Going To Sleep Is Free, But

George Carlin, 'A Place For Your Stuff', and the MacBook Air

• Categories: Technology
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My uber-cool sister-in-law gave me the George Carlin Reads To You boxed set. George Carlin's "A Place For Your Stuff" exactly summarizes my dilemma about how to keep my computer 'stuff' handy. Thanks to Apple, 'there's all different ways of carrying your stuff.' Let me explain.

All my 'stuff' is on my 24" Core2Duo iMac. That stuff is automatically copied every hour to an external hard drive via Time Machine so my stuff is safe from a computer hard disk problem. My really important stuff is backed up online using dotMac. Every night at 2 in the morning. Really.

I want to take some of my stuff with me wherever I go. I use my 60 GB video iPod to carry stuff around on but I need to plug it in to another Mac to see my stuff and, let's face it, there aren't a lot of Macs around in the workplace. Right now I use my iPhone to carry important stuff, but there's lots of stuff I can't carry on my iPhone, like the article on how to use Google Reader that I'm working on, or the PDF files I'd like to read.

Going from my iMac to the outside world means I have to leave a lot of stuff behind.....until now. Thanks to the MacBook Air I can now take most of my important stuff with me and it will only weigh three pounds!

NYT: Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft

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If you're long GOOG (or even if you just like Gmail), read this in the New York Times.

Swapping 3G SIM Card Into Activated iPhone Fails

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Having settled on giving my wife the iPhone I wanted to see if I could insert her 3G SIM into the already activated iPhone so that her cellular number wouldn't change. No joy. I saw a brief message about it being the wrong SIM (even though the SIM cards appear identical on the outside). The device worked, but I had no cellular signal strength indicator or carrier name.

What I've done instead is set her original number to forward calls to her iPhone number when it's off.

iPhone + New User = Fascinating

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I did buy an iPhone even though I said I wouldn't (buy this first one). The line at our local ATT store was about 20 people long when I checked at 5:45 p.m. Friday on the way home from work so I waited and snagged a 4GB iPhone. It is as insanely great as the commercials make it out to be. Fast, responsive, intuitive, solid, revolutionary...all those things.

I think the real power of the iPhone is in how easily people who are not tech savvy can interact with it. If Apple is going to sell as many iPhones as they think they're going to sell it will have to be to people who are not gadget freaks. By that measure this device hit the bulls eye.

I gave the iPhone to my wife, showed her how to turn if on, and asked her to perform certain actions without telling her how. She made a call in less than 15 seconds (to me, I'm happy to say) and soon thereafter figured out how to use the contact list to call her sister. She next used Safari to go to her favorite site for weather radar images (what is it with women and weather radar?) and bookmarked it. She took my picture and added it to my card in the contacts. She then SMS's her sister, who chatted right back and she got to see that iChat-like conversation log. Next, out to the garden to take pictures of her flowers.

Every cell phone she has ever owned before this one has had these abilities (contact list, SMS, web browser, built-in camera) and they went unused in every case. Only recently did she start to watch John Stewart's Daily Show and local weather reports in Cingular Video on her V3xx. Not until she got an iPhone did she actually enjoy using all those features and even did so without prompting from me throughout the day.

Tomorrow I'm going to give it to my nine year old son and watch him interact with it. In the mean time I want to thank and congratulate Steve Jobs and everyone at Apple for this breakthrough product.

I didn't make the Google Health Advisory Council :-(

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Well, I've checked my old e-mails to be sure I didn't miss something important. I didn't make the cut for the Google Health Advisory Council. (sigh)

Why I'm Not Buying The (First) iPhone

• Categories: Computers, Software, Technology
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With only three weeks to go until the release of the iPhone the frenzy is peaking. What features will it have? What is the twelfth icon? Will it have a SIM tray? Where will be the best place to buy one? I decided to today that I don't care. Let me explain why I won't be buying Apple's iPhone.

I've learned not to buy the first of anything Apple puts out. Though I love the company and have been buying their computers and other devices since the beginning, I think that (especially recently) there's good reason to be patient and let other people help Apple work out the kinks.

I ordered the MacBook on the day it was announced....and had the heat-sink problem. I ordered the 24" iMac the day it was announced...and had it up and die on day four of owning it. There are other examples of released hardware that was flawed initially but improved with each revision that, thankfully, I didn't experience myself. The bottom line is that being first has a price and that it's worth giving Apple a chance to learn from the initial release and improve the hardware with subsequent revisions. That doesn't mean waiting for the next model. Apple revises hardware between new releases, too.

The second reason for waiting is that the device you really wanted is usually the second one in the model line, not the first. But you compromise, tell yourself it's still worth getting the first one, but it's not. Because as soon as the second version comes it, you decide you should have waited. That's what happened to me with the Newton. I bought each new model as it came out (and still have a 2100).

What do I expect in the second version of the iPhone that I think makes it worth waiting for? Better-than-EDGE speed, for one thing. A camera that's better than 2 megapixels for another. GPS for a third. And many fewer problems.

Today, I put down my own good money for a Nokia N95. Five megapixel camera, built-in GPS, and a mature OS that has lots and lots of third-party apps. With iSync and the release of Nokia Media Transport yesterday (nice write-up here), adding contacts, calendars, iTunes music, photos, and videos just got a lot simpler.

Acoustic Respiratory Monitoring: What Is It?

• Categories: Anesthesia practice, Technology
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An intriguing press release last week from Masimo (known for their motion artifact-resistant pulse oximeters) begins as follows:



The release then refers to "an adhesive bioacoustic sensor applied to the patient's neck and connected to a breathing frequency monitor prototype" which in turn accurately monitors respiratory rate.

If this device does what I think it does, it will become the standard of care for post-surgical patients very rapidly.  We've been looking for a way to reliably monitor respiratory rate on the floors, once patients are discharge from the recovery room.  For example, a patient may receive pain medications from multiple sources, with unpredictable onsets.  How do we know their maximum respiratory depression won't happen after they've been delivered to their hospital room?

A patient can receive oxycontin and celebrex orally from a surgeon before their knee replacement surgery, then more fentanyl, morphine, and versed from us (anesthesia).  The surgeon may then inject bupivicaine and morphine into the joint at the conclusion of surgery (without necessarily telling the anesthesiologist). I might also do a femoral nerve block to further reduce post-op pain.  All of us are trying to do right by the patient but, given the right set of circumstances, are setting them up for significant respiratory depression post-op.  The ability to reliably monitor respiratory rate with this new Masimo monitor would be a huge patient safety advance.

The Society for Technology in Anesthesia abstract is here.