It's All Right 2.0

Hal had the idea to attempt another beach walk this holiday weekend, and I jumped at the idea.   Hal has completed it 4 times before, and the last time I went with him, I had knee trouble, and bailed out after 4 miles.

This time Hal wanted to walk south from New Smyrna end to the Playalinda end.  Our spouses graciously agreed to provide transport, and Alison dropped us off about 7:30am at Apollo beach at the tail end of a rainstorm with blustery winds.   However, it rapidly cleared up, winds dropped to gentle breezes, and we discovered the tide was ideal; it was dropping to a low at about late morning, leaving us with lots of hardpack sand for the first 2/3rds of our walk.

We encountered no one along the way except for a ranger running turtle patrol on a 4 wheeler.  Since it is still summer, we each carried about a gallon of water.  We saw thousands of staked turtle nests, a few fresh turtle crawls and one dead hatchling, dolphins doing acrobatics and leaping completely out of the water, and nudists at each end of the walk.  The oddest sight was a set of footprints at about mile 9.  They seemed to walk out of the surf, went straight towards the dune line, and did not come back down.

Flickr photoset here.  Google map of the 14.5 miles covered.

Linda and Alison met us in Playlinda about 5:30pm just ahead of some rain squalls coming in, and we celebrated at Dixie Crossroads with shrimp and seafood.

Inspired by http://blogs.vocalo.org/amykr/ I thought I’d put my own list together.  These are all things that I have done at one time or another in my life, which I am intending to avoid altogether for the rest of my days.

• leave a shopping cart in the parking lot
• permit someone to cut in a traffic lane because they didn’t want to wait at the beginning of the backup
• get in a fight with someone on the internet
• borrow money with pre-payment stipulations
• smoke (unless I go to prison)
• try to impress someone with how much I know
• drink to the point of blackout
• eat while talking on the phone
• litter
• fail to record car maintenance events
• be careless while handling a catfish
• texting from the drivers seat while the car is moving
• eat a clam, oyster or mussel
• be pressured into volunteering for a job I really don’t want
• go for a year without a dental checkup
• break things when I get mad or aggravated (I have a punching bag now)
• download warez software

On August 18, we accompanied Gina and helped her get set up in her dorm at University of Florida, just over 2 hours from home.    Her pal Alison accompanied Gina in her car, while we drove in the Honda pilot.   While there, we met her roommate Megan and Megan’s parents, got her computer up and running and made a run to Lowes for additional supplies.   We tearfully departed about 6pm, but it didn’t really strike home until we got back to our empty house.   Everything’s different now.  There’s a photo set on flickr.com and a few thumbnails below.

That is what I was thinking as I bounced off the hood of car while crossing six-lane Semoran this morning near the start of my run.   The light turned green while I was crossing in front of stopped cars, but there was one open lane and a driver came on through.   I thank god that he was paying attention enough to hit the brakes so it was a slow-speed collision, but a collision nonetheless.  I rolled onto the asphalt and then got to my feet.   I’m just fine.  I reassured the drivers and waved them on their way, and I finished my run.    I’m extra thankful today.

We are now living room consumers of streaming high-definition video on demand from Netflix, thanks to this $150 blu-ray/netflix player I picked up over the weekend.

Network connection to the living room is via a cisco powerline network extender that uses existing electrical house wiring.  I got this $90 network gadget in a random grab bag from woot.com last month for $8 shipped.    I plugged it in, and it just worked, with no throttling of network throughput, and no configuration required.   I’m getting a 10Mbs download stream at the remote hub just like I get at the source router.  That is over twice as fast as what’s needed for HD delivery.   And the added bonus is that my dish network DVR is now connected to the internet and I can manage the recordings over a web browser.  SOOO much easier to search for programming and navigate our queue of recorded programs. (Can a slingbox be far behind?)

But back to the streaming video: it almost indistinguishable from regular HD, although I did notice some visual stuttering during rapid camera pans.  We watched Julie and Julia Sunday afternoon, and there wasn’t a single hiccup in the whole movie.

Plus our first blu-ray DVD’s start arriving from netflix this week, and I look forward to that.

Hope this makes up a little bit to the family for my accidentally erasing the season finale of  Nurse Jackie,  after the series stopped airing on Showtime.

How do you deal with human error/mistakes and improve accountability?   In any event, but especially when safety is involved?

James Bagian—NASA astronaut turned VA patient safety expert—suggests in this Slate.com article to set a “blameworthy” criteria for mishaps.  His criteria is 3-fold: resulting from intentionally unsafe actions, intoxication, or criminal action (assault, rape or larceny).   I might add carelessness to that list, although from a systems perspective, carelessness can be the result of productivity standards set too high.

Bagian says that safety practices in our health care system are shameful compared with the fields of aeronautics and engineering.

Interesting series about wrongology on Slate.

I had a dream the other night that Gina had gone missing.   I went to the sheriff to report a missing child.   But the newspaper lead for the story was “Winter Park woman missing”.

Cancel my call to Dr. Freud.  I think I figured this one out.

Sunday Gina and I went to see the touring company of Chicago at Orlando’s Bob Carr center.  It was the final performance before they moved on, and our tickets were perhaps the best I’ve ever had at the Carr – orchestra center just 10 rows back.  Sight lines were ideal and I had no use for the opera glasses I brought along.   The Carr was nearly sold out.

I was a little surprised at the minimal staging.  The set was only a bandstand, and there were no costume changes.    However I read up later and found that this staging was characteristic of the 1996 Broadway revival of the show, which is still running today.  The original opened in 1975.    Popular thought is that the show resonated more with audiences in the 90′s era of celebrity criminals like OJ Simpson.  To me it brought to mind the media appetite for our local Casey Anthony case, a pretty young woman suspected of a particularly heinous murder.

The touring cast was polished and first rate.   Bonnie Langford was a little oldish for the part of Roxie Hart, but both she and Brent Barret (Billy Flynn) appeared in the Broadway revival at one point.  Langford is a Brit, best known as one of the 1980′s Dr. Who companions.   All cast members had near invisible body mics which were almost perfectly mixed from where I was seated.   The onstage band included a banjo player.   It was nice to hear some songs that were cut from the 2002 movie.