All posts by djones

money, rant

Money ad nauseum

4 Comments

I saw that the topic of the day over at One-Minute Writer was: “Can money buy happiness?” I want to consider the obverse: “Can lack of money cause unhappiness?” That is because I firmly believe that money cannot buy happiness, but I almost as firmly believe that lack of money can cause unhappiness. So how do I support my feeling that lack of money can cause unhappiness?

The prime example supporting the thesis can be found every day in the world around us. People (adults and children) are condemned to death simply because there is no money to pay for the drugs or the operation or the food or … that would keep them alive. The failure to prevent senseless deaths for want of as little as $15 per year per person seems to be a real indictment of humanity. But the issue as far as the thesis here can be reduced to the question of whether death can be equated to unhappiness in some way.

I know that some would argue that death is not unhappiness. The Christian far right and religions with a tradition of belief in martyrdom would argue that death and the subsequent journey to heaven is the opposite of unhappiness.  After all, consider the rapture of conservative Christianity and the martyrdom of conservative Islam and other such teachings of other religions. I don’t have any unique insight as to whether the victims themselves are unhappy, but I would argue that even if the victim was not unhappy, the circle of friends and family connected to the victim certainly are. It is the rare parent indeed that is not unhappy to see their child die. It is even rarer for any person not to have emotional ties to other people such that those people are not unhappy to see them die.

So I’ll leave it open to the theologians and moralists for a “politically correct” answer. But my personal answer has to be that a lack of money can indeed cause unhappiness. Being a logical sort, you’ll note I immediately pushed the argument right to the wall in equating death to unhappiness. That is because illuminating a question in black and white can make the shiftiness of shades of gray less entrapping. No matter whether you want to push it to the edge or not, you probably have an opinion on the question. So – Can lack of money cause unhappiness?

[ As and aside: I have to say that the ammo for Stupid Saturday is growing by leaps and bounds. While I really want to thank the universe for stepping up and making tomorrow’s post easy, I am at the same time very concerned for the survival of the world as we know it. It is probably good that intelligence is not a required trait for species survival. More tomorrow. ]

comments, oddness

Comment Moderation?

8 Comments

As I travel the blogosphere, I am puzzled by those blogs that moderate the comments. It is curious to me that some people feel that they have to moderate the comments and others just have the standard minimal captchas as a machine generated spam weeder. It seems to bear no relationship to the volume of visitors or number of comments or any other visible causative agent. So that of course left my mind running through the possible reasons that an author would chose to moderate the comments. I can understand perfectly the need for private blogs, etc. It’s just the comment moderation that seems a bit odd.

The very first possibility that came to mind was the simple prevention of machine based comment spamming (otherwise know as botnet attacks). That seems suspect because I haven’t yet seen any raw spamming of an unmoderated blog that has reasonable captcha authentication. I have even seen a couple of sites that have no captcha requirement, but simply put up an error message every time a comment is posted, forcing the comment author to re-submit the comment before it is accepted. It would seem that such sites would be extremely vulnerable to spamming, but I have not seen hints of it happening yet. Maybe the time delay to re-submit is enough to deter the machine spammers.

The next possibility that came to mind was cyber-stalking activity. People being stalked on the internet might feel vulnerable to allowing comments from the stalker to appear on the blog, implying a relationship that does not exist in reality. The problem with that hypothesis is that anyone being seriously cyber-stalked has probably moved the blog private so they can control who is reading what.

Then of course there is the possibility that they are simply trying to avoid offensive comments. But that would seem to fall under the same category as the first possibility. It also seems if it was going to be a real problem, it should have been apparent on the blogs which are not moderated (even some of the sex related ones which would be the obvious target). The only way this idea makes sense is if certain posters draw certain types of commentators. I suppose this is possible.

Another thought that came to mind was the need of some people to be in absolute control of their environment. I.e. in words of the vernacular, they are control freaks. I cannot think of any reasonable refutation for this possibility.

Along similar lines is the fear of the possibility of disagreeable comments, be they pornographic, spammish, whatever. Just the fear that it might happen could be bad enough to tempt some people to turn on the moderation button.

The final possibility that comes to my mind is the presence of one or a small group of people with a target relationship to the blog author that have been problematic in the past. This could include the Ex from h*ll that leaves bitter and vituperative comments, the former friend that just wants to snipe, you name it. This actually seems like a reasonable cause for moderation.

I’ll close with a request of those of you who read this blog: why did you decide to either moderate or not moderate your comments? Were any of my guesses close to the mark? Am I just an insane idiot? No wait! don’t answer that!

pvr, software, writer's challenge

Writer’s Challenge Response

10 Comments

Mama Kat ‘s been at it again with a new Writer’s Challenge . This one was a bit tough for me to respond to because some of it is ground I already covered here and some of it … So here it all is in the form of a Q and A session.

