Lessons from visiting Rocky Mountain Urgent Care

I went to Rocky Mountain Urgent Care in Boulder last Friday and came back from my visit with a valuable lesson. If you need specialized care then RMUC is not the place for you.

I had a cold about 3 weeks ago and suffered from the symptoms for about two weeks. Unfortunately I had a remaining tightness and discomfort in my throat whenever I swallowed (disphagia) so I went to my ENT doctor's office and saw my ENT doctor's physician assistant.

She checked my out and threaded an endoscope down my nose but didn't see anything besides some minor redness. She offered to prescribe prednisolone and I accepted. I picked up the prescription a couple of days later. Since I still felt the disphagia and wanted a second opinion I went to RMUC on Friday. Unfortunately I wasted time and money since they are a general urgent care practice.

RMUC didn't have a scope to thread down my throat and take another look. If I needed that they said I would have to go to a specialist or the emergency room at a local hospital.

More to come later...

Shorting in a real world example

There's been a lot of shorting of stocks this last month.

It's the opposite of what you'd normally do with a stock, which is go long. You buy a stock at a low price in hopes that you can sell it in the future for a better price, and make a tidy profit.

I thought I'd put shorting a stock into something a little more visually aiding since most of the trading we do with stocks these days is in electronic format.

The two principal ingredients to shorting are being able to borrow an object from someone and being able to return an equivalent/equal object back to them.

Say I have a neighbor across the street that has - for some inexplicable reason - 5 brand new Toro lawnmowers. He's not using them since it's late winter early spring and won't need to cut his grass for another two months.

Let's say I have a friend who has more winter grass that needs to be cut earlier in the growing season and he needs a new Toro lawn mower. Unfortunately, no local hardware stores have the model that my friend needs yet my neighbor has 5 of them!

I also have some privileged information knowing that one dealer will have some new Toro lawn mowers (the same type my neighbor has) in stock in about a month and at a price of seven hundred dollars.

Here I notice an opportunity and maybe in this scenario it's a little underhanded.

I tell my neighbor I'd like to rent one of his five lawn mowers for 100 dollars for a whole month. My neighbor agrees stating he'd like the lawnmower back in a month's time.

I take the lawn mower and sell it to my friend for one thousand dollars. He's happy.

Now I'm a bit of a risky position since I'm expecting the dealer I mentioned above to have the equivalent mower at seven hundred dollars in about a month's time.

Let's say everything works out. In another thirty days I do go to the dealer and buy the new mower for seven hundred dollars. Since my neighbor wants his fifth mower back after the month's rental period I return the new mower I just bought back to him. He doesn't know the difference.

So, here I sold a mower to my friend for one thousand dollars. Later I got an identical one for seven hundred dollars and gave that one to my neighbor. Minus the rental fee I made two hundred dollars.

So it was profitable being a middle man for someone who was willing to rent to me his item so that I could sell it at full cost to a buyer now, and then, at a later time give him the same "equivalent" item back to him that I bought at a much lower cost.

That's the essence of short selling.

But the risk is if the dealer I buy from suddenly increases his prices to more than I sold the mower to my friend, then I'm out of some money. The short seller gets squeezed and loses a tidy sum! I can't say to my neighbor I can't return his mower right?

How to win friends and influence people

You've seen this book and maybe like me you've perused it casually, seen it at the bookstore, thought about the title, but never actually read it.

It's also in book on tape format and this was my most recent view of it; and out of all places, a former colleague of mine's car.

I spied it in my former colleague's car on his second to last day at the firm as we drove back from his going away lunch.

The hilarity of it is that the day before I wished him well and complimented him on his people skills as a manager.

Little did I know I'd find the secret to his success the next day.

The irony is that most geeks I work with are not very personable and socially awkward.

So listen here you fellow geeks, pick up a copy of this book and better yet, buy it for your cassette or CD player on your way to work, so you too can be a people person and move into managing your fellow more socially incompetent geek squad members.

Jack McDevitt

Currently, I'd have to say that Jack McDevitt is my favorite science fiction author.

I picked up a novel of his about ten years ago and found it an average read. Since then I took a break from reading science fiction and when I delved back into that genre about five years ago one of the authors I started to read again was McDevitt.

He seems to be quite consistent with writing novels these days and it seems he publishes a new one about once a year. Some are not as good as others, some are more perfunctorily written, but then some really stand out for me.

He likes to take a lot of ordinary 20th and 21st society we find today and just place it a few hundred years or even ten thousand years in the future. The characters that inhabit his novels aren't grandiose or too fantastical. In some ways they live a practical, and non-assuming lives that are a little more than ordinary and where they're surrounded by more interesting technology and greater realms of exploration and adventure. This might be the reason that Jack's science fiction is more accessible to adult science fiction readers and that's why I like reading it.

