Why I love the second amendment..

This is one good way to explain it..

Really hi wi-fi

This blog posting isn’t anything more than some technical stretching and preening to demonstrate that one can make a blog post from in-flight wi-fi.

Streets of Kathmandu

Not my video. But pretty much what I saw.

Requiescat in pace

I did not agree very much with the late Senator Kennedy’s notion of what the good society was; and some of his policy notions such as using tax money to fund the killing of unborn children I find abhorrent. Yet I do not doubt that he loved his country and sought to serve her. Many things he set in motion like OSHA were well inspired, even if they have metastasized into things that he did not intend; but the same could be said, say, of the Iraq war or other conservative schemes. We are all in the same stew together, we Americans of all political stripes. R.I.P. Thank you.

‘76 remembrances

Away back in 1976 – the Bicentennial Year – I travelled with a church youth group – Campus Life – from Boston to Washington D.C. — on a ten-speed bike. It took 7 days to go 500 miles. We had a support crew traveling alongside us with tents, food, etc. It was a super experience. I think this is where I began to truly notice girls, as well.

Jump forward to 1980 – Stationed at Two Rock Ranch in California, I and a buddy rented bicycles to ride the 20 miles or so to the ocean. It just about killed us. Those 20 miles were straight up and down Napa valley hills. ..And I wound up with an adventure at a sheep farm, as well. I digress. That day I got to see Bodega Bay, where the film “The Birds” was shot.

..So today I wind up doing a quick 180 in the roadster and backtracking a block to look at a ten-speed for sale in someone’s yard. 35$ and a stop at a gas station for air later, and I’m back in the saddle.

I have long thought that the military, who sent me in just the first six months of my association with them to exotic places like New Jersey, New York City, Milwaukee, and the North Pole, are the people who gave me the travel bug. But I can look back and see that my experience biking down the East Coast is probably the culprit. Looking at my new ride, I can see in my mind’s eye some pannier bags….and a day trip or two in the countryside of my adopted home state.

Security…

I had a bit of a scare yesterday in Baltimore City heading to a tango event…a group of about 50 motor-scooter and ATV drivers running amok, through red lights and around vehicles lawfully operating…a sort of mobile “wilding.” Popping wheelies alongside minivans with kids, nearly causing a few accidents, carefully negotiating their way past a police car stopped to help at the scene of an accident. Remarkable.

It so happens that long ago in the Reserves I was tasked with editing a rather classified document. My job was basically to take three versions of this thing and make a coherent single version, going to superiors when I needed content clarified or explained. I had to go through a cipher locked door, which required four digits. Somebody else removed a removeable hard drive from a safe, and I attached it to a computer which had been disconnected from even the in-house network, along with the usual lecture about security, blah blah.

So in my hospital work, because of the almighty JCAHO, there are six digits that I have to enter to open a door to get into the room where there are stacks of linen, bedpans, and also some IV solutions. It’s not like somebody can sneak past the nurse’s station to get to the door of the thing.. but rules are rules.

So… six digits to get to a stack of bedpans. Four digits, long ago, to get to a document that dealt with security issues around the harbor.

And yesterday……I saw lawlessness just this shy of violence that was not being checked… Security expert Bruce Schier, whose materials I read, is correct that most security schemes fail because we over-react to non-threats and do not perceive the real threats.

40 years ago…

Man walked on the moon. And I watched it, live, on TV, a grainy black and white image transmitted over a few relays from the lunar surface. My grandfather and father kept hushing me; as I recall.

The lesser known (and better) stanzas..

On the shore dimly seen thro’ the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Progress

The very first electronic computer I ever laid fingers to the keyboard of had a cassette tape for storing programs and had a printer for the output device – no monitor at all. A few years later I saw a primitive Altair, I think it was, with a monitor. You could simulate landing a REM module on the moon with it. The computers I found in the military had obtuse and obscure commands in cryptic fashion; I learned then that the way to becoming a member of the Priesthood that interfaced with the Chip was the way to become indispensable. The closest I ever came to really being in trouble was when I crashed the MILSUPOPDEP (Military Support Operations Department) computer trying to install extra commands. However I dodged serious trouble by showing them how to restore the OS from back up discs. I had to show this to the designated civilian expert. Some files were lost but my putzy little career as a yeoman was not.

So now I have on order a netbook for my travel and tango adventures. It is several orders of magnitude beyond what was available even when my son was a child, playing with a graphics tablet and associated software. It can patch in to a global network with ease, keep me reminded of my schedule, and play my favorite tunes if I am on the backside of a country bar in Argentina and feel the need to tango.

I’m looking forward to a retirement someday when I can just tell the ** thing to go look up ζοεσ in the original Greek and offer commentary to me.

ACLS

So, I’ve had to do my bi-annual ACLS. The older versions of the ACLS were much more stressful to go through, such that the stress induced by the three-day experience was such that it may have kept people who could have benefited from the experience from going through it. Now it is more user-friendly. Some of this is based on the evolving science of cardiac resuscitation and some of this on the pragmatism of getting more people onboard. As well there are new technologies such as automated defibrillators which are even now on non-cardiac hospital floors. When I first went through the experience – it was three days back then – my testing proctor took me through, it seemed, every algorithm on the protocol. At the end the simulation still showed that my “patient” – a simulator dummy – had flatlined. I was sure I had failed. The instructor simply pointed out that sometimes we can do things perfectly well, or well enough, and our patients will die all the same. An important lesson. Today I made an “error” – I did the same yesterday – for treating pulseless ventricular tach with shock-amiodarone-shock-epinephrine instead of shock- epinephrine – shock – amiodarone. I caught my “error” so the proctor congratulated me rather than ding me. Later in the unit I asked one of the Intensivists and a nurse who functions at a practitioner level about this. The consensus seems to be that in the real world the two drugs are typically given almost simultaneously, and my dis-attached state as the simulated code team leader – where I was supposed to be following the “recipe” to the letter – was in conflict with that.

Anyway.. in the real world it’s not like you are the only person there. Only once in ten years or so of critical care nursing have I been alone with a crumping patient, someone whose pulse and blood pressure gave out in an elevator on the way to the Unit from the Emergency Department. But that’s another story…..