Sunrise From A Plane Window

Sunrise From A Plane Window
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

JetBlue and Google are running a "photos taken from an airplane window" contest to promote live Google Maps on the seatback TVs.

Here's my entry, taken on July 29th, aboard JetBlue Flight 1100 from RDU to JFK, around 6:30 AM and near the NC/VA border as indicated by Google Maps.

Got the shot with my iPhone.

Secret sauce

Pretty sure I want one of these T-shirts.

Microsoft offers Works for free

Via TechCrunch:

Microsoft has released the new version of Microsoft Works as a free, ad supported office package that will compete directly with Open Office and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

The Works package offers word processing, spreadsheet and slide (powerpoint) functionality partially based on code from older versions of Microsoft Office.

Whack-a-mole

Spike a column in your own paper, and the next day it's all over the blogosphere... and the day after that, your competitors are writing about it. The LA Times just found that out.

“The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.”

The site ran the 1,450-word column, which “fell into our hands,” in its entirety. In it, Mr. Goldstein proposed that his newspaper promote itself by following the lead of The Mail on Sunday in Britain, which inserted Prince’s latest CD into 2.9 million copies, and also give away music.

“While the Times still is a profitable business, our revenue was down 10 percent in the second quarter while our cash flow was down, as our publisher put it the other day, a ‘whopping 27 percent, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced,’ ” Mr. Goldstein wrote. “Times are so hard at the Times that the publisher has proposed putting ads on the front page to generate new revenue.”

New Life on the Web for a Killed Newspaper Column (New York Times, 30 July 2007)

Related: The actual, original column can be read here: LA Observed: Goldstein's Killed Column

...and the women aren't all that attractive, either

From the "This would be funny, only it's happening to me" department:

A private e-mail address, linked to a pseudonym that I use for occasional print and Web articles, has been helpfully subscribed to an "online dating" site.

The word "dating," in this case, seems to have the same euphemistic meaning that the transsexual hookers in New York City's Meatpacking District always understood: "...honey, want a date?" (a line not infrequently delivered in a disconcerting basso profundo.)

Even better: Having logged in with the credentials provided by the semi-literate prankster who set this up (since he or she used my e-mail address, I got all the notifications of account creation, as well as the many "special offers" that begin pouring into my inbox this morning)... there is no way to delete the account from the site via the web interface.

Okay. Scratch one e-mail account, set up another, add some random characters into the name.

Good thing they're disposable these days.

A brand new bag photo

Briefcase Contents - Workday Edition
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Update to an earlier post - here's the workday edition of "what I carry."

(Crossposted to Flickr groups What's In Your Bag and The Items We Carry.)

Anyone can play along at home - if you add your photos to the Flickr pool, please give a shout in the comments.

"I have no confidence in the system"

The first doctor gave her six months to live. The second and third said chemotherapy would buy more time, but surgery would not. A fourth offered to operate.

Karen Pasqualetto had just given birth to her first child last July when doctors discovered she had colon cancer. She was only 35, and the disease had already spread to her liver. The months she had hoped to spend getting to know her new daughter were hijacked by illness, fear and a desperate quest to survive. For the past year, she and her relatives have felt lost, fending for themselves in a daunting medical landscape in which they struggle to make sense of conflicting advice as they race against time in hopes of saving her life.

“It’s patchwork, and frustrating that there’s not one person taking care of me who I can look to as my champion,” Ms. Pasqualetto said recently in a telephone interview from her home near Seattle. “I don’t feel I have a doctor who is looking out for my care. My oncologist is terrific, but he’s an oncologist. The surgeon seems terrific, but I found him through my own diligence. I have no confidence in the system.”

Cancer Patients, Lost in a Maze of Uneven Care (New York Times, July 28, 2007)

Sadly, "I have no confidence in the system" is a very well-informed, thoroughly educated position to take, especially when it comes to any condition where the treatment options are complex.

And the "one person taking care of you who you can look to as your champion" pretty much has to be you (with support from your loved ones, hopefully)... and that at a time when, to put it mildly, you aren't feeling very well.

