Wired Sage

Special Thanks to my brother Donald for the Snow Shovel.

Crash Test Dummy

I must recant.  In my previous post I stated, “No injuries.  I don’t even think you could fake one either.  My airbag didn’t even deploy.” Wow!  Was I incorrect in that assessment.

After the accident I felt fine.  100%.    Nothing wrong at all.  At least that’s what I thought.  I must have been so hyped on a natural high, adrenalized as it were, that I didn’t realize exactly what happened to me.

So it went like this.  BOOM!  My car is knocked SIDEWAYS.  My head snaps to my right shoulder.  My hands leave the steering wheel and slide right, hitting the windshield wipers.  I see black for about a second or so — I’m not comfortable saying I “blacked out” since I was aware that I lost my vision.  My car turned itself off, I drive a manual, and I’m sure my foot had to hit the brake, which will stall out the engine.  I got my bearings, which was another second or two.  Jumped out, and made sure everyone was OK.

The rest of the story is in my previous post.  Long wait, police officer, shouting, tickets, drugs, chest X-ray, home…

I played around on the Net that night.  Doing some Facebook stuff.  Making the last blog entry here.  I commented on Facebook, “4:30 a.m. and counting. I’m starting to feel physically ill.” I went to bed.  I had a horrible night.  Didn’t sleep much.  Was really uncomfortable, cold sweats, unsettled stomach, and at about 7:30 a.m. I sprang from bed to vomit uncontrollably for several minutes.  It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

I tried to sleep again afterwards.  I couldn’t get comfortable and I kept getting nauseous.  Then I correlated head movement to throwing up.  Move my head, puke my guts out.  Move my head, puke my guts out.  Now that I thought about it, my neck was really sore.  Put some ice on it.  A few phone calls to my Dr. and I made the decision to go to Urgent Care.  I should say I made the decision to go to Urgent Care too late.  At this point it felt like I had seriously injured my neck.  The pain was so intense, I would have sworn I had just fractured a vertebrae.  I couldn’t sit up.  I rolled a T-shirt under my neck for support, put my feet up on the wall, and had my wife dial 911.  I needed a ride to the ER.

The first responders were awesome.  Funny bunch of guys.  Good guys.  I apologized.  I really thought this was a bit much for what happened, but I really couldn’t sit up.  They stabilized my neck after I insisted that it was the worst of my trouble.  They were pretty convinced I just had a really bad flu.

The ambulance ride was rough.  Upon arriving in the ER I filled a bed pan for them — so I didn’t feel that much like a faker.  I was very dehydrated, in an increasing amount of pain, suffering from vertigo, nausea and really feeling downright shitty.  I told the Dr. about everything, my bronchitis, the tiny fender bender I had yesterday, and he said, “It’s not the drugs you started taking last night.  It’s the accident that did this.  We need to make sure you didn’t really twist and hurt your neck.”  So, I got a CAT scan and an X-ray of my neck, all negative, and the Dr. concluded that it was muscle spasms and soft tissue injuries.  Some Demerol, Torodol and some anti-nausea medicine made me feel much better, really quickly.  I like how fast intravenous medications can affect you.

Several prescriptions later and I was discharged.  I was in complete disbelief that such a small fender bender could twist someone up so badly.  If the Dr. had called me a sissy and told me I was faking, I would have believed him.  I don’t know why I was so afraid of being called a faker… but I was.  It was nice to have someone believe, even when I didn’t, and offer relief.

A few days later, I was chatting with the insurance adjuster, and she commented that the Crash Test Dummy’s you see on TV are only going 35 miles per hour when they crash.

So, I was wrong.  I hope everyone else in that other car didn’t feel as bad as I did a day after the accident.  No matter how rude or obnoxious the other driver was, no one deserves to have pain like that.

And did I mention, her Insurance is picking up everything?  Rental car too while my car is in the shop.  So, I don’t even have to pay a deductible.  It’s officially her fault.  They’ll pick up the Doctor bills and probably give me $20 to boot for pain and suffering.

Still, it wasn’t worth it.

My car is completely payed off this February.

Where N equals the number of participants or observers to an event there will always be n+1 accounts of what happened.

