health care adventure part 2

After they gave her something for the pain they started to prep her for surgery. Once they had decided what was wrong I was kinda surprised how fast they got her in the operating room. The only hold up was waiting for the operating room to clear. Apparently there was another woman in with the same problem. While they were prepping her for surgery I decided to I really should call family to let them know what was going on. Frankly if we weren't borrowing my sisters phone, who's on a mission, I don't think I would have called anyone till I got home at about 2 that night. They no longer have pay phones in hospitals. Also I was really disappointed with the talk time on my sisters cell phone. Having to explain what was going on and then providing update I had to start cutting people off because I had used up a full charge. Course it probably didn't help I was on the 1st floor of a large 7 story building built into a hill.

Next the nature of a persons hospital stay is entirely dependent on the nurse. The first nurse was great. Helpful, understanding of Kristin's pain there when she needed to be but left her alone when she needed to be sleeping. The next nurse talked to my 27 year old wife (Okay she could pass for 19) like she was 2, hard of hearing and had severe learn disability. She was constantly asking if she had gone peepee our poot. Then they were waking her up every hour to take blood pressure and pulse. It got pretty ridiculous.

It the end for one rather simple operation, and less than 48 hours in the hospital the total cost was $28,000. Of that less than 6,000 was for the operation and of that about 3,500 for 4 doctor including the anesthesiologist. I have no idea what the other 22,000 was for. It certainly wasn't for the food, but at least the wifi was free.

health care adventure part 1

So two weeks ago Sunday morning at 2:05 am to be exact Kristin wakes up with an unbearable pain in her left side. I assume it's gas and get her various anti gas medication. A call to an on call doctor was less than helpful. She suggested it was found ligament pain(common pregnancy problem) or a kidney stone neither really fit the symptoms well. Well it wasn't gas or round ligament pain or even a kidney stone, all of which would probably be less painful. Monday afternoon she calls me after a brief lull in the pain to tell me the pain is back and it's time to go to the doctor. So I drive her to the hospital call her obstetrician to say she's in pain and dying (okay not dying but Kristin had made several request for a blow to the head to render her unconscious) ect. ect. So they take her in and do what obstetricians do and ultrasound her. They look at the babies and and measure there heads and look at their heart beats. It has determined that the babies are fine and were in no way involved in the pain. Now while they're sitting around bewildered she's literally vomiting because of the pain. So they send her up to the specialist, and they do what special obstetricians do best. . . ultrasound her with a really nice ultrasound. So they measure the babies heads and legs and finally after having to take unbearable pain breaks, they decide look at were the pain is coming from. This was after 30 min at the hospital the first attempt to actually diagnose the cause of the problem. So she finds this big gnarly looking blob. And they go back to looking at the babies. Then the doctor comes in and look at the blob and they turn on the Doppler ultra sound and see that the blob has no blood flow. Problems found. 1) Her ovary was the size of a orange 2) and most important it was twisted and had no blood flow. So they take her down to the recovery room because they were out of space and prepped her for surgery. And 3 hours after going to the hospital they finally give her something for the pain.

I'm sure my many faithful readers have been wondering why I haven't written any new posts in a while. Okay so maybe all both of them just thought I nothing to say. I did in fact have something to say however, but my wife swore me and my immediate family to secrecy until the end of the 1st trimester. And when your wife is pregnant with twins, it's the only thing on your mind for any length of time. But the gag order has been lifted and I can vent my deepest inner thought in a medium that is viewable to all the world.

