hypocaffeinemia

I’m at home cleaning– for me that includes electronics. I just downloaded a bunch of old photos off my cell phone and found one particularly interesting one to share. It’s a hyperbaric chamber from one of the local hospitals. It’s apparently one of the largest chambers in the U.S., and from what I can tell, one of the oldest. I don’t have a picture of the control console, but it looked like something from 1960’s area NASA. 

Here’s the chamber: 
 

It’s pretty nifty.

I’ve added OpenID support to the blog. Dunno if it will ever take off, but it’s a nice goal, so I thought I’d support it. Feel free to use your OpenID account to login here. If you don’t know what OpenID is, go look it up!

In the beginning of September, I reviewed a beta version of a young new browser based on the same Webkit platform as Apple’s Safari. Google’s Chrome, that very browser, sure has grown up fast: Here we are in the middle of December and Google has officially deemed it worthy of leaving the comforts of “beta” status. While for most companies leaving beta status is a normal rite-of-passage for software, we’re talking about Google here– lest I remind you Gmail, Google Calendar, and  Google Documents, amongst other applications, are apparently in an infinitely long beta despite their near perfect functionality. 

With that said, one would expect that Google holds very high standards for determining what it takes to leave beta. Does Chrome meet such standards? Read on.

Okay, I lied. 

I actually don’t have much of a parable to share, just random venting. Our soap dispenser in the one sink inside the ICU nursing station was finally replaced this week. It had been broken for the past two months. Why did it take this long to fix? Nobody knows, but it’s beside the point.

The irony, as any of my peers in this zany industry can empathize with, is our hospital’s fervent hand-washing hysteria coinciding. Sure, they gave us a temporary bottle dispenser. It doesn’t help to quell the pain. We can afford hand-washing secret shoppers (I dare not speak what we call them in reality), but we can’t afford to fix the soap dispenser. 

Le sigh.

So it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that ever since Hurricane Ike my frequency of blogging has decreased significantly. Nothing like a three-week stretch without power to break a habit, I guess. 

Anywho, my penultimate semester is now complete and once more I’m feeling the itch to tell random strangers on the intertubes about what I think. I’ve (finally) updated wordpress and adopted a ?temporary? new theme as the old one, stylin’ as it was, didn’t make the grade in the compatibility department. I realized I had about 80 thousand categories, so I cleaned them up a bit, too. Sometimes it’s more fun to do the technical stuff behind the scenes then to write, but I digress. 

Expect to hear more from me, whether you like it or not, over the coming weeks. I can’t promise I’ll be super active once the next semester gets going, but I may just try a hypocaffeinemia challenge™ : run 3 miles and blog once a day for an entire year. We’ll see how well that goes: the hurricane gave me the excuse I need to break my running habit as well.

I would venture to say a good one out of every four cars in Houston has this monochrome manger-silhouetted magnet affixed to its derriere which states, “Keep Christ in Christmas”.

That’s all well and good, but it is about as likely as keeping Thor in Thursday. The holiday has evolved over time– while at one point it may have been Christ-centered it didn’t even start that way. Lest we forget, The winter celebration has many decidedly non-Christian roots: Yule, Brumalia, Winter Solstice, and everything related.

I wonder how many Christmas traditions (not anything new on the so-called “War on Christmas”) have anything to do with the religious aspect at all? Not many.

That’s why this atheist Celebrates Christmas: It’s not about Christ any more than Thursday is about Thor. See also: Tyr (Tuesday), Odin (Wednesday), and Frige (Friday).

Also: If anyone knows where I can buy or make a “Keep Thor in Thursday” magnet, let me know!