In Communicado

Since I’m unable to work as a road medic or firefighter for the next month or two, I’ve taken a position in the communications center, which receives 911 calls and dispatches ambulances for five counties in southeastern michigan, as well as dispatching nine of the washtenaw county fire departments, and receiving a plethora of other less interesting phone services. Sunday night was my first night, and last night my second. I’ve got to say, I’m having a lot more fun with it than I thought. I think that for those of us who grew up with “10 PRINT HELLO; 20 GOTO 1O”, it’s a lot easier to make sense of all the information on the three screens (yeah! 3 linked screens! Would make a great flight simulator!) that are connected to each console.
Of course, every silver-lined cloud is filled with rain. Knowing what I do about computers… and common sense… I can quickly see that there ways to build and configure these dispatch systems so that they would be at least 1.5Lpbns (Leap-Bounds) better than they are now. So it’s a bit frustrating to learn a system that may have been the latest/greatest in 1989, but back here, in good, old 1955… err… sorry 2004, there are much better ways of doing it.

Domestic

Well, I cut the lawn for the first time today with my shiny (dusty now, actually) John Deere riding lawn mower. When I was younger, I thought that was fun. This was more of an exercise in not getting bucked off. I discovered all sorts of new potholes in my yard. Next toy: a Bobcat.
Also, Yahoo has added an RSS News Reader to their list of tools available in My Yahoo. If you already have an account, you can go to the bottom of the page and select, “Choose Content” and add the RSS tool, and then select the feeds you want.

post-op #2, and a new blog site

Had my second post-op appointment yesterday. Everything looks good. Got my stitches out and started mobility and strengthening exercises.

Also, I was dinking around with my home computer last night and have decided to upgrade my blogware. I’m going to attempt to host it at home on my cablemodem connection instead of on the university network, and since it generates little to no traffic, I’m hoping that Comcast won’t notice/care. The “under-construction” blog is here, but don’t bookmark it just yet, I have to decide what address it’s going to have permanently.

The Taxman Cometh

I actually got my taxes done yesterday! An entire 31 hours before the deadline! I think this is a new record for me.

new hardware

Scanned in this copy of one of my xrays yesterday:

Cut and Paste

Had my second knee surgery yesterday afternoon. Back on a brace and crutches, but I have much more confidence that this surgery was successful. I can already do a lot of the exercises that took me weeks to be able to do last time. I have my follow-up pm monday, so I’ll be able to talk to the surgeon then, but his resident said that things went smoothly, and the surgery took the time that it was expected to take (a good sign.) The pain is much more manageable this time around, and I remember a lot of the tricks that took me a while to figure out last time. So… here’s hopin’.

Where in Washtenaw Co…?

I took my GPS with me during my ambulance shift on friday nigh, and had it running (almost) from the start of the shift. So after doing some magic (forcing a square peg into a round hole, actually), I came up with a map of where we were that night. Unfortunately, a static map loses a lot of the GPS data, since so much of it is time-based. So it doesn’t show speeds, timestamps, direction of travel, etc. Anyhow, here ’tis: