Of course, the day after the good day I got into a huge fight with Testing. Blargh. But we have only 3 quarter-hours to go before we're on goal for the month, which means 8 hours committed for every working day, including holidays. Not bad.

It's very hot again -- near 30 -- which is nice. I walked out to the mailbox around 2:30, enjoying the heat and the clean smells that come from it. Bark mulch, spicy and sharp; grass; hot concrete. The summers do pay for the winters.

Still no ocean, but I'm hoping B.C. will sink beneath the Pacific soon.

No, not that.

It's a good thing I forget why I homebrew in the long dry periods between batches. Today I bought a six of mass-market beer (Big Rock's Dark Alberta Stout) because the Arrogant Bastard is turning out a little flat. Well, the Alberta Stout was carbonated, I'll give it that. But compared to the homebrew, it was bland like water. Sheesh.

And now that I'm done patting myself on the back with that hand, I'll start with the other: I have work to brag about too. An Australian client of our client (a metaclient?) had a crash in some code we work on. It was reported at 11:00 PM last night. We found and fixed the bug by 11:33 PM and had a patched version available for shipment at 11:42 PM. That's under an hour turnaround, and still the same business day in Oz. This evening, next business day, we got a letter of extravagant praise forwarded to us by our client:

The control group at $METACLIENT would like to thank you and your team for the "unbelievable" service and customer support you guys provide. As you are now aware $METACLIENT does not get the exceptional support from many of its software vendors (re. the executable file policy.). When talking to Megan to clarify the situation, her comment was "I wish we could deal with a company that was so eager to please its customers".

I'm not sure whether your team gets much feedback, but I would like to say thank you again for your impeccable support and product development.

PS. There are not many products, hardware or software, that we would rave about, but yours is one of them.

Of course this is worth exactly $0.00 to us, since we're on hourly contract and not bonusable employees. But it's still pleasant to know I'm creating value for the ultimate customer, even though we're not earning any money by it. And I don't think that customer emails like this make it less likely that our contract will be continued.

One advantage of working from home is that this isn't likely to ever happen to me.

But it would have been nice to have gotten this working thing done before the kid(s) show up.

My wife just turned to me and said,

"I just posted practically naked pictures of myself on the internet, and I'm feeling a little funny about that."

I haven't had anything to write about because there hasn't been anything in the news... not anything worth me writing about, anyway.

Our pet charity has an interest in the Camrose doctor story I wrote about the other day, and we actually put out a press release. But now all the Camrose and midwifery news has been blown away by the lonely dolphin story (link will rot quickly).

Maybe we can put out a press release about how dolphin midwives attend dolphin births in the wild, or something, to get a tie-in. But since Mavis apparently pined away after murdering her newborn calf, we should just try to stay away from the subject altogether...

The Edmonton Journal picked up the Camrose obstetrician story (link will rot quickly). In brief, there are too few doctors in Camrose (pop 15,000, 1 hr from Edmonton) who are willing to continue delivering babies. The last two plan to quit at the end of this year. That means anyone in Camrose who wants to deliver their baby under medical supervision will have to come to Edmonton.

That's unpleasant, but certainly within the rights of those doctors. What's more unpleasant and possibly illegal is that the local hospital has taken extraordinary steps to try to woo the doctors back into the delivery practice. In particular, the hospital has adopted a new policy of "doctor's orders only" during hospital labor, a response to "extreme birth plans". This may violate the rights of patients; certainly I don't see how you can reconcile doctor's orders with informed consent and visitation rights that are generally accorded to patients.

But that wasn't what I wanted to talk about at all. I went to the doctor today, finally making a follow-up appointment after last October's ultrasound. My left kidney contains a 5-mm stone. This is no surprise, since I've passed two, possibly three fragments in my life; what's colloquially known as "having a kidney stone" usually means passing a fragment of a stone out through the ureter. The rest of the stone remains in the kidney until another fragment breaks off. Needless to say, the process of passing the stone (technically called "the attack") is extremely painful.

How painful? This painful. It compares with labor pain. About 50% of women who have had both a kidney stone and a baby say the kidney stone was more painful. Here's one.

Anyway, I was waiting to see the doctor and in came a nurse with a little paper cup full of pepto-bismol looking stuff. She said: "This will make your tummy feel better. We call it 'The Pink Lady'." It was obviously someone else's medication she was bringing me, and I was so shocked I couldn't talk straight. I think I said: "I beg your pardon! I haven't seen the doctor yet! Patient MIKES!" She checked the chart and backed out of the room. Two minutes later I heard her giving the same spiel in the next room, I hope to the correct patient.

