Unless you're so burned out that you don't feel anything about any of your calls (In which case, it's time to leave which ever branch of emergency services you're in.), you don't just shrug it off. I will, at most grant you the possibility that you withdraw internally for the next couplefew days. The whole concept of "You do everything you can for the patients you can do it for, and leave behind the ones you can't save." Isn't something any of us actually believe, not deep down, it's what we tell ourselves to move on.
Now, as it happens, I agree with you completely about the fact that you don't spread that shit around, in fact, I don't even think they should send it to people inside the agency, let alone outside it. (Since, as it happens, I'm not one of the ones who copes in that manner, though I will admit I've snickered over the occasional article and picture in JEMS.).
The point I was making (poorly, in retrospect), is that it was dumb, not immature.
Sounds like they have a problem with immature police officers as well. Hopefully the officers got reprimanded for doing that.
Have you ever worked an unsuccessful code on a 6 year old? Have you ever gone out to a call and found a person who'd literally had their head crushed? Have you ever seen someone who was shot 12 times with shotguns, or a person who was stabbed 56 times?
Until you have, I suggest you STFU.
There are a lot of ways of dealing with that stress.
I know guys who spend the next week drinking, I know guys that go home and have amazing sex with their wives, I know guys who work for the next 80 hours without a break, I know guys who crack what would otherwise be just awful jokes, and I know guys that try to share it around, in the hope that it will be a little less awful if they aren't the only ones who saw it. What I don't know, are any guys who just shrug it off and go on to the next call.
So, before you judge, just consider what it's be like to respond to a "Traffic Accident" and find that.
I actually work in EMS, and I've had shifts where I was scheduled for 12 hours, I went in, did 20 minutes of maintenance, then watched a few hours of TV, slept for 8 hours, got up, did a little paperwork and went home.
Of course, I've also worked shifts where I was scheduled for 8 hours, and wound up working 70 straight hours, where the longest we stopped the ambulance was to buy diesel, snatching 20 minutes of sleep here and an hour there, eating whatever we can get out of vending machines and gas station minimarts.
Any how, that doesn't really apply to this conversation (despite, I think, what the guy above me is saying.), what does apply is this.
You have to play office politics.
Seriously.
I hate playing politics, in fact, I generally hate being social. You have to do it though. You can't just bury yourself in work, even if that's what you should be doing. While it may not always be related to getting your job done, it's certainly related to keeping your job. (Also, as a side note, even the conversations comparing people's bellybutton lint serve their purpose, you're much more likely to get cooperation from people if they think of you as that guy they chatted with once than if they think of you as that new guy in the cubical down the hall.)
Yeah, sorry, it's been a long night, if I had a point, I'm sure I don't know what it was any longer, I hope you managed to glean something of value.
But for the individual homeowner, it really does seem like overkill. If our power becomes so erratic that these things actually start to make sense, I'm going to say we've a lot more serious issues to deal with.
Now, I actually have a similar set up to this, I have a bank of 10 110Ah lead gelcell batteries connected to a 3500w Xantrex charger/inverter. It's worth every penny.
You see, the thing is, I live in the third world. Around here, we have power outages about once every two weeks. Usually they last less than a couplefew hours, but occasionally they go much longer, the record since I've been here is three days. While I will admit that I reduced my power consumption for the three day one once I found out how long it was going to last, I still kept the important stuff going (fridge, water pump, computer etc).
Most gringos around here have some sort of generator, be it gasoline, diesel or LPG, and while the initial investment is lower, I think the battery system is far superior. For one thing, it's almost completely silent (the cooling fans kick in on the inverter, and the ceiling fans start to hum because of the modified sine power the inverter provides), and for another it's got an instant transfer of power (Even with a automatic transfer switch on a generator, there's a slight delay while the generator warms up, not to mention that the humid, salty air around here tends to do bad things to ATSes, an dyou really don't want to see what happens when they fail so as to leave the generator on when the line power comes on.).
While those are nice, what's really superior is the fact that even when the line power is flowing, the battery system serves to condition it, brown outs and surges both.
Oh, and even with the efficiency losses, it's cheaper to recharge the batteries than it would be to buy the gas/diesel/LPG.
While I will admit that my case is not typical, I think it's foolish of you to dismiss this technology out of hand.
There are people who are walking the earth today who, were it not for me, would be dead. Not "I was a member of a team", not "If I hadn't been there, someone else would." because of me.
And yet I am referred to by a huge number of people as being an "Ambulance Driver".
Now, I don't see what's so degrading about being referred to as an "IT guy", but if it bothers you, then by all means try to change it. Speaking from my experience as a person who is exceedingly inept at the whole office politics thing, though, I'd suggest not putting that forth as a demand of taking the job, that sort of thing (I've come to find out), tends to make people think you're...well...a pain in the ass.
Yes, actually...or at least, it does where I live.
