What happens if you are suddenly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes these days? This happened to my son Karl, who is 17 and autistic, this July. He seemed to have a cold, but took a turn for the worse, looking suddenly very thin and tired and with an odd, deep note in his breathing. He couldn't keep fluids down.

We called 911 and he took an ambulance ride into the hospital. En route, they gave intravenous fluids and tested his blood sugar levels. "We don't know how high they are, because the meter only goes up to 500." Yikes!

At the emergency room, it was more IV fluids, followed by IV insulin, which they increased very slowly. His main complaint at this point was thirst, since he was allowed only ice chips because of the nausea. With insulin, he started feeling better as they increased the dose.

After a couple of days in intensive care, a couple of days in an ordinary hospital room, and meeting with a diabetes educator and a nutritionist, he was released.

There were many good things about the care he received and some not-so-good ones.

The good:

• The ambulance crew did all the right things, and his high blood sugar was known long before he even reached the hospital.
• Everyone at Good Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis was cheerful, competent, helpful, and reassuring.
• The hospital recommended and provided the latest and most appropriate insulin and supplies for Karl. More on that later.

The not-so good:

• The doctors told us, "This is Type 1 diabetes, and that means his pancreas is a goner. You may have a brief 'honeymoon period' where it recovers, but it's burn out soon enough and there's nothing you can do." This is nonsense with no basis in actual research; quite the contrary. It's an outdated assumption that's still widely believed by doctors in spite of having been proven false.
• The nutritionist told us, "Karl needs lots of carbohydrates to survive, so aim for 75-90 grams of carbs with every meal." In fact, the body needs no carbohydrates whatever to survive. The body needs fats and proteins (essential fatty acids and essential amino acids) to survive, but there's no such thing as an "essential carbohydrate"! Again, this is based on outdated assumptions that were proven false years ago.

Keeping Karl's pancreas going. If there's some pancreatic function left, the body makes some of its own insulin, and this makes blood-sugar control work one heck of a lot better. This is because the body increases or decreases its insulin production according to the needs of the moments, secreting more insulin if blood sugars rise and less if blood sugars fall. This feedback loop helps keep blood sugars where they ought to be. This is important because every minute your blood sugars are above around 140 mg/dl, your body is being harmed, while levels that are two low can cause you to be unable to think clearly or even cause you to lose consciousness.

Injected insulin doesn't have a feedback loop, so if you give yourself too much or too little, oh well. Even small mistakes in carb counting or insulin dosage can lead to big swings in blood sugar, unless you have some pancreatic function left, in which case the swings are much, much smaller. So keeping the pancreas going is very important.

In spite of what the doctor said, there are promising, known-safe methods of prolonging the honeymoon period, including the use of nicotinamide (also called niacinamide, one of the forms of the B vitamin niacin), using enough injected insulin that the pancreas isn't constantly exhausted, and keeping blood sugars under control, since high blood sugars actively harm the insulin-producing cells.

Keeping blood-sugar levels under control. So, in addition to vitamin supplements, the goal is to use insulin to keep blood sugar under tight control, keeping it below the danger zone of 140 mg/dl and above. (This is the goal set by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, as opposed to the old-fashioned stance of the American Diabetes Association.)

Tight blood-sugar control is hampered by the fact that you have to match the amount of insulin you take to the amount of carbohydrates you eat, plus the fact that insulin's effect varies from shot to shot, and the carbohydrate values of the foods you eat are not reported with much precision. Nutrition labels can be off by 20% in either direction, for example.

To take an example from Karl's menu, a kids' chicken strips basket at Shari's restaurant is supposed to have 82 grams of carbs, but this can vary by 20%, or 16 grams either way. The safe range of blood-sugar levels is 70-140. A gram of carbs will raise Karl's blood sugar by 5 points, so if he's at 100 at the start of the meal, if the meal has 16 grams more than advertised, he'll end up at 180, and if it's 16.4 grams less, he'll fall to a disastrously low 20!

What does this mean in practice? It means that eating a meal with 82 grams of carbs is like playing Russian Roulette (and the advice we got from our nutritionist was wrong). But if we dropped the carbs to just 30 (say, with just chicken strips and no fries), a 20% variation is only 6 grams, and if he starts with a blood-sugar level of 100, the variation is only 30 points each way, from a low of 70 to a high of 130. This is within the target range.

