about vinod kurup

Kavi has been getting bored being surrounded by adults all the time. He is very happy to announce that a sibling is on its way. We’re calling it blueberry. If things go on schedule, blueberry will be born sometime in June, so we’ll have 2 June babies, a couple years apart.

Pregnancy has been uneventful, unless you count those recurrent waves of nausea and vomiting that Mala’s been experiencing. Hopefully that will get better as we move into the second trimester.

blueberry

For the remaining 2 readers of kurup.org (one of them being me), let me apologize for the lack of posts here over the past couple years. I have always meant to write more, but most of my writing seems to consist of apologies for not writing, short bursts of writing, and then long stretches of inactivity. We are nearing the end of a long stretch of inactivity now, so it’s time for the apologies.

A part of my apprehension has always been that someone will read my writing and laugh at how ridiculous I am. How could I possibly take myself seriously? Yes, I am quite self conscious. But, I figure that now that I’ve posted just about nothing for the past year, anyone left here is going to be pretty forgiving of what I write.

So, I hereby announce my plan to start writing blog posts again. I don’t know what exactly I’ll write about, but I don’t think there will be much focus. Whatever I’m happening to think about will become the new focus of kurup.org.

Kavi is now 18 months old. He loves to sing, dance and make art. He has about 25 words that he says, although you have to be his father or mother to understand most of them. To my delight, he loves to sit in my lap just before bedtime and listen to me read stories. His favorite at the moment is a book called “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” It’s a silly book that has a repeating theme with the words “Uh oh” and “Oh no!” at regular, predictable places in the story. And whenever I get to those words, Kavi sings them back to me as only a toddler can. “Uh ooooooooh!” and “Nu nooooo!”. I’m actually going to miss these days once he’s speaking coherently someday…

Work has been getting better. I’ve been at DRH for over a year now and I’m starting to feel more comfortable as a hospitalist. I have much more confidence in my gut feelings than I did a year ago. Medicine, however, is always humbling, so whenever you start feeling comfortable, you can almost guarantee that something is going to blindside you and make you re-evaluate your thought processes and assumptions. I had a case like that the other day, which I’m not going to go into at the moment, since it’s too fresh and I haven’t had time to figure out what lessons I need to learn from it yet. On the whole, though, I am feeling better about work. I’ve even volunteered to lead a project to institute online progress notes (Electronic Medical Records) at the hospital. This, to me, is scary. There are so many things that can go wrong with any computerization project in healthcare and this is one that I badly want to go right. If there are any people who have been through this process before, I would love to hear from you.

PS. Thanks Mark

We had a few friends over tonight for our first little get-together in our house. Mala made homemade pizza and cake. I provided moral support Everyone had a great time. There were 4 little kiddos and 1 infant, which made for some craziness, but everyone left in good health. It’s a treat to watch Kavi interact with other kids. He’s a real observer. He sits back and watches what everyone is doing. While the other kids were running like crazy around the house, Kavi was content to sit on the carpet and watch them scream. He was pretty tired since he had taken an early nap, so maybe that was part of it. He also seemed happy to watch the other kids play with all of his toys. I mean, sometimes he would try to grab a toy that another kid was playing with, but for the most part, he didn’t seem to care. When we finally cleaned up and got him ready for bed, it was nearly 10 PM. He fell asleep while I was singing a lullaby to him. He woke up for a minute when I put him down, but that was it. He was tired!

OK, I know it’s been almost a year since I updated this blog, but rest assured that I’m still alive and kicking. The observant among you will notice that the design of the blog has changed. The even more observant will notice that huge swaths of content are now missing. Things like my photo albums, my running log, old comments, and Kavi’s little site are now gone. They may make a reappearance someday, especially if I get prodded sufficiently. I have my old site running locally on my laptop, but I’m too lazy to bring it all back right now.

If you’re just interested in pics of Kavi (and I know that’s most of you), go visit my Picasa photo album.

Cathy Sarisky, who had so kindly hosted kurup.org for a few years now, has decided to exit the web hosting business. I took the opportunity to scale down my web operations a bit. This blog is now powered by WordPress instead of OpenACS. I’m hoping that “outsourcing” the tech stuff to WordPress will allow me to focus more on writing stuff, rather than tweaking settings. Hold me to it! I’ve stolen the design for this blog from diveintomark. I’ve always enjoyed his writing and his design sense. I hope he doesn’t mind.

So much has changed since my last post. Kavi has just continued to grow and amaze us. I know for a fact that he is the most adorable little boy in the universe. He’s gotten even more adorable now that he sleeps through the night (as of the past month!). We’ve moved into a house for the first time in our adult lives. We are now residents of Chapel Hill, NC. We’re living the American Dream. I’m going to skip right over the whole purchase process which was more nightmarish than it should have been thanks to some very difficult sellers. Since moving in, we’ve replaced a missing toilet tank, shampooed carpets, changed locks, and hired painters, landscapers, electricians, pest control people, gutter cleaners and house cleaners. Almost makes you want to move back into an apartment.

I started work as a hospitalist last September, and I’m starting to get into a groove now. It was quite a shock to switch from outpatient, academic practice to inpatient, private practice. At times, I still feel like a resident, but for the most part, I find this job to be much more rewarding intellectually and spiritually. It’s more exhausting than I thought it would be, though. I can’t see myself working this kind of schedule for the rest of my life. So, as always, I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do when I grow up.

Well, enough rambling for my first post back. Hope to speak to y’all soon (That’s the southerner in me now!)

I missed the Milwaukee Malayalee Christmas Party this past weekend, but Lisa sent me pics. Can’t wait to go home for the holidays…

MarkD informed me that unregistered users couldn’t add comments. Turns out it was due to some extra quoting of query variables that has been fixed in more recent versions of OpenACS, but I’ve been too lazy to update. The good news is that all of you who’ve been dying to tell me off can finally do so!

Hey, my colleague Steve Vaughan is quoted in this NY Times article on music file sharing and he even got mentioned by name on scripting.com.

The Worst Jobs in Science [via badgertronics]

The next time an intern complains to me about their job, I’m gonna say, “Yeah, you’re right, but read this!”

Open Letter to SCO.

*Loud Applause*

Read this journal of a guy who had his sight restored after 43 years of blindness. [via Badgertronics]