Here in Honduras, I have my option of two different cell phone providers who offer UTMS and HSDPA access. In fact, I use one of them for my primary connection.
I pay about 45USD/month for 32Gs of bandwidth, though the prices go as low as about 12USD/month for I believe 2G.
The speed and latency certainly don't compare to FiOS, but it really is quite respectable.
As for reliability, well...it goes out less often than the power...actually, it's down an average of about 6 hours/month. I know that might seem like a horrible amount to some, but note my comment about the power.
Just a point, and it's not meant as a troll, thought it will probably read as one.
The question doesn't actually address the issue of right or wrong, as close as it comes is:
I don't install 'borrowed programs' in a production environment because I know that if the BSA got wind of this, it would all fall on me when they stormed in."
For that matter, vast majority of the replies do the same...only one sticks out in my mind as really addressing the ethics on a higher level than stage one (Avoidance of punishment) of Kohlberg's stages of moral development. (Which, incidentally, is what you expect to find in young children. [This would where the sounding like a troll comes in.].). The term CYA is a dead giveaway.
You, for what it's worth, appear to be addressing the issue from somewhere around stage four (Obedience to authority.). The one reply that stuck out for me (And, of course, I can't find now.) seemed to be looking at it from stage 5 (Social contract.).
Of course, I really can't say too much about this, since most of my ethical development was shaped by Heinlein's novels, leaving me with a basis in stage six (Universal principles) with a strong undercurrent of stage two (What's in it for me?)...or maybe that's the other way around.
I carried a Palm T|X for quite a while, and in fact used it as my primary internet access device for a while. It worked rather famously for me.
It has a nice, large screen (Both physically and given the ability to hide the input area, resolution wise, it's a usable QVGA), 802.11b (Do you really need g for this application?), takes a SD card (Though if all you're using it for is the stated purpose, that's beside the point.), easily slips into a pocket and there are three browsers that I can think of off the top of my head, so the odds are good that you can find one that will play well with your ILS site.
I've seen them on eBay for 50-200 dollars,, though I might suggest being wary of the lower end of the cost spectrum, given that there are some issues with the power button on them.
The other thing I'd suggest if you go this route is to pick up one of the aluminum hard shell cases (About $45 last time I bought one.). I carried my T|X in one for three years, in a highly physical profession and never had any damage to the device itself, though I did have to replace the case once. (You try crawling into a car wreck and lying on a iPhone for 45 minutes, tell me how well it holds up.)
Have them build Steel Pans
72 Man hours wouldn't be enough for building a complete pan, but they could certainly build a pan with 5 or 6 notes.
Lots of things to be calculated, dish size, note size, groove size etc.
It was all worked out originally by pure empirical experimentation, so if the calculations are off by a bit, it's there's enough wiggle room that you can adjust things. (What? That note marked C3? Nono, that was a typo, it was supposed to be a F3 all along...)
The physics of it are actually quite fascinating, and at the end of it, you have a musical instrument...
Now I realize that for a variety of reasons, my answer doesn't really work for most people, but here it is anyhow.
I move down to Honduras for six months, primarily so I could volunteer with the local ambulance service, but since I've been down here, I've found myself spending an increasing amount of time doing tech support for various educational ventures (Both religious and secular.). They tend to get boxes and pallets of what is termed down here "Junk for Jesus", mostly working, but some not.
I spend one or two days a week going through it all and trying to build workable computers out of it, not to mention going back and repairing others by cannibalizing parts out of other donated computers...and, of course, doing software support.
As I said, most people can't just up and move somewhere for 6 months, but even if you could go to some third world country for a week and do some hard core technical support, you could make a major difference in the lives of many, many children.
Try talking to your church, if you're religious, or to any church, if you're not. The odds are pretty good that somewhere in the organization, there's a mission to a third world country that could use your help...odds are pretty good you'll have to buy your own ticket, but they might be able to provide room and board.
Okay, I work in emergency medicine, both in ambulances and in ERs. When I'm in an ER, I work as a tech, who are, you know, the people who actually cut rings off. Don't listen to RNs, most of them don't even know where the ring cutters are.
So, having said that, first off, the likelihood of being able to cut off the ring is low, as every er I've ever worked in has one of these. These things will in fact zip right through titanium (I know, I've done it).
Now, iridium does have a much higher VHN (About 3x higher, in fact.) I've never tried to cut one with a ring cutter, so I don't know how it would do, but but I suspect it would work, just not as fast.
Even supposing that it won't though. I've actually had the conversation with a trauma surgeon about what's next, and the answer is not an amputation, but rather they would make incisions along the sides of the finger and pull out the globs of fat which (along with the spaces between them) are what is actually swollen up in there, until the ring can be pulled off.
Now, your finger would have scars on it, and it would look kinda funny for a while, but they wouldn't amputate it.