Brad Peniston at the Maritime Historical Society on Saturday

NYC-area peeps, Chaotic Synaptic Activity sends the following, on behalf of author Brad Peniston:

The National Maritime Historical Society (http://www.seahistory.org/) has invited me to talk about "No Higher Honor: Saving the Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf" tomorrow near their New York headquarters.

When: noon, Sat. July 28
Where: The Hendrick Hudson Free Library, 185 Kings Ferry Road, Montrose, N.Y. 10548
-- Phone: 914-739-5654
-- Google map: http://tinyurl.com/2smrqt

The event is open to the public; please come! Brad

The items we carry

manbag contents
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

My contribution to the excellent Flickr pool, "The Items We Carry."

(via)

[See also: The Workday Edition]

Sack up

I've gone hiking in bear country before, and a standard practice there is to hang your food (and the clothes you wore while cooking!) up in a tree, some distance from your camp, so that you don't invite bears into your tent.

(The reason that you hang the clothes you've cooked in, and don't sleep in them, is that if a bear wanders into your camp at night, you, smelling of food, in your sleeping bag, will appear to be something that was packaged by Kraft.)

Anyway... meet Ursack.

Battling hospital-acquired infections

At a veterans’ hospital [in Pittsburgh], nurses swab the nasal passages of every arriving patient to test them for drug-resistant bacteria. Those found positive are housed in isolation rooms behind red painted lines that warn workers not to approach without wearing gowns and gloves.

Every room and corridor is equipped with dispensers of foamy hand sanitizer. Blood pressure cuffs are discarded after use, and each room is assigned its own stethoscope to prevent the transfer of microorganisms. Using these and other relatively inexpensive measures, the hospital has significantly reduced the number of patients who develop deadly drug-resistant infections, long an unaddressed problem in American hospitals.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected this year that one of every 22 patients would get an infection while hospitalized — 1.7 million cases a year — and that 99,000 would die, often from what began as a routine procedure. The cost of treating the infections amounts to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.

[...]

“People don’t believe it’s in their institution, and, if it is, that it’s too big to do anything about, that you just have to accept it,” said Terri Gerigk Wolf, director of VA Pittsburgh Healthcare Systems. “But we have shown you can do something about it.”

Swabs in Hand, Hospital Cuts Deadly Infections (New York Times, 27 July 2007)

I have more than a passing interest in this topic. Both of my parents have contracted HAI's (hospital/healthcare-acquired infections) while patients in hospitals or nursing homes, and an multiple-antibiotic-resistant strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae, acquired during a hospital stay, killed my father.

Related:

• Centers for Disease Control: The Impact of Hospital-Acquired Bloodstream Infection
  
  "Nosocomial bloodstream infections are a leading cause of death in the United States. If we assume a nosocomial infection rate of 5%, of which 10% are bloodstream infections, and an attributable mortality rate of 15%, bloodstream infections would represent the eighth leading cause of death in the United States."

Three things can happen...

Over at Knowledge Work, I've posted about how to qualify proposal leads, and led off with the inevitable sports analogy:

Legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, who knew a thing or two about strategy, once explained why he typically ran an offense that relied heavily on the running game, shunning the forward pass:

“Three things can happen when you throw a football, and two of them are bad.”

Qualifying RFP-based leads (Knowledge Work)

Meet "Oscar," your furry little escort across the Styx

When Oscar the Cat visits residents of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, the staff jumps into action -- Oscar can sense within hours when someone is about to die.

In his two years living in Steere's end-stage dementia unit, Oscar has been at the bedside of more than 25 residents shortly before they died, according to Dr. David Dosa of Brown University in Providence.

He wrote about Oscar in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"It's not that the cat is consistently there first," Dr. Joan Teno, a professor of community health at Brown University, who sees patients in the unit. "But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours."

Nursing home cat can sense death, ease passing (Reuters via Yahoo News)

The staff don't believe that anything supernatural is going on; rather, they posit that Oscar is sensitive to some kind of biochemical change that is taking place in the unit's patients as death approaches.

However, definitely check out Oscar's picture in the Yahoo News article cited above. He appears to be a very wise cat, with a great deal of Buddha-nature. You can just tell that the little guy has quite a bedside manner.

