The ability

3am: don't panic

It was one of those nights. One of the nights that turn into day without any real sleep in between those moments.

We had a bit of a scare with DJ. Was so close to taking him to the hospital that I had the car running. And then I stopped. Do not panic. Do not panic. Rinse. Repeat.

It started after dinner when DJ said his heart was racing. I put my hand on his chest and sure enough his heart was going at a ferocious clip. I took it in stride. He spend most of the 100-plus-degree day outside. He played a little baseball, went swimming, ran around like a lunatic. The humidity was intense. There was an air quality warning. DJ is prone to respitory distress. Case solved.

I pulled out the nebulizer and realized we were out of Albuterol. We hadn't had to use it since the winter, so it never occurred to me to get more. I found a prescription bottle of Proventil that hadn't expired and gave him a dose of that.

That was at about 7:00. Cut to 9:00. He's pacing around the house. He's crying. He swears that he is dying. He's taking those big, sucking breaths that I take when I have a panic attack. I know the Proventil makes him a little nuts, but this is different. His face is ghost white, his hands are shaking and his heart is beating out of his chest. I know he is causing most of this distress himself by worrying about the original bout he had after dinner.

I try to get him to calm down. I rub his back, I get him a drink, we watch the Yankee game. When DJ cannot sit still long enough to watch a full inning, I know something is wrong.

He starts crying. He is sure he's going to die. We walk outside, inside, around the house, room to room. He cannot sit still. He will not lay down. I have never seen a in such an utter state of panic. Of course, this makes me panic.

By 11pm, he is still frantic. Justin and Natalie are both sleeping. DJ and I are camping out in the living room, watching the late innings of the game. He lays next to me and I hear him deep breathing. I want nothing more than to sleep at this point. I want him to sleep.

Midnight and he is still crying. His heart is still racing. That's it, we are going to the hospital. I call my father, because I know my father will talk me out of such nonense. Bring him here, my father says. We walk across the street to my parents' house. Dad talks me out of the hospital trip.

I didnt' call my pediatrician for one simple reason: I knew exactly what he would say. He would say relax, it's just from the heat and subsequent panic when he couldn't breathe, give him some Proventil and Tylenol and he will be fine. And don't panic. Don't panic.

I would have taken DJ to the hospital for one simple reason: It would have made him feel better. He would have seen it me doing something proactive, the doctors would have soothed him (after 6 hours waiting in the emergency room, I'm sure) and it just would have dissipated his panic. Hospital visit as placebo.

But no, I took him back home. Now it's almost 12:30 a.m. My body wants to drop into a coma for the rest of the night. I find some s' NyQuil and give DJ a tiny bit of it. Believe me, I was eyeing that bottle of tequila on my counter as if it were a magic elixer. For both of us.

I push the two couches together, because DJ insists he can't not be more than one foot away from me or surely he will die, and I flip channels while he sucks in his breath and cried and while his heart does some wild dance inside his little body. I keep thinking that I should have gone to the hospital. I'm afraid I'll fall asleep and wake up to dead laying next to me. Don't panic. Too late.

3am and finally DJ's eyes are heavy. We tire of the endless parade of cartoons and infommercials and the 10th repeat of Sportscenter. He finally puts his head down. He closes his eyes. His face is still pale, stained with tear trails. He looks so small. But, finally, he looks comfortable. His breathing sounds better.

He shifts, turns and lets out the hugest fart I ever heard. He giggles in his half-sleeping state. Yea, he's ok. He's fine.

Around 4am, I fall asleep. At 5am, I am up for the day. I'll probably fall asleep at my desk watching www.jasminlive.mobi at some point today. After work, it's a trip to the doctor. Lesson learned: always keep fresh Albuterol in the house. And Don't Panic.

It's going to be a long one.

Atermath

Perhaps I owe an apology to some of my sponsors. I'm sure my blogathon entries did not turn out to be what you expected. It wasn't the sort of stuff I usually post about. If you found that the entries over the course of the 24 hours were not in taste with either the cause or what your expectations were, please let me know and I will gladly give the money that you pledged to the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

In my own defense, I felt like I needed to do something that would keep people coming in (I did pick up new sponsors during the night) and keep me awake. It was a real effort for me to stay up 29 hours (yes, 29...I got up way too early on Saturday) and the constant emails and comments on both the main blog and the sub-blog kept me going.

I'm sorry if the content offended anyone who sponsored me.

I didn't do this for the hits. I didn't do this for attention. In fact, it (the boobieblog) was completely unplanned.

For those that did enjoy it, I'm glad you did. It will be staying up for a while. For those that hated it, unless you had a vested interest in what I did here last night(i.e., sponsored me), I owe you no apology.

