Thumb Writing

Whoa! Sometime I stumble onto something that just surprises me. Following up on my post a week ago about writing these with my Droid phone, I thought I would try again, taking the advice of my cousin-in-law about using the soft keyboard because I couldn't get uppercase or alternate characters (pretty much any punctuation other than period or comma) and digits when I was using the Droid's slide out keyboard.

The first realization as I tried to do that just now was that I can't seem to launch the soft keyboard... I tapped on the text entry box, but it just sat there, instead of giving me the soft keyboard.

The second, and much cooler realization, however came when, on a lark I held down the SHIFT key while I pressed a letter. To my astonishment, I got a capital.  I then tried the same with the ALT key, and that worked to give me the alternate keys.  In the last year I have used this keyboard literally EVERY DAY, and I have never seen it behave like a "regular" desktop keyboard. It has always been modal... You press shift, and then the next key is capped. Or you press shift twice, and it is in caps lock mode until you hit shift again. I wasn't even aware that the key matrix could support the simultaneous key press behavior...  Maybe everyone else with a Droid already knew this, but it was news to me!

The text entry still isn't perfect, because the self resizing text box keeps dropping the soft buttons on top of the line I'm writing at the bottom of the screen. I also keep hitting the SEARCH button next to the ALT and below the 'X' key which opens up the web search dialog. Also, the keys are so small that hitting ALT or SHIFT plus any of the adjacent keys at the same time is really difficult. Of course I just realized that the last gripe is easily avoided by using the other set of ALT and SHIFT keys, although I forgot they were even there because in modal keyboard mode I *always* use the left hand ones. And the Droid browser won't let me scroll down far enough to get to the Labels box, so I'll have to add those to this post later.  But even with all these minor gripes, it is really exciting to discover a new capability of my phone. Even if I probably should have known it was there all along...

Pick-n-Pull

My daughter drives a 1990 Subaru Legacy, which means her car is several years older than she is.  I have been told that the engine will probably survive to 250,000+ miles.  It has had a few problems over the years, such as a hesitating/stalling problem that was finally traced back to a bad fan, and a fuel injector that needed to be replaced, but on the whole it runs pretty well.  But a lot of little things tend to fail over time.  And when the driver's side sun visor joined the passenger side visor in falling off, I finally decided to do something about it.

I went to Pick-n-Pull.  Pick-n-Pull is a chain of auto wrecking yards where you pay $2 to get in, and if you tell them a specific year and model of car that you're looking for, they'll tell you which row to look in.  I found several Subaru Legacies in various states of decomposition.  The place was fascinating to me.  Over a thousand cars, many obviously the victims of accidents, neatly arranged in a grid where they were being disassembled and carried away in pieces by the customers to prolong the life of other cars.

In addition to paying $2 to get in (fee waived for a first time visitor!), you also sign a release so that if you maim yourself, it's your problem.  And there are plenty of sharp, jagged, oily, greasy automotive components on which to hurt yourself if you're not careful.  But mostly it's just a really efficient recycling of deceased cars before the picked over hulls are presumably shredded for scrap metal.  You have to bring your own tools to disassemble things, but they provide wheel barrows for hauling off the larger pieces.  And there were people wheeling away transmissions, axles, wheels, seats, doors, and pretty much whatever else they needed.  They even have portable overhead hoists available to help you get the engines out if you need them. ("Please do not use the overhead hoist to pick up cars...")

Before you head out to your local Pick-N-Pull, you can see if they have the models you're looking for on their website, which seems to reflect the same data they use to point you to your targets at their front counter.  I find this very convenient, but I've had mixed luck with it.  Two of the 1990 Subaru Legacies showed up on their website (and the in shop database) as sedans, but when I got there they were all actually station wagons, which meant they didn't have the same kind of release handles or tail light fixture that I needed.  Still, I found the visors I needed, along with a few other parts that have given up the ghost on Amanda's car.

