My wife takes a lot of drugs. She has had a chonic back problem for many years and we are planning on having the nerves burned out of her facet joints this week. She takes muscle relaxers, pain relievers, nerve pain blockers, and sleep medicine in order to relive some of the pain. Because of this we have a lot of drugs around the house, but we also have a 2 year old. The little girl has been taught to never eat anything she picks up off the floor (an 8 month old in our church died from eating a screw earlier this year so that added to the paranoia for us).
On Thursday night the little cutie was staying with my parents and sister when she brought an empty pill holder to my sister. My sister remembered seeing it on the counter with 2 pills inside, so the first assumption was that they had been ingested.
After breaking a few traffic laws my wife and I arrived to try to identify what pills they may have been and then we rushed immediately to the local hospital. Because the possible ingested pills cause heart arrhythmia she had an EKG soon after arrival and another one before we left 6 hours later.
It was no fun sitting in an emergency room under observation until late into the night, but a little discomfort is always a miniscule price to pay for the health of a child, especially your own.
Of course, there were lessons:
- No pill holder is really child proof so keep them out of reach
- Out of reach from a 2 year old? Yeah, that isn’t easy.
- Respond quickly. Call Poison Control (1-800-222-1222 in the USA)
- Not kidding, an hour is too long.
- Make sure you can reach someone to help out while you are at the hospital. You won’t want to leave at any time. My mom was able to come in later and bring food and the diaper bag which was left behind during our hurry.
- When you leave your diaper bag behind it is amazing that a diaper 2 sizes too small still fits when that is all they have on hand.
- Emergency room people can be very nice. Especially when you have a sweet little toddler with you.
By the way, have you added the poinson control number to the other emergency numbers in your cell phone yet? You did have the other important emergency numbers in your cell phone already, didn’t you?
This might be Mark Schultz, but I’m not sure. I’m here doing security rather than for the concert itself. However I do have a more live picture here than they do on the official site (until they update their site). It’s low quality, I edited it and zoomed a bit using the graphics editors little secret MSPaint. They keep it a secret in hopes nobody ever uses it.
I’m sitting at the security desk watching security cameras and listening to a looping video of a violinist (perhaps more like a Celtic Fiddler?). I’m not sure how the person at that booth stands listening to it loop for hours on end. She must hear it in her sleep (note: This is not a judgment on the instrument, the player, or the music).
The Worship Center is pretty full. 1800 people, maybe? They all get to exit through a few doors, but the signature tables are in the way of a hasty exit.
We finished with Intermission alittle while ago. I am surprised at the number of people who asked about where the concession stand is, and the number who were surprised that a church wouldn’t have one. I don’t think we could keep up with the clean-up caused by a concession stand at a concert in our main worship center.
Anyway, I need to go lock some doors. In addition to the concert at one end of the building we have a volleyball tournament at the other and they just finished up. That means its time to secure some more areas and turn out lights.
Well we “borrowed” our church name from Christ’s Church of the Valley (although there is no valley here so we couldn’t take that part), so we might as well use their Shelby Arena system.
I have been watching it for a while and even subscribed to the Yahoo! Shelby User Group to keep up with any details. There haven’t been any from there.
I have also been checking out the occasional posts from David Turner (his old site has info too).
The ArenaChMS site has been updated with more information as well. Although, if someone connected with the site reads this they need to look at it in Firefox, there are some issues.
All of this to say that I am getting questions together for November 15, so if anyone has any information that would help in my questions or questions they would like me to ask then post a comment.
Update: I forgot to add the link to CCV’s Arena page.
Published on
October 12, 2006 in
Techie.
I believe that tossing my browser cookies is is important. but I typically do it with the faithfulness and regularity of a Christmas/Easter Christian.The problem is that while dumping cookies protects my regularly devastated privacy I end up having to go re-login to a bunch of important places. That can be really annoying.
Now there is the Cookie Culler Firefox Extension.
I have installed it, activated it, and marked my important cookies to keep. Now I can toss them all in the oven and not lose sleep (except to general non-cookie related insomnia).
The developer seems like he may not be up to keeping this extension maintained, but I hope that if he doesn’t then it will be built in somewhere else.
I would really like a way to log into gmail without being logged into Google in general.
Published on
October 12, 2006 in
Religion.
One of my security hosts told me about his first visit to the church many years ago. He had grown up in the Catholic church and had been with it most of his life. One Sunday he and his wife decided to check out Mandarin Christian Church and they liked it. However, his reasoning seemed a bit odd to me. He said that the preacher reminded him of a car salesman.
Continue reading ‘Used Car Salesmen and Your Church’
Published on
October 4, 2006 in
Techie.
I have been looking at the newly opened Google Gadgets. I used some of them a while back when I tryed out the Google homepage, but I prefer my own basic page I have been using for 6 years now.
Some of these gadgets look like they would be good for church sites. There are Google Maps, clocks, weather displays, and other useful tools. The problem is that they are in ugly frames provided by Google.
I did some digging into them and since they are basically simple files served through Google they are easy to hack and reuse in your own style. You can see how they are put together by looking at the Google Gadgets API. I used the provided code and then right-clicked inside the produced iframe to see the code of that frame. Then you can extract the code there or even travel to the source of it to use the original tools.
For any of the Google map tools you will need an API key, and some of them may take a bit of web knowhow to get working. Browsing the gadgets has even led me to an interesting service called spacebrowse.