1st When people ask are you joking
I would never joke about twins.
2nd Fertility drugs
No my wife just enjoys being difficult

The looming weight of fatherhood is preeminent in my thoughts, but there is a great deal of comedy surrounding me.
Examples
My wife can no longer tolerant mint, mint tooth paste, or mint gum. Luckily there are alternative flavors of toothpaste on the market.
People's odd reaction when I refer to the fetuses as thing 1 and thing 2, apparently there is little appreciation for the great works of Dr. Seuss.
I recently found out that my nearly 90 year old grandmother, whose sense of tack has been completely lost, is probably a better secret keeper than the rest of my family. We told my immediate family about a month ago, but held off telling everyone else because of the high risk nature of twins. I'm pretty sure almost everyone told at least one person. For those that managed to contain there excitement thank you; everyone else . . . eh it's no big deal.
My sister got pregnant 2-3 weeks earlier, but I still managed to one up her, and since there twins they'll probably be born sooner
We're not going to find out the gender, and it drives my mother in-law nuts because she can't plan for boys or girls

So if anyone has any advice on how not mix up identical twins, and a place that sells double strollers let me know

I'm a rebel . . . a sneaky one

So if you can't tell from My previous post, I really don't like the encryption software they put on my school owned laptop. It slowed down my computer (alot), was generally annoying, completely unwarranted and it fubared my machine.

They managed to bring my computer back from the dead, but as is common with such things, not without some issues cropping up. For example my documents folder had become hidden and it wouldn't let me unhide it, and windows picture viewer was really slow ( I could load photoshop faster).

So I backed up everything onto my other older computer just in case.

Couple of week later I got adventurous and turned the sleep function back on because hibernation was just to slow. In short the same thing happens again. It goes to sleep, freaks out when it wakes up, and won't boot. I get looking online and it turns out the software is incompatible with Vista's hybrid sleep. Turn out when my university's IT guys put this software on my machine, and should have disabled the "hybrid sleep" but didn't. In 2 min. on the companies web site I figured out a problem that they probably still don't know about. This time the file system was completely corrupted. With a lot of work and some special software they might have been able to recover my files, but I had backups so I really didn't care.

So I had a choice I could 1: take in my computer, explain their incompetence and need to research their supported products better, insult there parentage, accuse them of buying a degree from a shady internet site that has since been shut down, and present them with the long and labor intensive task of fixing my computer with the understanding that it will run flawlessly when it is returned, or 2: throw off this buggy cryptographic oppression by decrypting the hard drive myself, and begin a computational new life with a fresh install of Windows that I can put to sleep with out fear of corruption from my bane called PGP.

I'd have preferred an option #3 that took in the best parts of 1 and 2, namely the name calling and then not having the encryption software. I doubt after calling them names they'd let me ignore school policy.

So I have rebelled; by chosing option 2 I refuse to conform; I'll no longer be at the mercy of incompetent IT departments; I will be the master of electronic domain; I can mess up my computer all by my self and need no help from anyone else to do it; I'll stand up and let my voice be heard . . .strike that . . . I'll be very careful not to let them know I'm braking the rules.

Whole disk encryption for dumbies?

A case study in the pit falls of whole disk encryption and how it can be real pain.

After countless news stories of laptops lost while filled to the brim with juicy patient and employee data our UAB wise bureaucracy has leapt into action. Now mind you, the less informed might wonder why personal information was being stored in such a portable form as a laptop, and why such a tantalizing piece of electronic convenience was left unguarded. No, my university has in its wisdom declared that all university laptops be fully encrypted with university issued software.

Why should that involve a lowly grad student who's research will never involve any private data? Why should this affect the hundreds of researchers who would never have non anonymized data? Well aparently the univerity is also worried about some one stealing our scientific data too. Frankly as a scientist I can barely make a living with it; what would a common thug do with it? We're NHI funded anyways so any papers we write about the data is pubic access within 6 months.

So why the rant? Well, six month ago the people who have graciously offered to pay for my education under a federal training grant program asked me if I wanted a free laptop. Well duh, my faithful Toshiba is showing its age. Because my computer is university owned I have to go bring it in to have it encrypted. Mind you I don't keep any data on my machine for convience; instead I just remote desktop my machine at school. That machine has all the software I need and access to a shared network drive for the lab. But the university insists that all my mp3s, family vacation pictures and saved half-life2 games are safe should my computer be stolen.

I also happen to be ward clerk and keep some sensitive information on my computer too, but they didn't know about that. So in part to keep things safe and in part to play around with some freeware I had created a hidden encrypted partition with Truecrypt that I doubt the FBI could have cracked. So frankly I had things under control.