The iPad Gap: Pure Speculation

I find myself wondering how long it will be before someone starts complaining that the poor in America don’t have access to iPads and that iPads are somehow key to their future opportunities for success. How long will it be before some government agency is asking tablet manufacturers to make special programs for the poor and carriers are bullied into some kind of subsidized plan for 3G network access?

What I find most intriguing is that if the government can’t pay for something it deems desirable, it will search for opportunities to make companies pay for them. Those companies are often quite willing to acquiesce, but the cost of providing a good or service at below its actual value isn’t a cost that the company will pay. It’s a cost that we, who aren’t subsidized, will pay.

Of course, all of this is done in the name of helping. Which is why so many of us wish the government would, maybe, help less.

Consider credit card reform. The changes made to protect consumers from the card companies had what I would consider to be an entirely predictable set of results: prior to implementation, cardholders saw rate increases and credit lines lowered. People on the lower end of the spectrum will have a harder time getting any credit (even though these are the folks that most needed “protection” and it will probably end up benefiting the high-cost payday lending outfits) and more cards will charge you an annual fee. So your over limit fees are capped at what the government considers a reasonable amount, but you’ll pay the difference in some other fee or in those interest rate hikes that the card companies pushed out before the new protections went into effect.

I’m sure that there will be a few more rounds of government protection to card holders that are meant to deal with those nasty side-effects of the reform--and that there will be more surprises in store for consumers.

Which, again, is why so many of us wish the government would, maybe, help less.

Making it harder or more expensive for a company to do business isn’t always the best way to protect a jasminelive consumer. Ultimately, if that company wants to stay in business, it will simply pass on new costs to consumers. When Comcast is forced to provide services below cost, it won’t just sit there dumbly wondering why the bottom line doesn’t look as good as it used to; it will raise rates where it can to compensate. Some small percentage of their customers will get a service below its real value and the rest of its customers will pay more than they should.

So, when will we first see the call for free or cheap tablet computers for the poor? It will probably come from an education advocacy group and it will probably provide yet another distortion on what I wish were a much freer market.

What’s my point? My point is that I am tired of a government that has such an overwhelming need to protect and help me. All those protections and all that help comes at yet another cost--and I’m already feeling overburdened.

Grandpa

I took about a dozen trays of 35mm slides home with me from Arkansas. These date all the way back to the mid-70’s.

I purchased a flatbed scanner with a slide attachment last night and tonight got around to trying the scanner. The film seems to be deteriorating. The clarity has suffered, the color seems to have shifted heavily toward red, and, of course, there are a good number of marks and scratches. This is the first one that I scanned and saved, so I’m still in the learning stage, but I’m worried that some of the older slides might be beyond saving.

I worked the curves on this to reduce red and introduce a bit more blue back into the mix and I’m reasonably happy with the results. It is still far too red in some areas, though, and I’ll need to establish a decent workflow if I want these to be done before 2012.

Still, I like this picture. It was likely taken by my grandmother (or perhaps my Uncle Billy) and my grandpa is seen walking their little poodle. Sadly, they are all gone and no one is there to tell me about this trip. He passed away back in 2005 and I still miss him.

Arkansas Christmas Miscellany

Merry Christmas to you all just a little bit late. I hope you’ll forgive my tardiness.

Darling girl and I spent Christmas in Hot Springs with my parents. It’s the second time we’ve made the trip, although it was complicated a bit this year by the awkward (for us) placement of the holidays. The trip home was done in one, long fifteen hour drive yesterday so I wouldn’t miss any work after we decided that it wouldn’t make much sense to leave late on Christmas to start the drive home. It wouldn’t have been fair to my parents since they only see me once every few years.

This is a series of notes about the trip.

Firstly, Hot Springs is a fun little town. It reminds me of Colorado’s own Manitou Springs only, perhaps, a little bit nicer.

We stayed at the Embassy Suites and it was absolutely wonderful. I used to work at an Embassy Suites and have stayed at a few here and there across the country, but this really was one of the nicest I’ve seen. The rooms were great, the setting beautiful, and the staff was uniformly warm, friendly, and helpful. I had chosen the Embassy Suites because I needed a place with a desk, enough room, and high speed Internet access so I could work and also watch free sex cams. I wasn’t much disappointed.

Not much but just a little. See, the hotel was wonderful, the free breakfast in the morning was perfect, the bar with some of my favorite vodkas didn’t hurt matters, but I did have an issue with the “high speed Internet” service. Two issues, really. The first is that most hotels (like the Hampton hotels that I normally choose) offer free high speed Internet, but the Embassy Suites charged for daily access. At the price of the room, I’m surprised that the service isn’t included in the deal. I won’t complain too loudly on that front, though: I made the reservations knowing I had to pay extra but decided that it would probably be worth it since I was also able to make spa reservations for my wife on premises, there was more than enough space for my needs, and it the location was good for us.