Once you're done, you pay for your parts on the way out according to their standard price list.  I have found the people that work there to be consistently courteous and helpful. And Pick-n-Pull even offer a 30 day exchange for store credit on any part that doesn't fit or otherwise meet your needs. ("Sorry, no cash refunds.")

I asked the guy ringing up my purchase what he considered the strangest thing he's ever found in a car.
"Blood," he said.
"Like, a lot of blood?" I asked.
"Yeah.  Like someone was murdered in it," he said.  "We called the wrecker to come take that one back.  We weren't gonna touch it."
And the most memorable thing that wasn't a murder scene?
He laughed and said, "We found a pound of marijuana once..."

Blood Donation

Today's entry is one of those gimmicky pieces where the writing of the entry is intimately connected with the topic being written about.  Yup, as I sit here typing this, I am hooked up to a Gambro BCT blood separation machine which is pulling blood out of my left arm, extracting the desired components (in this case platelets), and putting the bulk material back into my arm.

The fact that I can write this at all is a tribute to evolving medical technology.  When I first started doing platelet apheresis in 1992, the machines used separate extraction and return needles, so I had to sit with both arms extended and unbending, a needle in each elbow.  This pretty well limited what I could do during the 80 - 120 minute period of the donation to watching a movie.  One time I had an itch on my nose that just wouldn't go away.  I finally told one of the blood center staff, and she took a piece of gauze in a pair of tongs and used it to scratch my nose for me.  When the single needle machines were first put into use, I didn't like them as well as the two needle process, and I continued to request the two needle machines for several years.  Eventually, though, the single needle machines got better, and now that is all they use, except for white cell donations.

Although the donation takes longer, platelet apheresis is (I have been told) less physiologically stressful than giving a pint of whole blood.  Donating whole blood is essentially bleeding out 7-14% of your entire blood mass, and you can only do it once every 56 days in the U.S.  Platelet apheresis, on the other hand takes almost no red cells, and instead just platelets suspended in a few hundred milliliters of plasma.  Because the human body replaces lost platelets in about 3 days, donors are eligible to do apheresis as often as once a week, and in an emergency, as often as every 4 days.  There are a few other limits that the FDA puts on apheresis.  You can only donate a maximum of 24 times in any 1 year period, and they limit your total plasma loss in any one year period to 12 liters if you weigh between 110 and 175 pounds, or 14.4 liters if you are over 175 pounds.

Right now I am donating a "double," or two sets of platelets, which are actually going into two separate bags.  In total, they will take out 710 billion platelets, and about 415 ml of plasma, plus the tubes of whole blood removed at the beginning of the process for testing.  Every blood donation is tested for a variety of diseases, including HIV, malaria, hepatitis, and West Nile virus, which is why they extract those additional samples.  Sometimes the test samples are also used for additional research.

In order to keep my blood liquid while they are running it through the machine, they introduce an anticoagulant.  The anticoagulant combines with calcium in the blood, creating a temporary calcium deficiency during the period of the donation.  One side effect of this is a tingling in my lips, and mild muscle cramps in my jaw.  To counteract this, they provide Tums antacid for me to suck on, which gives me back calcium.  The tingling and other effects disappear as soon as the donation ends, and my body quickly metabolizes any remaining anticoagulant.

So why do this?  Well, for one thing, someone has to...  Platelets are used in the treatment of a lot of things, particularly for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.  Currently only about 3% of the medically eligible population donates blood or blood products.  Many people have asked me if I get paid for donating.  The answer is no.  Tax laws let me deduct the mileage to drive here, and the Stanford Blood Center gives me cookies and occasionally coupons for free movie tickets or Baskin Robbins ice cream, but I don't get paid.  And really, if you were in the hospital and needed blood products, would you want them to come from someone that donated because he or she needed the money?

