Want [...]]]> This weekend two of my friends had medical emergencies. One of them is still unconscious in a neurological ICU following a motorcycle accident. This has, as you might imagine, left his family in a terrible place, and his wife is having to put together pieces of their life that were left scattered on a highway.

Want to help? Then please, please consider the following suggestions.

Make a living will. Do you want to refuse medical treatment if you’re in a persistent vegetative state? Do you want any and all treatment possible? More importantly, do you want family and friends to have to guess at what you’d want or, worse, fight about it like Terri Schiavo’s family? A living will lets you set out, in a legally binding document, what your wishes are while you can still express them. For the US, Nolo has more information about living wills. Five Wishes is a popular living will, though it requires extra paperwork to be legally binding in eight states, including Alabama. The Lifecare Advanced Directive is excellent but takes time to work through.

Create a durable power of attorney for health care. Your living will won’t be able to cover all hypothetical situations, which means someone’s going to have to make those decisions for you. Choose your health care agent ahead of time, document your choice in a durable power of attorney document, and talk about your wishes with that person. Start with Nolo’s article on selecting a health care agent. The Five Wishes and Lifecare Advanced Directive include a section on designating a health care agent.

Make a will or a trust. If you’ve got assets like a house, bank accounts, or retirement accounts, designate what happens to them if you should die. If you have children, here’s where you appoint someone to take care of them. You can work with a lawyer to draw up a will or trust, or use software like Quicken WillMaker.

Add an ICE entry to your cell phone. “In Case of Emergency” entries on your cell can bolster more traditional methods of identification and can help hospitals contact family members.

Write down your passwords. Chances are you’ve got several computers and accounts that someone would need access to in times of trouble. If you use a password-keeper like 1Password, write down your master password. Put the list where people can get to it in an emergency.

Get a small fire safe, one that’s about the size of a bulky briefcase. The intent isn’t to protect your documents from thieves, but to protect documents against fire or flood and to give someone a one-stop place to go for documents they’ll need. Make copies of the safe key and give them to someone you can trust. And get some dessicant, like the little bags of silicon beads, to keep humidity down in the safe.

Distribute your documents. It’s best to store your original will and similar documents in a bank’s safe deposit box, but those can be hard to get access to in emergency situations. Send copies of your will, living will, and durable power of attorney for health care to your executors and family members. Put copies in your fire safe. Passwords, a list of insurance policies (if any), and information on bank accounts and similar documents go in the fire safe.

Update these documents once a year. Every January, crack open the fire safe and make sure all of the information is still up to date. Anything that isn’t needs to be changed.

Doing all of this is a task that’s easy to put off. Don’t. Spend some time this month getting your affairs in order. Those around you will be thankful later.

(Glenn Baeske of The Huntsville Times took that picture.)

The article touches on the Hermes system that we’ve been developing to help helicopters automatically pick up cargo and then guide them to the delivery point, which has a lot of potential applications for everything from medical [...]]]> Hey, look who was in Sunday’s issue of the Huntsville Times.

(Glenn Baeske of The Huntsville Times took that picture.)

The article touches on the Hermes system that we’ve been developing to help helicopters automatically pick up cargo and then guide them to the delivery point, which has a lot of potential applications for everything from medical heliflights to logging to resupplying soldiers in the field. I wrote our original proposal for the project back in 2005, and now, five years later, it’s on the cusp of being a real honest-to-goodness product. A lot of very smart people have put in a tremendous amount of work to make that happen, and I’m thrilled to see it all coming together.

So that’s what I saw on Sunday! How was your weekend?

It’s an opportunity cost thing. You don’t know what any given garage sale will be offering, and meanwhile the one thing that you’d really like, the single perfect item which you would buy if only it were right in front of you, is undoubtedly in [...]]]> Here’s the thing about garage sales: they make me slightly nervous.

It’s an opportunity cost thing. You don’t know what any given garage sale will be offering, and meanwhile the one thing that you’d really like, the single perfect item which you would buy if only it were right in front of you, is undoubtedly in another sale somewhere else run run run! It’s easy to lurch from garage sale to garage sale like you’re in some demented marathon along a street decorated with slightly ratty clothes and stuffed animals that are missing limbs.

The entire garage sale culture helps foster this paranoia. Sale starts at 7 AM? Then people will show up at 6, or perhaps 5:30, asking if they can get an advance look at what you’re offering.

It’s my fault that both Eli and Liza now love going to garage sales. One Saturday morning we got up early, went to a few garage sales, and ended at the local doughnut shop for breakfast. Eli and Liza quickly realized that they could turn small amounts of cash into broken toys that they would love intensely for at most two hours after we got home. Now this has become a regular thing, which means we have to be up and moving far earlier than is really healthy for any normal adult. If we don’t get to the sales quickly, then doughnut breakfast is delayed and Eli and Liza become octopuses with a penchant for grabbing and whining.

Besides, the perfect item I never knew I needed will be gone if I don’t go early.