Another anti-hospital/medicine nut...

Well, once again, some nitwit's wildly illogical commentary got me going. This time, among other things, the person said that "medical wisdom is an oxymoron" and far more that was harder to make sense of. Here is what I wrote in response:

Well, back in the olden days before 'evil' medicine came along, the mortality rate for mothers AND babies was horrific. It wasn't uncommon for the woman to hemorrhage to death or die of organ ruptures, babies to die of all kinds of things -- cord wrapped around the neck, birth defects, prematurity...

One heartbreaking case I read several years back really showed the truth. A woman did the home-birth, and as labor dragged on abnormally long, she pleaded to not be brought to the hospital. Her husband did get her there, but it was too late; the newborn died shortly after birth of some treatable problem that would've been detected with basic fetal monitors.

Such tragedies happen because some people put their fancies ahead of the well-being of their offspring... They forget that the important thing is to keep mom and infant alive & unharmed, not create her dream "birth experience"... *After* that fundamental basic has been planned, prospective parents should look into the delivery/labor options at nearby hospitals, so they can find one that is as close to their preferences as is possible. Deaths are rare, sure, but even one is too many, isn't it?

The idea that "medical wisdom" is an oxymoron is the most mind-bogglingly absurd thing I've heard in a long time, by the way. Thanks to medical science, I never knew anyone with vaccine-preventable disease as a child, and many things that used to be death sentences are now controllable for decades & often curable. Since the early 90s, they've even been able to fix major formerly-deadly cardiac defects in the womb -- can a midwife detect & fix that?

I'm not saying medicine is infallible; hospitals have caused me to suffer & very nearly die repeatedly over the years. I'm saying that most of the time, things are done correctly, so medicine spares us exponentially more pain & death than it causes. If the cost for that is being held in a room with mauve walls & eye-crossing privacy curtains, it's worth it.

PS. In case some are figuring this: no, people are not better off dead than with virtually any birth defect, disability, or disorder. Look up "Not Dead Yet" for more info if you are curious.

New Template, new distro

I just logged in primarily so I could post a link to some files that I bundled up the other day, mostly so I can find them again in the future (but also to save others the trouble in the future)... I installed OpenSUSE on Mom's computer, having fallen for it myself, and then, since the wifi adapter she was using was bombing out, I added a Netgear WPN111 USB wireless G on for her.  As it turns out, the darn thing needs ndiswrapper, which in turn required driver files...which weren't available on the install CD or shared on the web anywhere. Only way to get them was to run the setup in WINE (or Windows) and copy them myself. Meh.  So, for future reference, I shared the files here.

So, I logged in, as I said, and discovered that there's this fancy new "template designer" for Blogger.  I flipped through the various options, unsure what to go with...until I encountered this brightly-colored tye-dye theme. A few minutes of customizing text colors later, I had a much more individualistic blog -- a huge improvement, if you ask me, over the blah generic green thing I'd been stuck with.

Oh, and now I just need to figure out how the heck to solve ONE small problem in OpenSUSE... For some reason, at random times the first 2 keys I type don't register visibly, and the following one comes out accented. I've tried disabling the control key (or whatever it's called) that normally does that, but no luck so far.

OpenSUSE, Nautilus' location bar fix

Well, after having a few too many problems with GNOME within the otherwise-awesome SimplyMEPIS, I ended up switching distros yet again... After a lot of research & trials, I ended up settling on OpenSUSE, which runs faster & cooler than any other distro has on this computer by a longshot. Its version of Nautilus also offers both tabs and an extra pane for working with files, which should come in really handy.

I heard earlier this year that the "new look" for Nautilus, mostly available through custom designs, was an overly-minimalistic (aka "let's blindly mimic OS X") approach that disables the text-based location bar without giving any visible way of turning it back on. OpenSUSE seems to come with the latest of everything, and sure enough, the change was there. BLEAH.