And, like so many things, this began in part due to a dare.  When I was in college in the late 80's and early 90's, my best friend, who had been giving blood since high school, mocked me mercilessly because I wouldn't give blood along with her.  So finally, during my senior year, I stopped in at the Stanford bloodmobile one afternoon when it was parked in front of my university residence.  I mentioned to them that I was doing it in part to confront my discomfort with needles.  "Well if you REALLY want to confront needles," they said, "you should try apheresis! You get two needles!"  And here I am, 18 years later...

And the needle just came out, so it is time to go eat cookies and then go to work!

TPLO Surgery For Dogs

I have been meaning to write for a long time now about Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy (TPLO) surgery for dogs.  A common human knee injury is the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tear.  In dogs, the corresponding structure is called the Cranial Cruciate Ligament (CrCL).  When it fails, the dog's knee (stifle) joint becomes unstable and the dog goes lame.

Left untreated, a dog with a torn CrCL will have limited or no mobility, and the joint will suffer from arthritis and further degradation.  In small breed dogs, the ligament can be surgically reattached.  In large breeds, however, the inherent instability of the joint and the load on the ligament virtually guarantees that reattachment will last only a short time before it fails again.  Instead, the large-breed treatment is to make a round cut to separate the top of the tibia, rotate it around, and then reattach it with a plate and screws so that it heals in the new position.  The new orientation levels the tibial plateau so that it is stable, and the femur isn't always trying to slide down the top of the tibia.

About five years ago, our older Golden Retriever, a female named Dory, suffered a complete tear of the CrCL in her right leg.  When our vet first explained the surgery to me, my first impression was "that sounds like a goofy hack."  Rather than put the joint back together, they change the shape of one of the bones so that the joint is mechanically stable.  Imagine that you have a big inflatable Santa Claus decoration sitting on your steeply sloped roof, and a rope tied to your chimney keeps it from sliding off.  One day the rope breaks, and off it slides.  Well, the TPLO approach says "instead of reattaching the rope, we're just going to cut out a portion of the roof, tilt it upwards, and reattach it to the house in that position, so that our inflatable Santa is sitting on a flat surface."  I was skeptical.

Because our dogs are family to us, and the TPLO has the best track record for treating her type of injury, we decided we had to try.  We checked Dory into the pet hospital one morning, and picked her up the next day with one leg completely shaved bald, a a spectacular scar.  It took a while for her to heal, but eventually she did.  Physical therapy involved gentle, short walks, and swimming.  We put a cheap above ground pool into our back yard to provide a place to swim her regularly.

One unfortunately reality of the CrCL tear is that if it happens on one hind leg, there is a very high chance that it will happen on the other leg within a year.  Sure enough, almost a year to the day after her initial injury, Dory's left leg went.  We had the surgery on that side as well, and after more recovery and physical therapy, she was back up and doing great.

The initial quiet period after the surgery was the hardest.  Dory had to stay in her box almost continuously, so she wouldn't be putting stress on the hardware holding her tibia together while it was healing.  Getting just enough, but not too much, physical activity is hard for dogs that love to run and jump and play.  The swimming definitely helped a lot, because it provided an exercise that, because it was non-load-bearing, she could do as much as she wanted, without the risk of injuring the healing bone.  And as a water breed, Dory loves to swim anyway.  We always put a doggy life vest on her, so that if she did get tired or cramp up or just want to hold still, she would float like a cork.  But usually she'd paddle around and around until she was completely exhausted.

We have also been told by our vet that Dory has had the best TPLO outcome that she has ever seen.  Dory is more of a hyperactive puppy today, at almost nine and a half years old, than she was when she was three.  Except for being a bit bow-legged, it is impossible to tell that she has had major surgery on both legs. She runs circles (literally!) around our five year old male Golden (Rex), and she has amazing quality of life.  To help maintain her, we do have her on low dose daily Deramaxx, an anti-inflamatory.  We also give her Dasuquin, and Science Diet "prescription diet j/d," designed for joint health maintenance.  And she's doing great.

I mention all of this because if you find yourself in our position, I encourage you to think very seriously about the TPLO surgery.  It is expensive, and requires careful handling during recovery, but we have found it to be well worth it.  With any medical procedure, there are no guarantees.  But I can tell you from our experience, an excellent outcome is possible.

