NostalgiaChat was conceived on May 30, 2012 as a side conversation during another Twitter chat called ToolsChat. We started talking about retro computer technology like floppy drives and dialup modems, and realized this could become its own chat. We adopted the #NostalgiaChat name and hashtag after Kelly Singh made sure it was available.
Beki Winchel and I agreed to host the chat, and the first official NostalgiaChat was on June 6, 2012 for 30 minutes. A few weeks later it was expanded to an hour, since a half hour proved just too short.
The time and date were shifted a few times over the years to accommodate participants. In 2017 Beki passed the co-host baton to Terry Porter.
We now get together for an hour every Sunday at 4 PM Pacific / 7 PM Eastern / 11 PM UTC. (UTC is Midnight in Winter and 11 PM in Summer due to Daylight Saving Time in the majority of North America.)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if all of our disease and medical health testing could be done with just a finger prick of blood? Elizabeth Holmes and I share that dream.
She said her company could do it with a small robotic lab-in-a-box. Now she’s facing criminal charges because the blood testing company she founded took some shortcuts.
Elizabeth Holmes and I Have a Dream
It’s a dream of being able to run medical tests from a single finger prick of blood. Holms initially had a dream of diagnosing and treating disease with a patch on the skin. That didn’t work out (neither the diagnosis nor treatment parts).
She founded a company called Real-Time Cures, which became Theranos. (The renaming presumably happened when the idea of providing “cures” to accompany the testing was abandoned).
In these challenging times any kind of good news is welcome. I recently received outstanding updates from three separate crowdfunding campaigns I have supported. I’ve backed nearly thirty such crowdsourced funding campaigns over the years, and some have worked-out better than others.
In the best of times shopping carts are covered with germs, whether or not you can see them. Annoying as it is to find all of the carts are wet (which is common here in the Pacific Northwest) the silver lining is that you know the rain water has given them a rinse.
I generally think of the belt at the cash register being the biggest health risk. One grocery store chain said they are now cleaning the belts at least every 30 minutes. That is less frequent than I’d like to see during “normal” times. I tend to stack things on the belt to reduce the number of items that actually touch that belt.
Now with social distancing the checkout line is an even bigger concern. Standing in a line of strangers, and setting my groceries on checkout belts that I’ve never trusted to be squeaky clean, I can’t help but wish there was an Amazon Go store in my neighborhood. No checkout line and no checkout belt means nobody and nothing touches your groceries except you and the employees that stock the shelves.
I’m not much for New Years Resolutions, but the fitness tracker I’d been given had been sitting on the desk, staring at me for over a month. The box begged to be opened, and the band placed around my wrist, never to be removed.
Then again, this Fitbit model is only water resistant, so at least we would have some time apart while I was in the shower.
Here’s what I discovered, about the technology and myself:
Folks who know me know I give blood, and do it as often as I’m allowed to. (That’s every 56 days, which means six or seven times a year.)
One morning the staff double-checked my stats and told me where my unit of blood was going: Straight to the hospital, where it would be used for a baby’s surgery. How can that not warm your heart?
