Samsung Jitterbug- nice idea for older folks who live alone

A patient who is in her 80's and lives alone, while her son lives nearby in town showed me this last week. (Sorry, tried to upload a photo of it- drat this Blogger!)

Basically, it's a cell phone that you can get through the usual cell phone vendors that is well designed and intended for older folks (especially ones living alone).

It's large and soft enough to be held easily, but is only slightly larger than most cell phones. It opens like a clamshell phone, so the keyboard is protected from damage or accidental activation.

The keys and display are large enough to read and to use easily, even by folks with less than 20/20 vision or "arthur-itis".

A special model of this has three keys colored green, yellow and red. One calls Operator, one calls Help (such as a friend, relative or neighbor) and one calls 911.

My patient liked this over the usual LifeLine pendant ("Help! I've fallen and I can't get up!"), because it works outside the home, and she can also call her son instead of every distress call resulting in an EMT/fire department response.

Working With Your Hands

This is a really nicely written article by a guy with a Ph.D. in political philosophy who is very happily and fully self-employed repairing motorcycles.

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

I was very impressed by the kind of thinking that goes into how this guy solves problems.

In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

Hmmm. Sounds like a day in my life...