HVAC Guilt

HVAC Guilt

The air conditioning guy just left.  The news was pretty much what we thought it would be.  Our air condioning unit and furnace need to be replaced.  The funny thing is the guy we ended up calling was the guy who put the original a/c unit in this house before it was even our home .  We got his name from one of the pastors at church, and it turns out he’s a deacon at our church.  He was really nice, and I’m actually super excited about getting a new furnace.  Weird I know, but the one that’s in there now is a beast!  It was put in this house the year I was born (and I’m getting up there!)


We’ve lived in this house for over 13 years and have never had to replace any of the major things.  I think that’s pretty good.  For the furnace to last that long is amazing!  Tomorrow they’re coming to remove the old stuff, then Wednesday they’ll put the new unit and furnace in.  Right now there’s a beautiful breeze coming in the windows and it’s not horribly hot…yet.  As long as I do all my housework in the morning, it’s not so bad.  By the evening when the house is in the upper 80′s, I do nothing but sit and read.  We are definitely wimps around here.
Every time I went to post an update on facebook or tweet something about our lack of air conditioning I stopped myself.  I realized I was feeling guilty thinking of all the people who don’t have air conditioning at all.  Or the people who don’t even have homes to live in.  It’s a slippery road I go down sometimes.  I end up depressed and feeling guilty because I am blessed to be where I’m at. How crazy is that?  We give and do what we can to help people in need, and we shouldn’t feel guilty for what we have.  But sometimes I do.  It’s something the devil likes to beat me over the head with from time to time.  I think the root of it is that I know I don’t deserve the good and comfortable things of life anymore than someone else does or doesn’t.  Truth be told none of deserve anything.  All we have is a gift.  It’s in knowing that I don’t deserve it, and being thankful that God has blessed me with those things anyway that I find freedom from the guilt.

Funny Graduation Quotes

Graduation quotations bring a twinkle to students’ eyes and help in breaking the ice on serious occasions, like graduation, convocation, congratulatory day, and so on. On an occasion when students don mortarboards caps and long flown gowns, to collect their certificates of graduation; quotations and sayings play a significant role. While inspirational and success quotes help to inspire students and change their lives, funny and humorous ones make them laugh, think and dream. The highly charged and emotional situation can be lightened with these hilarious quotations. Read through the following lines to find out some funny and humorous graduationquotes.

 

Humorous Quotations For Graduates

 

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

- W.H. Auden

 

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car.

But if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

- Theodore Roosevelt

 

If you can imagine it, you can achieve it;

If you can dream it, you can become it.

- William Arthur Ward

 

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

- Mark Twain

 

Graduation day is tough for adults.

They go to the ceremony as parents.

They come home as contemporaries.

After twenty-two years of child-raising,

they are unemployed.

- Erma Bombeck

 

If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.

- Robert Goheen

 

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success.

- Robert Orben

 

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.

- Frank A. Clark

 

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.

- Garry Trudeau

 

It is indeed ironic that we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days.

- Isabel Waxman

 

...Yes, the lectures are optional. Graduation is also optional.

- Bob Bickford

 

Your families are extremely proud of you. You can't imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing. This would be a most opportune time to ask for money.

- Gary Bolding

 

I have never been jealous. Not even when my dad finished fifth grade a year before I did.

- Jeff Foxworthy

 

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.

- Oscar Wilde

 

Education is a progressive discovery of your own ignorance.

- Will Durant

 

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

 

The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate.

- Doug Larson

 

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.

- Milton Berle

 

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another, with no loss of enthusiasm.

- Sir Winston Churchill

 

At commencement you wear your square-shaped mortarboards. My hope is that from time to time you will let your minds be bold, and wear sombreros.

- Paul Freund

 

To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the 'C' students, I say you too may one day be President of the United States.

- George W. Bush

 

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Robot In medicine

Robot Doctors In Our Future?

Awesome, or scary?  Your call.

          I just read this article, concerned with the possibility of doctors one day being replaced by robots.  I thought it was very interesting.  I am a bit of a technophile, and the thought of an iRobot style world, with robots to help us with all the different aspects of our lives literally makes me giddy.  Seriously... how cool would that be?

          So I was reading about iRobot(a robotics company, not the movie this time) and how they have put a 6 million dollar investment into the healthcare company InTouch Health.  iRobot recently developed Ava, a robot with a tablet (Android or Apple or whatever) for a head and a robots body.  They are hoping that this robot, the first step along the way towards personal robots, would be able to be used in a healthcare setting in the near future.  This could be something simple, such as following doctors to help them manage patients' information or vitals or whatever, to something more complex such as educating patients about their disease when other healthcare professionals are occupied.  I thought this was really cool!

Unfortunately, Ava is extremely not awesome looking....
They should take a hint from Apple and make her look awesome.

          Then I stumbled on the first article I mentioned, an article which brought up the possibility of robots one day replacing doctors.  Even as I was fascinated and intrigued by the possibilities, my own self interest got in the way of my enjoying it too much.  If I'm going to blow 200 grand on my medical education (aside from my youth, time, blood, sweat, and tears), I sure as hell better have a job when I get out.

Watson

          But that said, I can see how robotics would have great applications in the realm of healthcare.  I read an article by Atul Gawande a while back, and it discussed the fact that the field of medicine has outstripped the capacity of the human mind.  Even within a specific specialty, the sum total of knowledge related to that field is beyond the ability of a single person to master inside and out.  This is where robotic opportunities come up.  What if we could have our own Watson (the IBM robot that showed off it's encyclopedic knowledge on Jeopardy) following us around, helping us examine ambiguous symptoms in light of the most recent research?  I think the possibilities are pretty cool.

          There are other avenues for robotics to assist in health care.  For example, Intuitive Surgical is at the head of the Da Vinci surgical system, a surgeon directed robotic arm that has apparently helps surgeons significantly cut down on patients' recovery times from certain surgeries.  I find the possibilities in this area to be fascinating.  The system is currently only capable of a relatively limited number of surgeries, but that number should be growing.  Not only that, but Mako Surgical Corp is developing an orthopaedics surgical arm designed to assist with ortho surgeries; evidently the possibilities for this surgical arm are considered great enough that Stryker Corp, a massive medical conglomerate, is considering developing its own arm to compete.  The implication I see in that is that they are worried this arm could replace many of the surgical instruments that are their bread and butter.

Surgeons hard at work with the Da Vinci

          I'm sure most surgeons are great, but unfortunately their tools, their hands and fingers, are prone to the same failures ours are.  They can slip, shake, get tired, etc.  Put them, with all their years of experience and knowledge, behind the controls of a robot that has literally perfect precision... and I think we can accomplish some pretty amazing things.

          The rate at which the technology around us advances is mind boggling, and I for one am excited to see what the future holds, whether it's the iPad I'll be getting in a week or so (more on that to come), or robotics in healthcare.  I say that with one caveat, though, and that lies in my hopes that my 200k education doesn't become obsolete... at least until I pay all the debt off.  Personally, my money is on the surgical arms being much more a part of our future than the actual robot doctors... if the Roomba (vaccuum disk robot) is the best they have come up with in the last 50 or so years, I somehow doubt they'll be pumping out robotic diagnosticians.