Category: Kaweah Delta

Quarterly inventory – 2026 Q3

Dear FutureMe,

Today would be a good day to do a quarterly inventory.

How is your personal life going?

How is your work life going?

How is your Volunteer Service life going?

Future Me

Personal Life

Near the end of July, I will retire from 37 years of “doing computers” for my employer.

I have done so.

I have yet to get a good routine going. On the other hand, I have had a day or four that were wonderful.

Mom is gravely ill

At the beginning of the year, she was fine, if a little unsteady on her feet. The underlying problem is that she wasn’t getting enough exercise. In years past, she would do some gardening and go on trips with Frank. There were four falls in four months, although thankfully, she hadn’t broken any bones. But she was unable to get back up on her own feet by herself. Her cardiac condition has been deteriorating, and her doctor forced a pacemaker on her. Within a day, she was in the emergency room at Kaweah Delta and couldn’t get herself out of bed. She’s been almost entirely bedridden ever since. From KDDH, she went to a physical rehabilitation nursing home but didn’t really make much progress. Insurance stopped paying, so now she is at home getting palliative care. I’m visiting almost every day, but her health is in slow decline.

Twitter/X

I deactivated my paid account on 2026-07-02 because these unhelpful people couldn’t figure out how to get me logged in via email with a second-factor via SMS. I never did find out why my account was flagged for lockout. My suspicion is that what I was reposting was deemed offensive by some, and they reported me, and no one at Twitter is tasked with reigning in butthurt bullies even when it leads to the loss of a paying customer. But it worked: I’m off Twitter now.

Weekend in Las Vegas

I tried mobile ticketing with the Las Vegas monorail, and that was a disaster.

Actually, on the way out of the monorail, there was a placard announcing “This way to Freedom Fest”. Huh, I had heard about that from the Andrew Heaton podcast. I looked up their agenda, and yes, I would have really liked to have heard from Andrew and Spike Cohen. I went to see how much it costs, and … $250 for the day. Oof, I’m out. By now it’s already 10 AM, and the day would have been over with by 4 PM (and there would have been downtime too as they break for lunch).

So now I’ve spent money for two nights on a hotel room, $50 for a mediocre breakfast, felt scammed by the monorail (although really it was just bad software programming), and essentially napped and played a video game. Just staying home would have been better. Well, I hoped Jimmy Carr would be funny.1

But really, I would have been far better off getting a room in the Wynn, where the Jimmy Carr show was, and doing the Thursday night show (cheaper room rate) instead of the Friday night show. If I’d simply done a one-night stay and turnaround, I wouldn’t have tried to mess with the monorail, and I wouldn’t have had to walk outside in the heat and wouldn’t have paid for a rip-off breakfast buffet.

Retirement Life

I explored a few new computer languages to learn. I think I’ll go with Racket, which is a version of Lisp.

One thing I’ve wanted to do for four years now is to 3D print some button covers for my Anker PowerConf S500. There’s a whole story behind using it in a Zoom meeting every week as a portable microphone in a room of 30+ people, but fighting the fear of needing to scream at people: DON’T TOUCH THE BUTTONS!!!

And, by the way, stranger, welcome to the meeting. But please don’t touch the buttons.

That is to say, the Anker PowerConf S500 has four buttons on the front, but only one (the power button) is a press-and-hold-to-activate button. The other three are insta-kill for Zoom.2 The middle button for answering a telephone call: wow, does that ever break Zoom. One must actually power down the PowerConf S500, unplug the dongle from the Zoom laptop, Windows registers the microphone as gone, plug the dongle back into the Zoom laptop, and then power up the PowerConf S500. Windows registers the microphone as present again. Zoom reattaches. Meanwhile, the online meeting attendees are filling the Zoom chat with messages that they cannot hear anything anymore.

It’s a little stressful.

The in-person people want to be helpful. They reach for the speakerphone to pick it up and hand it to the microphone runner. Sometimes they touch the insta-kill button. Sigh. 3

Nicely enough, the Racket programming language and the OpenSCAD computer-aided design program are a match made in heaven. Here’s my button:

This is from the underside; the top has smooth curves.

Anyway, this quarter, the real reason I bought the Anycubic Photon Mono resin 3D printer was realized. And I had a lot of fun getting Racket to emit an OpenSCAD file directly. The only thing I didn’t try was to get the edge that will be glued to the PowerConf S500 to curve in the same way that the PowerConf S500 curves. It doesn’t curve much, so glue ought to be enough to fill in the gap. But the perfectionist in me would like to find out the Bezier curve of the face where the three buttons poke out and then slice away that top plane (in the Z axis) to match the curve.

