Monthly Archives: October 2006

The Cold

I’m dragging pretty badly today, and I think I know why: The Cold.

No, not the one I was coming down with last week. The Cold that seeps in through windows, that slowly takes over the house as the improperly-set thermostat trundles along, thinking everything is okay. When I woke up this morning, freezing cold under my minimal covers, I immediately dove for socks/pullover/etc from the closet.

This is not weather that I’m accustomed to, especially not indoors.

The issue has (hopefully) been remedied — I spent five minutes programming the thermostat this morning and it should be a nice 68 degrees throughout the day and night now. Eventually my body will adjust to these temperatures. A warm last week with a New Orleans weekend left me vulnerable, but last night’s long term chill hopefully got my thyroid working on an adjustment plan.

I need blankets.

New OS X Install on Arwen

I had installed Linux recently on my PowerBook Titanium (again, yes), but was having issues related to WPA2 encryption for wireless access, so here I am back on OS X again.

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve decided this time to actually write down all of the things I install and do to set up the machine. These notes are below

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Going to New Orleans Tomorrow

Tomorrow will be a great day — I’ll wake up in Baltimore, but I’ll be in New Orleans before I go to sleep. I won’t be checking or replying to email as much while I’m gone, so don’t expect a quick reply until Monday.

Hi Katie!

What is a Harvard Respirator?

I was reading a paper today about a study on dogs, and it mentioned that the dogs were ventilated with a “Harvard Respirator”. It was pretty easy to find a few pictures on Google Images, but I couldn’t find much other information. Apparently it’s just a veterinary ventilator made by Harvard Apparatus. In case you ever need to know. I thought perhaps it was a particular type of device, like a “Holter Monitor”.

You will find a lot of mentions of Harvard respirators on Google, and they are mostly quotes from scientific papers stating that they used a Harvard respirator. Go figure.

ADDENDUM: The very same paper also mentions the pacing rate they used to stimulate the dog’s heart. They don’t mention the normal heart rate for a (mongrel) dog. I looked it up and found it here. It’s between 60-160 beats/min for average-sized adult dogs. That’s a pretty wide range. I’d like to see a plot of heart rate compared to size in dogs.

New Rules

Perhaps “guidelines” is a better word. I have two of them, to ensure my sanity:

  1. Taking a half day off on Thursdays shall commence in the afternoon rather than the morning (followed by work in the afternoon)
  2. No taking Saturday off until homework is done. Then, if it’s done, take Sunday off instead.

I should note that my current rules include swapping Thursday for Sunday, taking Thursday off entirely and working all day Sunday.