Everything Is Made

There are a lot of human-made things in the world.  In fact, if you live in the developed world, unless you are a farmer, or an extreme nature enthusiast, probably most of the objects you touch in the course of a day are "made" things.  Now sometimes I rant about the apparently lack of thought that went into making some of those things, but I also find amazing the cumulative total amount of thought, and effort, and logistical backing that goes into making just about everything.

Pick something REALLY simple, like a cafeteria spoon.  Stamped out of stainless steel sheet with a chrome finish, they sell for about 10 cents each.  They are likely produced in a big metal press, probably somewhere in China.  Someone had to design the spoon itself, with the exact size and shape and any stylistic flourishes, in order to make it.  But someone also had to design the press, and the hydraulics to run the press, and the hydraulic fluid in the cylinders, and the control system for the pumps, and mounting system to fix the press to the factory floor.

Someone else had to make sure that there was sheet metal of proper thickness, quality, and composition from which to press the spoon.  That required metalurgists, working together with refinery plant operators, to get from ore to metal of the right composition, and then a whole lot of industrial process control to roll it out into uniform sheets.

And getting the ore out of the ground required massive mining equipment like earth movers.  Each tire on those earth movers required an entire supply chain of its own.  Which was in turn fed by bulk rubber material and other chemicals that make up the rubber, and more metal, and more manufacturing machinery, with even more chemists, material scientists, industrial process designers, and engineers behind them.

So goes the chain of causality backward, until that one simple spoon has required the input of thousands of people and hundreds of industries.  Of course, those thousands of people were simultaneously making possibly thousands of other products as well.  And the mining, metal processing, hydraulic press manufacturing, and so on were all happening simultaneously.  But it is surprising to think how much making stands behind that cheap little cafeteria spoon, and by extension virtually everything else with which we interact daily.

Walking Backwards

I wanted to watch an AVI file that I had on my computer on my TiVo. No problem, I thought, I've even already written a blog entry about how to do that. So I referred back to that post, and discovered that it doesn't work anymore.  Sometime in the last year I had updated to the latest version of the free TiVo Desktop for PC software.  And in so doing, I lost the ability to transfer video files from my computer to my TiVo.  I researched this on the TiVo website, and thought, surely that function has just moved somewhere else in the software and I'm overlooking it.  Nope, it turns out that the ability to upload from the computer to the TiVo has been reclassified as premium feature, requiring the $24.95 purchase of a TiVo Desktop Plus Key.

Now, charging me $25 to unlock additional functionality in software that I already have installed is a long-standing revenue strategy for monetizing "shareware" software.  It's how they get you to go from using the free version, to paying money for added functionality.  Except that three things about this really annoy me:

First, I already bought the hardware.  I supposed you could equate buying the TiVo HD hardware to purchasing a computer, and now they're selling software to run with it.  But buying a TiVo is not buying some hacked-up home media server box.  It is an appliance, designed to provide a self-contained solution that offers additional flexibility to my television viewing.  Generally when you upgrade the software on appliances you get fixes and sometime even enhanced functionality for free...  Otherwise, you might go buy the competing product that offers better functionality.

Second, I am already paying a subscription fee to use the TiVo.  I actually bought the lifetime service contract for for my TiVo HD, instead of paying monthly, but the several hundred dollars I paid up-front is effectively just the lump-sum purchase of an annuity for the monthly service fee.  So I'm paying for this monthly subscription, and STILL the are charging more to get the added functionality.

Third, they aren't even asking me to pay more for additional functionality, they are asking me to pay more JUST TO GET BACK FUNCTIONALITY I USED TO HAVE.  This is not how product evolution is supposed to work, and it's really annoying.  They are probably counting on inertia to keep me tied to the TiVo platform, because I have already paid for the hardware, and I've already paid for the lifetime service contract.  They probably also selected $24.95 to be a low enough price barrier that most people will just bend over and pay.  But I feel like I'm effectively being fined $25 for upgrading to the latest version of the free TiVo Desktop for PC software.  How about instead TiVo reward customer loyalty by not removing useful features they've already previously released in earlier free versions?