This is my account.  I was driving in a parking lot.  Traveling between 10 and 15 miles per hour when at approximately 3:50 p.m. a woman in a silver Taurus backed into my path and collided with my vehicle.  I had no time to react.  Boom!  And the event was over.  Our cars hit perfectly on the corners of the vehicle.  My right front corner was hit by her right rear corner as she backed out of the parking space.  My car stopped moving, and my windshield wipers turned on.  My hand must have hit the lever on impact.  That has no bearing on anything aside from I thought it was very strange.

I jumped out of the car to make sure everyone inside was OK.  Yeah, it was only a 10 mph crash… but a kid could have poked an eye out with a crayon or something I guess.  No injuries.  I don’t even think you could fake one either.  My airbag didn’t even deploy.

She was obviously a Nurse of some kind, deduced by her attire: scrubs.  It was obviously a new car, deduced from the dealer tag in the window.  And just three days after Christmas, no one needs that.  I offered my condolences.  She was obviously mad as hell, so I said no more.  I observed her scream several times at the child who was in the back seat.  And when I say scream I mean she shrieked.  She shrieked so nastily, which such hostility and hatred, that each time I felt a flight or fight response and all I could think was “poor kid.”

I called 911 and reported the accident.  They gave me a 30 minute ETA for an officer to arrive.  I called home to tell my wife I was involved in an automotive altercation and then I called my insurance company to report the incident and make sure they knew I wasn’t paying a dime because she was at fault as far as I was concerned.  I snapped a few photos for documentation purposes and waited.  And waited.  And waited.

The Officer arrived about 45 minutes later.  Remember how I said I was originally sympathetic to this woman’s misfortune?  Well, my sympathy completely ended after the Officer asked me my account of the situation and she acted out, yelling and hostilely denying the beginning of my diatribe after only uttering several words.  The Officer commanded her to go stand by her vehicle in that way Police do.  I swear Police have Jedi mind powers!  And doesn’t everyone know not to raise your voice to a police officer? That poor guy didn’t want to stand out in the cold and do all that paperwork because of her stupidity.  And he definitely didn’t want to do all that AND get yelled at.

I was given a sheet of paper to fill out by the officer.  When I gave the paperwork back to him, he informed me that her story was quite different.  I told him she popped right out of the space and I had no time to react.  He said OK, and went to his car and told me I could sit in my vehicle to get out of the cold.  So I waited some more.  Finally he gave me her paperwork, that she would receive mine, and he told me I was free to go.  I had checked my lights and most of them worked.  I lost a running light and asked him if that would be OK to drive with.  He said it should be fine.  He asked if I had any other questions.  I asked if he had determined fault or if fault was determined in a parking lot and he shared that he had not determined fault at this time, but I could check the report in two or three days to see if that changed.  He mentioned that the insurance companies could and would work it out.  In parting he did tell me that the woman who hit me was driving with a revoked license, so she’d be getting a ticket for that, which was ultimately in my favor.  I thanked him for his time and apologized for the inconvenience to him — I have a lot of respect for police, they don’t get paid enough, and they deal with everyone on the worst possible days of their lives, it’s a tough job and I respect the people who chose it as a profession.

That was it… I was free to go. Now here’s the really strange thing.  You know that sinking feeling you get when you see the blue lights in your rear view mirror?  Or the blue and red lights in NJ and just the red lights in NY?  Or the sinking stomach feeling when you get in an accident or something really bad happens?  I didn’t get that at all.  I was completely apathetic to the direct consequences of the events of this afternoon.

Santa Clause brought a new 13″ macbook for my eldest daughter this year.  He was kind enough to set up most of the laptop for her, but left a few tasks for me to tackle after the holiday.  One of which was email.

Apple Mail has some wonderful Parental Controls allowing the parental units to define a white list of who the child can exchange email with.  Fantastic Stuff!  But my problem was my daughter has an email address from one of my google apps domains.  I needed to figure out a way for her to ONLY use Apple Mail and not login to Google via the web to circumvent those Apple parental protections.

I decided just on a monster password that she doesn’t know.  One that she will not be able to remember or type in.  We’re talking 35 characters long, upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters.  It’s not a perfect solution.  The password is saved in the Keychain, and she can get it out of there, when she figures it out, but it seemed like a good compromise for now.