So the only way of actually achieving blood-sugar targets is by cutting carbs from the diet. You eat fewer carbs. With every carb you cut, the margin of error goes down and control goes up. Simple, huh? Sometimes I think that the problem with doctors is that they aren't engineers.

Except that some doctors are engineers. I've been reading a wonderful book on blood-sugar control, Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars, which is by Richard Bernstein, an engineer who became the first diabetic to take blood-sugar measurements multiple times per day, using the then-new blood-sugar meters, which were considered to be laboratory equipment, not home-use devices. The insight he gained from this, and his engineering background in control theory and general problem-solving, allowed him to come up with a treatment plan that really works, reversing his diabetic complications. He entered medical school at the age of 45 so he could become a doctor and share his results directly with patients. His book is very practical and thorough, with both step-by-step procedures and a clear description of the underlying theory. A must-read for anyone with diabetes, or who helps care for someone who has.

A slimmer volume on much the same topic is Blood Sugar 101: What They Don't Tell You About Diabetes. I recommend that you buy both.

Insulin and equipment. On the other hand, I have nothing but praise for the insulin and equipment the hospital handed out. These days they have what are called "insulin pens," which have an insulin cartridge and replace the old syringes and bottles of insulin. One advantage of insulin pens is that they just don't look like syringes, so if we give Karl an injection in a restaurant, anyone around us with a needle phobia doesn't even recognize what we're doing! The other advantage is that the whole process is simpler when you don't have to mess around with a separate syringe and bottle.

Karl uses two kinds of insulin: Lantus, which is very long-lasting and provides what's called "basal insulin," the kind your body needs 24/7, and Novolog, a fast-acting insulin that deals with mealtime carbohydrates.

Lantus is, in theory, a 24-hour insulin, but if you read the instructions they admit that it's only 14 hours for some people. We started out by giving it to Karl only at bedtime, but his afternoon and evening blood-sugar levels weren't so good, so we now split the dose between breakfast and bedtime, which is a common practice. He gets a total of 7 units of Lantus per day.

Most people use Novolog in insulin pens that have a one-unit resolution, but the Novopen Junior lets you inject at half-unit increments, which is twice as good! It's marketed mostly for kids, for some reason. I don't know why anyone would use anything else, though. Karl is getting 8-10 units of Novolog per day.

The needles have gotten almost unbelievably tiny and short, making them safer and pretty much painless. The blood glucose meters are pretty spiffy, too. We're using the Bayer Contour USB model, which lets you download the last zillion or so readings to your computer and look at the trends. The software that comes with the meter is clunky and you will spend some time swearing at it, but it gets the job done.

Measuring Pancreatic function. We went out of our way to get a C-Peptide test for Karl after he'd been out of the hospital for a while. This test measures remaining pancreatic function, and Karl's results came back with a surprisingly high reading, showing that his pancreas is still doing quite a bit for him. Long may it last! None of our doctors mentioned this test, but no one minded performing it upon request.

All my life, I've discovered that, no matter what the industry, industry-standard practices are a strange mixture of brilliance and blindness. The hospital did a wonderful job with Karl, for which we're grateful, and I'm glad that Karen and I are used to doing our own research, because we don't think their advice for home care was of the same high quality. Doctor's advice is a good starting point, but I don't think it's a good idea to stop there.

I've just been quoted in the New York Times about my experience with cell-phone range extenders, or "femtocells."

The reported contacted me because of a blog posting I made giving my experiences with Verizon's range extender (which I'm still quite happy with).

I've turned my iPod Touch into the ultimate PDA. It wasn't hard, because it's pretty good out of the box. But I had to adjust a few things:

Enable Calendar Sync. Karen and I keep our days coordinated through Google Calendar. When we make an appointment, we enter it on our iPod Touch's calendar immediately and "invite" the other person so they'll know what's up.

The iPod Touch will stay current with your Google Calendar (or whatever calendar package you use on your PC) whenever it's connected to a wireless network. I really like Google Calendar, but the iPod Touch will sync with Outlook Calendar and plenty of others. It works great.

Enabling sync with Google Calendar is simple but uses an obscure menu on the iPod Touch. See the Google documentation for step-by-step instructions.

