I’m sorry, but there’s not enough air in here for everyone. I’ll tell them you were a hero.

I had an idea to translate this idea into photographs and tell a story within a limit of 3 photos (a generous 3000 words if we’re going by the standard exchange). I took the first two photos fairly quickly but the 3rd took me a long time to organize the scene (and get a participant). During some time off a couple weeks ago I found the time to finish the trio of photos and complete the tale.

Click on the photo below to see the whole story

An older couple accompanies a woman on a stretcher with hematemesis and a severely distended abdomen into room 9.  She’s legally blind and keeps asking if they are in the room.  The old man continually assures her with a soft “I’m here, mom.”  I consider the overflowing landfills briefly as my non-latex glove count hits double digits in an hour.  Another bout of black vomit snaps me back to reality.  Mother Earth can take the hit tonight.  The nurse readies an NG tube while I wipe off the patient’s chin with a warm wash cloth and tell her she looks pretty again.  She smiles.

Every time I walk past room 20 I hear a woman sobbing into the phone.  She was out celebrating tonight and a dozen margaritas later she woke up on a stretcher with a fractured tibia and fibula from tripping over a curb in a parking lot.  Somewhere between the bar and the hospital she’s lost her purse, her clothes, and her self respect.  All she can do is apologize to her mother on the phone through sobbing breaths, over and over.

The hours pass by.  A 22 year old woman has an abscess under her eye; the doctor decides to drain it with a needle instead of a knife because he doesn’t want to cut up a young girl’s face.  A 27 year old male has a seizure because he stopped taking his medicine; he says his doctor never gave it to him.  A woman in room 10 watches hospital security put restraints on her husband so he doesn’t roll off his stretcher or hurt someone.  An 84 year old man with dysphasia (he can’t speak) watches in silent pain as a nurse tries to get an IV started for the third time.  An old man tells jokes to his wife and the assistant who is setting up for an EKG; the only interruption of his smile is every few minutes when he’s curled up and clutching his chest in pain.

The Emergency Department showcases the extremes of the emotional spectrum – the best and the worst of human nature.  In one bed is a 27 year old female with cuts on her wrists who washed down all the pills in her medicine cabinet with a bottle of vodka – 20 hours later she wakes up long enough to ask to go to the bathroom and then passes back out.  Two rooms down is a man with Alzheimer’s, cursing at the nurses for trying to remove his shirt.  His wife tells me that half the time he doesn’t remember his name, but he always remembers how to swear.  She tells him she loves him as she calms him down.  They’ll be together forever.

When I drive away from the ER that night Loveline is on the radio.  It’s some girl complaining that her boyfriend doesn’t try hard enough in bed.  The world’s problems seem trivial.

I became an EMT last year and as a part of the course I had to work a twelve hour shift in the emergency department. I wrote this essay for the class, but it seemed like something to share here also. Read out of context it may sound like I didn’t enjoy the night, but that was definitely not the case – I had a great time and learned a lot. I would definitely volunteer to work there again if they had the room.

I stayed up late a few nights ago and wrote a script to raise an alert when something has changed. On its first run the script will recursively walk a directory tree hashing each file and storing the hashes in the directory (in an md5sum compatible formatted file). On subsequent runs it will begin tracking new files automatically but it will also print messages for missing and changed files. By saving the checksums in each directory it becomes portable – you can copy a directory somewhere else and still be able to verify nothing changed (a quick md5sum -c checksums.txt will let you know).

By default the script only prints messages when it sees something fishy so it’s perfect to drop into cron and it uses exit statuses so it’ll work for nagios too. I’ve been running it for a few months and have found a couple files that have changed – nothing critical yet but it’s nice to know it’s there.

I can look at them any time, and there are a few on flickr that other people can look at, but what about people that aren’t tech savvy or are really busy and get caught up in the daily grind?

I was thinking, the answer can be a really simple script running from cron, say, weekly. It picks a random photo from a directory and emails it to a group of people. That’s it. The idea is:

• it’s low tech compared to RSS feeds and social networking sites. This “just works” with the tools people (potentially, low-tech people) are already used to using.
• in a similar vein, commenting and discussion are built in if you feel like it.
• it’s focused on the people on the CC list. Sending out an old photo that is relevant just to those people has a lot more effect than one scrolling by on flickr. It’s got a personal touch.
• it’s automatic. You wake up Monday morning, drag yourself to work, and there is a photo from 15 years ago in your inbox and you can laugh about how bad your hair was. Awesome.

So, I thought I would try it and cooked up audreytoo. Basically, you seed a directory with copies of the pictures you want to send out, add the script to a cron job, and it does it’s thing. There are a couple other features in the script that you could look at if you want to get fancier.

