Stunslinger.com Blog

How hard is it to set a pager or cell phone to vibrate?!?  For the past six years, I have had a cell phone, and I’ve known how to set each one to vibrate.  When I carried a pager for work, I knew how to set it to vibrate.

If ever I did not know how to set something to vibrate, I sought out someone who did know and made them show me.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s a simple matter of respect.  Yes, there are times when you need to keep your pager on (notice I haven’t even talked about turning the thing off, just setting it to vibrate) during meetings, and that’s precisely what vibrate is for.  Personally, I even leave my cell phone on vibrate most of the time because I still know when the phone rings, but I don’t have to disturb everyone around me.  A brilliant strategy, I know.  Yes, I do want a brownie badge and kudos from everyone reading this.

I went to a meeting today and during the four hours we had multiple interruptions due to pager rings and cell phones.  This would have been bad enough, considering these are intelligent people who work in health care, but several times the person whose pager/phone was ringing was apparently oblivious to the ring.  How is that possible?!?  Everyone hears this high pitched ringing and starts looking around, and the owner of the pager doesn’t hear it.  In fact, over time I’ve learned it is always the one person not looking around.  Somehow they are the only person oblivious to the ringing, which is meant to alert them in the first place.  If you have trouble hearing your pager or cell phone, isn’t that even more argument for putting it on vibrate?!

I at least am less frustrated by people who are obviously surprised they forgot to turn it off or put it on vibrate.  These people are considerate, but they made a mistake.  That is forgivable.  These are the people who immediately grab their phone/pager, dip their head and make an “I’m so sorry and embarrassed” expression and run out of the room or silence the phone/pager.  That’s the other thing, if your phone or pager does accidentally go off in public there is always a quick way to shut it up.  I know exactly where to push to silence my phone.  If I need to take the call, I’ll silence it immediately and scoot out of the room.  Today one woman’s phone rang three separate times, each time she did the get-out-of-the-room-100-meter-dash but did not silence the ring any of these times.  To compound the problem she ran out through an enclosed hallway which functioned as an echo chamber.  So we all hear her ring, and then it gets louder as she runs out of the room.  Sweet.  I can’t chalk this up to a mistake either, because it happened several times.  She was well aware her phone was set to the “Loudest Ring Possible…make sure to run into an amplifying echo chamber when it rings” setting.

Argh.  And these are “professionals.”

So recently temperatures have been on the rise here in Salt Lake.  We’ve had a couple of weeks of temperatures in the high 60’s and 70’s with plenty of sun.  It really has felt like spring is in full force and summer is just around the corner.

Additionally, my wife and I like two things that often go hand in hand: helping the environment and saving money.  We drive fuel efficient cars that save us money and deplete fewer natural resources.  So with the warm weather, we thought, “let’s extinguish our pilot light on the furnace, save natural gas and some money!”  It was a great idea…for 5 days.  Then it snowed.

Yep, yesterday we got maybe an inch of snow.  Temperatures have dropped into the 30’s and 40’s, and yesterday when I got home from work our apartment was 58 degrees inside.  So I got to yank off the covers and re-light the pilot.

It’s not a huge deal by any means, and I actually am glad to have more snow in the mountains for late season snowboarding.  But still, c’mon nature….make up your mind!

I work in a hospital environment.  On a daily basis I interact with, or observe, a large number of staff members, who all hold different positions in the hospital.  It amazes me how often I see these professionals engaging in unhealthy behaviors.  I see obesity, smoking, hear talk of substance use and watch people consume horrible foods.

Now, I know that working in a healthcare setting doesn’t make a person perfect, not by a long shot.  But it is astonishing to me how many of us dispense advice left and right, but don’t follow it ourselves.

How can I expect my patients to take my advice, if I won’t take it myself?!?  When I was in my second year of graduate school, I had been seeing patients for a few months, it occurred to me that I better practice what I preach.  Here I was talking with patients about the values of sleep, regular relaxation, healthy diet and exercise, and I was doing none of it.  At that point I made a conscious effort to follow my own advice.  I forced myself to sleep 7-8 hours, started eating healthier, got up in the morning and went to the gym, and started practicing my relaxation techniques to manage my stress levels.

Shouldn’t we expect this from all professionals?  If you really believe these things are important, why aren’t you living them yourself?

Importantly: If you are a patient, don’t write off advice just because someone doesn’t follow it themselves.  Challenge yourself to take steps towards health.  No matter how hypocritical someone is being when they tell you to eat better/exercise more/stop smoking/whatever, the advice is still good.  Yes, you can be upset with them, but don’t continue unhealthy patterns out of anger.  Who knows, maybe you can be an example to your healthcare provider!

