Mary's Pad

Mary’s Pad

My personal space on the web, to rest my brain after its many wanderings

where I empty and rest my brain

Reasons I won’t buy the Amazon Kindle just yet

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If you’ve visited the Amazon.com website recently, you’ve probably seen the ads for their latest gadget, the Amazon Kindle – Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device.

Image from Amazon
Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device

What this is is an electronic gadget that you can use to read your books, but more than that, you can shop for books and download them right onto the Kindle without connecting to a computer, you can subscribe to and read newspapers, and more. Amazon has a fully fledged Kindle Store where you can buy books and such.

Now the first thing I did when I saw the Kindle was to say… pfft! I spend way too much time in front of a computer screen as it is, why would I want to read my books off of a screen too? But because I can’t seem to contain my curiosity about all things geeky and techy, I explored some more, read almost all 980 reviews on Amazon (yeah I know I’m weird), and here are the things I learned about the Kindle. I am going to break them down into reasons why I may buy the Kindle one day and reasons why I won’t buy it just yet.

Reasons why I might think about buying the Amazon Kindle down the road:

  1. It’s a gadget, and I’m a geek – need I say more?

  2. I love reading, and I usually have a problem when traveling because I want to try and fit my whole bookshelf into one small bag! – The Amazon Kindle can hold over 200 books at once!!

  3. It has an electronic-paper display that provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper, so it won’t hurt my eyes. It adjusts to the lighting for ergonomic purposes.

  4. The Kindle offers free book samples, so that I can download and read first chapters for free before I decide to buy. Plus I can shop anytime and the downloads are fast. Add to that, the wireless connectivity to Amazon is included in the price, I never have to pay any monthly fees or such for the wireless connectivity.

  5. Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.

  6. I can access more than 250 top blogs including some of my favs like Slashdot and TechCrunch, all updated wirelessly throughout the day. It also includes access to Wikipedia. And remember all this is at no extra cost.

  7. The Kindle is lighter and thinner than a typical paperback, clocking in at only 10.3 ounces.

  8. It has a long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Fully recharges in 2 hours.

Reasons why I won’t buy the Amazon Kindle just yet:

  1. It’s a device, and I have enough of those.

  2. I like books, I like the way they feel and smell, I like touching them, flipping through them, book-marking them, placing them on my shelf and reaching for them after some time to re-read them, seeing all the marks and notes I made before.

  3. They don’t have all my favorite authors and genres on the Kindle titles yet, so I’ll wait and see how many authors/publishers jump on the bandwagon before I go for it.

  4. The books you buy using the Kindle are copyright protected such that you can only read them on the Kindle, which, if you think about it a little deeply, is kind of unfair and a big disadvantage.
  5. It’s $399.00… yeah I know I’m going to be gainfully employed soon, but still…

So, hmmm, let’s see… I have 4 reasons for not buying the Kindle just yet, and 8 reasons why I might consider buying it down the line. What do you think the odds are that I’m going to end up owning one of these Kindles?

I think the biggest reason why I would NOT buy the Kindle is because, bottom line – it’s not a book. And I love books, in fact I would say I downright have a fetish for books.

But the Kindle is definitely in my list of drool-worthy gadgets to keep an eye on.

The Tree Man – A Mysterious Dermatologic Condition

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The Discovery Channel calls him “Half Man Half Tree”, and the UK Telegraph refers to him as the “Tree Man who grew roots.”

I am sure I am going to see many bizarre and heartbreaking stories in my career in healthcare, but this case is one of the strangest medical things I have ever seen or heard of.

Tree Man

From the Discovery Channel website:

“32 year old Dede lives in a remote village in Indonesia with his two children, trying to care for them. Dede, a former fisherman, has an extraordinary skin condition: he has root like structures growing out of his body – branches that can grow up to 5cm a year and which protrude from his hands and feet, and welts covering his whole body.

