The Dodge Retort

My first call firefighting training session went well and was more challenging than I anticipated. I might as well have left my pencil and pad at home because we jumped right in.

Before I get into the details, I feel pretty committed and have a lot of respect for the folks who are training us. The public service element of firefighting is obvious. We take firefighters for granted, but I suspect I won’t be anymore. Around Boston, you read about them when they die in the line of duty, are pissed about their union contract or have misbehaved largely with respect to booze and drugs (WN has zero tolerance for answering a call if you’d had any booze at all). And we read about their on and off-duty heroics.

Our department, West Newbury, Mass.

To say I didn’t initially do this on a lark would be fibbing, but that call firefighting is so  different from my 33 years as a journalist really motivated me (I’m still blogging and freelance writing, of course). It’s physical, very real and all about teamwork which I find appealing. However, I did cover fires for almost three years at the Haverhill Gazette in the seventies when arson was rampant and frequently fatal. I saw buildings and houses burning from a safe distance and remember the chief Lew Burton running on dangerous steep roofs. Haverhill FD was quite busy and less political than its fractious police department which I also covered. Any comparison of West Newbury and Boston or Haverhill with respect to fires is, of course, ridiculous. West Newbury is pretty quiet, averaging about one fire a year and 40 calls a month, some of them false alarms. A call came in last night during training for a woman locked out of her house…lots of mundane stuff. Not sure yet about mutual aid, but there’s plenty going on in the relatively populous North Shore.

I’m told there is serious attrition from, among other things, health issues given the physical strain of the calls and the training. There’s also people who realize or are told they are not cut out for the job. And you have to retire at age 65 which gives me a full five years.

We jumped right in, got in out turnout pants, boots, helmet with visor, fireproof hood and fire jacket. We also got two pairs of gloves (one for auto accidents, the other for fires), a blinding LED flashlight and radio which sits beside me. The gear is heavy and bulky, exacting its toll on the ladder climb. We didn’t do backpacks (air tanks) at this training, but Bob Pierce had me slip one on at the end of the evening. The backpacking I’ve done and more recently biking should stand me in good stead.

You’re supposed to don all this gear in under a minute. Even veterans struggle with this so I will need to practice.  You basically jump into your boots and pull the pants up over them. When you take your turnout pants off, you peel off the upper half and leave them inside out over the lower half which are on the boots as if you were wearing them. This allows one to quickly put on the pants and boots at the same time. This a “something (I forget) hitch.”

West Newbury's new ladder Tower 28. At some point, I'll be in the bucket 100 feet up.

Word is my gear will be kept at the Garden St. firehouse (Central Station is main West Newbury firehouse) which is about a half mile from my home. They tell me this end of town needs coverage. Glad to be needed.

We climbed ladders (about 25-30 feet), learned a foot lock so you can swing a fire axe to one side without falling backward off the ladder. That involves wrapping the leg opposite to the side you’re working around a rung and then the side of the ladder.  House painters should know this.

Then we carried fire axes to the top roof of the fire station and climbed back. We also practiced leg locks halfway up the ladder and swung the axe at an imaginary burning building. Then we donned masks and put our hoods on backward so we couldn’t see and followed a line (hose) to learn how to escape a building when it’s blacker than night. Key here is to find the three large lugs on the male coupling and follow the hose back from it. Claustrophobia and fear of heights came up a few times and I confess to a touch of both. Challenges are the allure of firefighting.

I found the training fun, physically challenging and highly interesting. I’m looking forward to training next Tuesday when we do knots, learn about lines (hoses) and possibly put out a live fire. The firefighters are pretty accepting of me, the newbie. Bob Pierce I know well and Scott Berkenbush, the new chief,  is supportive. I know a few other guys a little and there are two women in the training.

Garden St. sub-station where I go to don gear when I answer a call.

The Comcast repairman just came and left after two days of Internet outages and horribly slow performance. He found some line problems concerning the signal to noise ratio which cut out my cable modem. He replaced some “taps” and said I should be ok now. That was euphemism for “It’s working now. Nothing was wrong with it.” He also left the basement lights on and did put back a small ladder I got for him.

