Elf Sternberg

To the Nurses, I Am the Bed Whisperer!

2022-09-30T02:45:22Z

To the nurses, I am the bed whisperer!

Unfortunately, Not like that. But it’s still cool.

During my recent hospitalization, I was stranded on a hospital bed. Since I had fainted due to blood loss, I wasn’t allowed to get out of bed without an attendent. They even had frickin’s lasers watching and if the lasers sensed both feet on the floor an alarm would go off.

Nurse’s panel

Worse, the beds were broken. But, as someone else said recently, “I have ADHD, an internet connection, excellent research skills and poor self-regulation.” I took photos of the nurse’s side panel and underside to identify the make and model, downloaded the manual, discovered that it was no help at all, but ultimately found MedWrench, where nursing home technicians exchange gripes, complaints, and potential solutions. They hate this particular bed, but it’s popular because it’s cheap. Quelle surprise.

At one point, the nurse was struggling to make the bed go up. “Let me,” I said. “I’m the bed whisperer.” I reached through the handle, pressed the Global Lock + All Lift Locks buttons simultaneously, then pressed the specific lift she was looking for (raising the head of the bed).

“You are the bed whisperer! How did you do that?” She looked incredulous.

I explained, and I said I didn’t know how long that hack would last before the bed failed entirely. MedWrench says after that, you have to dig a panel open and re-seat a chip on the control board; it’s poorly held in and falls out if you move the bed too often. The most approved technique is to drill an 8mm hole at a location shown in various images and push the chip back in with a pencil eraser.

A little later, a nurse was checking on my roommate. She shuffled over to me and said, “Can you show me how to unlock the bed. The other nurse said you know how.”

“I can’t unlock it if that’s not working. But I can show you how to override the lock while you’re using the bed.” I showed her the trick (Hmm, two in the front, one in the back… I should nickname it The Shocker!), she went to the other patient, I heard the whirring and she shouted, “It worked! Thank you!”

Pretty much by the end of the day the nurses had all taught that trick to each other.

As I said, I have excellent research skills. But I refuse to believe that an entire hospital full of professional nurses had no one with curiosity and mediocre research skills to relieve a serious, ongoing problem. It boggles my mind that no one at that hospital had done what I’d done– downloaded the manual for a thing they use every day, then looked further when the instructions in the manual didn’t work!

A friend of mine suggested I have a programmer’s mindset– we get libraries and toolkits with crappy documentation and are used to supporting each other by giving out tips and tricks when we ask. But surely that’s not unique to my profession? Are we the last bastion of problem solvers in our species? No, I don’t believe that at all. But what to make of the fact that a patient had to solve one of their most commonplace irritations?

comments

Thoth wept, MSDN, where's the flaming table of contents?

2014-06-23T17:35:11Z

For reasons, I ended up trying to read the documentation on LINQ, Microsoft's new DSL for refining collection lookups, i.e. sorting and looking stuff up in large datasets. It's a lot like embedded SQL, only performant with regular language features like lists and lookup tables.

MSDN's (Microsoft Developer Network) LINQ documentation page has an "outline" on the left side. The feature I wanted, "LINQ to XML," was not in the outline. I found it down at the bottom of the document. I clicked on it, and followed the links down through five different pages until I found, you know, actual examples.

The outline on the left is worthless. It obscures more than it shows. If I have to "open" a level of the outline, and all that does is show me what's on the page I'm currently looking at, then I'm not getting an index, I'm getting an index-shaped-thing that might help me once I'm completely familiar with the material. It's not searchable in-page using Ctrl-F, not when the content is hidden. As someone who learns best looking at other people's code, this was an exercise in frustration, and it really needs to be re-thought.

comments

Dark Artists

2014-02-09T16:34:47Z

We have an phrase in the programming world, the Dark Programmer. The term comes from the analogy with dark matter: we know it exists because it exert gravitational force on our galaxy, but other than that we have no idea what it is. A dark programmer is like dark matter: we know they exist because someone keeps writing Java-based actuarial software for insurance companies, banks, hospitals, and other large institutions, but these aren't the sort of people who post to GitHub or Bitbucket, don't contribute to Stack Overflow, and generally aren't interested in advancing, or even learning much about, the state of the art. They just want to do their job for the day, go home, and not think too much about what they do.

It occurred to me, while watching the credits roll by for the movie Frozen, that there seem to be Dark Artists as well. Looking through the list of all the various artists, digital CGI, and ink-and-paint animators listed on the film, I proceeded to go through all of them to find out how many had some sort of presence on the web related to their love of their art.

About half. Almost all of them had some presence: they have LinkedIn accounts, IMDB entries, and the like. But only about half the artists had Deviant Art, Tumblr, Blogspot, or some other account where they shared process drawnings and discussed their work with other people. (Mostly Blogspot. Which I think is weird. Is there something in the TOS of Blogspot that makes it more desirable for arists than the others?) Which means that half the artists on the biggest animated film of the year just want to do the work, take their paycheck, go home, and not think too much about what they do for a living.

The programming world needs dark programmers; I wonder if the same mindset is in play for animation departments. After all, not every who went to art school came out as passionate as when they entered.

comments