His last few novels have focused on two timelines with two characters that inhabit those times. One, Priscilla Hutchins, who lives only a few hundred years in the future and two, Alex Benedict who lives around ten thousand years in the future when humanity has occupied a greater extent of our galaxy.

I just read one of his latest Priscilla Hutchins novels, "Cauldron" where she journeys to the center of the galaxy. The novel is broken into three parts and the actual final destination only takes a couple of chapters. It's more of a journey than destination novel. Hopefully, I presume that's what most authors try to achieve, although he might foreshorten the focus on the final destination. I found it a good fast read.

Ultimately though, my all-time favorite of his - and Hugo award winner - though is Seeker. That is a novel in the Alex Benedict series timeframe. I'll have to write about why I have read that book more than once a little bit later.

As Is the Universe, So Is the Atom

This is an adage from a Zen sayings mini book I've had in my collection for the last 15 years.

I'm reminded of this quote because I just a saw a great TV show on fractal geometry a few weeks back. It was part of the PBS NOVA series and went into how fractals pervade our lives from helping analyze forests to the use of fractal geometry in the creation of miniature antennas in wireless phones that we use today.

Maldelbrot sets explore fractal geometry and are quite beautiful. For me, one of the beauties of using maldelbrot programs is how you can take the whole mandelbrot design, zoom in and see that design repeated as you zoom in further and further into the set.

I feel this translates well into what we see with the universe that surrounds us. Maybe it's too simplistic but the structure of the infinitely small subatomic particles seems to be repeated in the layout of our own Milky Way to the countless galaxies in our universe.

Take for example the atom with the electrons flying around it nucleus. Can't exploded analogies be made of our solar system with the Sun and our 8 planets that revolve it or even to the stars that revolve around the center of our galaxy?

For me that's the amazing beauty of the space that surrounds us and lives inside of us. It may be a trite observation but for me that's what's so incredible.

A subset of the whole domain - however big it is - gives us clues to the whole domain's composition. There's something inspiring and incredible to this infinite fractal geometry.

Red Rocks 5K - October 12th

A few days ago I did the Red Rocks 5K with Kary.

Unlike a more likely 5K, this race starts with of a lot of downhill followed by an uphill trudge ending with a stair climb. The race course basically took a clockwise loop around Red Rocks starting in the upper north parking lot and then ending at the top of the amphitheater.

I did plenty of 5Ks in high school and then others throughout the years but this was the most unique grueling course. A lot of 5K courses usually have the same moderate amount of elevation loss and gain - or are basically flat - but this one had the most loss and gain I've ever done. Most courses I've done have had probably 300 feet total of elevation gain and loss but Red Rocks was more like 1000 feet. Most courses have you finish with a flat to moderate grade but Red Rocks was a stair climb to the finish.

With altitude, cold weather and so much climbing it was going to make for an interesting day. Additionally, since some "officials" on the course were not course guides, the group I was in took a wrong turn (while one of these guys was watching us take the wrong turn!) that resulted in us going about a mile extra. Luckily there was another official closer to Morrison Road that turned us around. Regardless, if wasn't pleasant to do an additional mile with so much uphill basically for the last mile and a half. My quads and calves were killing me the next 3 days.

I'd be pissed except that it was for a good cause.

Back in Boulder we were able to pig out on sausage egg cheese muffins and then take a nap later.

Trip to Oracle HQ at Redwood Shores, California

I flew to California last week for team training at Oracle headquarters.

I lived in Palo Alto for a year when I was in middle school so I was familiar with the area but some things have changed in the Bay Area the past 25 years.

US-101 is much more hectic and backed up although I think it was still plenty busy back then. We drove to San Francisco two nights for dinner and traffic near Belmont was stop and go till we got closer to downtown S.F.

We did take advantage of some great restaurants when we drove up to S.F. both nights. Swiss Louise was on Pier 39 and had a great view of the bay. I had Linguini and Clams, which was quite good. Wednesday night we went to House of NanKing. The claim to fame for this restaurant - besides its good food - is that you can have the owner order for you. He takes your menus, asks a few questions and entrees for the whole table come out within a few minutes. Definitely a great experience.

There seem to be a greater percentage of other cultures living in the Bay Area. Oracle HQ has a big percentage of people of Chinese and Indian descent. Compared to Boulder - where our offices are predominantly white - it's definitely a different world. Even driving on 101 I could see a greater ethnic melting pot.

Campus was huge with 7 huge cylindrical buildings for workers in addition to smaller periphery buildings. Each tower had a cafeteria on the 1st floor so each day was an opportunity to try some new cuisine.

We may go out for Spring training next year.