soapbox

Michael made a post a while ago about the Eye-Fi memory card that can both store pictures in your camera and automatically send them to you. It turns out that they might not be such a bad idea, especially if you tend to lose things.

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0534545220080606

Basically, the woman had one of the cards in her camera and left the camera in a restaurant full of pictures of her baby eating its first food and other important pictures. The people who ended up taking the camera walked by an open wifi access point and all the pictures got emailed to the camera owner… along with pictures of the kids who took the camera.

(I’ll try not to get on my high horse about the fact that doing this basically requires that everyone be using unsecured wifi base stations named “linksys”…)

A few years ago, I went on a kick of enfriending basically everyone that I knew from my home town in Alaska and I ended up with one friend who was one of the little kids in my church growing up. Of course, he grew up and was apparently gay and had issues with depression.

Sometime earlier this year, he ended up committing suicide.

That means that now I have a dead friend. Since Facebook doesn’t seem to have a policy of purging its users of the dead or just people who don’t use Facebook often, it looks like his profile will just continue on espousing “long live the flying spaghetti monster” as a religious view.

On one hand, it’s kind of odd that the page will probably last for as long as facebook does. (What is the lifetime of a social networking site anyway?) On the other hand, it’s a little bit comforting that the web will remember you even if the rest of the world doesn’t.

Kirsten and I have been working on a name, and it’s really really hard. We have a good name, but is it the perfect name? Should a name even be perfect?

Anyway, a few weeks ago on http://www.overheardinnewyork.com there was a great story:

Woman 1: I’m so tired of everyone calling my daughter by the wrong name!
Woman 2: What are they calling her?
Woman 1: Everyone calls her “Lady Nasty”.
Woman 2: What’s her real name?
Woman 1: Her name is La’Dynasty.

So now we’re thinking something along those lines.

So, we picked a pediatrician yesterday. He’s actually our neighbor, the same one whose tree fell on Kirsten’s car in the fall. He’s extremely highly recommended too and his office is close to the house, so he should be a good person to deal with.

Anyway, I learned two interesting things.

1. Adults should get immunized again for whooping cough. Getting it just causes cold-like coughing in adults, but adults are the main reservoir for the disease in the human population. It’s all included in the tetanus booster these days.

2. With all the drama about possible connections between vaccines and Autism, he’s very pro vaccination. In his words, “I’ve been practicing medicine long enough to have seen some of the diseases we immunize against.” Some really horrible stories… like one 6-week old that he helped treat when he was an intern who had whooping cough. The kid would have attacks of coughing so bad that it would go into respiratory arrest and have to be resuscitated on a daily basis. And this went on for weeks.