Work Life

I have built one last mail relay server to replace one made in 2009. The one in 2009 was a big mistake (Tenets of IT #47). But to test it, I need to be able to use swaks from many places. The security team has been a little slow to update the firewalls to let boxes and networks talk to my new server. I finally got it done, and every time someone sends an undeliverable email, my server sends not just the bounce but the original message! This will vastly help the people who have configured systems with bad email addresses. Their biggest problem is identifying which system or process is generating the bouncing email.

I got my retirement going-away lunch on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. There were probably more than 25 but fewer than 30 people in attendance. I gave a speech about my 37-year journey in IT; I’d set the timer for seven minutes4 and finished up 15 seconds before the timer went off. 🙂

Volunteer Service Life

On the drive to Las Vegas, I listened to a fabulous podcast episode directly tying to what our organization does. It was just wonderful and made me grateful to go on the trip.

Clubhouse volunteer

I’ve started volunteering at a local clubhouse two days a week for 4 hours a day. Mostly, I’m a janitor, but I also run the cash register, selling sodas, bottled waters, and candy. There was a board meeting, and it looks like they would like me to become their IT guy too. Really, they need a server to run CiviCRM, but thankfully I was given a Raspberry Pi 5 as a retirement gift. My personality wants to price out a refurbished Dell Optiplex with an LSI 9207-8i connected to an ICY DOCK MB326SP-1B disk enclosure running TrueNAS over six SATA SSDs…. This project could quickly become unwieldy before I even start. A friend asked if I couldn’t just do it on a Raspberry Pi, and sure, I could.5 I just need to plan to eventually build a low-cost robust server and migrate away from the Pi. I also have a leftover Protectli Vault V1210, so I’ll set that up with HA Proxy to let the local box host CiviCRM and a Nextcloud instance.

Chairman for New Year’s Eve Party

I have volunteered to be the main planner/chairman of our New Year’s Eve party. The fun part so far has been that I recorded the audio of the two planning meetings (so far) and (installed and) used my local LLMs to turn the audio into summary documents. Next month, I’m going to ask if we can start buying a texting service so that I can use a web page for texting to communicate with volunteers.

SF 2026 Master of Ceremonies

For our most recent dinner-and-a-speaker event, I got to be emcee. A nice thing is that this service commitment gave me motivation to lose some weight, and I did drop twenty pounds over eight weeks. My clothes for the event certainly fit me better than if I had not lost the weight. A bummer is that I lost my hat. I loved that hat67. Perhaps it will show up in some sort of lost-and-found box, but I probably won’t hear about that for a week.

  1. Yes, he was funny. ↩︎
  2. Well, two of the three are insta-kill; if you tap the Bluetooth button while already on Bluetooth, nothing happens. ↩︎
  3. I actually sent in a product enhancement request to Anker for a firmware fix to make all the buttons press-and-hold-to-activate buttons but they didn’t implement that. I understand that: No company of mass market consumer appliances wants to complicate their technical support by first having to ask, “Which version of the firmware are you on?” Heck, how would anyone even figure that out? ↩︎
  4. No-one remembers anything if one talks too long, so brevity is the essence of a good speech. 37 years in seven minutes, with thank-yous and everything! ↩︎
  5. The major problem with using a Raspberry Pi as a server is that /var/log gets written to the SD card, and writing to it is continuous. SD cards are built to store data; they are not built for continuous writing – they wear out after months or a year or two. If you know that it will wear out and die, you build a routine of backing up the SD card periodically. Then when it dies, it’s not a catastrophic loss of data. ↩︎
  6. I’m surprised that I didn’t post about my hat back in 2024. The first one I bought was from Etsy, for $32. It is a green baseball cap with embroidery that says “Make Orwell Fiction Again”. Along those lines, I later deleted my Google account. I wanted to buy these hats for Christmas gifts, so then I went with Rockatee, which was a mistake. Those were $27 apiece, but Rockatee didn’t deliver. Well, they didn’t deliver until I threatened to have my credit card company rescind the payment. But by that time, it was too late for Christmas. I placed a new order with Amazon, which did arrive in time, but those were $35 apiece. Rockatee shipped, so I ended up with product, and I did pay for them, and then I had extras to give away as gifts. ↩︎
  7. I had deleted my Facebook account way before. ↩︎

Kaweah Delta care (in general) has been good

Yes, my mom’s experience in the Kaweah Delta emergency waiting room was deplorable. But I recognize that if the only thing you, dear reader, had ever heard about Kaweah Delta District Hospital was that post – you might get the idea that Kaweah Delta was (in general) not good. I want to dispel that idea.

