Saturday, October 24, 2009

Novel N1H1, a nice dream, and a world of hurt.

Dear diary,
It's been an interesting day. Today I write about Novel N1H1 Influenza, a dream about a parts exchange program (PEP?) and a world of pain.


The day started off innocently enough. I awoke before 8:00 AM to get Virginia ready to go, and we went to Crown Point, Indiana, to get her immunized against the Novel N1Hi strain of influenza that will be making the rounds soon. We arrived at the county courthouse at about 9:00 AM, the stated opening time, to find the line wrapping around from the side of the building to across the front. It took approximately 3 hours, 40 minutes, to reach the front of that line. During this time, Virginia got tired a few times, and wanted to be picked up. (She's currently 3, and weighs about 45 pounds with all of the layers we had on today). I knew I would pay the price later, but that's what fathers do to help their little girls.

Here's a story from the local paper that covers the experience from a few days ago.

Virginia, like always made friends in the line. Hi Lauren and Mario!

She ended up getting the mist variety of immunization. This apparently contains a live, but "attenuated" virus to give her immune system something to recognize later, with a life-saving head start. Not what we expected, but good enough. The actual immunization only took about a minute, with about 2 minutes of paperwork leading up to it.

The car made the day more interesting by having a loose bit under the front, which I had to re-secure after returning home. There is an air dam, to help with aerodynamics, great when it works, but not fun when it flaps around on the highway. It's fastened down, and should be good enough for a while.

We all took a nap. I had a nice dream about writing a program, open source, that sounded really nice during the dream. It was called PEP - Parts Exchange Program, and was a way to deal with the situation I found myself in during the 1980s... lots of parts, a surplus in fact, but always missing something I needed. PEP would allow you to list all of the parts you had for sale, trade, etc... and automatically find things you needed from nearby sources. (Radio Shack, EDI, friends,ACRO, Digikey, etc) In the dream... it was really sweet, and everybody was excited by the idea.

Upon waking... the world of pain made itself apparent. My back hurts... a lot! I'm fortunate that I now have time to rest and let the Advil kick in and do it's thing. I'm also fortunate to have a blog to write into to distract me from the pain for a while.

The PEP program is a good idea, but the actual cataloging of all my parts would take more time than I can imaging spending right now. I think the concept could be applied to a number of places, especially in a world of decreasingly available cheap new parts. It can also be applied across a number of disciplines, pretty much anywhere people have things to share.

I also have the idea of a cheap curve tracer / parts measurement box for discreet and or 3/4 pin semiconductors, which would interface with PEP.

Well... that's it... Novel N1H1 gave me an interesting day, and gives you a hopefully interesting blog post.

Thanks for your time and attention.

--Mike--

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