Week of July 30, 2001
Monday
Tuesday Wednesday
Thursday Friday
Saturday Sunday
Most Recent Update
I am back again after being on call over the weekend. It was not too bad as call days and nights go but somehow I did not find time to post anything to this journal. I had today off as compensation for being on call over the weekend but had to go in early this morning for a meeting. The rest of the day was pretty much spent in the yard digging holes for Delanae to plant trees and shrubs. We also put in some lights and it is now getting dark enough outside to see how they are going to look. Pardon me if I pause during this to go out and look.
Computerwise, I am at the beginning of a reinstall of my operating system so I can get the driver for my new network card to be recognized and loaded correctly by Windows 98. The driver is installed correctly by the virtual device driver does not get loaded correctly. I have tried deleting the device and reinstalling it but nothing works. I know of nothing else to do other than to reinstall the OS. I need a clean install anyway as it has been awhile and I want to make it leaner and lighter so it will run faster on this old Pentium 200 machine. With memory so cheap right now I want to get some more to put on a new motherboard for this machine so I can give it to the kids when I build my new system. I am still contemplating what motherboard to get but will probably use a Celeron processor for it. I will also need to replace the power supply as I have been using a 145W power supply now for five years. It is due to go out anytime.
The lights outside look great. We still need to move them around some to get the right angles so they won't blind someone driving on the street or walking down our sidewalk. I forgot to tell you that these are halogen lights which are designed to go in a rock garden and look like rocks. We are using them for accent lighting.
This will be a short week for me. I will be off my usual day on Wednesday as well as today and have an all day meeting in Bellevue on Thursday. That means I am only in the office two days this week. I will have to cram four days worth of messages and notes into two days. I did begin this week with ALL my requests answered so none are left over from last week. See you tomorrow.
While hectic, today was not as bad as I had feared it would be. Clearing out all the work from last week definitely helped as did making sure I went through all that was left for me to do from yesterday while I was gone first, on arrival at the office. I got there early enough to do that and see my one patient in the hospital. That patient will be discharged tomorrow and those arrangements have already been made so I will not have to go in and see that patient in the morning. As a result, I am not going anywhere near the office until 11 AM when I have a meeting to attend.
I have two meetings to attend tomorrow, both of which are directly or indirectly involved in our region's chief operating officer resigning to look at other opportunities. He leaves this region in fine shape which means he has done a great job. He will discuss his and the organization's plans for succession with all the employees of the corporation tomorrow.
On the home computer front, after I updated this journal last night I opened up the case for my computer and did some more nosing around. I found that there were two USB ports on the motherboard but that they were covered up on the back of the case. I removed the paper cover to expose them then went into the BIOS where they had been disabled. I enabled them and rebooted the computer to see if they would work. They do not as the driver for them would not load , giving the same unable to load the virtual device driver message that I talked about last night. So, I still need to do a fresh install of Windows 98 to see if that will solve the problem with all these drivers not loading. That will be a project for later this week as I will be working outside tomorrow afternoon again unless it is raining. Have a great night.
Today was a real day off! We stayed up last night and watched "The Family Man" on DVD then slept in this morning until 8 AM since I did not have to be at any meeting until 11. I did not make any rounds at the hospital but, rather, stayed home to meet a man about an estimate on grinding down the stumps in our yard. He got here a little after 8 and was here maybe 15 minutes so I had time to eat a leisurely breakfast and do some web surfing before leaving for the hospital.
The meetings today were about the transition from one CEO to another who is now being recruited. One meeting also touched on long range plans for capital improvements to the physical plant and the expected growth in the area just south of our primary service area. That area is projected to grow by 150,000 people in the next 15-20 years so plans need to be made now for how we can position ourselves to take advantage of that new growth. One day we may be a real suburb of the Portland-Vancouver area. Our next CEO will need to have a vision like our present CEO has had.
I have ordered a new motherboard and processor for my system. I have ordered a GigaByte GA-7IXE4 motherboard with a Duron 750 processor and a new 300W power supply from Mwave.com. They had an incredible deal on the motherboard/processor bundle with a heatsink and cooling fan included, all for $115. Add the new power supply and 256MB of PC-133 memory from Crucial.com and this upgrade is costing me around $200. I will have almost a new machine and it will do all that I need to do until I can build my complete new system sometime in the next six months. I actually hope to build it early in the new year during the winter here which is rainy and dark. Then, I can give this system to the kids and it will do all they need it to do for a few years.
