24-hour smackdown

Apparently, the non-stop EMS calls this last weekend started on Friday the 13th. I worked from 1800 on sunday night to 1930 on monday night and got my butt simply handed to me. From talking to other crews, on saturday night there were Pri 1 calls holding all night, as crews were running into the hospital, handing over patients, and running back out to take the next one. On sunday, our first call was for a rolled ATV. Fortunately, the track ran right next to the road, so we didn’t have to do a wilderness rescue. Unfortunately for her, she was thrown down a 15 foot embankment into a tree and ended up with a shattered pelvis and tibia/fibula. When we got to UofM, we put her into the third resus bay… the other two were taken up by critcal patients from ATV rollovers. Oh, and apparently sunday was also designated stupid-driver day. Going lights and siren, I had two cars race me to get on the expressway, and once I was on, I couldn’t keep up with traffic. The flow-limiter on the ambulance kicks on at 91mph. One car ahead of me was passing people on the shoulder at about 100mph once he saw us get on the road.
But, we did manage to get 20 minutes in the station here and there on sunday night. Unfortunately, I spent it watching Timeline. I want a reimbursement for those two hours of my life. Idiotic characters, horrible directing, pathetic dialogue. Maybe I’ll feel better after I read the book.
After taking just about every other kind of call on monday, I ended my day with a cardiac arrest. Got another good intubation but no joy on getting a pulse back. He did get early defibrillation by PD, but that that only served to shock him from a dysrhythmia into asystole. Reminded me of that grossly-slanted and absolutely rediculous series of articles in USA Today about the failure of the EMS system. “CPR, defibrillators as good as medics”. The good part of the article is that it makes a push for more, easily accessible AEDs. The thing that it ignores is that without followup ALS care and transport, almost none of those patients would survive. This is just another in their brilliant analysis of the failures of the EMS system (see: “A USA TODAY investigation published last year found that even eight minutes is too long to wait for intervention, that lives are lost or saved within six minutes.”) Obviously, the solution is… just drive faster. It makes me wonder if these people ever even rode with an ambulance or fire/rescue crew.
Okay, rant over.
Oh, and I’m in the news… sort of. A tape of a 911 call that I was a calltaker for got FOIA’d by the Jackson Citizen Patriot newspaper. Still wondering if I’m going get subpeonaed for this one.

another one off the list

So it took a bit more than two hours to finish the walk, but we got it done. Tools used: shovel, wheelbarrow, trowel, rake, cold chisel, hammer, rubber mallet, circular saw, masonry wheel, air compressor (to blow off the brick dust, and to pump up the flat tire on the wheelbarrow). Two years in the making and finally a finished product to look at. We’re both very happy with it, and it totally changes how the house looks.

Murphy’s (Law, not Ale)

Wow, what a week. The brakes on the truck started to sound a little funny on wednesday… like something grinding. They still felt and worked fine, though, so I took it about 40 more miles during the course of the week, until I conceded that they were sounding worse, not better. So I took it over to Marie’s folk’s house (where a floor jack and jackstands were accessible), and decided to have a go at replacing my own brakes for the first time. Six trips to Murray’s Auto Parts and a day-and-a-half later, and I had brand new rotors and pads on both front wheels. I’ve not put more than 700 miles on the truck, but I never really checked both brakes fo even wear, either. One side had about 1/8″ left on the pad, the other was wearing unevenly and was worn right into the backing plate… which means the backing plate was wearing right into the rotor. Agh. No go on resurfacing… the rotors had probably been turned before and there wasn’t enough material left on them to do it. To make a long, frustrating story short, I won. We managed to replace the brakes ourselves (Marie tore one apart and put it back together too. Cool!) with some key assistance from both dads, and so far, they’re working great. Now if I could get the engine to run smoothly….
Oh yeah, and my server died a horrible, flaming death on friday. I had just succeeded in installing MythTV, a program whichs basically allows a PC running Linux to act as a Tivo. It worked… for a while. Then it made my hard disk mad and wrote random bits to the primary boot sector, leaving the computer in a total state of fubar. I de-fubar’d it this morning. Recording and encoding video AND acting as my jeffab.org server was probably a little much for it… so I’ve got it doing the exact same thing right now. Probably not the brightest idea, but now I’m curious.

more house stuff

Did some more small homeowner-ish projects over the last couple days… put in a new lockset and bolt receptacle so that the door actually latches when closed. Marie and I worked on putting a new brick walkway down. (Turns out that she has the patience to align and level the bricks, and I have fun chiseling and breaking bricks to fit. Works well.) And while Marie continued to do junk patrol and organization/elimination, I crawled under the house and did some documenting and planning for the forthcoming plumbing refit. Oh… and I shut off the gas going to the old dryer line lying on the floor in the back room.

taking my work home

So I realized that by trying to get out of doing a bunch of setup work to have jeffab.org actually hosted on my home computer, I screwed up some of the weblog posts, like links to pictures and such. So I bit the bullet and now am hosting my own name server in order to do real dns. The problem arises when my cable modem gets disconnected and my IP address from Comcast changes. Then I have to go to the dns registrar, change the nameserver record, and then update my own dns records. I suppose I could use a free-dns service, but I sort of wanted to play with the setup myself.
(The above is basically for myself… so that I can figure out what I did later when I break something else.)