Last night when I really needed connectivity to fix some typos in a SmartPlanet.com post, super slow life-wasting away Internet drove me bananas for about 90 minutes. I made some fixes, but did not complete them. I went to bed knowing there were typos in a post – not a good way to end the day.

It’s an understatement to say how much we depend on the Internet so I leave you with these two videos to show how berserk people go when “INTERNET DOWN! Plenty more where those came from….

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There’s several Youtube videos showing the Boeing 787 taxiing last week under a gray Seattle sky. It’s not flying yet, but at least it’s finally moving. I chose the amatuer video below because it has audio and others don’t There’s some wind noise,  but at about 3:10, the 787 almost looks and sounds like it’ll take off. Wouldn’t that be sneaky!?

If you’ve never heard of Wendall Potter and are interested in healthcare reform, listen to what he has to say about private insurers in an interview at Bill Moyers’ Journal. Potter is the former head PR honcho at CIGNA and resigned last year in a fit of conscience after he visited a free  healthcare “expedition” in Wise County, Virginia in July, 2007.

Wendall Potter Credit: PRwatch.org

Check out the Wise County free healthcare clinic and you’ll immediately understand how desperate people are for affordable healthcare. The expedition, according to Potter, was held on  county fairgrounds in unsanitary and un-private conditions under tents in animal stalls. He comes off as credible and claims he was neither fired nor treated badly by CIGNA. I searched for a rebuttal on CIGNA’s site, but it yielded zero results.

“It was like a lightning bolt hit me,” he said of the so-called “expedition.” Then, he goes to describe how insurers drop people and employers from their rolls when their profits dip and how he participated in an industry-wide campaign to discredit Michael Moore’s movie Sicko extolling the benefits of socialized medicine. Potter says now that the conclusions in the movie are largely correct.

Perhaps most significantly, he talks about the industry’s campaign to plant unjustified fears in the public’s mind about a government health plan. He argues that the insurance companies are simply afraid of competition (that said, they must compete with each other and the government is not under many of the same competitive pressures). Click here for CIGNA’s statement on “Commitment to Healthcare Reform.”

Public plan advocates point to Medicare’s low 2-3 per cent administrative overhead versus up to 30 percent for private insurers. Depending on where you fall in the debate, you can find numbers that argue that private insurers have lower administrative costs. But there’s no denying that private insurers’ profit-based model drives up overhead and impact who’s covered and for what. That’s just common sense.

In most respects, healthcare insurers are just doing what businesses do. But their behavior comes into serious moral conflcit when it involves an inividual’s well-being or life (Moore wants to abolish health insurers and regulate drug companuies like publi utilities. He could well be visionary on those points.) Judge for yourself, but for sure, listen to what Potter has to say.

PC Pitstop has conducted a netbook satisfaction survey which places the MSI Wind U100 at the top. Pitstop surveys folks downloading its Overdrive diagnostic download and asks three simple questions:

• How satisfied are you with this PC?
• Is this PC running slow?
• Is this PC hanging or requiring frequent reboots?
  

  Rob Cheng

PC Pitstop CEO and co-founder Rob Cheng who I knew a dozen years as a Gateway honcho says the netbook results were extracted from “well over a million and probably closer to two million” survey responses. However, the number of netbook responses ranged between 107-1,035, reflecting the small number of netbooks out there relative to overall PCs.  So while the U100 got the top rating with 170 responses, number 8 on PC Pitstop’s survey Acer AOA150 garnered the most responses with 1,035. That reflects Acer’s dominant position as the market netbook share leader.

Some of these models are a bit long in the tooth given the rapidity with which new models appear. Also, check out which ones crash the most or are reported as slow. PC Pitstop also looked at desktops (Dell took top nine spots!) and laptops (Dell, HP and Toshiba) as well.

A Verizon TV ad pushing a free Compaq netbook caught my attention today. I only caught the tail end of it, but apparently my ears were not decieving me. Verizon has a promotion that started Saturday giving away a free Compaq netbook (said to be a $299 value) to new FIOS customers. Or customers have the option of selecting a free Flip mini flip camcorder instead.

