Death of a Legend

Yesterday Dr. DeBakey died at age 99 leaving a larger than life legacy.  Our medical school class was the last to have Dr. DeBakey welcome it to Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) about a year ago. He gave rather strong admonition for us to study hard and excel in our chosen profession.  More recently, he also gave an interesting presentation on key accomplishments in his career this past Spring at our BCM research symposium.   It was amazing to have a 98 year-old physician lecture with such energy, passion, and dignity.  He told us how he became interested in sewing from watching his mother sew.  He also learned how to sew and appreciate good fabric.  This skill was obviously useful in preparing him in his career as a vascular and heart surgeon.  His innovative use of Dacron in aortic repairs was a major invention that he cherished to the end of his life.

How I did not want to spend my summer or How high efficiency and poor parts and construction create increase the actual cost of air conditioning

Well, it's nice to be off a little while in the summer to relax and take care of things that I don't have much time for during the year.  I have been spending most of my time with family and on pet research projects that are kind of like my hobbies now that I'm in medical school.  Unfortunately our fairly new home is having some problems that need attention as well.  Thank you Pulte (http://www.pulte.com/), for using "builder grade" junk to construct our home.   Pulte seems to use a lot of parts (faucets, A/C's, etc.) that fail in only a few years (we just replaced our main sink faucet ... we are not going to replace the inadqueate duct work, which would cost $8000).  I hope their "cutting corners" reputation / using parts that fail in 5 years catches up with them.   To their credit, our furnace is nice, as shown in the picture above left.  The air conditioning portion lacks an expansion valve and instead relies on an orifice.

One of the things needing attention is our central air conditioner, which is being replaced at a very young and tender 6 years of age.  Ours had some kind of leak or other problem that was causing it to freeze and fail about every 3 months, making us hot at the most inopportune times (usually a Holiday, like 4th of July when you can't find a A/C repair person).  We have had a Carrier 3.5 ton Model CK3BXA042021AAAA / 38BRC042330 (R-22 Refrigerant, which is being phased out) (see picture at left).  Needless to say, the Carrier central A/C should not be failing so soon and it really makes me think that Carrier parts quality is very poor (along with the Pulte unwise selection of parts and home construction of that unit).  Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so (see another Carrier complaint).  The complaints.com link also allows searching by brand and "Carrier Air" turns up about 96 complaints compaired to 12 for Lennox and about 12 for Pulte.  Every A/C company is likely to get some complaints, but Carrier really stands out and Pulte does not reflect well on themselves for choosing that brand.  If Carrier wanted to improve, they might start with paint that doesn't fall off after a few years (note the Carrier label that is falling off the top of the unit in an attempt to hide the guilty).   However, that's what came with the house, so it wasn't really something we could do a lot about other than replace certain critical components, which is what we are doing.  I noticed our neighbors also had theirs serviced recently as well, and so I don't think the problem is limited to our home.   We are replacing the central A/C system with a 4 ton Lennox Ch23-41 / XC14048 (new R-410A refrigerant) unit for about $6400 from Central City Air here in Houston.  

We had a Lennox central A/C in one of our previous other homes, and it lasted 18 years, which is how long these air conditioners should be lasting.  We nursed that previous 18 year-old Lennox unit along near the end and found out that it's better to replace a failing unit early on after we had sunk a couple of thousand in repairs into it.  A few $200 bills here, and another $400 bill there, and pretty soon, you could have paid for a new unit.  Our outside condenser system just plain looks bad for its age and corroded and our A/C repair man raised a number of concerns about the construction and working parts of that system as well.  Our home is one of those "high efficiency" homes, which uses more insulation and an undersized heating and cooling system.  High efficiency with an undersized A/C also means that the air conditioner will work harder and longer to begin with; add poor parts quality from Carrier and poor construction from Pulte and you wind up with a problem in only a few years that we had to address.  Despite these little annoyances we have been enjoying living in the Houston area, however.  There is a lot to do for our children (local parks, beach, entertainment, etc.), traffic moves pretty well, and the cost of living here (including gas prices) is low compared to national averages ... we save money overall living here and it's quite nice.  I even like our neighborhood; it's attractive, safe, and people are friendly.  I should not complain too much.  However, I wasn't able to find a lot of information concerning the actual quality of air conditioning units on the web, so I thought I would write this up.

Firefox 2 and 3 freeze-ups

Internet Explorer has not serving me very well (it's slow, it sometimes doesn't close, etc.).  Internet Explorer is functional, but leaves some things to be desired.   So, I decided to use Firefox a few months ago (until now) until I was forced to confront the 100th encounter with an interesting feature of Firefox somehow freezing my entire Windows XP systems from time to time.  We are talking about the mouse no longer moving and no keyboard recognition; it happens on multiple systems with many different users.  It seems to be a common problem (check out this search:  http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-searchindex.php?words=firefox+system+freeze+Windows+XP&sa= ) .  It might be an issue with Windows XP but we see similar issues on Vista as well.  It might be the way that Firefox does business.  I have no idea exactly, but it seems to affect both Firefox 2 & 3.   Anyway, the "party line" from the Mozilla folks is that it can't possibly by Firefox and they send users chasing their tails with suggestions to update/change drivers, firewalls, and all that.  Nevermind that there is no other application that does this and that the problem only occurs with Firefox and is reproducible across numerous machines and users.  Even if it is something else, Firefox has the unique distinction of activating this terrible bug, so there should be a bit more sympathy, but no.  Anyway, I loaded Opera (www.opera.com) on three of my machines and my Blackberry (http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/) and I'll see how it goes.  Hopefully it doesn't freeze up the entire Windows XP system like Firefox did ... not even Internet Explorer had that problem.  Opera also seems to be faster as well.  Anyway, I hope it will be an uneventful permanent switch.

First year (MS1) is done

Wow, it's hard to believe I'm at this point.  I'm done with my first year of medical school and it feels great.  Ok, I realize this is supposed to be the easiest year, but, in any case, I feel a certain sense of accomplishment or at least relief that I have time to do something other than my medical school assignments.  We have gone swimming, to an amusement park, and I get to play with computers as much as I want.  I am also working on a couple of research projects including one that I'm writing an MS Access database for right now (I actually find that fun).