zen.org Communal Weblog

May 5, 2011

Tick, Tock

Filed under: — brendan @ 21:55 IST

The wait is (still) on, watching the numbers. My platelets, after a bag yesterday, went up from 15 yesterday morning to 20 from this morning’s blood draw. A nurse comes to me anywhere between 5:30-6:15 and uses the central line to take 4 or 5 test tubes’ worth of blood. I wonder what the total liquid volume is of what they’ve taken, considering they’ve been doing it for so long?

White cells moved from 0.1 to 0.2, which I’m not yet interpreting as anything more than recognizing minor shifts can happen. Red blood cells are at 8.7, but they’re comfortable with them and expected we could wait until tomorrow for me to get a transfusion.

Wireless hacking

In case I’ve not complained about it before, the wifi available here on the ward was designed by someone in a bad mood. For reasons no one on the current IT support staff can guess, it’s set up to cut you off after 30 minutes. You’re then forced to put in a username and password again on their web page before you’re back online.

This is particularly rude when you’re in the middle of a Skype call. When asked, the IT folks didn’t seem like they saw any reason to change this behavior. Their suggestion? Reload the login page every 20 minutes. Seriously.

So I think I’ve found my hack to do something quite similar to their crappy reload suggestion, but make my laptop do it automatically for me. In a Skype call this evening, Elana and I had a small hiccup—only for a couple of seconds—but our call didn’t get cut off, like they always have been after about 25-28 minutes.

We reached a new record: a 42-minute call. I think my hack is working! I still think it’s ridiculous to expect people to do such a silly task.

To me, it’s just plain rude. Let’s say you were sitting at a table in the library, reading. Now imagine the librarian ringing a bell, and everyone has to get up, go back to the door into the library, and re-swipe an access card in order to go back in and keep reading. Not only would the librarian feel physically threatened by the animosity surrounding him or her, but the library would soon get shut down as unusable.

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