The netbook looks exactly like the HP Mini I bought earlier this year for $399 and returned once I finished reviewing it for eWeek.com. Now, they’re giving them away… sort of. They’re free only when you commit to either Verizon’s $120 or $130-a-month Triple Play TV/Internet/Phone plans. With the $110 a month plan, you still have to fork over $100 for the netbook or camcorder.

The deal also includes free HBO and Cinemax for three months, according to some folks kibbitzing about it on Verizon’s site. If only I could get FIOS in my neighborhood!?

My full review of the HP Mini Model 1151NR bundled with Verizon mobile broadband is now up at eWeek.com. In any case, I give it a B- given the inconsistent bars I got, but it pretty much works as advertised.

A better option for Internet ubiquity is the MiFI 2200  mobile hotspot which I also reviewed for eWeek. The full review was filed yesterday and I will link to it when it is posted.  In a nutshell, the device – smaller than an iPod Touch – is mobile broadband in one end and up to five WiFi connections out the other. And you don’t have to deal with Verizon Access Manager on the host after the first mobile broadband connection is made. After that, you simply switch on the unit and it automatically connects to Verizon’s 3G network.

The WiFI worked well once I understood you have to unplug the MiFi from host where the mobile broadband was the connection was initially made (For a host, I used a netbook running Windows 7 release candidate which worked fine). The device costs $100 and $60 or $40 a month for the ususal Verizon two-year service commitment. If I spring for mobile broadband  given its relatively high cost, it will be for this.

Verizon MiFi charging

Meanwhile, I am blogging away about at SmartPlanet.com which covers its namesake “smart” technologies. Check it out. Today’s topic was cameras implanted in a prosthetic or bionic eye.

I’ve been playing with HP Mini Model 1151NR that come bundled with Verizon Mobile Broadband for a couple of weeks now and the convenience is growing on me.

It’s much slower than Wifi and cable Internet and the Verizon Access Manager that you use to find the network and connect is a minor imposition. One problem is in my office I only get one bar ( four is tops) so connecting can take a little longer. You can track you speeds from a Statistics tab. Verizon says average speeds are around 500 Kbps with bursts up 1.4 Mbps and it generally delivers as promised.

Video downloads take several minutes, but it’s fine for browsing, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, email, visiting The Dodge Retort and other standard apps.

I’m going to return the loaner to Verizon soon and am going to miss it. Next decision is whether to spring for the unit at $200 and a two year commitment at $60 a month. I have a full review of the HP Verizon bundle  coming up at eweek.com.

Also, Verizon just gave me a Mi Fi mobile router with Mobile broadband in the back end and Wifi out the front so I don’t have to decide right away. It’s about two thirds the size of an iPod Touch and connects via USB to its host. I will report back in a week or so on that. Meanwhile, stay connected.

I have not posted for several days because I was busy with my new CBS Interactive blog ThinkingTech at SmartPlanet.com. Check it out.

We’ll cover all manner of smart technologies from the rehabilitation of the grid to smart gadgets that report on traffic in realtime. The focus is on smart technologies that are kinder to the planet and that help humans. It’s a great site with lots of video (hey, it’s CBS!)

But don’t worry, The Dodge Retort is still a top priority for me. In fact, I’ll be introducing video shortly and should be getting a Dell Mini 10v to review.

I also finished my review for eWeek.com on the HP Mini 1000 Model 1151NR that comes with Verizon wireless mobile broadband. I will summarize that review here next week. My conclusion is that it works as advertised, but could use some refinements. It’s all in the bars!

I’m posting this from the passenger seat of a moving car, by the way. I do like that!

Microsoft is taking off the gloves when it comes to showing how badly it think Linux is doing on netbooks and notebooks. On its Windows Team blog today, it trumpets the fact that PC World, the large UK electronics retailer, is going all Windows and ditching Linux. Check it out. The post even has a quote dinging Linux from a PC World executive.

For my money (and yours), I’d like to see Windows get some competition.