The doctor eventually came and we talked about the stone. He said he wants to refer me to a urologist for shockwave lithotripsy (ESWL), and I'll go talk to the guy, but I'm skeptical. I haven't had an attack since 2000, and the major risk I see in lithotripsy is incomplete fragmentation of the stone. I do not want to spend the three weeks following the procedure doped to the gills and passing 0.5mm fragments -- I don't want to undertake the procedure at all unless it's very likely that passing the fragments will be painless.

Besides, here's a classic example of waste in the health care system. Why do an ESWL at all, when I have shown myself capable of managing the problem through diet and fluid intake, and we can treat the occasional attack with painkillers? Is it just because we have a fancy ESWL machine? Stones are very common on my mother's side of the family (both her brothers, two of my male cousins, my mother herself, though she's asymptomatic), and nobody's ever had a problem with kidney function. That's the problem with stones: they don't impair kidney function at all, they're just excruciatingly painful.

On the other hand, they are excruciatingly painful. So I'll go see the urologist and maybe I'll be convinced to do the ESWL. After all, they've bought the machine, and I'm sure it sits unused most days. May as well reap some of the benefit of Alberta's health-care investment.

I was filling up the car today at the 7-11 on Calgary Trail & 76th Ave. when a car full of middle-aged guys pulled up and they all piled out. They stood around collecting money for a while, then they sent someone in and put a couple bucks' worth of gas into their car. I had my nozzle locked open and was cleaning the windows when I smelled something funny.

Is somebody smoking?

Yes. One of the guys had climbed back into the car and was working on the end of his smoke, while the other guys were all inside paying. At least they had finished filling up their car and mine had stopped filling... but really.

I guess he had been working on it before they hit the gas station, and didn't want to stub it out half-finished. So he just saved it. I'm guessing he left it glowing in the back seat ashtray while they filled their car and I filled mine. What explosion risk?

Randy Barnett writes an interesting post over at GlennReynolds.com. I've noticed this behavior too, and I agree that it seems to be getting worse.

Take the 2000 Presidential Election, for example. I no longer attempt to discuss it with family or friends, because I do not expect to be able to have a reasonable discussion -- nor even to find meaningful facts both sides are willing to agree on.

As far as point (3) -- "how do I know I'm not doing the same thing in reverse" -- you don't, and you can't. There's no straightforward way to prove that you're not living in a self-generated reality distortion field. It is for this reason that turning the tables is the favorite counter-argument when someone challenges the claim that truth is socially constructed. I believe the jargon word in literary
criticism is privileging, as in, "You're just privileging your own narrative."

The only recourse I have found is to develop a brutal sense of intellectual honesty, watch for self-deception, and freely admit error. The last is the most important point, I think.

Someone I know well, whose politics are well to the left of mine, had an active episode of mental illness (approximately, a paranoid-type schizoaffective disorder) brought on by the recent Iraq battles. A characteristic of this kind of illness is the patient's total lack of doubt in his beliefs, and an unwillingness to admit even the possibility of error.

Sound familiar? Iraq was not a bloodbath nor a quagmire. Baghdad was not razed in house-by-house fighting. There are not millions, nor hundreds of thousands, nor even tens of thousands of refugees. These predictions of the anti-war camp all proved false. I have not seen them retracted.

On the other hand, I have seen a significant amount of writing on the subject of the missing chemical and biological weapons believed to be in Hussein's hands at the beginning of the war. It's certainly starting to look like Iraq had more WMD capabilities in the 80s than in the 90s or in 2003. It's not quite comparable with the intelligence failures regarding 9/11, because in this case we were incorrectly overestimating the enemy's strength, and the failure mode for that is less unpleasant. So there's something that the pro-war camp was wrong about. And I think that's been said.

Not physically dry here, of course. This is Alberta's first year out of drought. As far as I can tell, the Alberta hay shortage is over, and there'll be lots of hay to feed the horses and cattle this winter.

Especially seeing as how the ranchers will be slaughtering 1/3 of the cattle in Alberta if borders remain closed until October.

At the local grocery store you can buy a cow's worth of beef -- I think it's over 300 lbs. -- for $1000 CDN. Perhaps that'll drop a bit if things continue.