Talk to your local school district and see if they want any and/or all of it.
Often schools have a bunch of legacy equipment that they have to keep running because they don't have the budget to upgrade, not to mntion that things like keyboards and mice jave a signifcantly shortened lifespan in educational settings.
Now, this obviously worked better with the poorer school districts, but I can't even begin to tell you how much tech junk I've offloaded on a inner-city school district, and they were glad to have it...even old dinosaurs of computers, if it was fast enough to run Word/OOO, then that was another computer they could put in the library/lab.
In fact, at least in San Jose, there used to be a charity that would take everything in at a warehouse, refurbish it and then distribute it to schools from there.
First I would like to say that this is not a fully developed theory of mine, so I will freely admit that there is almost certainly a glaring problem in what I will propose, but I don't think there is anything which is unconquerable.
The notion behind standardized tests is actually a pretty good one. They are supposed to give the teacher an idea of what it is that a student does and doesn't understand, thus allowing the teacher to address the deficiencies. That intention has, of course been subsumed by a secondary purpose where they are used to determine the effectiveness of the education, thus determining funding, whether the school gets taken over by the state, etc. The problem with standardized tests is, of course, that they don't work worth a damn.
There are a number of reasons why, first and foremost is that kids aren't standard, and it would be impossible to write a paper test which can adequetly assess complete understanding (As an extreme example, I went to school with a kid who was borderline retarded, except he was a lightning calculator, with an intuitive grasp of math that leaves me breathless today, he was successfully differentiating and integrating in 7th grade.). The second problem with them is language, where I went to school, I was one of relatively few native English speakers, some of the kids had only been in the country for a couple of years, unsurprisingly, I always did better on the tests than the school average, not because the other kids were dumb or didn't understand the concepts, but because the wording of the questions would trip them up. The last big problem with them is that the tests are frequently administered in
January/Feburary, and yet the teachers don't get the results until August...it's a little hard to use the results to adapt the education when you don't get them until after the school year is over.
I think the answer lies in Computerizeed Adaptive Testing. Now I never saw so much as a single CAT anywhere from elementary school through the end of college (And I'm a relativgely recent grad.) However they are widely (perhaps almost universally) used for licensure exams in healthcare, the theory being that question 2 is based on whether you get question 1 right or wrong. To give a grossly simplified example, if you got sqrt(x+2)=4 wrong the next questions determine whether it is because you don't understand square roots, addition, the two of them used in tandem or if you really do understand the concepts but you just "forgot to carry the two".
The benefit of these in primary education being that:
a) they give a much more specific picture of a kid's understanding.
2) They can isolate when it's just an unfamiliar word which threw the kid off track. (Although I still think that until a certain threshold of skill is attained in the local language, the tests (though not the instruction) should be given in the student's native language.)
iii) The results are instant, thus premitting them to be relevant to a child's education. Perhaps even being used not just once a year, but once a week.
Now, there are of course drawbacks, the biggest being that it would be a huge effort to write these tests, and perhaps an even bigger one to develop guidelines for the correct interpretations and applications of the results. Also, I can see this all going horribly wrong and worsening the situation, especially if it is believed to be a panacea, which it's not, but I think it might be a huge tool.
Okay, first and foremost, IANAL. However, as I understand it, this is an issue of emminent domain, which is a concept from the US constitution which basically boils down to "Anything we haven't covered here is up to the states." (Which, incidently, is what the US civil war was about according to how it is taught in the American south.)
California's position is that the regulation of pot is not an issue in the constitution, ergo it's California's decision. So they passed a law regulating it in a manner of their choosing. Namely allowing medical marijuana and decriminalizing simple possesion for personal use (Anything under an ounce, provided it is in less than three containers, as I recall.)
The feds, of course, see it differently. They say the federal statutes take precedent, as anytime there are differing laws at a federal and state level, the most restriftive takes precedence (As with minimum wage and vehicle emissions standards.).
Essentially what we have here is a tug of war, and eventually it (or another conflict of law of a similair nature) will wind up in court, probably proceeding to the supreme court, and, unlike what someone else said in a post, I don't think it will be a cut and dried defeat for California, I honestly don't know which way it will go.
No, no, no. Cheerleading is much too active, the kids might not turn out obese if we let them do that.
Latin 1 was replaced by television appreciation.
The hell the public portions of healthcare work okay.
Medicare is mediocre at best. The only reason that most places take it is because they don't have much choice. You'll get the bare minimum services you need on Medicare, but not much else (ie. if there are two possible courses of treatment, one which costs 500 dollars and has a 50% positive outcome and one that costs 15.000 dollars and has a 60% positive outcome, you'll get the first one, because medicare won't pay for the second, whereas most private insurances will.)
MedicAid programs are mostly completely broken, consider MaineCare (Maine's Medicaid), which pays something like a penny on the dollar of it's supposed reimbursment rates...that is, when it pays at all.
