I could have sworn that the slogan over at Lifehacker used to be “Computers make us more productive. Yeah right” or something to that effect. I can’t seem to find it there anymore, but if that’s not their slogan anymore, it’s their loss.

Today I went to the doctor’s office. I hadn’t been in a while, so they had some housekeeping to do with me. I gave my name and mentioned my appointment time. I didn’t expect, “What state were you born in?” to be the next question. “Uhh, Massachusetts?” I responded, pretty confusedly. She then explained that the computer made them ask some new questions, so she had to fill them in.

“Is English your primary language?”

It’s worth mentioning that this was in Bedford, which is even more “WASPy” than surrounding areas, or so it seems. (Wikipedia claims 97.4% white, which seems low to me.) While it was tempting to put on a thick accent and explain that Swedish was my native language, I decided to tell the truth and say yes.

“What is your ethnicity?”

She kind of laughed while asking that one, fully aware that the questions were pretty absurd and pointless. “Do you even have an ethnicity?”

“Uhh, is American an ethinicity? White?”

“No, that’s race. That’s the next question. I’ll just put–hmm… Decline to answer?”

After having me sign multiple forms, she told me I was done, before saying, “Oh, wait… It’s not letting me save this… Can I see your [health insurance] card?”

I could have sworn she told me that she needed to input information on my PCP (Primary Care Physician), which is weird since… I was at their office. It wouldn’t let her save without it.

So I ask–who’s in charge these days: computers or people?

I was just thinking that I should go for a jog. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day?

Don’t count on it.

I somehow managed to include Thursday twice, but at least it balances things out.

Periodically, I come across something and think, “That would be a great place to go photograph!” Here’s a compilation of recent (and not-so-recent) places I’ve thought that about:

• St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada; specifically, Cape Spear, apparently the Eastern-most point in North America.
• Antarctica. How could I not?
• The Falkland Islands, also home to penguins.
• Alaska, of course.
• Chernobyl (but I’ve discussed this one before).
• An African safari. My time in Africa was anything but a safari, so obviously, I must return!
• Cuba, which seems pretty novel. Can’t get here too legally, though.

Bin Laden’s driver is on trial. It sounds as if he may have been more than a bodyguard.

What concerns me, though, is the jury members:

“You must make your determination whether or not he is guilty based solely on the evidence presented here in court and the instructions I will give you. “You must impartially hear the evidence.” The trial jury is being selected from a pool of 13 US military officers and must comprise at least five members. The verdict will require a two-thirds majority.

I can’t imagine any US military officer finding bin Laden’s driver not guilty? I think it would be akin to having the police department be the jury for criminal proceedings. They’d be insane to find you innocent, no matter what the charges are.

I use my little VX-2R for a lot of local scanning. It just stopped on “CH-7,” 460.300. That’s Boston PD’s Channel 7, used for unit-to-unit chat.

I tried to see who had the license in NH, only to find no one. (Actually, that’s not true: the State of Vermont has a license on that frequency in NH, but it’s up north.)

So I switched over to my ASTRO Saber, which has a better antenna, and has the DPL code used by Boston PD programmed, so as to not receive extraneous data. A few minutes went by and, sure enough, Channel 7 came up with some traffic.

What range: 50-60 miles to be received decently well by a rubber-ducky antenna indoors. But I guess when you’re licensed for 335 Watts ERP from the top of the Prudential, that type of thing is to be expected. But strangely, I’m not hearing activity on any of their other channels.

Incidentally, we have a GP-15 on our roof at home, which I used trying to listen to a distant fireground channel last night, and found to have excellent gain: 6.2 dBi on VHF, and 8.6 dBi on UHF. I might have to go down there and see how Boston comes in some time when there’s not a lighting storm overhead.

Here’s a radio in good condition.

I’m trying to install XP Home Edition on an old machine; it came with XP Home Edition, I put Linux on it, and now I’m toying with selling it, or making it a generic backup machine.

I have the CD in there, and the system has a COE and license key on the bottom of the laptop. But the installer is rejecting it. It might be OEM-specific?

So here I am, trying to find a license key to use to install it, so I can go in and crack it. The problem is that I have a genuine license, it just doesn’t work. I’m “pirating” something I own.

What’s the deal with the apparent rash of people cutting babies out of other people’s bellies and claiming them as their own? When it happened once, I thought, “Wow, that lady is crazy!” But it seems it’s far from the first time this has happened? It’s ever so slightly creepy.

My periodic checking of FatWallet (and now, SlickDeals.net) led me down an interesting tangent…

1080p is 1920×1080. Higher-end HDTV sets will do this resolution. So I was browsing deals on 1080p TVs (not necessarily interested in buying, but I saw the link and had to follow it through…), and thinking about how we used VGA and HDMI off of an Xbox and PS3 (respectively) into Kyle’s TV, for amazing results.

Which then led to the next thought… You can get a 32″ HDTV at 1080p for about $500. That’s ‘kind of’ small for a home TV (though I certainly wouldn’t complain!). But for a monitor? A 32″ computer monitor at 1920×1280 isn’t bad. Yes, it’s the same resolution you might find in a 22″ LCD, meaning a lower pixel density, but it’s not as if you’re trying to use an old 50″ CRT at 640×480. It’d be halfway-decent. I’d want to try it before ordering a 32″ HDTV to use as a computer monitor, mind you, but in theory, it ought to be alright.

By the way… The 16:9 aspect ratio of HDTV sets (1920:1080, width:height) is exactly the same dimension as the sensors used on digital SLRs and the like.

There are a lot of attacks coming against Obama from the far-right… Many of them are utterly baseless, but the problem is that not many of them have been ‘debunked’ yet, so aside from people who are really familiar with his history and his entire platform, they’ll seem true. For example, there’s a strong argument that he’s going to raise taxes, not just on those making over $250k/year as he said, but on those making $32,000 a year or more. This is patently false, and comes from misinterpreting his non-binding vote for budget appropriations, but it sounds scary and if that’s all you see, you’re going to be shocked and want to vote for McCain.

The problem is that the Obama campaign is doing a bad job fighting these things. I posted about their Fight the Smears page, but it hasn’t been updated in a while… Or at all, really. I’ve submitted several things and they haven’t showed up, or even gotten a reply.

They need to have a person (or a group of people) on staff full-time who scour the web looking for all of the attacks being used against Obama. (There are a lot of them, and they’re easy to find.) But then, they need to be able to interact with policy advisers, spokespeople, and even Obama himself, to accurately counter each of these. And there needs to be a site full of these things. Or even a (moderated!) discussion forum.

I find it hard to believe that this position doesn’t already exist, but if it does, they’re utterly failing at communicating what they’re doing. It needs to be easy to rebut any of the attacks being used against him, and it’s currently not.