Thankfully, a quick web-search has shown me how to fix it... First, you can use control-L to switch quickly from text-based to buttons... If you want it to always start up with text, start the GNOME Configuration Editor, go into the /Apps/Nautilus/Preferences area, scroll down to Always Use Location Entry, then set it to true.

Voila, no more clicking to get everywhere, which is a huge improvement for those of us that can touch-type rapidly & have a variety of folders/drives active. If they're all within a home directory, clicking is easy -- but if you have a large organized folder hierarchy, it won't. (Do the people that prefer the buttons-only approach not know how to type, or just throw everything into a few directories? Enquiring minds want to know...)

Custom Mounts In udev For Non-Techs

One of the only difficult aspects I've found about transitioning to SimplyMEPIS is that while Ubuntu relied on fstab (which sometimes did make me want to f*ing stab things) for mounting drives, SimplyMEPIS uses the evidently-more-popular method called udev.

I keep all of my music, photos, videos, etc. on an external drive partition named Biggus after the Monty Python character. ;) When I'm using the command-line or a program dialog that doesn't show individual drives, it's much easier if I know Biggus is always at /media/biggus than wondering which /media/sd* it's been stuck at this time. Same goes for things like my iRiver H10 media player, external backup partition, and so forth.

So, onwards to udev... I understood the basics quickly enough, but the way to really use it eluded me for a couple of days, in part because I was using a seriously-outdated guide. (Having barely passed C programming long ago, I knew I was in trouble when the howto made reference to one of its "easier" commands.) Thankfully I found Arch's Map Custom Device Entries with udev wiki article...

Since udev is capable of so many things that it seems dauntingly complex at first, I'll explain how I met success. I'll probably need the mini-guide in the future, and maybe it will help some other hapless end-user.

Evidently Merced's prisons are empty and free?

Yes, I'm at it again... SFGate has a short article that states, in brief:

"Homeless people in Merced have six months to leave their camps or face arrest. The City Council adopted that deadline Monday night when it voted 4-3 to enforce Merced's no-camping law."

I was the second person to comment, and gave this wholly disgusted response:

"Wonder how many have developmental/cognitive disability or major mental illness that has gone untreated for various reasons, and won't fully comprehend the 'warning' or remember it?

If that seems like overdramatizing, try reading this sadly-common account from a country with much more assistance than ours: [Autistics.org: Autobiography Of Anonymous]

If you're curious why some patients become too terrified to seek/accept help: [Autistics.org: Conversation On Institutions]

I've encountered far too many people that have been through the same sort of things. As anyone that has dealt with SSI/Medicaid can attest, handling issues with them is a failure-prone drain at best even if you're well -- let alone for people with mental/cognitive problems.

Merced should get volunteers helping those folk get the help they need, so they have a solid chance at *contributing* to society. Better than wasting $$ to fill our prisons with folk whose 'crime' is needing help society won't give."

An Author Whines About BCP

Another quickie, as it's late (and no, I haven't sorted out my font problem yet, arrrgggh)... Salon's latest "traumas of the privileged class" article, Why I Hate The Pill, annoyed me enough -- I've always hated it when people whined about piddly shit -- that I was inspired despite the late hour to write a fairly diplomatic response:

The author's focus on the age of various forms of birth control is a sad sign of our times. Like with furniture, new isn't always better: most advances in medicine have improved or saved lives, but others have been harmful or even deadly. If one has endured despite multiple competitors, it probably works -- and no matter how new something is, some patients will have unpleasant or fatal reactions.

Note: I've never been bothered by the issue I wrote about below; I shared it because otherwise my reaction to the article wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.

I've been on various hormone pills since my ovaries self-destructed at 13 years old. Each year, if I still didn't have sexual thoughts or interest in finding a mate, I was given a higher dosage, until I finally answered 'correctly' at 19. We've bumped it up repeatedly since then, and given my symptoms, will probably do it again around the 20th anniversary in a few months.

I've tried to quit a few times after reading anti-BCP rants, but learned even before my first doses that without the drug, I have intolerably severe perimenopausal symptoms. Big whoop if my libido never learned to notice anyone sexually/romantically, I'm less "womanly" in mind than my ex-BFs were, and I never have surges of hormones -- I'm not suffering from hot flashes, cold sweats, random crying fits, simmering rage, attention/memory deficits, etc.