But, having chosen to pay for something that I normally get for free, I was surprised at the flaky, slow connection that I got. The service was slow, when I logged in daily it offered an extra paid upgrade for faster download speeds, and it dropped connections somewhat regularly. The work that i was doing required me to be sending 70+ meg files to a printer and I ended up missing a few soft deadlines. Luckily I was working with a friend (if you ever need a printer in Denver, Bob at RM Printing is the most reliable and hardest working man that I know in the business--I can’t recommend him enough) who was more patient with me than I deserved. I did end up getting the work done, but it was much harder than it should have been.

The kicker was that the wireless connection was so bad and so inconsistent that I ended up going old-school: wired connection to a data port in the wall. While my reliability went up, the speed didn’t see much improvement.

If the network service hadn’t been so flaky, it would have been the perfect place for the first half of our stay.

Secondly, I got my mom a Kindle for Christmas. I got her one because, largely, I couldn’t afford to get her an iPad but I knew that the Kindle would be something she would really love. That meant helping her with the set-up and showing her a bit how to use the thing.

I like the Kindle. It’s responsive, it works well, and it is really nicely priced--I think that my mom will love it.

I can’t love it, though. I can like it, but not only is it too limited in comparison to my iPad, but even on its own terms it has some design compromises that really bug me. For instance, the tiny keyboard is hideous. The sub-chiclet sized keys are ridiculous and I can’t understand why they didn’t have room for not only larger buttons but more buttons. Why doesn’t it have a set of number buttons? Why do I have to use an odd, on-screen pop-up for numbers and the alt-keyboard? I also, stupidly, mistook the “back” button for the “delete” button a number of times while I was setting up her account information--my fault, certainly, but it still bugged me.

Much of what I didn’t like about it came down to unfavorable comparison to the iPad, though. While it was responsive and it had a very nice screen, while it was light and very nicely sized, it didn’t have the same mix of size, convenience, and incredible breadth of capabilities of the iPad. I know it isn’t a fair comparison (the Kindle is built for reading and nothing more), but I couldn’t stop myself from making it. The same way that I judge netbooks negatively in comparison to my MacBook Pro, I can’t help but judge the Kindle a little negatively in comparison to my iPad.

This has lead me to wonder, though, that with an iPad in my life, do I really need my iPhone? I might actually downgrade to a phone when my current contract is up.

That also brings me to my thirdly, too: the iPad played a big part in this trip, too. Instead of using my dedicated GPS, I used MotionX-GPS Drive HD. It provided a larger screen with bigger maps and instruction, a great set of extra features (a few button clicks to find a list of the nearest coffee shops), voice directions, basic iPod controls, and the option to pre-cache all of the maps that I would need for the trip. I bought a mount for it (that proved useless) and ended up with what I will term a field expedient method of mounting that involved a design feature of my 2008 Ford Taurus X and the particular case that held the iPad. It worked shockingly well.

Since it was hooked up to the car stereo, the music volume dropped every time the voice instructions came along to tell me where to turn. That was a nice change from the stand-alone GPS where the directions would sometimes get lost against the music.

There were a few negatives, though. We ended up a little confused in Hot Springs when we missed a turn and it couldn’t find a new path for us against the quick turns we made to try to get back on track, for instance, and had a few other situations where it had a hard time finding a new route when we went off script. The stand-alone unit seems to be quicker in mapping new routes when necessary. Like the stand-alone unit, though, the MotionX app found some imaginary roads near where my parents live. Apparently the maps for the roads near Hot Springs Village have a few glitches.

The biggest issue came when the app crashed, though. About eight or nine hours into the trip home, the application froze. It came some 80 miles before my next turn, so it wasn’t a big issue, but it was a surprise. A quick restart had it back directing us in just a few seconds, so there was no damage done, but it doesn’t inspire the kind of confidence that you want from a GPS system. I’ll be using it again on my trip to Vegas next month and I’ll see how well that works out.

And, still on the subject, fourthly, the iPad makes a better workmate than you’ve heard. I was thrilled that I bought the 3G version on this trip. Whenever the flaky Internet service (and access at my parents’ home was spotty, too) my cell service was fine. I answered emails, I took notes, I sent links to pdfs through the Dropbox application, I used the contact list and the task manager (I use Manage, a great .99 todo application that balances a nice interface and features with simplicity of presentation and some useful export options) to keep me in touch and on task. I won’t be making my next 36 page brochure on the thing, but it’s not just useful for entertainment.

