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Monthly Archives: June 2009

Provided by management for your safety

You may well have noticed, that I can always find space to complain. And so, in that vein, I herewith complain about Yahoo! Mail and its repeated attempts to get me to provide secret questions and answers — “required” — so that if I forget my password then I may access my email. But, I [...]

Kindling

May only blog once per week… but the habit, the spark returns. Specifically, I’m prompted today by correspondence between my post on DRM and what Sheldon Richman has noted regarding Kindle’s DRM. While the following corollary may be fanciful, I wonder if the demise of paper currency, engineered toward a cashless society, helped by massive [...]

Thumbnails not

Knot? Too much time spent trying to find a simple thumbnail generator in PHP, so setting aside the prettiness of auto-generated thumbnails, at least pictures are online. Some, for now. Vision Mtn refers to a recent trip to eastern Washington. Thanks to Francesca for the hospitality! And déjà vu all over again, once more. Paring [...]

DRM and me and you

That’s for Digital Rights Management. Rights, sure. The “right” to be constrained. If I buy a CD, I can only play it in 5 CD players or less? Nonsense. Yet when I buy a song from iTunes, said song cannot just be played on any and every iPod or computer that I may own. It [...]

Medication reconciliation

In a statement welcoming Obama, AMA president Dr. Nancy Nielsen said the medical profession wants to “reduce unnecessary costs by focusing on quality improvements, such as developing best practices for care and improving medication reconciliation.” Decipher that one. There aren’t already best practices established in one of the world’s oldest professions? Or what’s changed, or [...]

Liberty steaks and freedom fries

And other absurdities, but first, a character’s understanding of inflation’s benefit to the indebted rich: As a commodity, money itself has a price. It is not a value-neutral medium, although it is a medium – of exchange. Because most people don’t buy money, but buy goods with money, they don’t see it as its own [...]

DIY database upgrade

You may have noticed the message “error establishing a database connection” — after upgrading MySQL the program didn’t restart, so after a reboot, voila. (Is that a noun, reboot? Aesthetic or no, usage is the key, sadly perhaps). But in order to reboot, I have to unplug the keyboard from the main computer and into [...]

Hiker's breakfast

Let’s lighten it up a bit (though not really, because I was full for hours, ha). 3 eggs, scrambled — paprika, olive oil, black pepper, sea salt. 4 strips bacon — Hempler’s, of course. Chocolate pudding — yes, chocolate pudding. Bike to Chuckanut area. Hike seven miles. Bike home. Ah, yes.