daverea.com

Monday nights are generally pretty paltry when it comes to EMS calls, and since that’s my night at the ambulance base, I usually get to enjoy a relaxing evening and a good night’s sleep. (When the crew and I don’t stay up ’till 2AM watching cartoons, of course!) Except for a few bursts of activity – like our baby delivery in October ’03 – we’re pretty laid-back.

Last night broke this pattern.

We were toned (savvy-speak for ‘dispatched’) a few minutes after 8PM for a two-vehicle motor vehicle accident. My partners Jason and Kay (and I) rolled one ambulance, while other-partner Phil waited in quarters in case a second was needed. About 1/4-mile down the road, we received word from the dispatcher that a second ambulance would, indeed, be needed – so Phil rolled another bus alongside our chief, Mark.

Jason, Kay and I arrived at the scene a minute or so after the fire department, and met one of our EMTs who had just arrived in his own truck. We split up to manage the three victims – two shaken-up occupants of a Ford Explorer, and the driver of a Dodge Intrepid who was in significantly worse shape.

The driver of our sedan was only alert to his first name, but couldn’t tell us the current month or give us any of his history (such as allergies, medications, etc). Hearing this, we opted to start a MercyFlight helicopter to airlift the driver to the hospital. Hoping they’d still fly despite a strong thunderstorm that just moved through the area (knocking out power sporadically around the town), I radioed in the request.

Ten minutes later, the MercyFlight ‘bird’ touched down in a nearby field. By this time, the non-critical patients were on their way to the hospital aboard Phil’s ambulance, and our sedan driver had been extricated by the fire department. As I gave a report to the flight paramedic and flight nurse, the rest of the crew started an IV and splinted a possible leg injury.

The flight crew opted to do a “hot load”, where the patient is loaded into the helicopter with the engines running and the rotors turning. It’s a dangerous procedure, since propwash tends to kick up ground debris, and the tail rotor poses a self-explanatory hazard – but it also cuts minutes off the transport time.

A crew of six – myself, partners Jason and Kay, the two helicopter crew members, and one fire fighter – rolled the patient to the waiting helicopter on our gurney. The pilot stood by to keep everyone safely clear of the tail rotor as we ducked under the copter’s boom. It took a few seconds to slide the patient in, and I stopped for a moment to look around. The rotors and jet engine drowned out every other sound, and there was a strange dissonance created between the low rumble of the top rotor, the whine of the tail rotor and the shrill 15,000-RPM idle of the engine. The rich-smelling jet exhaust washed down over us, reminding me of the airport and that distinct smell that inevitably kicks off vacations and business trips.

After the patient was loaded, I guided my crew out to the helicopter’s right side. The flight crew locked in the gurney and closed the bird’s belly hatch as we walked away with the empty gurney. We stood back, standing on the road not far from where the crash happened, and watched. The pilot spooled up the engine and – in one smooth motion – pulled up from the ground and nosed toward the hospital.

We headed back to clean up and start the paperwork… The patient would land at the trauma center before we ever left the scene. The system worked like clockwork – it was beautiful. It was life-saving as art. It was the reason why we all do what we do.

Ordinarily I’d be a bit more tactful about a story like this, but idiocy of the magnitude I’m about to describe needs to be treated with the ridicule it deserves: Doctors (who, in theory, are supposed to be some of the smartest people around) writing for the British Medical Journal have actually proposed a ban on kitchen knives to reduce the number of stabbings in the UK.

I was under the impression that doctors were, by and large, reasonable people. Perhaps I was mistaken: “The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.”

For years and years, “gun nuts” like myself have been jokingly/sarcastically jeering the Brady crowd that “Kitchen knives are ‘lethal weapons’, too – why aren’t you trying to ban them?” I guess we never expected anyone to be so obtuse as to actually try! Yet these idiots are actually calling for legislation that will regulate the sale, importation, manufacture or posession of kitchen knives!

So let’s go over this again, since you liberals obviously weren’t listening last time… Or you just have such an overarching faith in human goodness that you believe all inanimate objects (not just guns) are responsible for the crimes people commit using them… So here it is, plain and simple:

Guns, knives, clubs, open elevator shafts, pea-shooters (even “assault” pea shooters that fire armor-piercing, cop-killer Wasabi peas), large rocks, individual encyclopedia volumes and socks filled with pennies are not, have never been, and never will be responsible for crime. All of these things, and many other potential murder-weapons that I haven’t listed (such as candlesticks, lead pipes and ropes – thank you, Milton Bradley) have legitimate uses. If you want to stop stabbings, shootings, drive-by stonings or any other manner of violence, the solution is not to callously ban the item used. This only serves to punsh lawful users. The solution, counter-intuitive as it may sound to the twisted liberal brain, is to hold people (who, after all, are the ones committing the crimes) responsible for their actions.