Shared List Manager. Another great applications is Zenbe Lists, a simple to-do list manager that runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and costs $3.99. You can also use your to-do lists onlne. You can share to-do lists with other people, too. Karen and I have a shared shopping list, which is way more convenient than I expected! When one of us is in the store, we look at the list to see what's on it, checking off things as we put them in the shopping cart.

I used to use a Palm PDA, but it was compromised by not having third-party apps and not having a wireless interface, so it basically only got updates when you plugged it into your PC. With all the free wireless around these days, I get updates in town as well as at home.

File Sharing. Another application I like very much is Dropbox, which allows you to share directories between your PC and your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad -- and also between your PC and laptop. And it's free! I use for all kinds of documents and files I like to keep around, including works-in-progress. For simple things like notes, I use a companion program, PlainText, a free program that I like better than Apple's Notepad program.

Entertainment, too. I'm still using a first-generation iPod Touch, and it seems to run everything perfectly well. I even have the free Netflix application on it, so I can watch streaming video when I'm bored. I lust after the new fourth-generation iPod Touch, but even the oldest ones are good.

But mostly I use the iPod Touch for serious things -- email, time management, to-do lists, Google Maps, and plenty of random Web browsing to find information.

If you're thinking about getting an iPad, don't shoot yourself in the foot by getting the Wifi-only version. Get the 3G version, even if you aren't convinced you're willing to pay for 3G. Here's why:

I've had an iPod Touch for a long time. An iPod Touch is basically an iPhone without the phone -- and without 3G. It runs iPhone apps wonderfully, and I use it for everything: email, appointments, note taking, music, audiobooks, movies, Web browsing, games, shopping lists -- you name it.

The problem is that it only has wifi, and this means that anytime I don't have a wifi signal, there's a lot that I can't do. This can be very frustrating, especially when I'm around people with iPhones, who have constant access to the Web over 3G, and who simply don't have this problem. Having to drive to a different part of town to find free wifi so I can check email (or whatever) really detracts from the value.

With the iPad, you are given the opportunity to deal yourself the same kind of misery. People tell themselves, "I don't need 3G, because I won't use the iPad anywhere but home and work." They're fooling themselves, because the "use it anywhere" nature of the iPad is one of its biggest advantages. If you buy the wifi-only version, you're likely to be disappointed, and also stuck with an expensive iPad that isn't what you need.

With the 3G version, on the other hand, the worst that will happen is that you'll pay more up front for the iPad itself. You don't have to sign up for 3G service, and even if you do, it's month-to-month with no contract. You can cancel it at any time and avoid the ongoing expense of 3G. Compare this to the wifi version, where you're basically out of luck when you realize that 3G is mighty handy! And 3G on the iPad is a lot cheaper than 3G on my cell phone, oddly enough.

I'm very fond of my 3G iPad and I use it all the time when I'm away from home. A laptop is too heavy and klunky to take with me everywhere, but the iPad works just fine. I can do all kinds of work wherever I am with the iPad. I use the Apple slipcase with it (I think it's indispensible), and also a small Samsonite netbook case to carry the iPad, a spiral notebook, and some other necessities.

The iPad is not a cheap device, so you need to make sure you get full value from it. And that means 3G.

I need your help! I've signed up for an exciting writing class in Corvallis, taught by an Emmy-award-winning TV writer/novelist/teacher, Linda E. Hamner. The problem is, if we don't find two more people by noon on Friday who are keen to learn about writing, it's going to be canceled!

The topic is "Introduction to Screenwriting," but this will be a fun sleigh ride for anyone interested in writing of pretty much any kind.

The class is on Mondays from 4:00-5:50 at Benton Center in Corvallis. It doesn't carry any college credit, alas, but that means it can't hurt your GPA, either. It runs for seven weeks and costs a measly $57. Give it a shot!

To register, or to find out more, check out the Linn-Benton Community College Schedule.

See you there!

Full class description: "Explore the basics and obtain the tools it takes to write a professional screenplay. Terminology, format, story, building a scene, character development, production considerations and dialogue will be discussed and analyzed. Emmy-award winning TV writer, novelist and teacher, Linda Elin Hamner will provide real-life insights into the workings of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Film clips will be shown to illustrate screenwriting techniques."

You have to make a choice: Do you want the truth or your comfortable illusions?