What I found most surprising was that I was only out of cell phone contact a few times during the entire trip. Where 3G wasn’t available, it was rare that I didn’t have EDGE coverage. For all that AT&T is maligned for its network--and that isn’t entirely undeserved--the breadth of coverage for me was still impressive. And for a good chunk of my stay in Hot Springs, the 3G connection was more reliable and faster than the “high speed” Internet connection that plagued me.

It’s hard for me to spend $900 on a non-essential bit of electronic kit without feeling even a little bit of regret, but I can honestly say that I don’t regret the iPad purchase at all. It has done more than I imagined it would and it has really changed the way I view tablet-based computers. It has a few shortcomings that I would like to see addressed, but the overall device is startlingly good.

After all that chatter, here’s what I really wanted to say: it’s good to be home.

Glad to be Home

I’m not a big fan of LA. The traffic is hideous, everything is expensive, and where I have to stay is about an hour away from the ocean. Flying in and out of LAX is fairly miserable (although the security lines are much quicker than what you find on a bad day at Denver International Airport) and you tend to run into people talking loudly on their cell phones about the TV shows that they’ve been involved in recently.

That isn’t to say that the place doesn’t have its charms. The weather was wonderful and there are some truly wonderful people in the area. While I never really think of it as a friendly town, the truth is that I usually have some great conversations with absolute strangers and in the most odd places.

The young lady who worked the front desk, the lovely lady and her son who were seated with my co-workers and me at Tokyo Wako one night (a place similar to Benihana), a serviceman coming home from a trip to Australia with his family, and a Rhodesian gentleman who left his home country after Robert Mugabe’s government took his home all helped make my days a little happier. LA will never be my kind of town, but, if I were to be honest, there are far worse places to spend a few days.

Anyhow, these are a few pictures from the trip. All were taken with my iPhone and were then modified either on the phone or on my laptop.

This first picture is dark because I was more interested in the shapes and the shadows than I was in the colors. The view is from the hotel and the gentleman to the left is the Rhodesian man I mentioned earlier. After fleeing Zimbabwe in the early eighties with only what he could carry on the plane and a few dollars in his pockets, he made his way to the US and started a business. He provides limousine services and says that business is great. We chatted a bit while he waited for Doctor Suchandsuch and I waited for my ride to the office. Typically I rent a car when I’m in town but decided to let my co-workers shuttle me around this time. I’m glad I did.

I’ve never flown American Eagle, but after my last few trips on United I decided I needed to find a new carrier for my business trips. I wasn’t disappointed. The folks at American and American Eagle were wonderful and the flights got me where I was supposed to be with minimal fuss and very nearly on time. Through my own stupidity, I also managed to miss my flight Friday morning but making changes and finding a later flight was easy and painless. It did leave me spending a good portion of the day at LAX, though, so I spent $50 for a day pass to the Admiral’s Club where the seats were nice, I had high speed Internet access, and where I could find a clean bathroom. I don’t fly often enough to need a membership, but it made the wait much nicer.

I plan to fly American again when I head to Vegas in January and look forward to giving them an opportunity to keep my business.

One of the odd things about flying American Eagle into LAX, though, is that the planes go into a small terminal a few minutes away from the main terminal. Passengers check in and go through security just like anyone else, but then they board little buses that shuttle them to the little building after driving around the runways. When we flew in, the bus driver played a canned tape that explained that we would be going to the main terminal and that the trip would take a few minutes. “Airplanes have the right of way,” the recording helpfully explained.

This next picture was taken in that little terminal. I snapped it when I noticed that people had started to gather around when Bill Clinton came on to explain why Democrats should embrace the Obama-negotiated tax deal. Most of those people had been ignoring the TV until Clinton showed up and I was struck by a few things: first, that in the world of former Presidents, Bill Clinton is a bit of a rock star, and, second, for all that President Obama has been lauded for his speaking skills, he has nothing near the skill of Clinton. Clinton has warmth, humor, and an easier manner, he showed a better grasp of the political situation, and, simply, he has a charisma that our current president can’t match.

Now, Clinton was also in love with the sound of his own voice (and his State of the Union addresses were testimonies to his own unbridled ego), but it was interesting watching him working the press corps with such skill.

I still can’t decide whether it was brilliant to bring in Clinton to help sell the deal or if it was tremendously self-destructive because it showed President Obama to be a much weaker politician. It felt a bit like a Hail Mary pass from a president who still has two years left in his first term and that speaks of an administration willing to take a big risk for a small win. Perhaps that’s not how the Democrats see it, but my Republican mind is smelling a little desperation.

Notably, that Christmas tree is very nearly the only holiday cheer that I saw in the town. It was surprisingly un-Christmasy throughout.

This last shot is taken from my seat while I was flying out. It never translates quite right, but it was a beautiful sunset and a great view.