My life with dialysis and kidney disease
Archive for February, 2006
American Idol – Ace Young
Feb 24th
Friends and Family,
Growing up in Boulder Colorado, you’re not likely to have a friend or aquaintance grow up to be someone famous.
A handful of us though, are in this enviable position – the position of someone who can say “Yeah, I grew up with so and so…”
I have received numerous emails from friends in the last few days encouraging me to watch American Idol and cast my vote. An old friend of ours, Ace Young is a contender this season and we all need to do our part to carry him to the next round. He’s a very talented individual, and is in the words of Dave Perkins “good people”.
So do what your conscience is telling you to do – call the toll free number and vote for Ace Young – as many times as you can.
Watch American Idol this week, and VOTE ACE YOUNG.
You’ll be doing a whole bunch of people in Boulder proud.
10 Best Ipod Deals EVER
Feb 17th
So I’m a little excited – I just ordered a new ipod from the apple store.
No, this isn’t about the 10 best deals ever, but it does contain two decent deals.
I decided to go for the new “Video” ipod model, and was excited to find a few “deals” online. No, I’m not talking about those “free ipod” offers that you see all over.
*break*
My wife is sitting here with me at dialysis, so I must say:
I Love My Wife!
The support I receive from her is awesome – she meets me here at dialysis, and brings a nice picnic lunch to enjoy with me, and then sits here for four hours as I degrade from normal to lousy.
She rocks … and the world now knows it.
*end break*
So back to the ipod… I kept finding these “deals” all around the web, but some of them are so misleading! For instance, what good is a $30 discount with $30 shipping?
I finally found an “educational discount” through the applestore, and jumped on it. This one truly was a $30 discount, and even with decent shipping was under the MSRP.
Interested? Check it out here.
The only other “real” deal I found was a 10% off promotional code at Target, which dropped their price ~$30.
promotional code: TCPDPTCD.
Next stop? An Ai-Net adaptor for my car stereo.
Getting Comfortable with CSS
Feb 15th
CSS and standards compliant web design might be old news for some of you, but for others it might be something you keep reading about, yet are afraid to try.
I thought it might be helpful to write a couple of CSS tutorials to aid in getting some of you to a point where you’re ready to “jump in”.
I mean, if I can help to make one web site on the web look a little better, I’ve done my part right?
So what is CSS anyway?
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Cascading style sheets are pages we author, which tell the browser how to display content. Many of you have relied on WYSIWYG editors to do all of the page layout for you, but what some of you don’t know, is that many of these spit out horrible code. Others of you are savvy enough to code things by hand, but are utilizing the old <table> tag to control page layout.
*hand slap* No! *hand slap* No!
If you plan on using <table> tags to control page layout, read no further.
CSS draws back the shades and lets the light in. It allows us to control page layout in an intuitive (sometimes) way that is extremely easy to change.
First of all, somewhere in the <head> of our HTML page, we need something telling the browser to go and grab the CSS page.
<link xhref=”style.css” mce_href=”style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>
Now, your style sheet can be created in any text editor. For now, just use whatever text editor you’re comfy with, and then experiment once you’ve gotten a pretty good idea of how this all works.
Before we get into the meat of it, let’s get an understanding of selectors and classes.
Classes and Selectors
All HTML elements can be used as selectors in CSS. For example, <P> is a commonly used element in HTML. Well P can be a selector in CSS, and can be given it’s own properties (everything between the { and } )
This might look something like:
P { font-size:15px;}
So we can use any HTML element as a selector, and then define whatever properties we want – cool.
Classes
.h {font-family:Verdana; font-size:20px; font-weight:bold;}
In this example, we’re naming the class “h”. In CSS we always put a “.” before whatever class we’re describing. We can call our class whatever we want, and we can give it whatever attributes we want. The HTML calling the class might look something like this:
<span class=”h”>text here</span>
We have two basic declarations in CSS:
Properties (things like font-family, margin, and color)
Values (things like 500px or #000000)
So properties are the parts of the element we’re going to manipulate with CSS, and values are how far we are going to manipulate it.
Looking back at our .h class we see the property “font-family”, denoting what font to use, whose value is going to be “Verdana”.
ID Selector
The ID selector references a specific part of an HTML element, and is called with the # sign.
An example of this would be:
#Left {font-family:Verdana;}
This means that an HTML element calling the ID #Left will have the Verdana font (or whatever other properties and values you’d like to assign).
In the HTML this would be called like so:
<div id=”Left”>
Phew! Is that confusing enough yet?
We then get into parent/child relationships between classes and selectors. I will go into this further along the line (perhaps in part 2 or 3).
