health care for those who served

I've been watching a special news documentary on ABC "To Iraq and Back," about and by Bob Woodruff, the ABC News anchor who was severely injured in Iraq. Woodruff suffered major brain trauma after a roadside bomb hit the tank he was riding in, essentially exploding one side of his skull. The story was poignant, particularly in the depiction of the impact on his family and his recovery over the period of a year. One view of his caved in skull while learning to recognize objects again was shocking. Yet he is very lucky and knows it.

The rest of the hour documentary is spent visiting injured soldiers and marines with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and the impacts not only on them but on their families. He does not sugar coat the problem. The VA and the military states that there have been about 23,000 non fatal battlefield casualties in Iraq. However the Veterans of America says over 205,000 soldiers have been treated at VA hospitals since the war began. In the main VA hospitals the medical care for the intense treatment and physical therapy required for these patients is among the best available in the world. Yet, once these service people are sent to VA hospitals close to home, the availability of such highly skilled treatment is not always available. The report ends with a discussion of closed brain injuries, the type of injury many soldiers may suffer because of the high blast pressure waves, even though they may not have any visible injuries. It is now thought that up to 10% of returning veterans of the war in Iraq may suffer closed brain injuries with varying impacts on cognitive thinking, moods, socialbility, and other quality of life issues.

When you think that over 1.5 million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, that means that about 150,000 may suffer injuries like these. Yet they have come home to their own health care war here at home.

More needs to be done for these soldiers. There should be no question of getting the care they need, no matter what the cost, no matter what politics are. The administration needs to step up to the plate for these people. We all do.

practice

Heard on a TV show (aimlessly watching while away on a work-related trip)

"The first recorded war was in 2700 BC; there were probably more before writing was invented."

"That's almost 5000 years of killing each other."

"It's something we've always been good at."

Organization, #1b

OK, this only has a little to do with the previous post. My organization changed over to a new IMAP mailserver last night. Instantly my email quota went from a measly 80 Mb to 1 Gb, not Google Gmail standards but pretty darn good. This will allow me to keep my organized and project emails with large attachments available via IMAP longer without the constant need to archive to my local hard drive. The web interface is better too, and they've instituted SSL for both retrieving and sending mail. This means less to worry about when I'm on the road using free or hotel access points.

Organization, #1

I've finally gotten most of the backlog cleared off. While I still have a few major reports to complete and manuscripts to review in order to get them submitted, at least I don't feel inundated. In the past several weeks I've cleaned up my office a little, at least getting some of the older stuff filed. I've started a reorganization of my work email inbox following GTG principles and an article about it that was in Macworld (March 2007 issue, not available on line). Right now I'm working from the following concept for my work email, at least the email that is still stored on the IMAP server.

Inbox - mostly messages read and not filed; my goal is to keep this relatively small in number; working to quickly file/archive/delete email I will never need in the future

Act on/Flagged - messages I need to act on within a few days, some that I flagged where a rule puts them in this folder from the inbox; these should be no older than 1 week.

Read and Review - messages I have read but want to review before filing or deleting; some of these will be the literature searches from various journals or PubMed that contain papers I want to at least read the abstracts; I hope to keep these rotating so no more than a week or two old

Waiting For - messages that contain items I need to act on but I'm waiting for further information

Archives (on IMAP server)
-- subfolders for specific topics, already acted on and stored
-- project specific folders, for quick access (also using MS Entourage Project Center with many of these)

Archives (stored in local folders) - these are messages either with big attachments that by necessity I have to move off the IMAP server (limited quota), or when older messages get to an age where I don't really need to act on them anymore. By default all archived work emails are stored on my work desktop computer. To confusing to try to synch work and laptop computers for this.

Regarding archived mail, my agency was reminded today about the regulation that we must preserve all e-mail that constitute agency records. While I'm not sure that much if any of the email correspondence I have constitutes "agency records" I'll have to review this regulation. The reminder also talks about keeping paper copies, which would be a big burden.

Anyway, it's a start!

time passages

We visited the newest member of the family today, my youngest sister's new baby boy. It's always wonderful to see new life. And it always makes me reflect about my children, how fast time seems to have gone now that they are almost 17 and almost 21.

On top of this, my wife and I celebrate our 24th wedding anniversary tomorrow as well. It all seems so fast! What is it about the passage of time? It seems so slow when you're young, and then moves so fast when you get into that late middle-aged time frame. My wife and I have both been thinking about the fact, that all other things being equal, we are facing the downward slope of life. It's hard not to think of accomplishments, of legacies. Have we done enough? Could we have done things differently? What's the best way to proceed from here for our careers, day to day work life? Can we find a better balance?

Always something to work on.

Hear the echoes and feel yourself starting to turn
Don't know why you should feel that there's something to learn
It's just a game that you play

-Al Stewart, Time Passages

hasta la vista

Computer OS wars. Bill Gates has hurt feelings about Apple's PC-Mac ads. Especially the ones that poke fun about the difficulty people will have with upgrading to Vista, including the method used to implement security. He claims it was Apple that stole all the great features now being released in Vista. He says that the Mac is cracked every day, and brags that Vista was built with security in mind. Numerous articles and blogs have already shredded the Mac exploit statement. It was really an odd statement to make.

Steve Jobs put out an open letter about digital music. He states that there are three things Apple and the RIAA could do; keep things as they are (purchased music from iTunes retains the FairPlay DRM), license FairPlay to other vendors, or simply drop DRM on downloaded music. He says the second one won't happen, since it would be too hard to work with many other companies with the DRM code and keep it secret. He clearly feels dropping DRM would be the best solution for the recording industry and consumers alike. Should be interesting how this plays out.

End of a season

I've felt a little lost this week. Not because of work...actually getting caught up with things there, including getting a manuscript submitted yesterday. It's because...soccer season is over, at least for the select team by son plays for that I co-coach. We lost in the quarterfinals of the state tournament for mid-level select teams. We should have won! Actually, if we had won or tied our last divisional game (after winning the first two) we would have stayed at home for the quarterfinals and played a bit of a weaker opponent. As it was, we had to travel down to Vancouver (~170 miles), many of us the night before, play on a sub-optimal field. Close game, we couldn't hit open shots, and at 1-1 with less than 10 minutes left, the center ref called a handball on one of our players in our penalty box. PK, and that was the game. I know refereeing is hard, but damn, it was not a call you make in a close game...there was no intent on the player to touch the ball (a point blank cross, that hit his elbow besides), and it gave them the game.

So, I'm lost because now there are no practices or games to look forward to for awhile. It really is a lot of fun, and we had/have a team of quality young men. My son starts high school soccer in a few weeks, and then we have tryouts for the summer/fall/winter club team in a month. One more year, and then my son graduates. I will miss it once it's over. I've been doing this for 11 years!