Bear Flag Blog

I have sensitive hearing - I can sleep in a room with the lights on without issue, but any regular source of noise and no luck. The same goes for concentrating in general.

So today I am working at home, troubleshooting a lab, when I hear a high-pitched whine. Seems to be very nearby. And of course, once I hear it, I cannot stop hearing it - so I have to seek it out and put a stop to it.

I'm surrounded by at least three working computers, but upon aural inspection none of them seems to be the source of the whine. The ventilation system? No. I walk in and out of the room and around within and the whine is loudest at my desk.

Cell phone? No. iPod? No. What the heck...?

It's my Diet Pepsi. I had screwed the cap back on firmly enough to prevent spillage, but apparently not firmly enough to create an air-tight seal, and it's carbonated enough to force out a thin, reedy whine.

Which I dispose of with another firm twist. And back to work.

"TomTom admits to sending your routes and speed information to the police".

Well, if I'm ever in the market for a GPS, no way in Hell I'm buying from them. Sure it's a sensationalist headline, but the underlying information is that TomTom will hand out data about you to whomever they see fit. No thanks!

I finally changed the security protocol of our home wireless network over to WPA2. I have known that I should do so for years, but of course changing every device on the network would have taken like twenty minutes of work, and I am, in fact, that lazy. So we've been using WEP because, well, when I got the router set up initially its UI was so impenetrable that I was fooled into believing it only knew about WEP.

But the other day I was reading about the police breaking down someone's door because their neighbor was downloading society's current "worst possible material ever" via the hapless individual's unsecured wireless network. And I had just read about a firefox plugin that snoops on wireless traffic, so finally I checked up on exactly how easy it is to crack WEP, and that was enough.

Twenty minutes later, the laptops and the Wii are all happily running with WPA2. And I'm back to having only the government reading my network traffic.

Yesterday evening I was out on the deck putting meat on the grill. The boys were running around in the backyard; I had just leaned over to check on them before I started to put the meat on.

Then E. started screaming.

As my wife points out, E. has only one volume setting: screaming could mean he got a splinter, or it could mean that there is an alligator on his leg. Nonetheless, it sounded serious, so I called K. out to help him while I turned off the grill and dealt with the raw meat.

She ran out and down the stairs; as soon as she saw him lying on the ground she could tell it was serious. His right wrist was folded unnaturally; his right arm below the elbow had taken the shape of a lightning bolt.

She carried him inside as I called 911. The Vienna Fire & Rescue ambulances arrived in a couple of minutes, while we packed a bag with snacks and books. I rode in the back with E. as the paramedics tried with mixed success to cajole him. Luckily B. was not working that evening, so she raced home (on the bike) to babysit the little one, allowing K. to drive to the hospital.

It was a bad but clean break. They gave E. some pain medication, then hooked up an IV (which was, I think, the most traumatic part of the hospital visit). We did some X-rays, saw the bones (yeek), and they lined up the procedure. There was some stress when Dr. Lo came by to discuss the risks of the sedative they'd be using but K. was out front calling relatives; when she came back, he had gone, and we couldn't find him for twenty minutes. But eventually we got the low down and signed off on the anesthetic.

Then we changed rooms, E. got knocked out (which his body resisted mightily, demanding extra sedative and then coming back around well in advance of schedule) and K. and I left the room while the orthopedic resident reset the bones. We returned to find E. wearing a splint and the sedative already wearing off, leading to some interesting observations from E. about how how odd it was that we all had four eyes.

E. broke his arm at about 6:45 pm. We got to the hospital a while after 7; and we got home at about midnight. This morning there was some discomfort but after a little Tylenol 3 the boy seems to be fine.

Not what we had planned for last evening - and it's certainly going to put interesting crimps in the next couple of months - but all's well that ends well, I suppose.

I've uploaded our Italy trip pictures - with captions even! - to republic's photo gallery:

http://www.republic.org/gallery2/main.php

It's password protected: the username is my first name, and the password is my wife's first name. I figure if you have those two pieces of information then you're legit to see the pictures.

Actually, I password protect my photo gallery just because I don't want to deal with seeing my family photos used to advertise a supermarket chain in Slovakia or some such thing. Anything on the Internet is out of your control!