Tomorrow, Delanae and Stacey are accompanying me to Bellevue. I have to be there for a meeting that is supposed to start at 8 which means we will have to leave at 5 in the morning to make it through rush hour traffic in that area to arrive on time. They are going to just look around the area while I am in my meeting. The meeting is to discuss further standardization across the corporation in the use of the electronic medical record system we have. We will also discuss some things we would like to see included in this system in the future. Wish us luck on our long day of driving tomorrow.
What a day on the roads. We left for Bellevue, which is just east of Seattle, at 5 this morning and by the time we got to Tacoma about 7 we were in bumper to bumper traffic, stop and go for the rest of the way there and from the time we left Bellevue at 2:30 until we got to Olympia. My apologies to Matt, but I don't see how anyone could live and work in Seattle and have to face that traffic seven days a week. Yes, we've driven through there on the weekend and the traffic is still bumper to bumper and stop and go. I can more readily understand road rage if one has to drive in that traffic every day. I am frustrated and we were able to use the car-pool lane as there were three of us in the car.
Anyway, we got there on time and I was dropped off at the corporate headquarters where we met from 8 to 2:30. The meeting was actually quite interesting with a nice view of what the company that wrote our electronic medical record software package is developing for the future. The company is looking for some practicing physicians to give them feeback about their product on a regular basis so I may have the opportunity to do some of that for them. It would probably be mostly by conference calls and "Net Meetings" but could also involve some travel. We'll see how this plays out in the future.
Tomorrow it is back to work. I will have only been in the office two days this week which will mean I will have a lot of messages to catch up on tomorrow. I was able to check my office e-mail on the corporate network while we were in Bellevue so I am up to date there. Tomorrow promises to be a long day so I am going to go get ready for it and get to bed early as I got a lot less sleep last night than I had planned on getting.
As I predicted last night, today was very busy. My office patient count has not dropped any this summer as it has in the past and has actually increased. Plus, today I had to admit a patient from the office which always takes more time. Still, I was able to get my medical assistant out on time this afternoon even though I did not get home until 8 since I had to go by and check on a couple of patients in the hospital after I finished dictating. The only thing I did not finish was answering some e-mail, most of which was generated by the meeting on Thursday. I will have to go by and answer it sometime this weekend.
Tomorrow looks like will be spent moving rocks and other manual labor. The man who is going to grind away the stumps in our yard thinks he can get to it by late next week. This means that we need to move some things that would be in the way of him driving his pickup into the yard to tow the grinder he will use to the stumps. In particular, one pile of rocks needs to be moved. Also, some trees need to be planted which means digging some more holes.
My new motherboard, processor, power supply, and memory have all been shipped. This according to e-mails from the companies. That means they may be here as early as Monday but more likely Tuesday. It does not look like I will have time to actually install them until Wednesday at the earliest and likely later than that. Next weekend we are going to the beach (Seaside, Oregon) so I can attend a medical conference there while the rest of my family enjoys the ocean. Actually, the conference is only four hours long which will leave me plenty of time to enjoy the ocean also. Hopefully I can get the new hardware installed before next weekend.
Today was indeed a day for manual labor. We moved rocks and trees, replanting some and just digging up others. We now have everything planted in the yard except for some iris bulbs that Delanae is going to plant next week in various locations. The yard is ready to have the grinder come in and grind down the stumps. It is much more open now in the backyard since we dug up some trees and transplanted a rhododendron to the front yard.
Stephen was only a little help today as he had stayed last night at a friend's house and we found out after he came home that they had not gone to bed last night. He got very sleepy by the middle of the afternoon and had to go in and go to bed leaving Delanae and I to finish the digging and planting. Luckily, the rocks had already been moved before he tired out.
Tomorrow morning I am doing the sound for both morning services which means I need to be at the church at 7:30 AM. That also means I had better get to bed now so I can get up early in the morning. It also likely means naptime tomorrow afternoon. Too bad there is no NFL football yet to fall asleep on the couch watching. It will be here soon though.
Short note tonight. We just got home from church and I found out that I have four or five people to see in the hospital tomorrow morning plus a meeting of the Leadership Council from 7-9 and then patients to see in the office beginning at 9:30. This all means I have to get up even earlier in the morning to do all this so I need to get to bed earlier tonight. I still have some things to get together for tomorrow morning which I will do now.
I hope to be able to tell you tomorrow night that my new hardware is here. Even if it is I do not know when I will have a chance to install it this week. This coming weekend we are going to a conference at the beach so won't be back until sometime Sunday. I will get it installed sometime. Hope everyone has a great week.