Day 3 of the Snowboard Fest dawned warm and sunny.  Were you expecting otherwise?  We had decided to sleep in a bit and leave a little early, which meant we spent roughly 5 hours at the resort.  This was mainly due to fatigue for my friend and me, as we had ridden two full days already and neither of us was ready for such exertion.

Ticket troubles
First things first, we bought tickets at Canyon Sports in Salt Lake, but didn’t know how they attached.  We can handle stickers which you place over a frame, or cards on a leash, but we didn’t know what to do with these.  So I asked two guys in a booth in the parking lot at the Canyons.  Apparently you need to get a zip tie and attach the ticket to your zipper through a little hole on the ticket.  High tech!  So I asked the guys if they had any zip ties, and they said they didn’t and didn’t know where to get them.  They started to chat up my friend and wife, so I strode off in search of zip ties, which I found at the nearby ticket booth.  As I walked back I saw my friend and my wife holding zip ties.  Apparently the guys were joking with me, and hadn’t thought it important to let me in on the joke.  Super duper.

The “Flight of the Canyons”
Getting to the Canyons is quite an experience.  From the parking lot you take an open air gondola to the village.  From the village you take a closed gondola up to the lodge.  This second gondola (where you stick skis and snowboards in boxes on the outside of the gondola doors) is actually called “The Flight of the Canyons.” 

As we went up we could see that the snow was definitely lacking.  There were a couple of runs that lead back to the village and they were sort of snow covered (nice brown patches in places), but the ground all around was barren, devoid of snow.  Not a good sign.  Luckily, by the time we reached the lodge things had improved and everything was snow covered.

In which my wife decides she only needs one ski
One at the top we began looking over the massive trail map.  This place has 17 lifts and 8 mountains to ride!  We finally decided we should start easy, on the greens right at the lodge, since my wife was still getting comfortable on some blues.  So we load onto the lift and head up.  Partway up my wife exclaims, “I’ve only got one ski on!”  Apparently she had been wondering why one foot felt heavier than the other, and thought my snowboard was pushing her ski down.  She finally realized somewhere between loading onto the lift and the midpoint her ski had fallen off.  We got to the top and the lift operator called down to ask if anyone had seen an orphaned ski, and the answer was no.  So my friend and I snowboarded down following the lift looking for a ski.  We got all the way to the bottom and found nothing, so back up we went.  Apparently someone behind us had picked up the ski and brought it up not long after we headed down the run.

After this we headed down the run, realizing that this was one of the easiest greens we’d seen yet, so it was time to hit up the blues.  After we took a break for lunch, my wife and I headed off to the far left mountain on the trail map.  In order to get there we had to ride three different lifts and take several traversing runs.  It was actually quite a cool experience, because a lot of these runs took us over bridges and even through a little mountain neighborhood.  By the time we reached our destination we took two runs and then had to head back to the lodge.

All in all, I was very impressed with the Canyons.  It is huge, has an option for people of nearly every ability level (I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re just learning though…the greens are really lame compared to other resorts), and has nice scenery.  I feel like I could spend a whole season up there and still have places to explore.  I would just hope for better snow than we had!

G’day mate
One odd thing: the Canyons seemed to employ the entire country of Australia.  Everywhere we went we kept running into employees with heavy Australian accents.  It was so remarkable that we all noticed it separately, before we even talked about it at lunch.  I don’t know if there is some sort of exchange program or what, but it was uncanny how many times I heard that accent in the few hours I was there.

SLC Snowboard Fest 2007 Day 1: Snowbird

SLC Snowboard Fest 2007 Day 2: Solitude

Here’s something weird about Wordpress that bugs me.  I have my blog set up to notice pingbacks (doesn’t everybody?).  When I create a link to one of my own posts, I have to go into the comments and delete the pingback from my own blog!  Is there some setting I’m missing that would eliminate this minor headache?

A while ago I suggested some changes to iTunes.  Now I have another one, and I think the Apple developers should get right on it: Quit adding features (temporarily) and make iTunes run fast!  I am sick and tired of downloading and installing updates to iTunes, and the program still runs slow on my computer.  No, I don’t have a bleeding edge comp, but I do have over 1GB of RAM and a separate video card.  Is it too much to ask that the program I use to listen to music should respond quickly, without lag?  Apparently it is.

And yes, I do have the album-cover-art-flipper-thingy turned off, but that only lead to a slight improvement.  Don’t get me started on using the scroll wheel with the album-art flipper!

For a while now I have written off using Flash for anything more than little animation extras on a site.  A long while ago I was fully on the Flash bandwagon, but then I became interested in web standards and realized a number of limitations of the technology.

However, this weekend I had a discussion with a friend who indicated Flash has grown through these problems and can be a very effective tool…especially when run with a database backend (with interaction through XML).  So I’m interested again.