An example of this though, would be:
P.h {font-family:Courier; font-size:10px;}
in this example, we’ve taken the selector P, and have said that anytime the class ‘h’ is called within a P tag, it should have the above attributes … but only within that <P>. Other instances of ‘.h’ will be treated as described in the .h class declaration.
In the HTML this would be called like this:
<p class=”h”>
The goal here is to get some of you comfortable enough with this that you can use it to save time, and increase ability to turn out decent pages. More importantly though, is to achieve and maintain a higher standard for your work.
So are you ready to play?
Emil Stenström has a wonderful tutorial (way better than mine), and some great examples of CSS in action.
CSS Zen Garden is also a must see – with some pretty amazing examples of how CSS can manipulate a chunk of HTML into just about anything you want.
A List Apart will also get you on your way with lots of helpful tips and tricks for CSS.
In fact, I don’t even know what I’m doing trying to write a tutorial on CSS – all of the above mentioned resources have WAY more info than I do. While I’ve been utilizing CSS for a few years, it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve started to see what it can really do. Start playing with it though, and you’ll be hooked.
I promise.
But now dialysis is over – sorry, no more for today.
Check out the links I gave you and have fun.
Medicare Part D – How is it Affecting Small Pharmacies?
Feb 10th
I promised yesterday that I would write a little something today about the new Medicare prescription drug coverage, and how it is affecting smaller independent pharmacies.
I’ve suddenly become very drowsy while at dialysis, and I’m a little “out of it”, so my apologies if this is short, useless, or otherwise inarticulate.
Basically, this new plan stands to severely and negatively affect small independently owned pharmacies. Don’t get me wrong, it will hurt all pharmacies equally, but large stores with other retail departments will be able to mitigate these losses much easier. It’s worth it to Walgreens to make very little profit on a prescription fill, if that person happens to take stroll down the “seasonal” isle while they’re waiting, and purchase an obnoxious dancing Santa Clause. That Santa was probably built in China, and delivers a huge gross profit margin.
Basically, Medicare has decided to start helping people with their prescription drugs. Someone has to pay for it though, and it appears that in many cases, it is the pharmacist who is footing the bill.
Sure, as a patient I will pay a monthly premium, and still still pay a small copay for the drugs that are filled – but I’m doing that with the assumption that Medicare is then paying the pharmacist the difference. This doesn’t appear to be the case.
Speaking with one local pharmacist, it was clear that his business wouldn’t last long if the majority of his patients were on Medicare Part D.
Let’s say “Patient X” comes in to fill his prescription, which has a wholesale cost (cost to the pharmacist) of $250. Now, “X” pays let’s say $5 (or perhaps $0) because this drug is a “Tier 1″ drug on his plan. “X” whistles a cheery tune as he walks out the door with his drugs. The pharmacist though, will only be reimbursed $258 from Medicare. $13 on a $250 purchase? Can he really stay in business with such a low gross profit margin? Certainly not …
It gets worse – with so many different plans and providers, the billing part of it seems to be a nightmare. One pharmacist I spoke with said that he already had $30,000 out in inventory, without any reimbursement yet. How can he keep the doors open with no inventory, and no money to order more? How long does he have to wait to be reimbursed?
As I’ve said many times before, I don’t have all of the answers.
I don’t know how to fix this, but it seems that Part D might not be all it’s cracked up to be, for both the patients and the pharmacists.
Certainly it is a welcome help to some of us, but at what cost? I’d almost rather continue paying out of pocket for all my drugs, and at least know that I’m helping to keep a local business in operation. The reality though, is that I simply can’t afford to. I just hope that the small independent pharmacies will be able to keep their doors open – or at least adapt to the market and remain viable.
Perhaps they can all put in seasonal isles, photo departments, and $5 DVD bins.
Finally – Buttonhole Update
Feb 10th
After a few tries at cannulating my arterial buttonhole site with no success, I marched into treatment today determined that I was going to make it work.
As I mentioned earlier it was obvious that the track was developed, but for some reason I just wasn’t able to get the buttonhole needle in.
I asked the tech putting me on to hold my fistula in place, as the last few times it had appeared to roll away from the needle.
She held it straight, and thankfully the needle just slid right in – “like buttuh”.
So I guess I’m officially a buttonhole patient now. I’m much less apprehensive about travel now, knowing that not only can I stick myself, but I can stick myself easily with these newly established buttonhole sites.
I’ve also learned that it is in no way abnormal to have one site develop faster than the other. It’s also not uncommon to have to “spit on it” and really push that needle in there.
If you’re establishing buttonhole sites and having trouble, stick with it. I was adamant about continuing to develop this site rather than move to a new spot, and here we are a week later with it working fine.
Feel free to email me if you have questions about this experience.
