I bought a new toy this week. There’s now enough compelling medical content out there that it was time to upgrade from my 2 Mb Palm V; I thought I was going to get the Palm Vx, but the Clie caught my eye. So far, so good — I like the feel (it’s slightly smaller), and love the omnipresent Sony jog dial.

A week or two back, I pointed to a news article about a father who left his two-year-old son in his truck, went hunting, and came back to find his son wasn’t there anymore. Unfortunately, they’ve now found the son’s body; it also looks like they’re looking at the father as a suspect.

What a bad precedent to set — now every bride and groom are going to expect a tank escort, or at least a Harrier flyover…

The newest nightly build from the folks at Mozilla finally renders the tables on this page correctly (or at least nearly correctly)! It only took them a few years… I wonder if the final Netscape 6.0 will also include these fixes.

Speaking of Mozilla, there’s been a great pissing contest over this past week which began when O’Reilly author David Flanagan penned a piece noting that Netscape’s newest offering won’t be as devoted to web standards as it claims to be. MozillaZine chieftan Chris Nelson then wrote a response, seemingly an attack on anyone who’s ever had anything negative to say about the browser project; the last salvo was a terse and reasoned reply from Jeffrey Zeldman, in the name of the Web Standards Project. And granted, most people who’ve read Q for any length of time know I don’t like Mozilla much, but how can anyone take MozillaZine seriously with that damn distracting “Punch the Monkey” ad on most pages?

It’s shocking how little regard for well-established law dumbass, right-wing school boards can have.

I’m done, done, done with the neonatal ICU, for the next year at least. Friday night was my last night on call there, and I witnessed possibly the most peaceful death ever. A few-hour-old child with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia was on full support — a high-frequency oscillating ventilator, pressors (drugs that help the heart maintain function), etc. — and his brain (or, more appropriately, brain stem) just gave up. His parents had signed an order for no heroic measures, so we just watched as his tracings slowed and finally stopped. It was sad, but intensely surreal as well; the few in-hospital deaths I’ve witnessed have involved frenzied resuscitation attempts, so to see one that happens so calmly is strange.