RDO stuff

[mrsbrown]

Today's achievement: Persuading no.3 son that his attitude to blood tests was something he could use his brain to control, not his adrenalin rush. It required the application of time (we went to the pathologist twice) and a hefty bribe - when he has his next blood test in 6 weeks time I will buy him $140 worth of hard drive for his computer. He's going to spend some of his own money and get a 200G drive.

Z has heard a lot about blood tests from his father, who has a mild phobia about it and was VERY upset at the idea of someone taking blood out of him (he says he's fine with people putting stuff in). When we first went in, he sat down and chatted calmly with the pathologist, but when the needle was about to go in he freaked and insisted we leave. We stayed for about 30min, trying to persuade him and talking about the great vein he had, and how little time it would take. Finally we just had to leave.

Then I suggested the hard drive. He checked it out online, and thought about it, and agreed quite quickly. We printed out the specs and took them with us so he could look at them while the needle was going in. Ultimately, he watched the whole procedure and was much happier that the next pathologist seemed just as nervous about taking blood out of him as he was of having it taken out. He's been high as a kite all evening and much chirpier than usual. Probably worth most of a hard drive all by itself.

I'm not normally into bribery for children, but, I realised, I'm willing to pay a lot of money for him to have an education and music lessons etc. Being able to walk into a pathologists and have a blood test, without a drama is a valuable life skill - that I'm happy to pay for too. Z's uncle died of bowel cancer after ignoring and procrastinating about blood tests and doctor's visits for his ulcerative colitis. I'm glad to have an opportunity to do something about Z's attitude, while he's young enough to sit on my knee, and cry if he needs to.

Latest computer update - This process has been cursed with hardware fuckups and now I think it's the video card too. I replaced the cd drive on Sunday - it was giving me too many errors in the install process, but I now have linux installed on the machine. I just can't see it. As soon as I get out of X-window (I think it's called) the screen gets 2 or 3 vertical strips of multicoloured horizontal lines. I know linux is in there - but I can't see it and I can't adjust the display settings and I can't get a text console and ... IT JUST DOESN"T WORK!!!!!!!

If it weren't for my natural persistance, just plodding along, a bit each night, I'd have given up by now. Tomorrow, I get mr_bassman to play with the hardware and tell me it's all working.

Comments

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

I wish someone would buy me computer hardware as bribery for bloodtests.

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

...lordy, I'd be living in the lap of luxury.

Has he not had a blood test before?

Do you think he realised it wasn't all that bad? I hope so. Of all the phobias you can have, it could certainly be one of the more damaging ones.

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

And if he goes through life treating himself to something nice as a reward for getting a blood test/going to the dentist/whatever...seems pretty healthy to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Phobias are freaky things. Awkward because, despite rationalisations to the contrary, they're not very rational at their core. Sounds like you've managed to nip that one in the bud. Could set a nice precedent for future similar issues too. "You said the same thing about blood tests, remember?"

Odd graphics hiccough. The artifacts it's producing do sound like it's the card, but it goes ok in X-window which suggests otherwise. The only thing that would negate that idea is if when you leave X-window, you're going into something that uses hardware accelleration. Are you going into some form of CAD application that uses open GL? Easiest way to find out, of course, is to swap the card over and see what happens.

[sacred-chao.livejournal.com]

Whoops...damn it, I keep forgetting to log in.

[anthraxia.livejournal.com]

I never had a problem with having blood taken as a kid, largely I suspect because my parents were both regular blood donors and talked openly about what happened when they gave blood and what was done with it. Maybe that's another thing to get him to look at - people do this all the time, not just when they have a blood test. It's a good thing to do, if you can. And it may have some health benefits for men - there is some evidence to show that men who donate regiularly have a much lower incidence of heart attack and stroke (which may be why women have lower incidence also).
I often think the scariest thing is not fully understanding what's going to happen. Now he's had it done, he knows exactly what to expect and it's not such a big deal - well, hopefully.

[hometime.livejournal.com]

I had to giggle a little at the comment about Z's great vein- my nursing students used to often comment on how nice my veins are (very close to the surface & very obvious due to pale skin), and start eying them off when they were learning how to take blood & insert IV lines.

[mr-bassman.livejournal.com]

This process has been cursed with hardware fuckups and now I think it's the video card too.

Now all fixed. Apparently the
FC3 i810 driver is broken. So I used the option "noaccel" in xorg.conf and now we have everything betterer.
I used "switchdesk KDE" to get it to boot into kde every time.
Notwork Card is a trusty but slow (10Mbps) HP job. I tried to use a faster DEC card. It didn't work! It might need a DOS config program to adjust it. so I'll stick with the old one.

Mr_B