Saying goodbye to protoboard

Am 03.02.2018 um 15:39 schrieb Tom Gardner:

Yeah!

:)

Appropriate tech!

Why don't you employ a technician who can make your prototypes and answer the phone?

There's a dearth of qualified labor for technician/assembly work in this area; there are many positions at large companies going unfilled that can afford to pay way better than I could for the same skills.

Relocation isn't currently an option as I'm also a part-time caretaker for an elderly parent and Army combat veteran, the rest of the family supports me in this but I'm the only one in the area and "just stick 'em in a home" isn't the plan we want to go with when there's any other avenue.

You forgot the duct tape.

And defects.

Yeah, that kind of thing can be a real bummer. Have you heard comments like "maybe it is time and it would be better if I died" stage yet?

More or less the same here in Poland, just substitute USD with PLN (i.e. divide the prices by 3.5). The shortest turnaround is 8h. I have never used it, the dirt cheap 10 business day standard is usually fine, I just switch to another task in the pipeline. Best regards, Piotr

Nah, Dad's not really like that. He had to stop driving last year and finally caved to his doctor's demands to wear an emergency bracelet and use a walker whenever he takes a stroll outside, but even at 91 he's still relatively independent and can dress himself and cook his own meals, etc.

He has his moments of depression and anxiety like anyone, amplified due to age but 90% of the time he's pretty cheerful and just enjoying life the best he can in the Buck Rogers year of 2018; his new toy is one of those Amazon Echos which seems to take the brunt of any pent-up frustration. "No I said play...play the song by...ah you fahkin' thing..."

Just living life one day at a time and however it goes it goes

His Pakistani PCP probably saved his life back in 2011, he drove himself to her office one morning feeling dizzy and coughing, she recognized the early signs of a heart attack and ordered an ambulance to come get him immediately.

He ended up having the heart attack in the emergency room of the local large suburban hospital which has a helipad and a medical airlift chopper on standby, into the chopper he went and was in the cardiac unit of Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston within 20 minutes

My mother was much like that at a mere 91[1]. At 96 she still lives alone in a 4 storey 1840 house (longest stairlift of its type in the country), and has 4 legs and 2 or 4 wheels.

But all her friends and neighbours are dying/dead, and she's beginning to /feel/ loss of mental acuity. She's mainly worried that I spend too much of my time doing things for her. I just regard it as just rewards :)

Mother died at 96, grandmother died 2 months short of a century in ~1930. Yes, she would presumably remembered Queen Victoria /coming/ to the throne.

Etching PCBs:

Cheap, big, simple boards that can be easily patched up with additional wiring.

MfG JRD

Why wasn't he taken to a hospital with a cardiac care facility the first time?

Lol. I hated transitioning to digital.

NT

There was no transition. There was materiel absorption.

One absorbs the new materiel and moves on.

I have done plenty of analog since the digital era ushered in on us.

The first hospital certainly had one, but they quickly recognized that they weren't equipped to handle the severity of a massive heart attack in a man ~84 years old.

It eventually required a triple bypass but prior to that several weeks of medically-induced coma on life support to allow his average perfusion to return to a level high enough that the surgical team felt confident the operation could be performed successfully. Only the "big gun" surgeons and cardiac unit at a major teaching hospital had the skill to pull it off, I guess, and certainly also deserve a lot of cred.

Even then while he was in the ICU the team put his odds at no better than fifty-fifty.

After the successful operation he spent another two months or so in a long-term rehab facility, then was out driving again by spring.

That's really odd. A 20 minute chopper ride isn't exactly a walk in the park for someone in that condition, either.

There is a lot to be said for the big hospitals in situations like this but time is everything. It may not have progressed that far if they'd taken care of him immediately.

Sure. At that age, recovery is a lot more difficult. I did cardiac rehab a couple of hours a day for 12 weeks (three days a week) as an outpatient but was 25 years younger. I didn't have a heart attack, either.

WWwwwooooosssssshhhhhhhh! DumBulb is too short to grasp another obvious point flying over his head.

There's certainly the possibility the initial hospital didn't triage him appropriately, I don't know exactly how long he spent in the first ER. He had enough time to call me on his cell phone from the ER bed and by that point his cough had gotten significantly worse, and give me a few instructions on "how to wrap things up if this doesn't work out great."

At the end of the call there was a lot of commotion in the background, sounded like stuff being wheeled in and bunch of doctors and nurses talking. Said he had to go, "Guess they want to run some more tests" and judging by the call timestamp vs. the time they told us he arrived at BIDMC he was unconscious and in the air not much more than 7 or 8 minutes later. He was crashing badly by that point.

Hard to say and definitely hard to prove any kind of error, it didn't really interest any of us much in looking into further since everything worked out OK eventually. My impression at least was that while he may have arrived in pretty bad shape he always has had a tendency to rack jokes and play down discomfort and may have successfully "fooled" them into thinking he was in better condition than he was.

Yea, there certainly was a transition. Since I was there and took part in it I do know what happend. Longhair wasn't observing the situation afaik, so a bit silly for him to tell me what did or didn't happen where I was at the time.

The problem was we transitioned to a terrible package. All the tricks I used to do with crepe tape no longer worked.

NT