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Sunday December 16, 2001

I am writing a post this week as you can see. What all happened this week to keep me away from this journal? Well, let me reflect back and tell you a little about this past week. I may forget some things but I will try and catch you up on some of what I have been doing.

Sunday night, after getting home from the hospital, was spent installing the Plextor PlexWriter 16/10/40 CD-RW drive. Physical installation took less than thirty minutes then when I booted my computer back up no window came up to say it had installed any new hardware. Being naturally suspicious, I went to Device Manger and under CD drive the proper drive name and model number was listed. Sure enough, Windows 2000 had installed it correctly without any intervention from me. I did not even use the CD that came with the drive, Win 2K just installed the correct driver without asking. When Plug N Play works right it really works right.

This drive, with Nero Burning ROM, just works great right out of the box. Stephen has also given it his blessing saying that it burns CD's much faster than the one in his mother's computer. I have been using it to burn copies of programs that I have downloaded from the Internet including Nero itself.

Monday I was on call and did not get home until very close to midnight. Then, I was awakened off and on the rest of the night and had to go back into the hospital about 5:30 Tuesday morning to see a patient. I got finished in time to run back home, shower, and change clothes then go back to the office. This was also the day that Stacey got hurt during her basketball game. She and a player on the opposing team got their feet tangled while going for the basketball and she fell on her hip. No fracture or dislocation but a bruised hip that she has been limping on since and which kept her from playing in her final two games.

Tuesday was a very busy day at the office as I recall. I got home after 8 that night after attending Stacey's orchestra Christmas concert and was too tired to run or do much else other than eat then go to bed very early. I don't think I even touched this computer that day or night.

On Wednesday, I worked half a day in the office. During the afternoon I ran errands which ate up all my computer time during the afternoon and something else got in the way that night after choir practice. I'm drawing a blank now on what happened Wednesday night other than doing some Christmas shopping online but something kept me away from this page.

Thursday and Friday were strange days at work for me. I was slow, for me, both days which is unusual. It must be the holiday that did this. Tomorrow we are going to a different way of scheduling called advanced access or open access. Basically, there are only 25% of the appointments for the day scheduled before that day then the rest are scheduled that day. Anyone who calls in and wants to be seen that day and can make it is asked to come in that day. So, we are doing today's work today rather than putting it off. Some of us have been wanting to try this for quite a long time as other clinics that have done this have been very happy with the results. It makes for better patient satisfaction and cuts down on no shows. The patients are able to get in with their clinician unless the clinician is off that day. In the beginning there will be some very long days as we work down the backlog of scheduled appointments over the next few weeks but my February it should all be same day appointments. Our team is pioneering this in our group and if we like it then the rest of the group will be asked to do it.

Besides the new scheduling, tomorrow also starts off with a Leadership Council meeting at 7. I will not start in the office until 9:30 which means I will already not have as many open slots as if I started at 8:30 as I usually do. Tomorrow should be an interesting day to say the least.

Yesterday I finally had the chance to sit down and figure out why the peer-to-peer networking wasn't working. As I went back through the configuration on both machines it struck me that the Win98 machine was set to find an IP address automatically so I reset it to a static IP address in the 192.168.n.n range and both machines saw the other one for the first time. I now have a network although I am having trouble sharing one folder on my Win2K machine with the Win98 machine. I have no problems with sharing all the folders on the Win98 machine with the Win 2K machine. It is the folder for Stephen's music so he can transfer music files to that folder over the network before he burns them onto a CD. Nero Burning ROM needs the files to be burned on the same machine as the CD burner. I will figure this one out too, it is probably something to do with the permissions being set wrong on the folder.

Now I must go and get ready for tomorrow. I will try, but will not promise to post every day this week. I have no more call nights until Dec. 30 so I should have some more time at night depending on how the new scheduling goes at the office. This may be a slower week anyway and we may not see much difference until the first of the new year. Wish me luck.

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