Now, if you want to talk about government provided healthcare, the active-duty military HC is actually repectable, but the VA HC is abysmal, Walter Reed is not an isolated incident,
Some of the state provided health care can be quite decent. Hawaii leaps to mind, but then, they shift a significant portion of the healthcare insurance burden by mandating employers offer private insurance, which leaves them better able to cope with the remaining population. If you want to see what state healthcare is like elsewhere, I suggest you go ahead and saunter on down to a free clinic and take a look around.
In short, government healthcare doesn't really work, it's just a ponderous behemoth that keeps going on inertia. Given a little more time with nothing done about it and it's going to fail.
I work in healthcare, and I just started at a facility that uses IV fluid pumps which run on CE.
Now, if one BSODed and it just didn't pump any fluid through, there are few situations which it would cause a major problem provided it were caught relatively soon. But were one to glitch and feed too much of many drugs (some of them by a very small margin) it could easily be fatal.
Even scarier, I've heard rumors that another model from the one we use have built in wireless networking (not sure if it BT or WiFi) to allow for central monitoring/control...
If I were the patient, I'd rather take my chances with a watch and counting drips.
Slightly less scary is that almost every electronic charting/medical records system I have seen runs on one flavor of windows or another, and most of them have either restricted or unrestricted internet access.
Now see, I can't directly address this question, since I don't now, nor have I ever worked in an IT environment. However, I can speak directly to the issue of downtime.
For you see, I'm an EMT. Some days, I walk in the door, clock in, have no calls for my 8, 10 or 12 hour shift, and clock out. (To balance this, some days I clock in, run straight out for 35 hours, clock out and have to sleep for an hour before I can bring myself to drive home.)
Now, just because I don't have any calls doesn't mean it's all downtime, there is necessarily a certain amount of maintenance type things to be done, but honestly, even if you try your best to stretch them, you can't make it last for more than a couple of hours.
So, assuming that I'm working a dead 8 hour shift, and I've stretched my chorse for as long as possible, I'm left with 6 hours.
Okay, well, in health care, as in IT, there's always something else to be learned. (IT may develop faster than medicine, but we've been working on it a hell of alot longer.) So I'll try to do something educational, be it reviewing some current journal articles, or perusing through some of the reference books we have lying around, or doing some online CEHs. I, however, cannot successfully sit and read material for more than a few hours and have any hope of retaining anything useful, at least not for more than few days running.
So now we're down to 3 hours.
Now what? I've done everything I can directly do for the company, I've done all I can to make myself more valuable to my patients, my company and my future employers, and I'm still waiting to hear a damn set of tones come in so maybe I can actually do my job, because believe me, by this point I'm bored out of my mind.
This is what I call my true downtime, and you know what I do with it? Any damn thing I can think of to ease my boredom, whip out my palm pilot and read an eBook, go take a nap (Ah yes, EMS, the only job I've ever had where not only can I sleep on the job, but they give me a bed to do it in.) or, say, browse the web.
When I first got into this business, I used to feel quite guilty about that last stage, but slowly I came to realize that at that point, slacking off was the best thing I could do for myself, my patients and my company, because when the tones finally go off fifteen minutes before the end of my shift (as they are wont to do), if I've been going around making busy work for myself for those last 2.75 hours, I'm tired, irritable and discombobulated. If, however, I've spent that period slacking off, I'm ready for it, my mind comes to the problem I'm presented with fresh, my body is well rested (I would imagine this is more of an issue in EMS than in IT, but still not to be discounted), and I can generally slap a smile across my face (Which sometimes is much more important than any skills I might perform.)
So, I guess all of that is just me saying that with your downtime, you should definitely find something productive to do, and there's always SOMETHING that's been neglected, and you should work to educate yourself, but sometimes you should just play a stupid flash game.
That's just my 22 cents worth. (Sorry, didn't realize I'd be so verbose.)
I work in EMS, and my company recently rolled out toughbook CF-19's, I can't attest as to their abilities to withstand long term abuse, but I can say that they will quite happily drop a little over a meter onto linoleum covered concrete without so much as a mark (On the toughbook, the lino has a noticible dent)...not that I'm the clumsy type.
As for the brightness of the screen, they are BRIGHT. I have used one in direct sunlight easily, now it's not as easy as using it inside the ambulance, but it's still quite doable. The other proviso I should make is that is in the Maine sun, which isn't quite the same thing as the California sun I grew up with, but well, it's still sunlight.
The only complaint I have with the system thus far, and this is really kind of petty, is there is a sicker on the lid which has the actual toughbook branding on it, and it's soft, at least compared to the rest, in fact, the only mark on any of our 12 TBs, is on one of those stickers.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit.