He is known locally as ‘Tree Man’ and his condition has baffled local doctors for 20 years. In an attempt to earn a living to support his family, he is part of a circus troupe, displaying his Tree Man limbs along with others afflicted with skin deformities in ‘freak’ shows.”

From the UK Telegraph:

After testing samples of the lesions and Dede’s blood, Dr Anthony Gaspari of the University of Maryland concluded that his affliction is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a fairly common infection that usually causes small warts to develop on sufferers. Dede’s problem is that he has a rare genetic fault that impedes his immune system, meaning his body is unable to contain the warts. The virus was therefore able to “hijack the cellular machinery of his skin cells”, ordering them to produce massive amounts of the substance that caused the tree-like growths known as “cutaneous horns” on his hands and feet.

Tree Man

One of the things I have learned and tried to practice throughout nursing school is the medical poker face, where you try never to show your inner feelings when you see something on a patient that absolutely throws, scares, or disgusts you (such as crazy smelling wounds and secretions). But this… I would have a hard time maintaining that poker face with this. It gives the concept of warts and HPV a whole new meaning.

I will definitely be following this story. If you subscribe to the Discovery Channel, see if you can catch the show.

Watch the video

Interesting little fact about pulses and blood pressure

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In a Trauma or Emergency situation, there’s not always time to slap on a blood pressure cuff, as I learned recently during a visit to a Trauma center. You eventually do want to get a blood pressure reading as soon as possible, but there’s a quick way to estimate the blood pressure, and that’s by checking pulses.

If you can palpate a radial pulse (felt at the base of the thumb), then that means that the person’s systolic blood pressure (that’s the top number in your blood pressure reading) is at least 80.
If you can feel a femoral pulse (in the groin), even in the absence of a radial pulse, then the systolic blood pressure is at least 70.

If you can feel a carotid pulse (on the side of the neck), even in the absence of a femoral pulse, then the systolic blood pressure is at least 60.

Pretty cool huh?

Funny stuff – Microsoft surface technology parody video

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Back in May I posted about Microsoft’s new surface technology – some real drool-worthy stuff! I still can’t wait until these become available in public places so I can play with them, although I’m sure that will take some time, given that the price-tag is $10,000! At the risk of being redundant, I will post the youtube video here again for you to see why I’m drooling. Anyway, today while surfing the web I found this parody of the original microsoft surface ads. It’s pretty funny! I had trouble embedding the video here so I hope the link works. It should open into a new page, then click anywhere on that new page and it should play.

Microsoft Surface Technology Parody videos

If all else fails, you can watch the video here.

Below is the original ad that this is a spoof of.

The last lecture

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Today I had my very last lecture of nursing school! I walked into class, placed my bag down, and said to everyone in the room, “Can you guys believe this is our very last day of lecture together ever?” There was a slight moment of silence, not because people had forgotten, but because there was something about hearing it said that I think made it even more real.

What made it more poignant was that it was also the instructor’s last class at the school, and we are the last class that the current Dean is graduating. A lot of lasts. A lot of finales.

We had a good lecture, then went to the formal luncheon I mentioned in yesterday’s post, and then back for the second half of class. After lecture I gave my friend Chris a hug for sitting next to me all through nursing school, putting up with my dorky comments, gracing me with her interesting facial expressions whenever someone said something weird in class (and believe me, that happened a LOT), and for being there. I also gave my instructor a big hug to say thank you for investing herself in me, for sharing her wealth of knowledge, and for being a wonderful instructor. I could have hugged every single person in that classroom and I would have had a unique reason for hugging each person, because it really has been an amazing journey with amazing people, but then I think they would all have thought they’ve underestimated my weirdness all this time…

Tomorrow and Wednesday I have my last clinicals, and then Thursday is a day off for all those who never missed a clinical day this semester, so I get to sleep in and rest some. Monday morning we do the final exam and then start the senior elective.

It’s winding down… yes it is!

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