Month: April 2024

Kaweah Delta care (in general) has been good

Yes, my mom’s experience in the Kaweah Delta emergency waiting room was deplorable. But I recognize that if the only thing you, dear reader, had ever heard about Kaweah Delta District Hospital was that post – you might get the idea that Kaweah Delta was (in general) not good. I want to dispel that idea.

Once my mom did get into a hospital room, the care there has been good. Very good, I would say.

Her nurses and physicians and other staff have been attentive, timely, and professional.

Myself, I’ve had two experiences with KDDH in the last five years: both were of high quality.

I didn’t need emergency care in those situations, so I didn’t have to go through the emergency room waiting room process.

One mild snark though, about the emergency room waiting room. One has a lot of time to be observant over the course of sitting in the waiting room for seven hours (my experience, not my mom’s).

They have digital signage (big television sets) mounted on the wall, playing a loop of various public announcements, advertising of new clinics that have started up, a new doctor accepting patients, etc.

There’s a video interview of two of the hospital bigwigs by Stefani Booroojian1. Anyway, the video is captioned, but the transcriber missed a word. The doctor is talking about keeping healthy, and says it is very important to do smoking cessation. The transcriber wrote that it is very important to do smoking sensation. Not the same thing. 😉

Somebody probably ought to have caught that in the first week, so that the original content creator still had the file around and could re-do that little bit of the caption.

  1. Oh my goodness, she’s been with Channel 24 news for 40 years! She still looks great. Good on her. ↩︎

Terrible experience at Kaweah Health hospital

My mom went to Urgent Care, and they put her into an ambulance and sent her to Kaweah Health hospital. My mom spent 25.5 hours in the emergency room waiting room before getting a room / bed.

This is disgraceful.

Mom showed up at KDDH1 at 2024-04-19 1400

The urgent care people had told the ambulance people to give her some saline because of severe dehydration (because of three days of vomiting and diarrhea). That was the last liquid she got until 2024-04-20 1700.

The doctor who saw her during the initial contact said they needed to do a CAT scan to find out what was the source of intense pain in her abdomen. She finally got that CAT scan at 2024-04-20 0540.

My mom was concerned that she would need emergency surgery for gall bladder removal because her mom had had to go through that. I should probably mention that my mom is 86 years old, and although her mind is clear with no signs of dementia, her body is getting frail, and in the dehydrated state, she is pretty wobbly. The idea of being 86 years old and having to go under the knife scares her.

The night shift doctor finally did get to interview her at 2024-04-20 0715; the CAT scan revealed that it was an inflamed colon – not gall bladder. Thank goodness. Apparently, an antibiotic my mom took a month ago also affected her biome in her colon, and something in there took hold and created an infection.

The doctor was a nice young man, but he did mention that he was at the end of his shift. He said they would admit her, but there weren’t any rooms available: it might be a couple of hours. My mom then sat in the emergency room waiting room for another seven hours. Eventually, my mom got worried that they had lost track of her (she was on the third shift of administrative and nursing staff in the waiting room), so she hobbled up to the front, and when the nurse asked her what was wrong, she burst into tears. She’d been there more than 24 hours, and she was afraid they’d lost track of her. That was shortly after 3:15 PM. The nurse did promptly get her a room.

When I visited her a little before 1700 (5 PM), she still hadn’t slept since the morning of the day before, but finally a nurse did cover her feet with a blanket. My mom has poor blood circulation, so her feet felt cold, and it stressed her out so she couldn’t sleep. The other problem is that the diarrhea continues, so every few hours she needs to get help to climb out of bed to get to the toilet.

I had shown up a little before midnight on the 19th, and relieved Frank from sitting with my mom. About 2 AM, it dawned on me that the CAT scan wasn’t going to happen until the morning shift showed up to work. I don’t know why the CAT scan wasn’t done between 2 PM and end-of-shift on the 19th.

I also don’t know why, when the overnight doctor went off shift, that the emergency room staff don’t seem to have a process for hand-off or review of who needs care. When my mom screwed up enough courage to ask the nurse at 3:15 PM, they immediately found her a room. The room was available. Why isn’t there a process for informing the emergency room when rooms become available? Instead, little old ladies have to tell the nurse that there’s a problem, and then they act. That’s the opposite of the way I would expect medical care to work.

I know that doctors hate it when their patients try to self-diagnose and then direct the doctor on how to provide care. Yet, here was a situation where a little old lady had to force the situation, twenty-five and a half hours after being delivered in an ambulance.

It’s just terrible.

  1. KDDH was the original name: Kaweah Delta District Hospital. Everyone around here still calls it that. They even had that coveted four character domain name: kddh.org – I will rant about the idiocy of changing the company name later ↩︎

Bulk change MP3 file genre

I reset my playlists in Nextcloud. During the rescan, as it imported them, the Music app sorted them into their genre. This might be useful. But one author’s genre was Folk, and really, I’d prefer if it were Instrumental.

I tried changing them from the command line, but id3tools trashed the tags. Really, it was a problem with UTF-8 versus something else. All I really know is that when Nextcloud scanned the files, it got Chinese characters instead of anything useful.

Turns out, I used kid3 and EasyTAG to solve the bulk search and replace problem. Why both? Because kid3 let me see what I wanted to change, but EasyTAG would let me (bulk) change them.

kid3 let me change tags just fine. The problem is: only one file at a time.

The kid3 interface is rather nice, otherwise. If I hit Ctrl-A, it selects all and reads all the files and all the tags. I had added Genre to this list of columns at the top, so then I could sort on that.

EasyTAG wouldn’t let me change the main page displayed columns, so that was less-than-ideal. But, it does have a Find feature, and everything I selected in the Find window remained selected in the main window.

