My days as a concert pianist are over.

Last night Susana and I made freshly squeezed orange juice. Hours later, while we were waiting to go out with Christene and Dave, I was washing the dishes and when scrubbing our big Henckel Five-Star chef’s knife of dried orange juice pulp, my hand slipped and the knive sliced open my right-hand index finger. If there’s one thing I learned about first aid, it’s to apply direct pressure to any bleeding. But this thing was deep.

Susana drove me to Swedish medical center in Ballard where we waited for an hour to be looked at, then another hour to be treated. I asked the nurse how the night was going and he said it was all the usual suspects—people have more time on their hands on the weekend to get into trouble. And later there would be a wave of drunks who tripped over curbs. Last night he had a guy get injured getting into the trunk of his car (so you know he was tanked) and the nurse guessed it was a Ford.. the drunk said “how’d you know?” but it was because the nurse could see the “Fo” from the Ford nameplate imprinted on his forehead.

The doctor came in, diagnosed the sitation and said flatly, “Stitches”.

Then he pulled out a 5 inch needle and said “This is gonna hurt. Are you ready?” Luckily Susana was there to make funny faces at me while he stuck this needle in my hand four separate times causing overwhelming pain as I felt it passing through various tendons and muscles.

After that the hand was asleep and we talked as the doctor used his crochet tools on my finger. He started complaining about the state of healthcare—a rightfully contentious issue among doctors—and how 60% of what my insurance will be paying is going to the uninsured patients in the next room, but by law they must evaluate and stabalize everyone who comes in. He was on a roll.. so we got him off of it when he talked about Brazil.

Meanwhile Christene and Dave were making dinner at our house for us..

Here’s an article on breadcrumbs:
Breadcrumb Navigation: An Exploratory Study of Usage which says that while breadcrumbs may be useful for telling users where they are in a site, are not clicked very often. The back button still reigns.

This NY Times article, With Wires in the Walls, the Cyberhome, talks about “smart” homes. I just bought a digital thermostat, and in addition to our lights-on-a-timer, we’re fairly with the times. Why would someone need to go online to adjust their thermostat from work? The only thing I’m really looking for is a device to hook my stereo up to my LAN to receive streaming music or play mp3s from my PC.

You can spend several hundered thousands dollars to create a fully produced experience:

They now have video screens in most rooms and a tiny camera over the crib in the baby’s room. If the baby cries, the music in the networked audio system fades and the video screen tunes in.

But why think about this when there’s a war going on?

I have a weblog. I’m calling it “what i know” which was inspired by the following quote.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, clarifying US policy on the war on terror at a Pentagon briefing.