But, I aquiessed to their demands and bring my computer in to be encrypted. Three days later, after some confusion about my already encrypted partion, I get my computer back on a friday. Sunday morning at 7:20 am (yes it's early) my computer goes to sleep (not fair I wanted to sleep too). I turn it back on for the next meeting and enter my password and it crashed, the full enchalada, bluescreen, something about a memory dump, and it resets. Odd, but it reboots and the encryption software asks for my password. Then, windows declares my boot record is fubared and it needs the windows disk. Now such an catastrophe has been anticipated for. Windows can repair itself, as a Dell it has recovery partion that is bootable, once the boot record is repaired windows can use a restore point if more than just the boot record is fubared. BUTT, all of this is worthless to me becuase booting from the window disk won't allow it to read my fully encrypted hard drive and I can't get to the Dell recovery partition (als because of the encryption).

Good news I'm not fixing it, bad news it's going to take the university guys a few days to make an image of my hard drive (for safety), decrypt it (can take 24+ hrs), fix windows (this is the short part), and then reencrypt my hard drive.

Next time I ingnore the emails.

To honk or not to honk?

First, a little background. A large number of people in the state of Alabama are unable to merge properly. Instead of finding a gap and matching speed like any sane, intelligent, or generally not stupid person they pull up right next to you or directly in your blind spot and wonder why they can't move over. Or they try to merge going 10 mph slower or faster than traffic. To further complicate the mess there are a large number of last second mergers that not only slow down traffic but when the try it in peoples blind spot it makes for a very dangerous habit.

Today I was driving to school at around 10 (because I can, and to avoid rush hour). I move over to the right lane about a mile before my exit and as I drive by an on ramp I catch a glimpse of a car in my blind stop. I saw a little yellow and thought it was a cab. I was a little ahead and so give it a little bit of gas. Now mind you it's 10 and traffic is light. I was following a car and so ahead of me there wasn't a lot of space but there was no one behind me for 2/3 a mile. Instead the car next to speeds up just enough to pull up right next to me. Now he's running out of lane and right after that the intersate goes over a short bridge. This guys running out of space. He pull a little bit forward and starts moving over forcing me to slam on my brakes. I was about to honk my horn. Because if you don't tell them they're stupid they'll never learn. Turns out the yellow on the car was the sheriff's logo on the sqaud car of a policeman talking on his cell phone. I thought better of it. Instead I yell and wave my arms and rant and write a blog post about it. I would feel much better if I'd honked my horn.

So this brings me to my survey question. If you get cut off by a cop (no lights or sirens), in one of those hey you idiot learn to drive moments, not one of those please don't hit me moments, do you honk your horn?

Spike's awesome chocolate cream cheese cookies of awesomeness. . . Did I mention I think they're awesome?

First, let me explain how I came about the creation of my very own, one of a kind, cookie recipe. Oddly enough it all begins with cinnamon rolls. When ever I make homemade cinnamon rolls, I make homemade frosting for them. I take a glob of butter and mix in powdered sugar until it looks right, and then add some milk and vanilla. I generally avoid measuring while cooking. As a scientist most of what I due all day involves measuring. I digress. I like cream cheese frosting better. Same thing but you replace some of the butter with cream cheese. As I was mixing in the powdered sugar, I had a flash of inspiration. When I substitute cream cheese for butter it makes frosting better. mmmmm cheese cake. I put lots of butter in cookies. mmmmm cookies. Hey I could put cream cheese in cookies. So without further introduction I give you my masterpiece.

1 stick butter
1 8oz package of cream cheese
2 eggs
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tspn vanilla
Mix
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tspn salt
1/2 tspn baking soda
5 Tblspn Baking coco
mix again
add 3/4 bag of milk chocolate chips (it has been suggested, but not tried, for those who like dark chocolate that use of dark chocolate chip would work quite well)
mix some more
cook 350 for about 12 minutes (preferably on a baking stone)

May this recipe bring you peace, happiness, and . . . something else good.