Having A Clinic & Pharmacy On Campus Is Terrific

Cerner Pharmacy IM Conversation

When was the last time your pharmacy did an instant message conversation with you to ask where you’d like your prescription delivered?

Not only are the doctors at our clinic both very convenient and very good, but there’s nothing like having a pharmacy where:

  • they’re very friendly and greet me by name.
  • there’s usually no wait, and never a wait longer than 5 minutes.
  • the prescriptions are cheaper than anywhere else.

What’s That Thing She’s Sitting On?

Push Bike
I got a few questions about the bike that my daughter is riding in this picture. It’s generally called a “push bike” or a “balance bike”. The concept behind it is explained pretty well in an article by Josefine Köhn-Haskins, Push Bikes and Balance Bikes for Children. And there’s other good information by Bonnie Rochman in Bye-Bye, Training Wheels. Hello, Balance Bikes.

Josefine explains the general idea:

Starting a child on a balance bike makes it easy for him to learn riding a pedal bike. Most kids will be ready by the age of five or even four.

We’ll see how it goes. Neil has started learning using training wheels and it’s taking him a while. But we might have started him a year too early also. I took his training wheels off last Saturday.

Josefine also mentions this:

Children can start using a balance bike as early as age two. But do not expect them to sit on the bike and just race off.

Um, no. We have a little daredevil girl.

These bikes can really speed up, especially downhill. And most youngsters discover the fun of rolling downhill with their feet up pretty fast.

For Gillian that took all of 2 minutes. She fell off her push bike several times, which is not the usual course of action for these things. But she always got back on. To go back to the top of the hill again.

sigh

TV Makes Me Feel Inadequate

When I write code to do a search it looks something like this:

Very Dull

When computer guys on TV do a search it looks something like this:

Huge Screen!

A Long-Delayed Update

For the longest time I’ve been using Drupal at our main family site, Crooks.net. That installation of Drupal is getting a bit creaky, being two full versions behind. Crooks.net doesn’t really get many visitors and is primarily used simply to host my personal blog. (It handles one other important feature, providing a secure location for some family information. I’ll cover that in a different blog post when I get Crooks.net updated.)

Over the years I’ve gone through several different iterations of figuring out how I wanted to do my meager blogging. For the most part that meant posting the occasional picture. My tool of choice for a while has been Posterous, a blogging site that made it really easy to email in a blog post that would then get routed to any other social sites (Twitter, Facebook) plus my blog at crooks.net and nicely format everything.

I decided recently that it was silly to use Posterous. I have long paid for my own web server with Dreamhost and I can install darn near anything I want on it. So I’ve now gone through the motions and I believe I can pretty easily post directly on this blog and have things sent to Twitter or Facebook if I so choose. Easy is the key. I wanted this to be at least close to as easy as it was to use Posterous. The good part now is that I own everything: the shorturl service, the blog software, where pictures are stored, etc. Now I’m only in danger if Dreamhost goes out of business and I haven’t made a recent backup.

This is all brand new so I’m sure I’ll be tweaking things over the next month or two. And I still have to go put a replacement in for Crooks.net also. This seems to be a good start.