Don’t believe me? Just Google the phrase “Boston gun project”. The Boston gun project, far from a misguided implementation of gun control, was an effective law enforcement program that “focused criminal justice attention on a small number of chronically offending gang-involved youth” – and drastically cut the amount of gun violence in urban Boston.

While the Harvardites that completed the project would never admit it through any means other than omission, the project didn’t accomplish its goals by banning any particular object. It was hinged on community policing – crime control, not gun control. And – lo and behold! – it worked.

I’m not sure what these brits are truly trying to accomplish by calling for a knife ban throughout the UK. But rest assured – 20 years from now, when Orwellian teams of black-uniformed ‘Yardies are arresting housewives for dicing tomatos with un-approved edged implements, we American “gun nuts” will be saying “We told ya so!”

Winn Schwartau, it appears, is a rennaissance man.

He’s been busy the last couple of days, kicking off a series he calls “Mad as Hell” – in which he bitches, loudly, about the shortcomings of the Windows-Intel computing platform.

For those who think “WinTel” is a new long-distance provider, a little background information… Windows, as you probably know, is the world’s most popular computer operating system. It “runs” the majority of the world’s desktop PCs, and seemingly causes the majority of the world’s PC headaches, too. Windows is the “Win” in WinTel. The “Tel” portion is the tail end of “Intel” – the manufacturer with the most market share in the processor chips used in the world’s desktop PCs. If you don’t already know your computer contains an AMD, Cyrix or Transmeta chip, then it probably has an Intel under the hood.

You can go read Winn’s blog to learn just how the WinTel schema of the PC world has pissed him off. He’s steamed for a lot of good reasons… WinTel hardware is historically not the most well-built or robust stuff around. Every Windows operating system has been riddled with security holes, instabilities and outright confusion. Even for those who just want to check their e-mail and browse a few web pages, a minefield of spyware, viruses, trojan horses and pop-up ads await them.

As Winn points out, not all of WinTel’s problems are Microsoft’s fault, nor are they the fault of Intel. It’s possible to buy very good Intel-based hardware, and (if you’re a guru with a lot of time on your hands) it’s possible to configure Windows to be – well – usable. But for the overwhelming majority, their combination is a double-batch recipe for migraines.

Winn Schwartau’s solution is to switch to Apple Computer’s Mac platform. The Mac uses tightly-controlled hardware and well-designed software to provide a consistent user experience – from the way the mouse feels to the way you’re greeted when you call for tech support. Winn’s series proves they’ve got something going for themselves…

Unfortunately, users like me are left hanging out to dry in this big computational equation. I’m an electrical engineer, and (fortunate or unfortunate as the case may be) much of my work is done on computers. Whether I’m designing circuits or circuit boards, writing firmware or software, modeling a plastic enclosure or running simulations, I’m pretty much helpless without a computer – as much as I’d like (some days) to go back to the days of ammonia blueprints and slide rules. You know, before I was born.

Doubly unfortunate for engineers like me is that many of our tools are only available for the Windows operating system. Which means – ker-chunk – we’re locked into WinTel.

Enter stage right: Linux. Thanks to a whole slew of helpful people, there’s another alternative to WinTel. Instead of going to the Mac and losing most of our engineering apps, we can turn just slightly upstream and join the small-but-growing LinTel crowd. There are free, open-source applications for most of the things I do (from progrmaming microcontrollers to building databases) and there are some proprietary titles to round out the mix – such as a Linux-compatible FPGA development suite from Xilinx.

So, after you’ve boiled it all down, you’re left with three choices:

• Door #1: Plunk down a moderate wad of cash for a WinTel box. Enjoy countless computing headaches, but a wide variety of available programs to do just about anything you want.
• Door #2: Plunk down a larger wad of cash for a Mac. You’ll have a sexy, stable system but won’t have nearly the cornucopeia of software titles to choose from.
• Door #3: Buy yourself an Intel computer, but save a few clams and skip the Windows install. Instead, load up Linux. You’ll work a bit harder to get everything running, but once it’s working to your satisfaction, it’ll stay that way for years. While you might not be able to find every app you might need, there’s a good selection out there (especially in the engineering/science realm) as well as a decent range of emulators and virtualization titles to choose from.

