 Thursday, June 01, 2006
A Death on Everest-Don't Judge Unless You've Been There..
By now you must know about the climber on Everest with severe altitude sickness up at 28,000’. The climbers walked past him and let him die, and the morality of Everest is under attack.
First, I say to all of those who judge the climbers on the mountain that day: you can only judge if you have been at altitude on a climb. I have been on the mountain and lived and worked with the Sherpa for a month; they took me into their homes. If a rescue was possible, they would have done it.
But there is no way to rescue someone from 28,000 feet. Absolutely no way! If you have such severe altitude sickness like he did, the 18 hour journey down to base camp would have killed him. (Plus how would you get him over the Khumbu Icefall without killing him?) Base Camp is not low enough to recover from Altitude Sickness since it is at 18,000’ and there is exactly 1/2 the oxygen in the air than at sea level. And that is assuming that he would have had a rescue from Base Camp, the last time a helicopter tried to go to base camp, exactly 3 years ago last week, it crashed and killed everyone on board. (Remember I brought a piece of the helicopter home?) So he would have had to go down, all the way to Namche Bizarre for a helicopter or plane.
If it was me some friends have asked? I remember on September 11th we went over to the hospitals to give blood. What was amazing about that scene was that the Doctors set up a triage unit in the street. (Thankfully it was not necessary since there was so much less damage than there could have been.) But it gave me a lesson in triage. Sometimes it is ugly, but necessary.
I would have given some spare oxygen if I had some (which DID happen by 2 climbers and is not in many articles) and moved on. I walked past a climber in very bad shape at about 14,000 feet on Mt. Rainer. I stopped and said "Are you all right dude?" He said "No, but I will be ok, I’ll be going down with my guide when he returns from the summit." At that point lacking any emergency equipment and oxygen myself, not to mention the severe pain I was in, I moved on. (He did make it down, I checked.)
This is not the commercialization of Everest, this is the popularity of Everest, people want to do Everest and it gets crowded. Statistically more people die then in the 1960s when nobody was on the mountain. (Sir. Edmond Hillary is just bitter about that. Climbers disagree with his criticism.) Some "real" climbers want to keep the "paying" climbers like me off the mountain. Let me tell you, every "paying" climber I met was an amazing person in amazing shape with lots of experience. Anyone who trains, has some experience, and is willing to pay for an expedition should be allowed on the mountain. (Though the Government of Nepal should limit the permits it gives out.) They do have to understand the risks, you can be left behind.
Baseball, football, tennis, etc usually doesn’t involve death as one of the risk factors. Mountain climbing does. Get over it.
The death is a tragedy and sad, but unfortunately a risk we take when we climb Mt. Everest. One in seven climbers die above 28,000’.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Red Gate Releases SQL Prompt-Intellisense for SQL Server
Red Gate has released SQL Prompt 2.0, a pretty cool auto-complete and Intellisense for SQL Server Management Studio and Query Analyzer. The best part: t is FREE! Download it here.
When you load it up and connect to a database, it will ask you to connect.
Now when you are typing code in SQL you have real auto-complete and Intellisense!
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Monday, May 08, 2006
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Way too much time on his hands...
All my friends are excited about the Mets' great start this year, bringing up memories of 1986. We'll see how the 2006 season plays out but this guy in San Diego has way too much time on his hands. He has recreated the most dramatic event in sports history, the bottom of the 10th in Game 6, in RBI Baseball and synced up the announcers. Watch it here.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Watching the World Wake Up From History...
Today I saw one of the most amazing things in my life. So subtle yet so powerful. While on my way to speaking at the Gdansk .NET Users Group we passed the docks. The place where communism died.
Not everyday you can walk past something so historical and so important in the history of the world. What is funny is that my friend Michal Chaniewski just said very casually as we passed: “Oh here are the docks. You know we had strikes here in 1980 led by Lech Wałęsa.” I said “they were not just strikes man.” I studied the Solidarity movement in Poland very closely in university and Michal was being very modest. He said, “I guess. What happened here did change Europe.” I replied: “What happened here changed the entire world.” We went on to talk about Lech Wałęsa and communism and then of course .NET.
Just across the street we went to the offices of Computer Services Support, an old communist era building to have the first ever user group meeting of the Gdansk .NET Users Group. I was honored to be the first speaker. While talking about the Model-View-Controller design pattern, I was amazed that I was standing just meters away from a place that changed the world. You can see the docks from the classroom.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Speech Server Day-New York
Speech Server Day: New York, NY
April 18th, 2006 8:30AM – 5:00PM
Does your application have something to say? Show me the code!
Using the power of .NET, Microsoft Speech Server and Visual Studio 2003 can give your application its voice. Used in conjunction with the Microsoft Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK), this platform enables developers to write and deploy web-enabled speech applications to new and existing .NET applications.
Join Microsoft and Brooktrout for a one day special developer session designed to teach you how to architect, develop and implement speech enabled applications using Visual Studio 2003 and the Speech Server platform. We will show how this combination provides all the components necessary for building and deploying telephony (voice-only) and multimodal (voice/visual) applications. Additionally, we will show how the Speech Server platform builds upon the work of the open industry standard Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification to extend existing Web markup languages by adding speech recognition and prompt functionality to your Web applications. Using a practical code oriented approach we will cover how to architect, build and deploy applications that performs speech recognition and speech synthesis that can be accessed by telephone, cell phone, Pocket PC, Tablet PC and other devices.
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