Unless you're so burned out that you don't feel anything about any of your calls (In which case, it's time to leave which ever branch of emergency services you're in.), you don't just shrug it off. I will, at most grant you the possibility that you withdraw internally for the next couplefew days. The whole concept of "You do everything you can for the patients you can do it for, and leave behind the ones you can't save." Isn't something any of us actually believe, not deep down, it's what we tell ourselves to move on.
Now, as it happens, I agree with you completely about the fact that you don't spread that shit around, in fact, I don't even think they should send it to people inside the agency, let alone outside it. (Since, as it happens, I'm not one of the ones who copes in that manner, though I will admit I've snickered over the occasional article and picture in JEMS.).
The point I was making (poorly, in retrospect), is that it was dumb, not immature.
Sounds like they have a problem with immature police officers as well. Hopefully the officers got reprimanded for doing that.
Have you ever worked an unsuccessful code on a 6 year old? Have you ever gone out to a call and found a person who'd literally had their head crushed? Have you ever seen someone who was shot 12 times with shotguns, or a person who was stabbed 56 times?
Until you have, I suggest you STFU.
There are a lot of ways of dealing with that stress.
I know guys who spend the next week drinking, I know guys that go home and have amazing sex with their wives, I know guys who work for the next 80 hours without a break, I know guys who crack what would otherwise be just awful jokes, and I know guys that try to share it around, in the hope that it will be a little less awful if they aren't the only ones who saw it. What I don't know, are any guys who just shrug it off and go on to the next call.
So, before you judge, just consider what it's be like to respond to a "Traffic Accident" and find that.
You will [be] standing out in the sun every day...
Hi, Welcome to /.
I actually work in EMS, and I've had shifts where I was scheduled for 12 hours, I went in, did 20 minutes of maintenance, then watched a few hours of TV, slept for 8 hours, got up, did a little paperwork and went home.
Of course, I've also worked shifts where I was scheduled for 8 hours, and wound up working 70 straight hours, where the longest we stopped the ambulance was to buy diesel, snatching 20 minutes of sleep here and an hour there, eating whatever we can get out of vending machines and gas station minimarts.
Any how, that doesn't really apply to this conversation (despite, I think, what the guy above me is saying.), what does apply is this.
You have to play office politics.
Seriously.
I hate playing politics, in fact, I generally hate being social. You have to do it though. You can't just bury yourself in work, even if that's what you should be doing. While it may not always be related to getting your job done, it's certainly related to keeping your job. (Also, as a side note, even the conversations comparing people's bellybutton lint serve their purpose, you're much more likely to get cooperation from people if they think of you as that guy they chatted with once than if they think of you as that new guy in the cubical down the hall.)
Yeah, sorry, it's been a long night, if I had a point, I'm sure I don't know what it was any longer, I hope you managed to glean something of value.
(Unkie) Reamus
But for the individual homeowner, it really does seem like overkill. If our power becomes so erratic that these things actually start to make sense, I'm going to say we've a lot more serious issues to deal with.
Now, I actually have a similar set up to this, I have a bank of 10 110Ah lead gelcell batteries connected to a 3500w Xantrex charger/inverter. It's worth every penny.
You see, the thing is, I live in the third world. Around here, we have power outages about once every two weeks. Usually they last less than a couplefew hours, but occasionally they go much longer, the record since I've been here is three days. While I will admit that I reduced my power consumption for the three day one once I found out how long it was going to last, I still kept the important stuff going (fridge, water pump, computer etc).
Most gringos around here have some sort of generator, be it gasoline, diesel or LPG, and while the initial investment is lower, I think the battery system is far superior. For one thing, it's almost completely silent (the cooling fans kick in on the inverter, and the ceiling fans start to hum because of the modified sine power the inverter provides), and for another it's got an instant transfer of power (Even with a automatic transfer switch on a generator, there's a slight delay while the generator warms up, not to mention that the humid, salty air around here tends to do bad things to ATSes, an dyou really don't want to see what happens when they fail so as to leave the generator on when the line power comes on.).
While those are nice, what's really superior is the fact that even when the line power is flowing, the battery system serves to condition it, brown outs and surges both.
Oh, and even with the efficiency losses, it's cheaper to recharge the batteries than it would be to buy the gas/diesel/LPG.
While I will admit that my case is not typical, I think it's foolish of you to dismiss this technology out of hand.
Now, I'm an EMT, I'm trained to save lives.
There are people who are walking the earth today who, were it not for me, would be dead. Not "I was a member of a team", not "If I hadn't been there, someone else would." because of me.
And yet I am referred to by a huge number of people as being an "Ambulance Driver".
Now, I don't see what's so degrading about being referred to as an "IT guy", but if it bothers you, then by all means try to change it. Speaking from my experience as a person who is exceedingly inept at the whole office politics thing, though, I'd suggest not putting that forth as a demand of taking the job, that sort of thing (I've come to find out), tends to make people think you're...well...a pain in the ass.