4.) Tell us about your pet! If you have a weird infatuation with your dog or cat we want to hear about it (or if they just plain drive you crazy)…but please don’t compare them to children. It’s just not the same.

If you want to hear about the dogs of our married life, go here . It was a topic a bit ago.

3.) Who was your first bloggy friend? How did you find each other? Do you still correspond?

Given that I am prehistoric in computer years, my first online friends predate blogs and even the existence of the internet as we know it. I don’t know that there was a first that I can single out, but there is a group of people from that time were dedicated sounding boards and late night talkers.

We met via various BBS’s from technical and management discussion issues. Many of the acquaintances made then survived the development of the internet and changes in our various life directions. It was interesting to see discussions move from BBSes to email to the predecessors of chat rooms to … The dynamics changed at each stage and the people involved changed as well since we were all growing up and having families and … Not all that different than what happens today as people shift from chat to blog to twitter to skype to vlog to …

I still occasionally talk to some of them (now more than 20 years later), but the conversations have tapered off as we all headed of in different directions – personally, professionally, and geographically. One is a professor at Harvey Mudd College, another is a teacher at an Indian reservation college, one died, another went insane, …

You didn’t ask about the real nut cases met via the internet. One of the more outstanding oddballs used to wear a loaded sidearm into the server room, run a porno empire’s servers as his second job, had a duly certified art school that he owned and ran (specializing is certain types of art if you get my drift), and registered really odd domains just so he could make puns on the names. Other than that he was a pretty normal nerd. I still get a note from him every couple of years now. [As an example, he once registered the domain evil.com just so he could claim to be the root of all evil (root@evil.com) *AND* he put it as the logo on his business cards.]

2.) Ask a loved one to use 6 descriptive words to describe you and report your findings. How well do they know you?

Given that L is under the weather, the words would probably have been “go away and let me be”, which doesn’t say a lot about how well she knows me. After 30+ years of marriage and close to 40 years of knowing each other, we probably know each other as well as two individuals can know each other. As my mother put it a few years ago when we had been married for longer than I lived with her and dad – “You’ve had him longer than I did; any thing you don’t like is your problem now.”

1.) Describe your latest obsession.

I’ve been looking at memory models and their interaction with digital TV. This is brought on by the PVR craze typified by Tivo and others. Some of my earlier work work before Tivo existed was in the development of context sensitive search relevance and how it applied to digital TV guides. Now you can build your own digital TV with your own program guides with  about $20 of hardware from EBay and some programming elbow grease on top of Open Source software.

Why is this my obsession of the week? Because you can do a great amount with very little and the problems all are amenable to solution by divide and conquer – i.e. you don’t have to have a blinding flash of insight to see a solution, just break the problem into pieces and solve each piece in a workman like way. It means one can get enjoyment without delaying gratification for long periods. But there are also places where a flash of insight could change the whole view of how to approach the problem. So you get the quickies and the long term rewards as well.

calls, climate, mayor, misc, weather

Disordered Thoughts

2 Comments

I’ve been thinking of adopting a theme for certain days in the posts here. I figure that might serve to keep me a bit more organized and to give you the readers a chance to build expectations for what you will be reading. The problem is what to choose for the themes. It is a safe bet that I’m not going to be following a theme like HNT (Half Nekkid Thursday) or TMI (Too Much Information Tuesday) . First off, because I’m shy, and more importantly, because I don’t want my readers to run screaming from their computer screens clawing their eyes out. I’ll probably make Wednesday be Writer’s Wednesday since that would be a good time to put up the response to Mama Kat ‘s Writer’s Challenges. (Did I get enough s’s in there?) And I kind of like the idea of Stupid Saturday to recount the stupidest thing seen or read during the week. So what do you think?

Today was one of those days. You know the type, when the phone rings often but the calls are a wrong number or have no real purpose in being. And of course, no day is complete with the requisite call to complain about something. Most people who call the mayor to complain are just misinformed. Sometimes it is because they actually believe what was written in the local newspaper (which is often retracted/revised in the coming days) or because the coffee shop gossip circuit has got it wrong. Most times when you get to the root of the problem and explain what is really going on, they do an Emily Latella imitation and say “Never mind.” The problem is that every so often, the caller has a real problem or a legitimate beef. So you listen through the Emily Latella ‘s of the world so that you can get and respond to the useful calls.