I could blacklist the URL for gmail so she can’t access her email via the web on her computer.  But, that won’t stop her from accessing her email  from another computer if she can figure out how to get the password off her macbook.

I’ll do some more investigation around this later.  It would be nice if Google allowed an account to ONLY be accessed via IMAP.  I’ll look into if that’s an option today, and if not, I’ll ask Google for the feature.  I think it would be a nice option to have.

Yesterday we also set up iChat, so now we have a video intercom in our house.  It’s funny to video chat when your kids just down the hall.  She is completely enamored with the Alpha Channel options in Snow Leopard’s iChat.  We need to get a green screen now.

The chair, desk and apple macbook are all new for Christmas.

My eldest Daughter got a MacBook from Santa this year.  A little 13″ solid plastic uni-body MacBook with a clear protective cover.  Yes, she’s only 9 years old.  Yes, she really does need it for school.  She attends a magnet school and is currently making straight A’s in one of the toughest/best public schools in the state. Santa did right by her this year.

In comparison, I was 12 years old when I purchased my very first computer, a Commodore Vic 20, back in 1981.  I got it from K-Mart for $125.  Money I had earned working paper routes with the Atom Tabloid and Star Ledger — my mother lied for me so I could get the Atom Tabloid job a year early.  In NJ the child labor laws mandated a kid be 12 before they could earn an official taxable wage.  Meh!

So, I got a computer at 12 years old and taught myself to program.  By 13 I was an old hack.  By 14 I was soldering external sensors to my Vic 20’s RS232 serial port.  I think having that computer experience got me where I am today — from the Vic 20 to Facebook.  I had to poke fun at Facebook, I just had to. 

I didn’t grow up with a computer, like both of my kids did.  I didn’t figure out how a mouse worked at the age of two just from sitting on my father’s lap and watching him work like my kids both did.  It’s intuitive to them.  It’s second nature.  Plus they’ve been hogging my wife’s PC and my Mac far too much for far too long.  I think Santa did my wife and me right.

So, it’s now the day after Christmas 2009 and I’m looking through my employee benefits sites at work trying to find the “$10 Office 2008 for Mac” deal that a co-worker told me about this past summer.  All of my daughter’s school work is done in Word, Excel or Power Point.  She knows Power Point so well, she’s been tutoring her fourth grade teacher on how to use it.  I got her hooked on the Mac with iLife.  I knew I wasn’t going to win any awards forcing her to learn iWork.  So I just got her the Microsoft Programs for the Mac.  She even agreed to split the $10 licensing fee I had to pay.  What a good kid.

But it took me ALL DAY!  The house was a mess.  Leslie and I are both sleep deprived.  I’m fighting a cold.  Holidays are getting rougher in our old age.  The kids were acting bratty.  There were 100+ interruptions — to a computer geek interruptions are like ice picks in the eyes; nothing is more annoying than an interruption when you are trying to get something complex done right.  Ugh!

Finally though, I finished installing all of the work on her computer.  I’m pretty proud of myself too.  Aside from the programs for school she also has the iLife suite, Voice Candy, and two Luxor games to play with.  It’s under complete Parental Control.  I’m using the Mac Parental Controls in conjunction with Open DNS which will also filters out nasty domains (phishing and maleware as well as sites that are not child friendly).  With a little Remote Desktop magic I can also view her screen in a window on my iMac’s 2nd monitor to make sure she’s doing her homework when she should be doing her homework.  Time limits keep her from spending more than 4 hours a day on the machine and will force her to logout at bed time, and she can’t login again till morning.  So there will be no late night net parties in her room any time soon.

My next plan is to show her the address book on the machine.  I’ll have her convert our old paper address book to the Mac format, then I’ll be able to port it into my machine with ease.  It’s a win-win.  She’ll love typing in all the information and using the Address Book program.  She’ll love having all that contact information at her fingertips.  And I’ll get to benefit from her labors.

Tomorrow we have to work on integrating Google email with Snow Leopard’s Mail and resolving the Parental Permission issues around that.  Tomorrow should be both fun and interesting.