What EasyTAG has (which is great) is in the genre field for any song, there are two buttons: a drop-down to select which genre, and an Apply All button for everything selected. Excellent! Apply All is precisely what I wanted.

Also, it turns out that if the predefined list of genres doesn’t match what I want, I can just type in my choice. The Apply All button still works for something I typed. EasyTAG didn’t have a Flamenco genre, but I have 85 Flamenco guitar files. That I can type my own genre makes this a trivial problem.

So after doing an Apply All in EasyTAG, I’d go back to kid3 and do a reload, followed by another Ctrl-A. Then I sorted by (whatever). I’d find something that matched all the songs I wanted to alter, and copy that to the clipboard. Then I’d switch to EasyTAG, unselect all, and go into the Find screen, and paste in the identifier and search I’d select all in the find window, and close the find window. Then I changed the genre and hit Apply All in the EasyTAG main window.

I think I re-tagged close to 800 songs in about fifteen minutes. Woo! Now, the bulk of my music files are in eleven genres, which becomes a playlist without the manual playlist editing. There are 331 songs in the Instrumental genre list. I would have so hated having to manually make a change 331 times.

Quarterly Inventory 2024 – Q1

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

Question: How is your personal life going?

Question: How is your work life going?

Question: How is your volunteer service life going?

Personal Life

There hasn’t really been much change this quarter in my personal life.

I went to the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 21X), but regret it because it was so much money. Previous SCaLE events were at the LAX Hilton, which is half the price of the Pasadena Hilton. The trade-off is that the LAX Hilton has only about five restaurants nearby, so if 400 people break for lunch, those five restaurants are absolutely swamped. If 400 people break for lunch at the convention center in Pasadena, there are probably 30 restaurants within a ten-minute walk nearby. But $400 per night for this show really isn’t worth it to me. If I had stayed three nights for the full four-day show, that would have been $1,200. ACK! For that kind of money, I could pay down my mortgage one month and retire a whole month early. Really, SCaLE is a wonderful show if you already live in Los Angeles and don’t have to spend money at the Pasadena Hilton.

Had my ten-year colonoscopy. Zero polyps found; I get to come back in five years because of my age.

I went to a Jack-In-The-Box restaurant a couple of months ago. Lunch was $20. I suspect this was my last visit to a fast food restaurant ever 1 (well, in California, at least). Sacramento decreed that fast-food workers should get, beginning today, a minimum wage of $20 per hour (as if fast-food workers would make it a career). The result is that Sacramento has completely priced these stores out of business due to inflation (unless they replace the workers with robots).

2024 New Year’s Resolution: go to the gym more often. Resolution failed: I suspended my gym membership. $60 a month is too much (yes, inflation).

One really fun thing for me is that I bought another Tiny PC and put 32 GB of RAM in it, and I am running Proxmox on it. This lets duplicate all the steps I will go through to migrate the website (item (5) in the volunteer service list below) from Amazon to Linode. If I bungle a step, I revert the snapshot and try again. Even better, I can document about how I did the migration to my blog. I did have DNS pointing to this home device, which (via pfSense) did actually route the public Internet to this little host. I’ve since turned this off, but will turn it on again when it comes time to demo the new website.

Work Life

If $44,000 dropped into my lap today, I would retire tomorrow.

I have little to do except e-discovery and email retention policy work. We had a good system where clients would work through legal counsel before opening an email investigation; but, our new(er) management wants to bend over backwards to be helpful. That is a nice sentiment, but the previous practice protected us from liability – only the people with legal training made judgement calls. Now, I have people asking me to find “inappropriate” email, as if I know what the hell that means in a legal context. Sometimes I hate my job.

I did take on printers and the print server. I did build the replacement server and migrated over; that went really well.

The other big project is to check 5 million email that are about to be deleted: are they supposed to be deleted? There’s no way that my direct report and I can read all five million email and verify them all. So, we’re spot-checking. I probably will read about 12,000 email before we can confidently pull the trigger on the deletion process.

Volunteer Service Life

I counted up all the current service commitments I have, and it numbers sixteen at the moment.

  1. Sundays: treasurer of a weekly meeting.
  2. Sundays: Technology captain of a weekly meeting (I run the Zoom camera, speakerphone, and laptop).
  3. Second Sunday: audio recording and posting the recording to our .org website of the second Sunday speaker breakfast monthly meeting.
  4. Tuesdays: Secretary of a weekly meeting.
  5. Second Tuesday: web servant for our little 501(c)(3) central office.
  6. Second Tuesday: liaison to our district (complement of item (10) below).
  7. Second Tuesday: president of the board of our little 501(c)(3) central office.
  8. Last Tuesday: member of a monthly technology sharing session (I presented last month). Nicely enough, this is on Zoom, and happens from 16:00–17:30 which allows me enough time to be secretary at 19:00 (item (4) above).
  9. First Wednesday: Recording secretary, monthly district meeting.
  10. First Wednesday: liaison to our little central office monthly meeting (complement of item (6) above).
  11. Every other Wednesday: co-chair of the Founder’s Day Picnic; as such, I am on the planning committee. I set up the laptop, camera, and speakerphone for Zoom participants. Created two documents, but have a third pending. The other chair has been in Europe, so as far as I can tell, I’m the only one who has done anything.
  12. Thursdays: meet with my sponsee weekly.
  13. Thursdays: treasurer of a weekly meeting. Also, supplies.
  14. Fridays: literature captain of a weekly meeting.
  15. First Saturday: member of a temporary contact committee (meets monthly), and have begun outreach to a local institution.
  16. First Wednesdays (until this weekend): stage manager for our twice yearly dinner and a speaker event.

  1. Edit: this is almost certainly an overstatement. I still like Panda Express, and it hasn’t raised prices ridiculously, but it does qualify as a fast food restaurant. ↩︎