Adventures with a small child

Spent an afternoon in the ER and then two days in the ICU because my daughter may, or may not, have had something serious. It's looking more and more like she did not have anything more than some minor viral bug. It started with a fever Sunday morning so we called the answering service for our pediatric clinic. A doctor called back and said we should consider going to the ER. We figured it would be a quick trip. We would be in, get the patronizing talk about how kids just get sick and be on our way.

It did not go that way at all.

There were lots of tests, lots of conjectures, conclusions concluded and then rejected, and finally two days in the ICU while doctors tried to come up with an explanation for the symptoms the weren't sure they were seeing. While it was stressful and will likely turn out to be pretty costly in the end, even after insurance, I'm kind of glad that the doctors have tentatively decided that it was nothing. The alternative -- that the concerns were all justified -- would be obviously worse.

The most vivid memory is of waking up the second night in the ICU and reaching over to touch my daughter's forehead. Touching her cool skin was like having a glass of cold water after wandering through the desert.

Tidbits

Tidbit: The allure of the iPad wore off pretty quickly for me when I learned that it doesn't do flash and it doesn't have a video camera suitable for Skype.

Tidbit: Watching your three month old daughter get an IV sucks.

Tidbit: The anonymity level of this blog has gotten out of sync with my life. If this blog were a lot more anonymous, then I could post more. If I were willing to give up anonymity I could post a lot more. As it is fastchance sits in a no-blog's land where much of what I would like to write can't be written. Normally this wouldn't be a problem; I would just fill up this blog with pointless ill-informed blatherations (PIIB). Having a child a marriage and a job has left little time to develop high (or even low) quality PIIB.

Dems Lose 60/40 Majority

... and health care reform is suddenly facing considerable challenges.

If you're planning for retirement, projected health care costs are a big deal. If you take a worse case view -- health insurance companies will drop you when you're old because you're expensive, and you'll be paying out of pocket because medicare went under -- then you'll probably want to have millions of dollars in savings when you retire. While not an economist, I suspect that everyone channeling the fraction of income necessary to achieve this into savings instead of, say, new cars or vacations or cell phones or dinners out would cause the economy substantial damage. Health care reform has the potential to take away this worst case scenario by requiring that insurance companies offer people health insurance at reasonable rates for their entire life.

I don't think this worst case scenario is likely, but I find it odd that anyone would argue against enacting laws precluding it. Of course there is a lot more to argue about in the current health care bill, but this requirement that affordable health insurance be made available to everyone was something I thought was important and I'm disappointed that it may not become law.

There are many in this country that see taxes as essentially bad. But health care costs are just as compulsory as taxes -- even if they become high, you pay them because you'd rather that you and your family be poor than sick or dead. However, unlike taxes, the majority can't change health care costs through voting -- unless we enact health care reform.

How to Be an Evil Company and Other Stuff

How to Be an Evil Company, or at Least Piss People Off:

Let's say you are a large company and are required by law to provide a certain service for free. Here's what you do: loudly advertise the free service. Then, when people try to obtain this free service, steer them toward unknowingly signing up for the non-free version of the service that bills their credit card monthly. When people call up and say, "WTF? Unsign me up!" make them listen to blatherations about how great the non-free service is.

Other stuff:

Still getting used to the changes since grad school. While the post-doc and kid seem good so far, the changes have come so fast as to be disorienting. The focus of my work, how I work, my home life, the responsibilities I face and the resources at my disposal are all hugely different from what they were nine months ago. The sense of self I have seems incompatible with the life I'm living. I would dearly love to stop for a bit, step outside my life and assess, but that doesn't seem like an option.

We're Living in the Future!

It is the year twenty-ten!

An amazing information network blankets the planet. Spacecraft routinely make trips to low Earth orbit. Some cars have become very streamlined; others, not so much.

Soon we will all wear shiny skin-tight clothes and have cell phones so small that we must pin them to our chests so that we don't lose them.

It is an age of wonder.

Also, I'm eating oatmeal.

Pointless Christmas Post

In the last two weeks every piece of consumer electronics in my apartment, save the toaster oven, has caused me considerable frustration. The problems are all variations on the theme of, "It does something maddeningly different from what one would reasonably expect it to do." After lots of web-searching and experimenting I've gotten things back to a state of mostly-working.

By comparison the swell hat and analog wrist watch I received over the holidays have just plain worked. I did not need to upgrade the firmware in my hat. My watch did not overheat and require that I jam a paperclip in some hidden port and wait ten seconds before activating it. I did not have to call tech support and ask "why do several reviews of products on your website say `Don't buy this hat, it isn't compatible with heads!'?" only to be told, "I can't tell you if hats are compatible with heads."

These are not fly-by-night companies hocking shoddy goods for the holiday season and then vanishing. No, some of these companies have been around for decades, give elaborate product announcement presentations, and are lead by an aging charismatic hipster who can easily convince you that his company just invented pencil and paper (in a sculpted aluminum case) as the way to store impromptu text and graphical content -- with a stunningly simple new user interface!

With every year the technological Star Trek fantasy -- "Scotty, there's a space-time singularity on the event horizon! Reroute the warp-engine antimatter through the orange juice maker!" "Aye, Cap'n." -- gets replaced with the dull reality of, "No wait, this USB cable isn't compatible with the USB port," or more seriously the first fifteen minutes of a job talk stalled while people run around trying to figure out how to get the laptop to display through the overhead projector.

In any case, my new year's resolution is to forgo all technology ...except Skype ...and my cellphone ...and some other stuff, until all this gets worked out.

Curious

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