I meditate as part of a dedicated yoga practice. When I am doing a group practice, i arrive early and perform a physical warm up and then spend ten minutes in a seated meditation before the class begins. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my workout to get my mind firmly rooted in the immediate experience.

Back when Perl was the language of choice for bioinformatics, I found a huge performance boost pre-processing large (~1Tb) text files using built in unix tools like sed and awk with regex. So while it might take me a full hour to peck out the correct incantation, the task would then run in an hour, compared to four hours or more for the same task using Perl.

So many pipes…

They need a fifth man. Let me check my calendar…

‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.

It’s great as a mental prosthetic. When I am tackling a new complex topic like say a new cloud platform I’m learning, i can test my understanding of the implications of a change to the console settings. I tell it what i think and ask it to check my understanding. Really speeds up my learning, but I don’t rely on it exclusively. I will write my own dang emails, thank you.

The struggle is real and most don’t get it. Ive had to forcibly quit hobbies that triggered that ‘lock-in’ because my life was going along unmanaged. There’s no explaining it to peoole who don’t experience it.

Only true friends will jump-hump for you.

Feedback is a gift!

Music, especially singing in groups. Once I shrugged off the religious trappings associated with music, it turns out there are very many wonderful songs that have nothing to do with God. The feeling of oneness transcends religion, and is a human experience that we all need to feel once in a while.

Oh, hie, Kolob!

Most bands I care about have a website and an email distribution list. Most venues I enjoy also send out their upcoming events by email.

Now excuse me, there is a cloud I must go yell at.

Neato!

The choice is stark. Toil in bitterness till death or make a way to be involved in building something better . . . till death.

Either way it ends the same. One path makes for a better interim.

I’m having a Floorgasm.

Status update: still defaced!

Thank you for chiming in on the slightly spurious billing claim. Yes, billing and charge codes are woven throughout EHR systems but that’s just because everything we do in health care costs time/money. It’s as much about cost tracking as cost recovery.

We measure what we treasure however and if you look at the structure of any EHR, they are steadfastly patient-centric. Billing is ubiquitous but it is more like tinsel on a Christmas tree, sort of draped lightly over and connecting everything. Pick off the tinsel and the core patient care features are unaffected.

It will take years to see the effects in large scale but I like the features that allow patients to see their test results the minute they are released. As a patient myself, it gives me a feeling of having a bit more ownership of my own healthcare.

I was intrigued to learn recently that better EHR use a patients highest education level to tailor the way genomic test results are presented in the patient-viewable chart. The same results are reported to anyone but apparently patients with higher education levels will take positive actions when provided with sufficient depth of background information. Conversely, too much background info can be off-putting for others and reduces proactive behavior changes.

I get it, it’s really easy to be cynical about health care especially in the USA where it is kinda bad in many ways for no good reason. But at least pick the right things to complain about.

That it can be a form of ‘tokenism’ that erases or ignores the vast majority of my personal characteristics and reduces me to a cliche.

I hated identifying as a gay cis man after a while. It was in a small US town and the identity came to feel like a straight jacket (ha!). My identity is much more fluid now even though I fit the descriptor of ‘mostly gay’ in a statistical sense.

I’m not your fscking ‘gay’ friend, in a nutshell. If someone doesn’t understand why I might feel this way, well then the friendship is probably doomed.

“All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.”

Ok!

Years ago as a stupid fresh college grad, I worked for the US Forest Service as a summer intern. I co-authored a study that showed that bighorn sheep were NOT limited by availability of lambing habitat.

This was a political hot button issue that pitted hunters against cattlemen. Cattlemen claimed that the sheep were not getting brucellosis from their cows and that the sheep populations were indeed limited by lambing habitat.

I was very surprised when, 15 years later, I visited the same ranger station to say hello and that same study was still being used as evidence in hearings to undercut the claims of the cattlemen that they didn’t need to vaccinate their cows to protect the sheep. That felt really good.