UPDATE: I sent TiVo email about my gripe, and pointed them to this blog entry.  They replied:

Hello Phillip,

Thank you for contacting TiVo Customer Support.

I would be happy to assist you in getting your feedback recorded and into the right hands. What I recommend that you do would be to fill out the TiVo Feature Request questionnaire located here: http://research.tivo.com/suggestions/2web519.htm . I apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause and invite you to contact us again if you have any other questions or concerns.

101009-00XXXX is the reference number for this inquiry. Please refer to this number if you choose to contact us again regarding this request. In order to respond to this email, please log into your account at www.tivo.com/mysupport. Replies directly to this email will not be received.

Sincerely,
James

TiVo Customer Support Representative
www.tivo.com/support
http://forums.tivo.com

I will submit the form, and see if I hear anything more about it...

Stuff I Want

Here are some of the technologies that I would like to see really take off yet in my lifetime:

Life Extension - While I don't necessarily want to live forever, I'm nowhere close to bored yet, and I think I could easily keep myself amused with the things I'm already interested in for at least a few hundred more years.  But my cells aren't optimized for that kind of span, and there are enough external sources of creeping degradation (random cancer cell clusters, environmental toxicity, sub-optimal diet and lifestyle) that I'll be lucky at my current pace to make it past 100 years.  But these are largely engineering problems, and if enough of them can be solved, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to live a few hundred years, killed off almost exclusively by sudden accidents.  The societal impact of this is a whole other discussion, but if I can have my biological age cleanly reset to 25 years old, I would be happy to have my social security eligibility also reset to 25...

Automated Transportation - There are a LOT of people working on self-driving cars.  The idea of having the flexibility and convenience of automobile transportation together with the someone-else-doing-the-work aspect of riding a train or bus really appeals to me.  On top of which, even though regular car usage kills tens of thousands of people a year, any automated technology won't be accepted until fatalities are virtually eliminated.  So not only will I be able to ride anywhere I want while doing whatever I'd like sitting there, the likelihood of being killed while doing so will be far less than any road trip involving human drivers.

Less Stuff - When I was younger I felt that material possession was a symptom of success.  I have, over the years, come to believe more and more that your stuff owns you far more than you own it.  And even with that belief, I'm writing this at a desk piled with random bits of debris from my life, including several cameras, a digital audio recorder, three loose hard drives, two MP3 players, various office supplies, three headsets, and at least 500 pieces of paper.  I can pare down or efficiently store the electronics, but the paper is just unnecessary.  I don't really want paper, I want data.  And while there are already online bill payment mechanisms and online document storage and online information management systems of all sorts, we aren't quite there yet.  I would like getting a piece of paper to become the exception, and instead I just receive a secure, verifiable, digitally timestamped piece of data.

Clean Energy - We are rapidly coming up on the end of the age of oil, one way or another.  There's still a lot of coal left, but that is still taking carbon out of the ground and dumping it in the air.  We really need a clean efficient energy solution.  Ultimately, it seems that it is going to be either direct nuclear (preferably fusion), or indirect nuclear, which is to say, solar.  There has been a huge increase in solar energy production in the last few years, and the curve is getting steeper, but it is still a tiny fraction of our total consumption.  There are also several related technologies that need to mature in addition to production.  We need efficient storage and transport, and we need more efficient usage of what we do produce.  There are almost no incandescent bulbs left in my home, and in a few more years, I expect I'll have started to go toward LEDs.  It will be interesting to see if my first self-driving car (see above) is also entirely electric...

Of course there will be false starts, and development in directions that we can't even begin to imagine right now.  There will also be lots of unintended consequences, some of which may have the potential to kill us all.  But there's some of my wish list items.  How about you?  Leave a comment with the technologies you want to see come to fruition...