This evening when I called L and the son at the mountain abode, I got the answering machine. So I figured they must have fallen asleep in their chairs/couches. Sure enough, a bit later L calls to say she was sleeping in the chair and the son was asleep on the couch when I called. L has been under the weather for the last day or so, so I was calling to see if she was feeling better. She was, she’s still tired but getting better. The son on the other hand has been burning the candle at both ends, getting in at 2am just to go back to work at 7am. So of course this evening when he got in early, he took L to send off some business papers, grabbed some food, and then fell asleep on the couch. I remember being able to sleep on any couch, no matter how short. I am old enough now that sleeping on a couch means waking up in pain and walking like a hunchback for several hours.  Oh to be young again!

It interesting just how different the weather in the mountains and here can be. Although here and there is only 300 miles or so apart and are at roughly the same latitude, they are at different altitudes. Here is at ~3900 feet, the mountain abode is at ~9200 feet. So today it is in the 40’s and a little windy here, but n the mountains the wind is howling and it is snowing like mad. There they have something like a 7 foot layer of snow base already, but here there is no snow on the ground at all. The thing missing here is moisture in any form. I hope it rains or snows soon or the winter wheat won’t be growing come spring and the dryland farmers will have a rough year. The climate out here on the plains is semi-arid bordering on arid, which is the technical term for “damn near desert.” We average less than 12 inches of precipitation a year. The last couple of years have been closer to 6 inches. I always kind of picture that the Australian outback might have a very similar feel.

Well, I have to get some other things done yet tonight and have to be up early to mosey down to the radio station for the show in the morning. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

dentist, medical center, physician, weather

A Potpourri of Nothing

3 Comments

I have been officially crowned (and of course billed). It is so neat to chew again. Might even be worth all it cost.

I was talking to a colleague as I left the dentists office, and we shared the observation that there are few things that can hurt more from less damage than teeth. He is even older than me (geologic time maybe?) and he has both implants and a bridge. His bridge had started causing problems over the holidays, so he was waiting to get in to see the dentist and hoping that it wasn’t going to be a problem with his anchor teeth.

The whole conversation led me to consider the history of dentistry. What prompted the first person who figured that they could try to do anything other that just remove a hurting tooth? (Go here to see a timeline of dentistry. ) I figure it was either an accident ala “hey, since I stuffed that mud and leaf mix into that hole in my tooth, it doesn’t hurt as bad!” or it was a sadist who wasn’t real good at the concept or maybe just liked to string the pain out. In any case, it ranks right up there with the idea of primitive brain surgery in oddness. I suppose one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. In the ancient days, people eventually wore their teeth out and starved to death when they couldn’t tear and grind food anymore. At least today there is a fix. I literally cannot imagine what it would have been like to have an impacted tooth prior to about 700 AD when the Chinese write of the first amalgams (“silver paste”).

Onto more breezy subjects. Today was one of those days where the temperature itself wasn’t too bad, but all day long there was a stiff breeze that made it feel down right cool if you stepped out of sheltered areas. I find that harder to handle than days when it is just brutally cold. When it is like this, you look at the thermometer and it says 30+ degrees and then you step outside and out of shelter of the building and … BRRRRR. But at least the day did have some redeeming qualities. I got to use my Christmas present of a new pair of sweat pants for my walk. That was pretty comfy. And the sun was out so that it was not depressing like the other day. Hooray!

Well, time to do my homework for the meeting tomorrow morning. I have a 7:30 breakfast meeting of the physicians recruitment committee at the local regional medical center. We’ve been successful in recruiting physicians for most of our needs except for full time ER doctors. The medical center has used locum tenens physicians to staff the ER for the past while, but the real goal is have regular full time staffing. (For those whose Latin is a bit weak and don’t hang with MD speakers, locum tenens means temporary at this location or place-holder in the sense of lieutenant.) 

We of the committee try to put the community and area forth with all the bells and whistles to aide in recruitment. We usually have representatives from the county government, the city government, the local community college, the Welcome Wagon, the banks and local business, and the local school district. It seems to be a unique approach. We often times get thank you notes from the visiting physicians and their families, thanking us for making it easier to get a feel for the community and noting how unique it was. The whole idea is to get questions answered right at the source. Seems to work well.

Rural areas like this one have several specialties where it is hard to recruit medical personal. Number one is for appropriately trained and certified ER doctors and number two is surgeons. Both are hard to recruit because the successful candidate is going to have to do a wide range of procedures without the nearby presence of specialists in many areas. Modern medical training tends to specialize the med students so finding wide ranging ER docs and meatball surgeons is harder than family practitioners, etc. I suspect with time and the pending nation wide shortage of physicians, the models for rural medical centers may have to change or else medical school curriculum will need to be revised once more.

Back to the football game …