Once my mom did get into a hospital room, the care there has been good. Very good, I would say.

Her nurses and physicians and other staff have been attentive, timely, and professional.

Myself, I’ve had two experiences with KDDH in the last five years: both were of high quality.

I didn’t need emergency care in those situations, so I didn’t have to go through the emergency room waiting room process.

One mild snark though, about the emergency room waiting room. One has a lot of time to be observant over the course of sitting in the waiting room for seven hours (my experience, not my mom’s).

They have digital signage (big television sets) mounted on the wall, playing a loop of various public announcements, advertising of new clinics that have started up, a new doctor accepting patients, etc.

There’s a video interview of two of the hospital bigwigs by Stefani Booroojian1. Anyway, the video is captioned, but the transcriber missed a word. The doctor is talking about keeping healthy, and says it is very important to do smoking cessation. The transcriber wrote that it is very important to do smoking sensation. Not the same thing. 😉

Somebody probably ought to have caught that in the first week, so that the original content creator still had the file around and could re-do that little bit of the caption.

  1. Oh my goodness, she’s been with Channel 24 news for 40 years! She still looks great. Good on her. ↩︎

Terrible experience at Kaweah Health hospital

My mom went to Urgent Care, and they put her into an ambulance and sent her to Kaweah Health hospital. My mom spent 25.5 hours in the emergency room waiting room before getting a room / bed.

This is disgraceful.

Mom showed up at KDDH1 at 2024-04-19 1400

The urgent care people had told the ambulance people to give her some saline because of severe dehydration (because of three days of vomiting and diarrhea). That was the last liquid she got until 2024-04-20 1700.

The doctor who saw her during the initial contact said they needed to do a CAT scan to find out what was the source of intense pain in her abdomen. She finally got that CAT scan at 2024-04-20 0540.

My mom was concerned that she would need emergency surgery for gall bladder removal because her mom had had to go through that. I should probably mention that my mom is 86 years old, and although her mind is clear with no signs of dementia, her body is getting frail, and in the dehydrated state, she is pretty wobbly. The idea of being 86 years old and having to go under the knife scares her.

The night shift doctor finally did get to interview her at 2024-04-20 0715; the CAT scan revealed that it was an inflamed colon – not gall bladder. Thank goodness. Apparently, an antibiotic my mom took a month ago also affected her biome in her colon, and something in there took hold and created an infection.

The doctor was a nice young man, but he did mention that he was at the end of his shift. He said they would admit her, but there weren’t any rooms available: it might be a couple of hours. My mom then sat in the emergency room waiting room for another seven hours. Eventually, my mom got worried that they had lost track of her (she was on the third shift of administrative and nursing staff in the waiting room), so she hobbled up to the front, and when the nurse asked her what was wrong, she burst into tears. She’d been there more than 24 hours, and she was afraid they’d lost track of her. That was shortly after 3:15 PM. The nurse did promptly get her a room.

When I visited her a little before 1700 (5 PM), she still hadn’t slept since the morning of the day before, but finally a nurse did cover her feet with a blanket. My mom has poor blood circulation, so her feet felt cold, and it stressed her out so she couldn’t sleep. The other problem is that the diarrhea continues, so every few hours she needs to get help to climb out of bed to get to the toilet.

I had shown up a little before midnight on the 19th, and relieved Frank from sitting with my mom. About 2 AM, it dawned on me that the CAT scan wasn’t going to happen until the morning shift showed up to work. I don’t know why the CAT scan wasn’t done between 2 PM and end-of-shift on the 19th.

I also don’t know why, when the overnight doctor went off shift, that the emergency room staff don’t seem to have a process for hand-off or review of who needs care. When my mom screwed up enough courage to ask the nurse at 3:15 PM, they immediately found her a room. The room was available. Why isn’t there a process for informing the emergency room when rooms become available? Instead, little old ladies have to tell the nurse that there’s a problem, and then they act. That’s the opposite of the way I would expect medical care to work.

I know that doctors hate it when their patients try to self-diagnose and then direct the doctor on how to provide care. Yet, here was a situation where a little old lady had to force the situation, twenty-five and a half hours after being delivered in an ambulance.

It’s just terrible.

  1. KDDH was the original name: Kaweah Delta District Hospital. Everyone around here still calls it that. They even had that coveted four character domain name: kddh.org – I will rant about the idiocy of changing the company name later ↩︎