It has been a while since I last posted, and I must confess that part of the reason for that absence has been that I have been routinely violating the cardinal rule of a successfully busy professional life - work hard, play hard.  I have been working very hard, as evidenced by a pending 'use it or lose it' vacation time crisis (the fact that I can even view vacation as part of a crisis is evidence of how bad the situation is), but playing hard has not quite been there.  I seem to remember where my golf clubs are, but I'm not totally sure.  However, I received a reminder of the importance something like blogging can have, so I'm trying to play hard in a virtual sense, and to me, writing, researching and collaborating ARE like play.

This first blog post back is actually a bit old.  I'm putting it in here to illustrate a point I'll get to in a moment, but the details of how this came to be are pretty spectacular.  The entry below was written longhand at around 3:00 a.m. on October 17, 2007.  I was in the labor and delivery room of the local hospital waiting on my first-born/fourth child.  That is not a typo, but it is a matter of some interest to some.  I began the impossible process of dealing with the teen years before I even held an infant who had my eyes and nose, so there I sat, a veteran father who had the same anxious thoughts as a new father.  At that point I hit on an idea that intrigued me more and more, so much so that I probably owe my wife an apology for the diversion of my concentration at certain times. 

The point I mentioned earlier is about the longhand version of this post.  I am immersed in a world of knowledge management, and what intrigues me is that there is so much information that needs to be captured and used, but is not in a structured, or semi-structured state.  I have heard this referred to as the 'cocktail napkin' (n.b. here is a link to an author's small presentation of his book "The Back of the Napkin" on BNET: http://www.bnet.com/2422-13724_23-196933.html), and this concept is legendary in the world of IT.  In fact, the circuits for the first Cray supercomputer were sketched out on the back of a napkin, and many deals have been sealed using documents that have a water (or triple-malt) ring on them. It is rapidly becoming my life's work to figure out the best way to use this information to its full potential.

So, the following entry has a little age on it, but it does afford a unique opportunity to examine some things.  My idea is to take a look at the effects that technology has on a person's entire life, and I am taking the opportunity of my daughter's birth to use her as the guinea pig for this series of observations.  This isn't the sole focus of the blog, and for the first few months of her life especially, the technologies have been frozen at the point where they were when she was born, because you don't expose an infant to ANYTHING for the first few months.  I'll occasionally make observations on how technology affects her, and how she interacts with it, and they generally won't be this long, but I'll call them Sophie's Tech.  As an aside, Sophie was indeed okay, and today she is a seven month-old of almost unbelievable health who strives to be at least five or six so she can compete with her siblings - the technology of competition!

SOPHIE'S TECH, POSTING 1 - 10/17/2007

I'm sitting in a chair beside a bed, a voyeur at best into the interactions between mechanical and electronic technology.  A bed with fully-hydraulic controls supports my wife, but that's just mechanical technology.  The real wonder is an interaction between pheumatic, electronic and mechanical technology that comprises the monitoring station.

A split-screen-type display monitors contractions from one sensor and the heartbeat of the baby on the other [NOTE: due to the genetic disposition toward stubbornness that must obviously come from anywhere but me - pause to allow the laughter to subside - Sophie refused to cooperate with the sonograms to determine her gender, so in this post when I use generic terms, that is why].  If the baby moves, its kicks and nudges cause information to change on a graph that also displays its heart rate.  I strongly suggest not watching the baby's heart rate monitor, because to the non-medical personnel, when you see it drop, then go to 0 the first couple of times, the nurses have to peel the excitable husband off the ceiling and explain to him that such things happen when the baby shifts positions and the monitors lose track of them for a bit.  

An integrated monitor takes a blood pressure reading every 15 minutes, displaying the number on an amber screen.  An interesting thing is that the amber screen conveys more of a sense of accuracy and medical efficacy than does the multi-colored PC-esque screen (actually, there is no -esqueness there - a Dell PC is providing the feed), even though I know intellectually the information is the same.  I suppose this could be termed the Windows effect.  It wouldn't be very good to have BSOD in a hospital!  I did actually see BSOD (blue screen of death - when Windows, much like Douglas Adams' whale, realizes it can't fly) on a monitor at a hospital a year or two ago when I was visiting a friend, but it wasn't hooked up to a patient, so I suppose it wasn't harmful.

I'm the birthing coach, so I should go.  I can't leave , though, without commenting on the things that make all this possible.  Someone somewhere wrote millions of lines of code to turn 1's and 0's into meaningful items, and then millions more lines of code to turn those meaningful items into informative ones.  Edward Tufte is a notable student (and teacher) of the display of information, and I think even he would be impressed with how all these pieces fit together.  So we have micro-pulses of electricity turned into stronger pulses that are queried and interpreted by other streams of electricity and turned into electrons that spit out of a gun and paint a picture that tells me that my wife and baby are doing fine.  At some point I don't doubt that there are other streams of electricity that take these interpreted streams of electricity and turn them into light pulses, which are then taken on the reverse course at the other end of a network.  And they say that the alchemists are gone... Now I must be gone as well.

I was going to end the blog posting right there, but there is some other technology that I have to talk about.  Sophie Elise (it was a girl!!!!) was born full-term at 5 pounds and 14 ounces, but she had difficulties during birth, and had to be resuscitated (I'm actually writing this a little bit after the 17th, but I wasn't about to take pen and paper to the NICU!) there in the delivery room.  I saw plastics technology used to both fill her lungs with air and open up passageways for that air, I saw more monitoring technology at work, and most importantly I saw a miracle when she came around, and saw the technology of touch as they let me hold her hand while they were doing their work.  I even saw chemical technology when her blood sugar started to crash and she had to be given special supplements to get it back under control.  If you know a lot about infants, they really are hard to do things for, because they are so new their systems can't tolerate a large amount of chemical input, and they have allergies sometimes, yet the supplements had been technologically advanced to the point where they didn't cause her any trouble.  Her prognosis is good, and all appears to be okay, and a large part of that is due to the skillful blending of technology and knowledge, materials and purpose.

You cannot separate yourself from your faith when you see your child who was not alive come back.  That is my final note, that the technology which matters most in life is faith.  Regardless of what it is - religious or secular - the act of faith - believing in what is not seen... yet - is the true driver of technology.  We have faith that we can make things that work, that they will work better than other things, and that they will improve life; we also have faith that all of this matters: the struggle, the process, the journey - the reason we should ever try, or do anything.  It is personal, but also vital, and without it most people would have returned to the hunter-gather tribes of the distant past.  Now if I might be excused, the nurse is going to teach us how best to apply materials technology to provide thermal comfort to a newborn (that's making a 'baby burrito', in non-technical speak).