We're caught up on billing work, but now I'm exhausted. More blogging soon, maybe. Life is short.

I didn't realize that the "LA Car Accident" headlines I'd been ignoring all day were actually about a Santa Monica car accident until my brother-in-law mentioned it tonight at dinner. (He's also from Santa Monica.)

I know that area, of course. The last time, or the last time but one, that I was in Santa Monica we took my sister's kids down to the Promenade and Farmer's Market and the beach.

There's a post up at Hit and Run about this ... sorry, just realized what an inappropriate blog name that is for this story. Anyway, there's a post up at Reason's blog and one of the comments is:

The farmer's market is a regular event - why didn't they have barriers in place?
The *very same intersection* (3rd & Arizona) has removable anti-vehicle barriers to prevent cars from driving the other way, down third street.
Posted by: crap-action-jackson on July 17, 2003 07:15 PM

I'm guessing crap-action-jackson has been reading news stories about the crash but hasn't been to the crash site. 3rd street between Broadway and Wilshire is closed to vehicle traffic; it's called the 3rd Street Promenade. There are permanent steel barriers, which can fold down on hinges -- e.g., to let emergency vehicles pass.

Arizona, on the other hand, is a normal through street. It's closed two mornings a week for the Farmers' Market but otherwise handles all normal traffic, so permanent barriers (even folding ones) don't make a lot of sense. Normal traffic sawhorses are put up to stop cars from entering the Farmer's Market.

One of the drawbacks of living in an area described as aspen-poplar parkland is that cleared areas, such as my yard, are subject to invasion by the aspen and poplar.

Our push lawn mower does a lovely job of the grass, and decapitates dandelions fine. But saplings, it's not so good at.

We're finally caught up to our goal for billed hours in July, after a bad start with several days sick and the triple holiday of Canada Day - 4th of July - anniversary. So the blogging will resume, perhaps, now that morale has improved.

The Center for the Advancement of Women released a new study (pdf, 302k) a few days ago. (An aside: This organization was formerly named the Center for Gender Equality. Why change the name, I wonder? Perhaps the new name was intended to refocus the group's efforts on advancing women instead of achieving equality. If nothing else, at least they're honest. It's not like the old name was some 60's holdover: "The Center was founded in 1995...." )

And kudos to them for releasing it (especially the original report by the survey company, Princeton Survey Research Associates part 1 part 2) because the Center probably found the survey results on abortion rights to be very unpleasant. The detailed question information is on page 72 of part 1 of the complete survey, and the 2003 follow-up is on p.10 of part two. It's also included in the summary document. Here's the question:

18. Which one of the following four statements comes closest to your own view on abortion?

(sorry, I don't know what's wrong with my stylesheet that creates this enormous gap)

Since this was a forced-choice survey, we'll never know how many women would have answered "Abortion should continue to be legal in the way it is now", which would probably skew the results. (Another aside: Don't any of these people understand conservative philosophy (in the Burkean sense)? Many people subscribe to the idea of not doing anything -- you could call it "active inertia" if you were trying to sell it.)

But that aside, it turns out in that in 2001, 64% of women surveyed support stricter limits on abortion and 45% would support a near-total ban. Two years later those numbers are 68% and 51%, at best a barely significant change (margin for detecting differences = 4%).

I recently heard the idea that the abortion issue would be solved if we simply put it to a vote of only women. After all, goes the argument, abortion is a women's issue. I reject that reasoning. I believe that abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia are "life issues" intimately connected to the definition of life and murder.

But if nothing else the survey above shows that abortion is an issue that divides women as much as it divides the nation as a whole. Further, it may show that keeping abortion legal depends on the support of those who benefit most from abortion. And yes, I do mean young unmarried men who would be fathers but for an abortion.

That's it for now -- gotta work.

This is not a pleasant way to wake up (link via den Beste). Best comments are the one by "J." (whose father was appointed to the French Legion of Honor) and the first comment on jkrank's weblog SofiaSideShow. (So it's an old joke -- so what?)

That was before my run this morning. On my run this morning, I saw a middle-aged Asian lady jogging in pajama pants (!) and holding a length of PVC pipe. As I passed her I realized that it wasn't (just) a PVC pipe, but some sort of sword, with a scabbard that appeared to be made of PVC pipe. We gave each other a wide berth.

Oh yes, Canada day today. I expect that we'll be working. Fireworks tonight.