Which would you choose?

A brief synopsys of “life since last Thursday”…

• Dad posted Wedding Pics.
• My car still has yet to spit out her transmission. She’s enjoying 6 fresh quarts of Mobil 1, and a freshly replaced connector that revived her ailing left fog lamp.
• Brett is in town – social interaction will inevitably ensue!
• Tonight is laundry night.
• Kelly and I went to see Sarah McLachlan – she was, quite as was to be expected, truly incredible.
• That was a blatant change-of-tense back there!
• Maybe it’s OK, though, since this technically isn’t a paragraph.
• I spent today at a mildly interesting conference where I absorbed Intel marketing material and rubbed elbows with various friends in the Rochester engineering scene…

[Dave takes breif break to shuffle laundry between appliances...]

Tonight is workout night, which means I get to spend some quality time with my iPod and a Tectrix stair climber machine. Hopefully the continued combination of “workout night” and sustained consumption of rice cakes will help me avoid having to donate all my 34″-waist pants.

After spending two days in Dad’s Tahoe, we’ve retrieved Phoenix the Intrigue from the transmission shop. A rebuilt tranny will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1700-$2000, and a brand new ’65E can be had for a cool $2600 installed.

The Jasonian is researching the possibility of replacing the ailing hydraulic pressure control solenoid (translation: expensive little actuator thingy), with the help of a technician friend and the use of a garage bay at the local dealer, for the cost of the part and a case of beer. It would take the better part of a Saturday to do, but supposedly is well within the realm of possibility…

Meanwhile, I’m driving as gingerly as possible and remembering my prediction when I named the car “Phoenix” – after all, a Phoenix is “a legendary Arabian bird said to periodically burn itself to death and emerge from the ashes as a new phoenix”.

So I guess I knew this would happen eventually… And I like Ani DiFranco’s take on the outcome:

“…and God help you if you are a Phoenix,
and you dare to rise up from the ash…
A thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy,
while you are just … flying away.”

Amusingly enough, just as this story appeared on my feed reader, the song “Diamonds” by Klint popped up on my iPod.

For those not familiar, “Diamonds” is a catchy tune with a melody tastefully plucked out on a fretless bass. They used it as the opening soundtrack title for the movie “Snatch” – where Brad Pitt and friends steal a 96-carat diamond…

Phoenix the Intrigue is sick… She spent the day today up and the transmission shop. It looks as if sensor has gone bad inside the transmission, causing the computer to think that shifts are taking longer than they are. As a result, the computer upped the hydraulic pressure, which caused the tranny to shift super-hard and damage a bunch of components with long, obscure, scary names.

So now comes the big choice – do I spend $2000 outright to repair the transmission problem? Do I keep running it to the point of non-drivability? Or do I bite my lip, say a tearful goodbye to my faithful friend of four years, and trade her in for a newer vechile and three years of payments?

Since a truly new replacement vehicle is darn near out of my financial picture, the best option for now might be to run Phoenix with her current transmission, and start searching for just the right pre-owned car to take the reins in her stead.

Why do I feel it necessary to personify and wax poetic about about my car?

Of course, then comes the even tougher question: what to search for! I’ve developed quite an affinity lately for the small-to-midsize SUV market; Honda CR-Vs are nice, as are Hyundai Tuscons, and of course there’s always the Toyota 4Runner. Any of them would be a great vehicle to have available as Kelly and I venture into the maze of home ownership – all are ideal for Home Depot runs and canine carting alike.

But there’s something I’d miss. There’s something – more like a lot of things – about slipping into a sedan’s torso-hugging leather seat and feeling the exhileration of a twisty road. It’s the feeling you get when you drop the windows on a crisp, bright fall day and listen to the engine climb through the gears as you whip along a country road – you’re there for a moment, then the leaves settle and you disappear…

So you might say I’m still up in the air – looks like there are tough decisions ahead!

It’s half-past-midnight, and I’m not asleep yet. There’s a beat-you-to-pulp sort of day behind me, and a load of laundry ahead of me, waiting to go into the [currently occupied] dryer.

On days like these, when tasks start to slip and I start getting off my game, I start wondering if all those assertions that I’ve got too much on my plate are actually true. Fortunately, I generally manage to remember that my super-productive days will always balance out the ones like today.

And now, while I’m waiting patiently for the auto-dry dial to decide my clothes are done, I think I’ll go wash the dishes.