(Unkie) Reamus
Yes, actually...or at least, it does where I live. Here in Honduras, I have my option of two different cell phone providers who offer UTMS and HSDPA access. In fact, I use one of them for my primary connection. I pay about 45USD/month for 32Gs of bandwidth, though the prices go as low as about 12USD/month for I believe 2G. The speed and latency certainly don't compare to FiOS, but it really is quite respectable. As for reliability, well...it goes out less often than the power...actually, it's down an average of about 6 hours/month. I know that might seem like a horrible amount to some, but note my comment about the power.
The question doesn't actually address the issue of right or wrong, as close as it comes is:
I don't install 'borrowed programs' in a production environment because I know that if the BSA got wind of this, it would all fall on me when they stormed in."
For that matter, vast majority of the replies do the same...only one sticks out in my mind as really addressing the ethics on a higher level than stage one (Avoidance of punishment) of Kohlberg's stages of moral development. (Which, incidentally, is what you expect to find in young children. [This would where the sounding like a troll comes in.].). The term CYA is a dead giveaway.
You, for what it's worth, appear to be addressing the issue from somewhere around stage four (Obedience to authority.). The one reply that stuck out for me (And, of course, I can't find now.) seemed to be looking at it from stage 5 (Social contract.).
Of course, I really can't say too much about this, since most of my ethical development was shaped by Heinlein's novels, leaving me with a basis in stage six (Universal principles) with a strong undercurrent of stage two (What's in it for me?)...or maybe that's the other way around.
I carried a Palm T|X for quite a while, and in fact used it as my primary internet access device for a while. It worked rather famously for me.
It has a nice, large screen (Both physically and given the ability to hide the input area, resolution wise, it's a usable QVGA), 802.11b (Do you really need g for this application?), takes a SD card (Though if all you're using it for is the stated purpose, that's beside the point.), easily slips into a pocket and there are three browsers that I can think of off the top of my head, so the odds are good that you can find one that will play well with your ILS site.
I've seen them on eBay for 50-200 dollars,, though I might suggest being wary of the lower end of the cost spectrum, given that there are some issues with the power button on them.
The other thing I'd suggest if you go this route is to pick up one of the aluminum hard shell cases (About $45 last time I bought one.). I carried my T|X in one for three years, in a highly physical profession and never had any damage to the device itself, though I did have to replace the case once. (You try crawling into a car wreck and lying on a iPhone for 45 minutes, tell me how well it holds up.)
(Unkie) Reamus
Have them build Steel Pans 72 Man hours wouldn't be enough for building a complete pan, but they could certainly build a pan with 5 or 6 notes. Lots of things to be calculated, dish size, note size, groove size etc. It was all worked out originally by pure empirical experimentation, so if the calculations are off by a bit, it's there's enough wiggle room that you can adjust things. (What? That note marked C3? Nono, that was a typo, it was supposed to be a F3 all along...) The physics of it are actually quite fascinating, and at the end of it, you have a musical instrument...
Now I realize that for a variety of reasons, my answer doesn't really work for most people, but here it is anyhow. I move down to Honduras for six months, primarily so I could volunteer with the local ambulance service, but since I've been down here, I've found myself spending an increasing amount of time doing tech support for various educational ventures (Both religious and secular.). They tend to get boxes and pallets of what is termed down here "Junk for Jesus", mostly working, but some not. I spend one or two days a week going through it all and trying to build workable computers out of it, not to mention going back and repairing others by cannibalizing parts out of other donated computers...and, of course, doing software support. As I said, most people can't just up and move somewhere for 6 months, but even if you could go to some third world country for a week and do some hard core technical support, you could make a major difference in the lives of many, many children. Try talking to your church, if you're religious, or to any church, if you're not. The odds are pretty good that somewhere in the organization, there's a mission to a third world country that could use your help...odds are pretty good you'll have to buy your own ticket, but they might be able to provide room and board.
Okay, I work in emergency medicine, both in ambulances and in ERs. When I'm in an ER, I work as a tech, who are, you know, the people who actually cut rings off. Don't listen to RNs, most of them don't even know where the ring cutters are.
So, having said that, first off, the likelihood of being able to cut off the ring is low, as every er I've ever worked in has one of these. These things will in fact zip right through titanium (I know, I've done it).
Now, iridium does have a much higher VHN (About 3x higher, in fact.) I've never tried to cut one with a ring cutter, so I don't know how it would do, but but I suspect it would work, just not as fast.
Even supposing that it won't though. I've actually had the conversation with a trauma surgeon about what's next, and the answer is not an amputation, but rather they would make incisions along the sides of the finger and pull out the globs of fat which (along with the spaces between them) are what is actually swollen up in there, until the ring can be pulled off.
Now, your finger would have scars on it, and it would look kinda funny for a while, but they wouldn't amputate it.