So I really have to wonder what Geraldine Sealey would have done in my shoes -- or, if she eventually has peri-menopausal symptoms as horrid as mine are but reacts badly to hormone replacement, what she'll do then. She might have to handle any emotional issues with medications, as I do with my PTSD-induced anxiety/wariness & depression.

PS. Since she felt this was worth sharing in detail despite its relative rarity, the author should find a routine activity to keep things in perspective... It can even be upbeat: volunteer at a hospital's pediatric playroom, join a night class or seniors' group focused on autobiographical writing (plenty of great tales there), read some of the blogs at Inspire.com, etc. It's not about how good one has it -- it's about being reminded that we all have challenges that sometimes feel horribly unfair/burdensome if we don't see real evidence of others fighting along with us, and then getting that 'evidence' so we feel more determined/optimistic again.

I'm not saying that nobody gets to recognize that life's unfair (it is!) or that this fixes the really traumatic stuff. I'm talking about handling things more in line with my having to carry an asthma inhaler & spacer everywhere, her not being able to take BCPs, your team losing a big game, and so forth. As a really cool sociology teacher put it, "you have one minute -- don't waste it."

For Salon: you're not doing yourself any favors with the "traumas of the privileged class" series, especially since most aren't very well-written. If you want to attract readers with personal tales, there are quite a few on Open Salon alone (let alone other blog sites) that are more engrossing, hard-hitting, and well-written, plus some of the authors could use the money. Some blogs/posts I'd strongly recommend, shortened due to the absurdly long URLs OS uses:
http://bit.ly/MindiTheMagnificent
http://bit.ly/TequilaAndDonuts
http://bit.ly/ArizonaTeacherHell
http://bit.ly/MySonsBrain
http://bit.ly/ForNathanWhoWas2
http://bit.ly/Grannys5Tips
http://bit.ly/TheClassClown
http://bit.ly/IHavePTSD

As a bit of a side note, I have a slight suspicion that the author mentioned might have been experiencing a psychosomatic reaction to some degree. I noticed years ago that on discussion groups for self-identified asexual people, there were three very distinct groups:
-- never had sexual interest/awareness, no fantasies, no real sense the body is gross (like a kid before being told it is)
-- people that had been sexually abused or were virgin girls afraid of sex hurting the first time
-- people with strict religious or otherwise anti-sex upbringings that they internalized

I'm in the first group: I don't mind having sex, I can orgasm, but I just don't seem to notice anything/anyone as having sexuality. As far as I can tell, that is what it is to be asexual -- and I'm pretty damn sure people in the other two groups have a major psychological hang-up about sex in the way. Among friends of mine that didn't handle BCPs well in that way, there was a similar breakdown: some of them just became asexual, but others (who often had anti-chemical or anti-science parents, went that way in college, etc.) acted more like they had some kind of personal guilt/morality issue making the whole thing so horrible that they didn't want to even think about it. No need for BCPs if you're too disgusted/uninterested to have it, after all.

(I'm not saying that I necessarily don't have mental issues of my own in the sexuality department. With my medical history, I'm quite certain that I do... However, given I have no emotional reaction and a working libido that simply doesn't seem aware that living creatures exist sexually any more than doorknobs, I don't think the medical stuff is the culprit.)

OK, who stole the sub-pixel hinting...

Ever wondered how genuinely horrid fonts can look if the sub-pixel hinting (known in other OSes as Cleartype/Cooltype) is really out of whack?  Well, now I can show you:

Yes, that's not zoomed (unless Blogger edited my HTML...) -- it's actually how bad the Font Installer in System Settings looks at the moment. Bizarrely enough, not evverything looks remotely that bad, nor is there any consistency with what is/isn't affected.

I think I'm going to go take half of a migraine pill, finish ordering the case of Ringer's Lactate for the renal kitties