I realize there is some irony in using an automated script to say “I’m thinking of you” but as long as I’m on the CC list it’s still true. Anyway, I’m sharing the code in case anyone else can find value in it.

When I install an application I’m stuck with the version I get unless I happen to check the Android market, go find the application again, and attempt to reinstall it. There is no indication that an update is available until after I’ve clicked the “Install” button again at which point it explains it will replace the existing installation.

In this first wave of applications for the G1 a lot of developers either skipped some features or avoided adding some final polish in their rush to be first in the store. Now their application is available to everyone and they have no (built-in) way of keeping people up to date.

When I see interesting applications with some complaints in the comments I’m tempted to hold off installing them because there might be updates in a few days and I’d rather have the new versions (there’s no way I’m going to be reviewing all my apps and checking for new versions). That’s ridiculous!

In an attempt to fix this oversight several applications have added code that does its own checks for updates. If this is the route developers are forced to take we’re looking at bigger downloads taking up more space on our devices, additional bugs since everyone has to write the script themselves, slower devices with less usable RAM, and additional security bypasses (the applications with update scripts in them require permission to access the internet and start when the device starts).

Automatic updates should have launched with the market to save developers’ time and keep people up to date. As it stands now, I guess I’ll add it to my Christmas list for Santa Google.

What we mail back consists of the anonymous ballot, a secrecy envelope, and an outer envelope. The outer envelope has a bar code which identifies who is voting and it also requires a signature on the outside of the envelope. Once the fact the person has voted is counted (note: not what they voted) the outer envelope is discarded and anonymity takes over.

I’ve never liked having to sign the outside of the envelope. It’s always seemed like one more way someone could rip off a signature relatively easily.

Is it that big of a deal though? We sign all kinds of stuff and my general attitude has been that no one really looks at signatures these days anyway. Mix that idea with other people coming to the same conclusion, add my general laziness and I guess I let my signature slop around on my ballot envelope. Also, apparently they actually look at those. I got a letter in the mail today that said:

We were able to match your signature and your ballot was counted from this election, however it appears that your signature has changed since you last registered to vote.

They include another registration card for me to update my signature. I’m curious how they matched my signature despite it changing and, since they could match my signature, why am I being asked to sign another card? My guess is it failed a computerized test and had to be reviewed in person. That just raises the question, why can’t they scan the new signature and add it to the list of matches in the computer?

Anyway, it’s the first time my signature has mattered in a long time and seems to bring relevance to my original concern – putting it on the outside of an envelope makes it that much easier to copy.

A few straggling bugs aside[1] proper message sorting has been achieved and the ThreadBubble extension is no longer needed.

The latest version, ThreadBubble 0.8, is compatible with Thunderbird versions up to 3.0a2pre and I expect it will be the last version released. Maybe I’ll work on a Firefox extension next…

Anyway, thanks to everyone who tested, used, and gave feedback about ThreadBubble.

[1] This is kind of a joke – the parent bug is actually a meta bug for all threaded view issues and I don’t know how many of those are confirmed or are relevant to what ThreadBubble fixed. I do know I filed bug 461100 last night which is a new problem with the threaded view as far as I can tell.

• Thunderbird 3 Support: Tested on the latest nightly and working fine. This also means a lot of the code was cleaned up and made simpler. (Thunderbird 2 still works)
• Fixed a bug when sorted ascending where new messages wouldn’t sink to the bottom of the list.

Download ThreadBubble 0.8

Someone already tested this update and had no problems so I’m putting it online. If I don’t hear any complaints by next week I’ll push it live on AMO and everyone can get the update automatically. Thanks!

Not that I need a special occasion to bake a tasty pie but mother’s day combined with picking 6 pounds of fresh rhubarb added up to a good excuse.

I puttered around on the internet looking for less ordinary recipes than what I was used to and came up with an idea and a recipe.

The pie with the lattice top was a regular strawberry/rhubarb mix but I stirred the fruit in a custard before adding it which made it richer with a hint of nutmeg.

The pie in the background was a Rhubarb and Pineapple Pie. There were four layers of fruit in the pie: two pineapple and two rhubarb. I thought it was a good combination, but really, we’re talking about butter, sugar, and fruit – how bad is it going to be? You could put pomegranates and kiwis in there and it’d probably still taste great.

Oh, one more thing – what’s the deal with tiny pies? That recipe I linked to calls for two cups of rhubarb and one cup of pineapple…really? That’s it? If I’m going to all the trouble to make pie crusts and bake a pie I’m going to fill that bad boy up. I put in around 5 cups of rhubarb and an entire pineapple. Of course, that meant a piece of the pie wasn’t so much dessert as the whole meal.

The site claims the vanilla can be used as soon as a month but I expect to filter it around September and then transfer it to smaller bottles. All in all I should get about a cup and a half of extract. I hope it’s as delicious as it smells.