So if anyone out there on the interweb can suggest a book/website/tutorial that would point me in the right direction, I’d be greatly appreciative (if scripting is involved, it needs to be PHP instead of ASP).  And yes, as a faithful subscriber to A List Apart, I have read the article on semantic flash, which was another piece of the puzzle getting me interested in Flash again.  Help me out readers!

I use Google Reader for my RSS feeds, and I’m very happy with the service.  Since making the switch to reading my main blogs in RSS instead of trying to remember to browse to the site, I’ve missed no new articles and even caught some posts I would have missed.  I’m a fan.

I also am a fan of the Consumerist blog, and I have subscribed to their feed.  However, I’m considering dropping it from my list because of the sheer volume of posts.  Sometimes I miss logging in to Google Reader for a few days, and I’ll see over 100 posts have accumulated in the Consumerist feed.  In the same time, another of my favorites (ProBlogger) will have 14 or 20.  The ProBlogger feed is much more manageable, and still full of useful information.  In fact, I find that I tend to read all of my other feeds and avoid the Consumerist feed until I have enough time to sift through those 100+ posts to find the 15 I am glad I read.

By the way, if you like my blog, feel free to subscribe to it (click the bright orange button at the top of the right column).  I won’t overwhelm you with 100+ posts (90+ maybe, but not 100+!)!

“Just say no” to overwhelming blog posting!

This weekend seemed like a great one for a mountain trip.  A friend from Oregon who lives in Provo emailed to see if I wanted to go snowboarding.  I said, “absolutely!”  Since my wife was not working on Saturday, she joined us as well.

Everything was going fine for the first hour or two, but then we went to a new lift to hit some good blue runs.  We got off the lift, and my friend and I strapped into our bindings.  We all headed down a ridge to the top of a bowl, but my wife didn’t make it to the top.  We turned around and saw her sitting down about 100 yards behind us.  Sure enough, she fell and hurt her knee.

Next thing I know Ski Patrol is strapping her into a sled and taking her to the medical clinic.  X-ray showed no breaks, but the doc pulled different ways on her leg and diagnosed her with a torn ACL.  Yippee!

So now we’re checking out doctors who are covered by our insurance and preparing for ACL reconstruction surgery and the resultant rehab.  Thankfully we were referred to a top doctor in the field who works in Utah and is covered by our insurance.  Now we just hope we can get in to see him!

My wife is so cool that, despite her injury happening at 11:00 am, she insisted on hanging out at the lodge while my friend and I spent the rest of the day on the slopes.  It was fun, I got some more black diamonds done, but my mind was with her all day.

Saturday we returned to my home base.  Solitude is where I normally snowboard, so it’s well within my comfort zone.  I was a little nervous to take my friend there, in case he didn’t like it.  Another friend from internship joined us and we headed up the canyon.

Magnetic snow
The weather was still hot, so the snow was slushy yet again.  For some reason, many of the runs at Solitude had magnetic snow on the ground, or so it seemed.  Going down some of the runs, as the snow softened up it seemed to grab onto my snowboard in an attempt to slow me down.  The annoying part was that this happened inconsistently, so I would go along with an irregular fast-slow-fast-slow pattern.  For me this was more of an annoyance, but it actually worried my friend from internship.  He is a skier and he had heard that a friend injured herself on just this type of snow because it gripped and her skis got twisted.  So we spent the day trying to find runs with better snow.

We ended up finding that the steeper more trafficked the slope was, the less magnetic the snow.  This led to a pattern that was basically the opposite of a normal day: find a steep where there are a lot of skiers/boarders.

In which a black diamond is achieved
So we spent most of the day riding off the only detachable high speed quad at Solitude.  At one point we went to another side of the resort to get to the summit and some steep blues, but found it had just been closed due to an avalanche.  So we went back to the detachable quad.  My friend from Oregon is much more advanced than I am, so often he would split off to go down a black diamond while my intern-friend and I went down blue runs.  Eventually he had tantalized us enough with the black diamond that we attempted it.

I now know something my friends have been telling me for a few weeks: I have the skills for black diamonds, my block has been all mental.  Somehow I was able to overcome my doubts and go for it, and before I knew it I had successfully ridden a black diamond run!  This was huge for me.  Not only does it mean the entire mountain (well, almost) is open for me to ride, but I accomplished my goal of riding a black diamond by the end of my first season.  I was elated.  I should mention we went back down the same run, and I did have a sit-down (don’t want to call it a fall) that time, but I still feel like I was successful.

All in all, Solitude is a nice resort to relax in.  I am starting to realize that the runs are fairly short.  The short runs and the relative lack of high speed lifts are the only criticisms I have for Solitude.  It was a good day.

SLC Snowboard Fest 2007 Day 1: Snowbird

SLC Snowboard Fest 2007 Day 3: The Canyons