Talk to your local school district and see if they want any and/or all of it. Often schools have a bunch of legacy equipment that they have to keep running because they don't have the budget to upgrade, not to mntion that things like keyboards and mice jave a signifcantly shortened lifespan in educational settings. Now, this obviously worked better with the poorer school districts, but I can't even begin to tell you how much tech junk I've offloaded on a inner-city school district, and they were glad to have it...even old dinosaurs of computers, if it was fast enough to run Word/OOO, then that was another computer they could put in the library/lab. In fact, at least in San Jose, there used to be a charity that would take everything in at a warehouse, refurbish it and then distribute it to schools from there.
First I would like to say that this is not a fully developed theory of mine, so I will freely admit that there is almost certainly a glaring problem in what I will propose, but I don't think there is anything which is unconquerable. The notion behind standardized tests is actually a pretty good one. They are supposed to give the teacher an idea of what it is that a student does and doesn't understand, thus allowing the teacher to address the deficiencies. That intention has, of course been subsumed by a secondary purpose where they are used to determine the effectiveness of the education, thus determining funding, whether the school gets taken over by the state, etc. The problem with standardized tests is, of course, that they don't work worth a damn. There are a number of reasons why, first and foremost is that kids aren't standard, and it would be impossible to write a paper test which can adequetly assess complete understanding (As an extreme example, I went to school with a kid who was borderline retarded, except he was a lightning calculator, with an intuitive grasp of math that leaves me breathless today, he was successfully differentiating and integrating in 7th grade.). The second problem with them is language, where I went to school, I was one of relatively few native English speakers, some of the kids had only been in the country for a couple of years, unsurprisingly, I always did better on the tests than the school average, not because the other kids were dumb or didn't understand the concepts, but because the wording of the questions would trip them up. The last big problem with them is that the tests are frequently administered in January/Feburary, and yet the teachers don't get the results until August...it's a little hard to use the results to adapt the education when you don't get them until after the school year is over. I think the answer lies in Computerizeed Adaptive Testing. Now I never saw so much as a single CAT anywhere from elementary school through the end of college (And I'm a relativgely recent grad.) However they are widely (perhaps almost universally) used for licensure exams in healthcare, the theory being that question 2 is based on whether you get question 1 right or wrong. To give a grossly simplified example, if you got sqrt(x+2)=4 wrong the next questions determine whether it is because you don't understand square roots, addition, the two of them used in tandem or if you really do understand the concepts but you just "forgot to carry the two". The benefit of these in primary education being that: a) they give a much more specific picture of a kid's understanding. 2) They can isolate when it's just an unfamiliar word which threw the kid off track. (Although I still think that until a certain threshold of skill is attained in the local language, the tests (though not the instruction) should be given in the student's native language.) iii) The results are instant, thus premitting them to be relevant to a child's education. Perhaps even being used not just once a year, but once a week. Now, there are of course drawbacks, the biggest being that it would be a huge effort to write these tests, and perhaps an even bigger one to develop guidelines for the correct interpretations and applications of the results. Also, I can see this all going horribly wrong and worsening the situation, especially if it is believed to be a panacea, which it's not, but I think it might be a huge tool.
Okay, first and foremost, IANAL. However, as I understand it, this is an issue of emminent domain, which is a concept from the US constitution which basically boils down to "Anything we haven't covered here is up to the states." (Which, incidently, is what the US civil war was about according to how it is taught in the American south.)
California's position is that the regulation of pot is not an issue in the constitution, ergo it's California's decision. So they passed a law regulating it in a manner of their choosing. Namely allowing medical marijuana and decriminalizing simple possesion for personal use (Anything under an ounce, provided it is in less than three containers, as I recall.)
The feds, of course, see it differently. They say the federal statutes take precedent, as anytime there are differing laws at a federal and state level, the most restriftive takes precedence (As with minimum wage and vehicle emissions standards.).
Essentially what we have here is a tug of war, and eventually it (or another conflict of law of a similair nature) will wind up in court, probably proceeding to the supreme court, and, unlike what someone else said in a post, I don't think it will be a cut and dried defeat for California, I honestly don't know which way it will go.
No, no, no. Cheerleading is much too active, the kids might not turn out obese if we let them do that. Latin 1 was replaced by television appreciation.
The hell the public portions of healthcare work okay.
Medicare is mediocre at best. The only reason that most places take it is because they don't have much choice. You'll get the bare minimum services you need on Medicare, but not much else (ie. if there are two possible courses of treatment, one which costs 500 dollars and has a 50% positive outcome and one that costs 15.000 dollars and has a 60% positive outcome, you'll get the first one, because medicare won't pay for the second, whereas most private insurances will.)
MedicAid programs are mostly completely broken, consider MaineCare (Maine's Medicaid), which pays something like a penny on the dollar of it's supposed reimbursment rates...that is, when it pays at all.
