified for the job, and Obama isn’t.

Whatever her answer, it would tell us something we need to know: either that her doubts about Obama are so serious that she would not be willing to support the nominee of her own party, or that she would support someone she thinks is unfit to serve, or that she does not believe a word she said about Obama, and is willing to impugn a fellow Democrat’s fitness to serve as President because her own interests matter more to her than her party’s or the nation’s.

In case you missed it, Hillary Clinton (D-Entitlement) thinks that she and Sen McCain (R-Whichever Way the Wind Blows) are qualified for the job, and Obama isn’t.

Whatever her answer, it would tell us something we need to know: either that her doubts about Obama are so serious that she would not be willing to support the nominee of her own party, or that she would support someone she thinks is unfit to serve, or that she does not believe a word she said about Obama, and is willing to impugn a fellow Democrat’s fitness to serve as President because her own interests matter more to her than her party’s or the nation’s. [From Crossing The Threshold]

I’ll take judgment over experience every time.