The poor state of the American healthcare system has become abundantly clear to me in theory, but John writes about his experience in practice, trying to find health insurance for his family after leaving his job. His first entry describes the problem and commenters offer some suggestions, his second elaborates a bit more and asks commenters for more information about other countries’ health care systems. Hearing how the system works in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and the UK is interesting and enlightening. There are clearly problems with many implementations of socialized medicine, but I would contend there are far greater problems with the US system. Many people have stated that we have a looming healthcare crisis, and yet no one in government seems to be willing to start having the inevitable difficult conversations.
Microsoft is rolling out a new Mac-specific wireless keyboard and mouse combo. I’ve used MS peripherals in the past and generally been pretty happy with it. If my current mouse dies and their setup uses Bluetooth, I’d probably buy it. Hopefully, however, my mouse won’t die, cause I like it a lot and Logitech discontinued the model. 🙁
Let’s back up a bit
Someone explain this to me, because now I’m confused. Does being a participant in “fandom” always or generally imply that a person writes pornographic ‘shipper fan-fiction? I mean, not that there is anything wrong with writing stories about television characters or your own fantasies about their non-relationships, but I always thought fandom referred to a community built up around a television show. Wikipedia seems to agree. Thus I find it odd that people are worried about losing their jobs for participating in “fandom,” unless what they actually mean is participating in X-rated story writing, which is perhaps more likely to ruffle feathers among those with delicate sensibilities than simply dressing up as a Klingon or going to a Buffy meet-up (I’ve done one of the two, I’ll let you guess which…).
When you start to look closer, Apple’s new MacBook Pro gets less and less appealing. The first thing I noted was the lack of any advertised battery life. He noticed several other problems, not the least of which is the stupid, stupid name.
For those of you interested in MRIs and brain research who don’t have someone working in the field to talk to (that we could all be so lucky!), this Slate article about experiments using functional NMR imaging is a good starting point. Also, here’s a previous found object on this topic.
House, H.D.
Today we got our new HD cable box/DVR thing from Comcast, and I’ve been fiddling with it. Using some Apple developer tools, I am able to record full-resolution high-definition video off of my cable box onto my Mac laptop over a FireWire connection…at 80MB/minute. How cool is that?
(Hint: very. Very cool.)
Soon enough the content providers and cable companies will start locking things down and prohibiting this kind of behavior, which of course won’t stop the pirates but will stop interested hobbyists like myself. As it should be, right?
The _New York Times_ article about the use of facebook.com by college students is notable for a few reasons. Most administrators surveyed are taking a fairly hands-off approach to the site, and show a surprising amount of cluefulness in realizing that it isn’t Facebook that is inherently good or evil, it is just another socializing tool that can be used in various ways. The second thing I find strange is the angle about online privacy. The _Times_ quotes several students who are upset or confused by the idea that what they do online, in a semi-public medium, is not private. For instance, they post pictures of underage drinking, and then are upset when they get written up for it. The assumption seems to be that Resident Advisors (i.e. other students) as well as administrators have an obligation to *not* to look at a web site publically available to everyone at the school and to not act on anything that is chronicled there. Um…why? How can you claim breach of privacy when you are posting things publically? Not to mention how much control Facebook gives users over their privacy settings — a lot, so that things really can be “private” if a user so chooses. There is really no reason to be shocked or angry that there are legitimate consequences to ones actions, be they in the real world or online.
Email obfuscation
Knowing that spammers often use web crawlers (or let search engines do the work for them) to find email addresses sitting on web sites to add to their spam lists, most people now understand that it is a good idea to obfuscate email addresses they post on web sites. Many major sites do the obfuscation automatically, converting the addresses to images, which are much harder to scan, or making them less address-like, i.e. myname (-at-) mydomain (-dot-) com, trusting that users can figure it out, but hoping that computers cannot.
Which is all well and good, until you start using the mailto link, which is a link that is meant to open someone’s email program and automatically address the message. A lot of people who “get” that obfuscation is good don’t also get that if you put the *actual* email address in the mailto link, the spammers will be able to get to it even easier than if it was in the text of the web page. After all, something that says <a href="mailto:myname@mydomain.com"> is quite the red flag. And yet, when I make my mailto links the same as the displayed email address (i.e. with the obfuscation), I get complaints from people who don’t understand why when they click the link and it opens their email program the address isn’t correct, and their messages get bounced. You would think intelligent people, with a bit of thought, could figure this out.
Meanwhile, we have the highly silly phenomenon of sites using email addresses that are obfuscated to the naked eye but perfectly well-formed in the code, in the mailto links, saving the spammer the trouble while leaving the same amount of confusion in place for the reader.
Aaron Swartz has decided to turn off another emotion: “Turning off an emotion is always a tough decision. I remember how a couple years ago I decided to say goodbye to anger. Sure, anger has its bright moments — you haven’t really lived until you’ve known that special joy of hurling a chair across the room — but it’s also quite time-consuming. Every time someone comes up and hits you, you have to run around chasing after them.” He is well on his way to becoming a highly efficient human being. Now if we could just get rid of self-doubt.
I haven’t been paying too much attention to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal that is ensnaring many major Republican congresscritters, but this explanation of how the whole scandal came to light amuses me greatly.
At the end of the tunnel
I’ve never gotten a chance to light a show, and it occured to me tonight that I still want to do so. I took a lighting design class my last semester of college, and I’ve run light boards on various productions, but the last time I did anything with hanging and focusing lights was in high school. I’ve never had a chance yet to actually hang a light plot that I’ve designed and see if it works.
I don’t expect I’ll be in a position to direct a show any time soon. With my minimal recent acting experience I probably won’t find myself acting in one, either. But lighting — that I could do. And it doesn’t need to be incredibly elaborate. One of the best examples I’ve seen was a show at Brandeis that was lit by at most ten instruments, and turned out great. I also was board op on a show lit by 60 or 70, and it turned out awful.
So perhaps I’ll put that on my list of things to accomplish.
_Harper’s_ Yearly Review for 2005 – I love _Harper’s_ because its so scatter-brained, like America.
Joss Whedon explains the future of TV, including what sorts of shows we can expect and how we will watch them. I’m particularily excited about his final prediction.
Even the _New York Times_ ombudsman is being stonewalled in his attempts to determine why the _Times_ held off on publishing the NSA spy story for a year.
Five simple steps to designing grid systems – for the designers out there.
Learn how to code “AJAX” in 30 seconds with this tutorial/code snippet. Easy, huh?
Dave Pell says much of the reason the Bush administration did so much worse this year than the last four is because they lost Colin Powell. Interesting point, and certainly one contributing factor, although how central a factor is debatable.
Shaina and Paul and a furry thing