Now, if you want to talk about government provided healthcare, the active-duty military HC is actually repectable, but the VA HC is abysmal, Walter Reed is not an isolated incident,
Some of the state provided health care can be quite decent. Hawaii leaps to mind, but then, they shift a significant portion of the healthcare insurance burden by mandating employers offer private insurance, which leaves them better able to cope with the remaining population. If you want to see what state healthcare is like elsewhere, I suggest you go ahead and saunter on down to a free clinic and take a look around.
In short, government healthcare doesn't really work, it's just a ponderous behemoth that keeps going on inertia. Given a little more time with nothing done about it and it's going to fail.
I work in healthcare, and I just started at a facility that uses IV fluid pumps which run on CE.
Now, if one BSODed and it just didn't pump any fluid through, there are few situations which it would cause a major problem provided it were caught relatively soon. But were one to glitch and feed too much of many drugs (some of them by a very small margin) it could easily be fatal.
Even scarier, I've heard rumors that another model from the one we use have built in wireless networking (not sure if it BT or WiFi) to allow for central monitoring/control...
If I were the patient, I'd rather take my chances with a watch and counting drips.
Slightly less scary is that almost every electronic charting/medical records system I have seen runs on one flavor of windows or another, and most of them have either restricted or unrestricted internet access.
Now see, I can't directly address this question, since I don't now, nor have I ever worked in an IT environment. However, I can speak directly to the issue of downtime.
For you see, I'm an EMT. Some days, I walk in the door, clock in, have no calls for my 8, 10 or 12 hour shift, and clock out. (To balance this, some days I clock in, run straight out for 35 hours, clock out and have to sleep for an hour before I can bring myself to drive home.)
Now, just because I don't have any calls doesn't mean it's all downtime, there is necessarily a certain amount of maintenance type things to be done, but honestly, even if you try your best to stretch them, you can't make it last for more than a couple of hours.
So, assuming that I'm working a dead 8 hour shift, and I've stretched my chorse for as long as possible, I'm left with 6 hours.
Okay, well, in health care, as in IT, there's always something else to be learned. (IT may develop faster than medicine, but we've been working on it a hell of alot longer.) So I'll try to do something educational, be it reviewing some current journal articles, or perusing through some of the reference books we have lying around, or doing some online CEHs. I, however, cannot successfully sit and read material for more than a few hours and have any hope of retaining anything useful, at least not for more than few days running.
So now we're down to 3 hours.
Now what? I've done everything I can directly do for the company, I've done all I can to make myself more valuable to my patients, my company and my future employers, and I'm still waiting to hear a damn set of tones come in so maybe I can actually do my job, because believe me, by this point I'm bored out of my mind.
This is what I call my true downtime, and you know what I do with it? Any damn thing I can think of to ease my boredom, whip out my palm pilot and read an eBook, go take a nap (Ah yes, EMS, the only job I've ever had where not only can I sleep on the job, but they give me a bed to do it in.) or, say, browse the web.
When I first got into this business, I used to feel quite guilty about that last stage, but slowly I came to realize that at that point, slacking off was the best thing I could do for myself, my patients and my company, because when the tones finally go off fifteen minutes before the end of my shift (as they are wont to do), if I've been going around making busy work for myself for those last 2.75 hours, I'm tired, irritable and discombobulated. If, however, I've spent that period slacking off, I'm ready for it, my mind comes to the problem I'm presented with fresh, my body is well rested (I would imagine this is more of an issue in EMS than in IT, but still not to be discounted), and I can generally slap a smile across my face (Which sometimes is much more important than any skills I might perform.)
So, I guess all of that is just me saying that with your downtime, you should definitely find something productive to do, and there's always SOMETHING that's been neglected, and you should work to educate yourself, but sometimes you should just play a stupid flash game.
That's just my 22 cents worth. (Sorry, didn't realize I'd be so verbose.)
It's good to know that somethings transcend little things like nationalities. Grad students look the same the world over.
I work in EMS, and my company recently rolled out toughbook CF-19's, I can't attest as to their abilities to withstand long term abuse, but I can say that they will quite happily drop a little over a meter onto linoleum covered concrete without so much as a mark (On the toughbook, the lino has a noticible dent)...not that I'm the clumsy type.
As for the brightness of the screen, they are BRIGHT. I have used one in direct sunlight easily, now it's not as easy as using it inside the ambulance, but it's still quite doable. The other proviso I should make is that is in the Maine sun, which isn't quite the same thing as the California sun I grew up with, but well, it's still sunlight.
The only complaint I have with the system thus far, and this is really kind of petty, is there is a sicker on the lid which has the actual toughbook branding on it, and it's soft, at least compared to the rest, in fact, the only mark on any of our 12 TBs, is on one of those stickers.