In my last post I described how Gisele had surgery on her finger to remove a cyst. One result of the cyst was frequent infection under the nail.
Since surgery more infection has set in. The doctor had her on oral Keflex for three weeks and it has been improving, but slowly. This week he is concerned enough that he has started her on twice-daily intravenous antibiotics.
The visiting nurse came on Friday evening to start the IV. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he failed on two attempts (poor Gisele!), so another nurse tried again Saturday morning. This time it went fine.
The catheter stays in the vein in the back of her hand and twice a day I hook up to it and administer the drugs. This will go on for a week.
The infection seems minor, but I guess this is how MRSA and C-Dif get started, and we certainly don’t want that. It already seems a little better today, so we are hopeful that this will do it.
Gisele had surgery on her finger on Wednesday. She had a cyst in the end joint of her middle finger that was impinging on the nail root, resulting in a gap under part of the nail that frequently became infected. The surgeon removed the cyst, and promises that the nail should grow normally now.
She had a lot of fun for a couple of days with her huge finger. Someone cutting her off in traffic would really get an eyeful (if she were that kind of person)!
They took off the big bandage today and now she just has a band-aid. Much more convenient, but more likely to get bumped so she is wearing a metal finger protector over it. No pictures — it’s not that exciting.
My helicopter (quadricopter) arrived back today, after undergoing warranty repair. The crash a couple of weeks ago was my fault, but “fortunately” right after it crashed I tried to upgrade the software and it corrupted the firmware. That’s covered by the warranty, and while they had it they fixed everything else.
So it flies fine now, but only in my family room since it’s been raining all day. I’ll have to wait a day or two before I can take it outside.
I crashed my quadricopter today. Got too close to a tree and bumped it. It spun out of control and fell to the ground.
The damage was minimal, but it became harder to control. Then I tried a software update which “bricked” it — rendered it completely unresponsive. I have contacted the company and it looks like they may repair the software update problem for free. Hopefully that will also repair the stability problem. But it looks like no more playing for a while.
I was capturing video when it crashed. Maybe I’ll put it online.
I flew my quadricopter up to take a quick look at the solar panels. I left this in full resolution when uploading to YouTube. Set it to highest quality when viewing to see how the original looks.
It’s a remote control helicopter with 4 rotors that work together to give amazing stability and control. It can be easily controlled with either an iPad, iPhone or Android tablet or phone, indoors or out. There’s one mode where you just tilt the tablet or phone to have the copter move that way, easily getting it to fly in circles or hover motionless.
It has two cameras; a 720 HD front-facing camera and a lower res down-facing. Live video can be viewed on the tablet or phone, and can be recorded. The down-facing camera is also used to help keep it hovering in place, along with sonar sensors to keep it at a constant altitude.
It’s a neat toy, and I’ll try to post some videos I’ve taken with it later on. I’m still just learning the fine details of control.
Verizon is still ranked number one for coverage in the US, but it’s becoming very expensive. We pay about $220 a month for 4 phones, one of which isn’t even “smart”.
The rest of my family is going to stay with Verizon for now, but I’m in the process of jumping ship. I bought the new Google Nexus 4 phone, unlocked, for $350 direct from Google. That may seem expensive when you are used to buying subsidized phones directly from the wireless company, but for an unlocked phone it’s very cheap. Verizon would sell an equivalent phone without a contract for $600 or more, and at least $250 with a 2-year contract.
The best part is that I got a month-to-month no-contract connection with T-Mobile for just $30/month. That includes unlimited data and text, and 100 minutes of voice.
On the potential downside, the phone doesn’t support LTE, the latest high speed data connection. But it does support “HSPA+“, an enhanced 3G service that is supposed to be pretty fast. I temporarily have both phones, so I did some comparisons using SpeedTest at a few locations around town. Here are the results:
Surprisingly, in most of the locations around the East Valley (Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert) T-Mobile download was faster than Verizon. Uploads were all slower on T-Mobile, but that is much less of a concern for me.
A couple of years ago when I bought my Verizon Thunderbolt, it was the first Verizon LTE phone on the market, and the LTE bandwidth was all available for a few users. At that time I was regularly getting 20 MB/S download speeds. But (I assume) as more and more people are using LTE, it is getting crowded and therefore slower.
Tomorrow I’m taking a trip half-way to Payson, so I’ll see how coverage is outside the metropolitan area. I assume that Verizon will be better, but that’s what I assumed for the local speed test, so I’ll wait and see. I also haven’t done much voice quality testing since I haven’t ported my number over yet. Funny how the most important thing to me about my phone is not using it as a phone.
Derek went to the orthopedic surgeon for a followup to his shoulder surgery of 6 weeks ago, and was told he no longer needs to wear the sling. He is celebrating. He is progressing well, has full range of motion and feels pretty comfortable. Now he just has to continue to heal and strengthen the shoulder
But the sling doesn’t get put on a shelf, since Dale broke his clavicle yesterday and needs to keep his arm in a sling for a few weeks. A timely trade!
Early on during the recent election it looked like Obama might win the Electoral vote while Romney might win the popular vote. It didn’t turn out that way, but it recently has (Bush-Gore, 2000). Every 4 years there are suggestions to change the way we select our president, either by abolishing the Electoral College or making some modifications in how states allocate electors. Without the electoral college my vote might have mattered more, and the candidates might have been more interested in the rest of the country besides Ohio.
One suggestion is to allocate Electors by legislative district. Arizona has 9 legislative districts, so as each district votes, one elector would also vote. The two extra electors could vote as the state as a whole votes. A couple of states do this already. But a major problem is that the legislative districts are often strongly gerrymandered, so it could be even more likely that a president could win without the popular vote. As evidence of this, it was reported that more people voted in this election for Democratic Congressmen, but more Republicans won seats.
Another suggestion is for each state to allocate electors in proportion to the vote in their state. I see merit in this suggestion. It wouldn’t guarantee that the candidate with the popular vote would win, but it would make each state more important to the candidates, and couldn’t be gerrymandered. My vote would seem more relevant. But if the proportion of the state’s count was within a few votes of moving an elector from one party to the other, it might again require a whole state recount and this might happen more often than the case where the vote is 50-50 in a state.
Neither of the above two methods would require a change to the Constitution. States are free to allocate their Electors however they wish.
The most radical suggestion is to just eliminate the Electoral College completely (which would require a Constitutional amendment) and select the president by popular vote. On the surface it’s the most fair, but in an election close enough to require a recount, the whole country would have to participate. Florida 2000 multiplied by 50.
Smaller states in general gain an advantage from the Electoral College, since the ratio of Electors to population is higher in smaller states. This is because each state gets one elector for each seat in the House, and two extra electors. So Wyoming has 189,000 citizens per elector, while California has 685,000 citizens per elector. In effect, a vote in Wyoming is worth about 3.6 votes in California.
The inertia of the current system is pretty strong. Will it ever be changed?
Consumer Reports just published the results of their car ownership survey, and for two years in a row the Chevy Volt has the highest rate of “Yes” answers to the question “Would you buy this car again?”
92% of Volt owners said “Yes!”, just nosing out the Corvette and Porsche 911 at 91%. I’m certainly in that 92%.