Frankly, I think most people prefer illusions, because of their comfort value, but there's a lot to be said for truth, especially when the future is riding on it! One of the most useful ways of getting at the truth is the side-by-side test, which has lots of applications in everyday life. I'll talk about farm-related ones here.

I frequently tell people that I have "the best eggs ever." Is this true? Well, so far it is! But I don't just rest on my laurels. Once in a while, I go out and buy other people's eggs, then cook them up in exactly the same way and do a taste test. Ideally, this would be literally a blind taste test, since my eggs tend to have very dark yolks compared to other people's. In a blind test, you don't know whose eggs you're tasting, so your preconceptions and wishful thinking are kept in check.

So far, the results have been very encouraging -- nobody's eggs taste better than mine -- though as a side effect I discovered that many of the bad things that people say about supermarket eggs just aren't true. I've heard a lot of claims that supermarket eggs are old and have weak yolks, so I was surprised by the results of my first test, where the el cheapo eggs from the supermarket were just as fresh as mine and had really strong yolks, too. So don't believe what you hear from others. Test, test, test!

With broilers, the results have been more mixed. Our non-irrigated pasture browns off in the late summer, and in one late-summer taste test, our broilers were not as good as another pastured poultry outfit's, one which I suspect grows their birds on irrigated pasture. And some of the faux free-range chicken from California was surprisingly flavorful, considering that their "outdoor access" was more or less mythical. Normally I expect that it's green pasture plants that give the chickens their flavor, but I suspect that there's another way of doing it...

One interesting side-by-side experiment we made happened when Karen took a Poultry Science class at Oregon State University. One lab involved butchering chickens from the university's broiler barn. Karen butchered the chicken using methods that were equivalent to what she uses at home, but this well-cared-for confinement broiler tasted far blander than a grass-fed broiler of the same age that we tested at the same time, and the confinement broiler had an unpleasant manure-y aftertaste that could only be blamed on growing conditions, not processing. Ewww!

The reason people don't do more side-by-side testing is that it raises the possibility that their cherished beliefs will be proven false. Of course, this is exactly why you should do it! Great ideas only get you into the ballpark. You're probably up in the bleachers somewhere, not on base at all. But it's a start. You get on base when you get the details right and drop some of the baggage that we all bring to a new venture. You're going to lose your illusions one way or another, either by refining your ideas until they actually work, or by failing. Using denial is the more natural and comfortable option, but it sends you straight down the road to failure. Testing and refining are less comfortable at first, but they reveal the path to success -- reliable, ongoing success -- the path that leads to a reality that's far better than any illusion.

If you look around, you'll see many opportunities to use side-by-side testing. The experiments are often very easy. For example, it took me less than half an hour to test half a dozen kinds of coffee, from which I discovered (to my surprise) that I don't appreciate fresh-ground, gourmet coffee -- something that has saved me a lot of money over the years.

Go forth and test! This is the Age of Science!

I'm spending about a week in California, on a visit to my day job, Citrix Systems. At one point I was flying to California every week (which was exhausting!) but tight budgets have kept me at home for nearly two years!

That's left me more disconnected than is good for my work -- I write the user documentation and kibitz on improvements in our super-spiffy network accelerator, Branch Repeater (and if you were wondering, no, I didn't write the product description the link points to).

Actually, I've spent my whole career in something of a stealth mode — a computer engineer by training, technical writer (or writing manager) by job title, general guru and architect by inclination. When I was at Activision back during its glory days, my job was discovering all our game designers' design secrets, duplicating them, and distributing what I'd learned to our other designers. Heaven! Pretty soon I wasn't just writing up what had already happened, but was making things happen. And it's been like that ever since.

(Trivia note: I wrote the last piece of code for the Atari 2600 game system ever shipped by Activision.)

Karen will be holding down the fort while I'm gone. I used to live in the Bay Area, where Citrix is, and I'm sure I'll be hooking up with some old friends.

I upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 7, which I'm very happy with, but it gave me more grief than it should have. I've owned computers since 1980, when I got my first Apple II, and I'm a bona fide computer wizard, so it should have been easy, right?

Well, not quite. The first hurdle was dealing with Windows 7's insistence on wiping out your "Documents and Settings" -- the only indispensable things on most PCs! Do you have any idea how much data I've accumulated over the years? Messing around with backing it up and restoring it was Not Fun. It was just as hard as if I were transferring my stuff to a brand-new computer, which I wasn't.