Related: Dosa, David M. A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat N Engl J Med 2007 357: 328-329

A history of progressive rock

Strawberry Bricks: a history of progressive rock from 1967-1979.

Hat tip: deVille

Dad's math book makes the grade

Some parents pitch in with homework when kids get bad grades in math. Nicholas Aggor literally wrote the book.

The Riverview engineer was so distressed when sons Samuel, 14, and Joshua, 13, brought home bad marks, he took it upon himself to rewrite their textbooks chapter by chapter.

Four years later, they are in advanced classes and the Ghana native's pet project has become a passion that's produced a math curriculum for grades kindergarten to nine -- 14 books in all. And soon, it may not be just his kids whose grades are improving.

Dad's math book makes the grade (The Detroit News, 20 July 2007)

Hat tip: deVille

Opsware founder Marc Andreesen on the HP acquisition

In September 1999, at the height of the dot com boom, a small group of colleagues and I started a new company, Loudcloud, based on the idea that the huge Internet infrastructure buildout then underway -- by startups and big companies alike -- required a new approach to running modern datacenters and computer systems at high scale: automation.

The eight years that have followed have been an unbelievable journey...

Today we have announced that Opsware is being acquired by Hewlett-Packard for more than $1.6 billion in cash, or $14.25 per share.

HP buys my company Opsware for more than $1.6 billion in cash (blog.pmarca.com)

Ron Paul profiled in the NYT

Paul represents a different Republican Party from the one that Iraq, deficits and corruption have soured the country on. In late June, despite a life of antitax agitation and churchgoing, he was excluded from a Republican forum sponsored by Iowa antitax and Christian groups. His school of Republicanism, which had its last serious national airing in the Goldwater campaign of 1964, stands for a certain idea of the Constitution — the idea that much of the power asserted by modern presidents has been usurped from Congress, and that much of the power asserted by Congress has been usurped from the states. Though Paul acknowledges flaws in both the Constitution (it included slavery) and the Bill of Rights (it doesn’t go far enough), he still thinks a comprehensive array of positions can be drawn from them: Against gun control. For the sovereignty of states. And against foreign-policy adventures. Paul was the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1988. But his is a less exuberant libertarianism than you find, say, in the pages of Reason magazine.

The Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-Medicare Candidacy of Dr. Ron Paul (New York Times, 22 July 2007)

personalDNA

via Rachel

Soul food in New York

Courtesy of prairiesong, a good article about soul food restaurants in New York City: COMFORT FOOD.

Sometimes you can travel north to go south. As removed as it might seem from the easy pace and wide open spaces of the Southern states, New York City still knows about life below the Mason-Dixon Line. Tucked away on side streets and in basement clubs, an authentic culture thrives, and it welcomes visitors who want to slip away from the bustling city for a few hours of downhome hospitality.

enrevanche demographics

Time for another peek behind the demographic curtain at enrevanche's readers.

Based on analysis of the site logs:

• Country share: the US leads with not quite 80%, with the remaining 22% (in declining order) split among the UK, Canada, India, Sweden, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Spain, Singapore (Hi, Fiona!), Germany, Belgium, Japan, Israel and Norway.
  
  
• OS share: 65% of you are running Windows XP; a whopping 25% of you are using Mac OS X (results likely skewed by the links we've been picking up from MacSurfer lately; see below.)
  
  The rest of you (10% in aggregate) are using older or newer Windows variants (Vista penetration: less than 3%) or Linux; at least one brave soul is browsing the site using OS/2!
  
  OS/2 guy: Rock on with your retro-bad self.
  
  
• Visit duration: most enrevanche visitors linger for between two and three minutes per visit, an absolute eternity in blog-time. (It takes me less time than that to *write* many of the posts.)
  
  
• Top referring sites in the last month, in order:


• MacSurfer
• Agitprop
• Bill in Exile (warning, NSFW and try not to be drinking any beverages while reading)
• Real Clear Politics
  


• Top search engine: Google.


• Top Google search strings bringing unwary visitors to the site this week: Westell 327W, Sunrocket