Blessed by the Potato

Well, the blog is 4 years old now.

…Guess I don’t really have much to say about that, even though I’ve had a lot to say about just about everything else :)

Speaking of 4 though, it’s now been 4 months since Wayfare’s been paid. Not to worry: she hasn’t been laid off, she’s still working as hard as ever… but a payroll department epic fail has meant she hasn’t been paid since June. It really underlines the need for a healthy emergency fund: even if you don’t get injured or lose your job or whatever, a simple payroll issue could mean you’d have to live off your savings for a few months until the next paycheque rolls in.

For years my dad has dealt with using the internet via dial-up while at the cottage, or when the Rogers internet goes down at home. Perhaps due to increasing usage in cottage country, perhaps due to old copper, the quality of dial-up has really taken a nosedive in the last few years at the cottage. What was once slow but tolerable has become unacceptably slow — not only has grabbing a handful of emails via POP (i.e.: old-school stuff) gotten so slow it’s painful, but he’s actually had trades timeout on him when trying to use the online brokerage. That’s costing him money.

I’ve been trying to get him to try something different for a while, but he hasn’t been too interested in increasing his monthly bills, plus since the cell phone service is so spotty up there he figured that the wireless options, such as the Rogers Rocket Stick, just wouldn’t be worthwhile. Finally I just decided to pick one up while I was up there and test it out, because every time I was talking to him, he was complaining about the dial-up. It had a 15-day return policy, which was enough for us to see how well it would work in our location.

Fortunately, it’s been pretty good, and simple to use, too: plug it into a USB slot, hit connect, and you’re off. We typically see speeds of about 300 kbps — about 10 times slower than the cable service at home, but a significant improvement over dial-up. He’s been pretty pleased with how the service functions. At first we thought it’d even save money: the basic plan is about $30/mo (plus fees A[bsurd], B[ogus], and C[razy]), which is less than the cost of dial-up (~$20) and a second phone line (~$20).

Unfortunately the one downside to the Rogers mobile internet is the crazy low usage available. My dad is about as light a user as you can get: he wakes up, checks his email, reads the news, reads the brokerage research reports for the day, gets some stock quotes, makes a trade, and takes a nap. No streaming video, no gaming, no facebook photo albums, and he’s only online for a few hours a day, and only on weekdays at that. Yet that still adds up to over 1 GB/mo, which puts him somewhere into the 2nd or 3rd usage tier. For comparison, when Rogers set the download cap for the cable internet to 60 GB/mo, they said the typical user used 5 GB/mo, and that was what, 4 years ago? There’s been a lot more streaming video use in that time! So the actual cost turned out to be a fair bit higher than the advertised cost, but I suppose that shouldn’t be anything new from Rogers.

As iPhones, Blackberries, and other smartphones become more popular I’m sure (or at least, hope) that Rogers will revamp those plans to make data available wirelessly at more reasonable rates. $35/GB is kinda silly, and doesn’t allow for a lot of usage on these things.

The most ludicrous thing though was that the rocket stick is, according to Rogers, “technically a cell phone”. From a hardware point of view, I can kinda see that — it has a SIM card, it’s a transmitter working on the cell network. Whatever. What was not cool was we got charged for “receiving text messages”. WTF? 15 cents each for what was probably spam sent to what was not actually a cell phone. Why isn’t this blocked on what is obviously not a text-message enabled device? Why is there even a charge for receiving text messages, even if it was a phone? I managed to get that bogus fee refunded by calling in to complain, but if the spam keeps coming, I’m not looking forward to having to do that every month to get my 75 cents back.

Anyway, the rocket stick has surprisingly good reception, or perhaps to put it more exactly, the Rogers network in cottage country is different than the Bell one, so just because we have zero bars with our Bell phones, doesn’t mean that the Rogers stick won’t work — if you’re in a rural area it’s probably worth checking out what their coverage map actually looks like. The service is not like cable or DSL, but it’s a damned sight more usable than dial-up, and can be used in areas not serviced by copper, which is the point. However, it’s not cheap, and keep in mind the exceptionally low usage included in the plans when pricing it out.

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How on earth does it make sense for these OHIP cards to have to be renewed every 3-5 years, especially when a) they’re not legally allowed to be used as ID and b) a significant portion of Ontarians still don’t have their first photo OHIP card. In the last 3 years I’ve now spent more time waiting in line to apply for/renew my photo OHIP card than I’ve spent getting medical care, and that includes two hospital trips!

We’ve been doing some training lately, preparing for the worst. Specifically radiation disaster management. It’s a pretty interesting course, with some good take-home messages.

The first is that dealing with the (terrified) public can often be the hardest and least predictable part of disaster management, and in a radiation disaster situation that can be pretty bad. The public generally has exceptionally poor knowledge of what radiation is, how dangerous it actually is (yes, people have died, but it’s not nearly as dangerous as people are afraid it is), and what the difference between contamination and exposure are. We’re told that we have to explain physics concepts to the public at a grade 6 level, and that can be quite the challenge. Especially when you also have to deal with an attention span of maybe 1 minute. That speaks to me of a need for more general science outreach and education, something I’m all in favour of all the time (aside: notice the “science questions” topic tag — feel free to ask any, as this kinda sorta counts as a scientist working on educating the public ;)

For those of us worried about potential future terrorist attacks, there are a number of frightening scenarios thrown around. That of a dirty bomb or even a full-blown nuclear attack often top the fear lists. However, as our instructor today said, “I hope to hell that nothing happens, but if there is an attack, I hope it is radiological. We have detectors that go ‘beep’ at even very safe levels of background radiation. We can fairly quickly and very reliably screen those who have and have not been contaminated. We don’t have a meter for germs or nerve agents.”

Of course, we have to deal with the fear that the word radiation inspires. Sarin nerve gas is deadlier than the radiation in most dirty bomb scenarios, but thanks to poor delivery the attacks on the Tokyo subway resulted in only about 1000 casualties of some sort (those moderately ill with vision problems) as well as the 12 dead. For every sick person that showed up at a hospital tough, five more “worried well” came in to be checked out. So that’s going to be a huge issue with radiation, and hospitals are somehow going to have to deal with screening and even just corralling the thousands of frightened people.

An even bigger issue to deal with is the fear in the healthcare workers and first responders. Before training, many healthcare workers are afraid of radiation, and wouldn’t want to work on a person coming from a disaster or dirty bomb attack for fear of being contaminated themselves. Fortunately:

No caregiver in the history of radiological accidents has received a medically significant dose of radiation from treating a contaminated patient.

That includes the doctors and nurses who treated the firefighters at Chernobyl. It includes the rescuers at the SL-1 disaster. Now, that’s not to say that the environments can’t be dangerous — many firefighters did get excessive doses from going into the reactor at Chernobyl*. It’s not to say that it can’t happen that someone could get so contaminated that they’d put the rescue crews at risk, but it is exceptionally unlikely, and hasn’t happened yet.

* – a big part of that was poor training and misinformation: many of the figherfighters didn’t know it was a nuclear situation, they didn’t have the proper equipment or procedures in place to protect themselves — I can’t find a reference, but I’ve heard they weren’t even told to strip off their contaminated outer clothes after exiting the reactor. The USSR was too secretive for anyone’s good.

So for medical teams the issue becomes one they’re familiar with: stabilize the patient medically. Airway, bleeding, circulation. Only after those are taken care of do you worry about potential contamination and cleaning it up.

“There are no points for clean corpses.”

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