The other hurdle was with mirrored drives. The more spendy versions of Windows 7 allow you to do disk mirroring, so all your data lives on two drives simultaneously. If one dies, the other keeps going, and you can slap in a replacement drive and get back to mirroring. No prob. And it doubles the speed of disk reads, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Disk mirroring is also called "RAID 1." Don't ask.)

But it's amazingly difficult to figure out how to set it up. Why, Microsoft, didn't you provide step-by-step instructions?

Some motherboards have the same capability in hardware, but they, too are always incredibly ill-documented.

But I'm up and running again, and Windows 7 seems quite a bit snappier than XP, though it seems to have some teething troubles, with the occasional odd bit of behavior.

A while back I bought a bargain-basement computer for under $300 at Staples to use as a secondary computer, and even el cheapo machines are pretty usable these days. So you might want to do it the easy way and get a new computer when you decide to switch to Windows 7. That's called a "forklift upgrade" in the biz.

The only cell phone tower near my farm is slowly getting masked by trees as the forest next door grows up, and the cell phone reception in my house is dreadful.

I just bought a Verizon Network Extender and couldn't be happier. This is a device that looks like a wireless access point but acts like a miniature cell phone tower, using your DSL or cable modem to reach the cellular network. Our phones went from zero bars to four! Woo-hoo!

This is a zero-config device: I plugged it in and it self-configured within about 20 minutes. I didn't have to set a single parameter.

And it not only covers the whole house, but extends quite a way beyond it, even to the mailbox on the other side of the road. Generally speaking, reception in the house is worse than anywhere else, so it completely covers the problem area.

The retail price of this technological wonder (called a "femtocell" in the biz) is a wince-inducing $250, but I found a "$50 off All Accessories" coupon online, and, much to my surprise, found a $50 rebate form inside the box that's good through most of January, so it really cost me only $150. There is no monthly fee.

It doesn't handle 3G traffic (though your 3G devices will fall back to the "1X" standard, which it does handle, though slowly). and I don't know if non-Verizon subscribers can roam through it or not. But sure solved my problem!

There are similar devices out there that work with other carriers, plus a wide variety of cellular signal boosters that use an outdoor antenna to talk to the cell phone tower, and an amplifier and an indoor antenna to talk to your cell phones. The main difference is that boosters don't work in areas where you have no signal at all, while network extenders that use your cable or DSL links do.

These devices will probably turn out to be a must-have for rural residents everywhere.

[Update, March 24, 2010: After more than two months of use, I'm still very pleased. The higher signal quality means that our cell phone batteries last for many days rather than just one, and I no longer have to hunt around the house and farm for Karen if I need to talk to her: I can always reach her by phone. That wasn't true before. The only downside is that the extender adds a noticeable time lag when both ends of the conversation are going through it! This only happens when both parties are on the farm, of course.]

[Update: the links actually work now!]

I invited all 4,400+ subscribers to my monthly poultry newsletter to join the Grass-Fed Eggs discussion group, and then the fun began.

It turns out that Google Groups will let you sign up without having a Google account, but if you do, you can't change your subscription options. And the default subscription option is "send me every posting as a separate email message," which -- because the group has become lively -- is too many email messages for most people.

And to add insult to injury, Google Groups managed to double-subscribe a lot of people under two different email addresses. How, I have no idea. People who were dual-subscribed could edit the options of only one of these, leaving the other one blasting them unwanted emails. Sigh.

This has pretty much blown over now.

In general, I think the problem revolves around bugs in the "invite new members" feature, and there are similar problems for people who subscribe via email rather than through the Google Groups Web site. If you use the Web site, you should have no problems.

So when you join the group, do yourself a favor and subscribe via the link, using the Google Groups Web interface, and not with the hokey email subscription mechanism. This requires that you have a Google account. If you use more than one email address, set the email options in your Google account to let Google know this, and you won't have any trouble. And set your subscription to "Daily Email Digest." It's the best compromise for most people.

It turns out the Google Groups are notorious for being sadly neglected, as discussed in this article from Wired. I had decided to put my discussion forum on Google Groups because I was tired of the long, slow decline in quality in Yahoo Groups. Just goes to show.