soapbox

This is grabbed directly from the June issue of Men’s Health, but I thought it was worth posting: a list of eight medications that doctors said they themselves wouldn’t take.  Not cheerful, but just in case…

• Adavair - use only if your other asthma meds are REALLY not working,
• Avandia - maybe helps diabetes, but doubles the risk of heart failure.
• Celebrex- still available even though Bextra and Vioxx have been pulled for gastro issues, liver damage, and heart damage.
• Ketek -  super-antibiotic with liver and heart-rhythm problems.
• Prilosec & Nexium - suspected link with cardiac issues, elevated bone loss rate.
• Visene Original - “it gets the red out by shrinking the blood vesses” - can perpetuate the problem.
• Pseuodephedrine - raises blood pressure and heart rate,  can worsen symptoms of benign prostate disease and glaucoma.

I’ll just go with this one bullet-style:

• Randomly switched on the TV just as the last episode of Idol started.  Now apparently this is the six or seventh season?  But I’ve never seen one, so I decided to stick around and learn a little about pop cuture.
• Was also intrigued because Tony Kornheiser (of ESPN’s PTI fame) makes reference to Idol on his podcast, so I had some familiarity with his opinions of the show.
• David A. scared me, he looked two-dimensional and very breakable.  Tony K called him “a Disney kid” and “Celine Dion as a seventeen-year-old boy”.  Great voice, sang Elton John very well, but ugh.  couldn’t watch him, but convinced taht he’ll win.
• David Cook is a much better musician, but not the heart-throb of 13-year-old girls, so he can’t win.

I feel kinda dirty now for having posted on this.  But it’s been several years since I posted something about The OC, so maybe it’s alright?

So, even though the major credit card companies do not  concede any wrongdoing, a class-action lawsuit against them is in its final stages, which means that you have ~10 days left to claim $$ from them.

This stems from the foreign currency fees charged by Visa/Mastercard/etc, so click here if you used your credit card overseas between 1996 and 2006.   I haven’t finished it yet -updates today or tomorrow, but I am told that the best way is to call first and get a claim number, then finish it up online.  (But it has to be done/completed by May 30th!)

There are three different options: if you didn’t travel much, then you just get $25.  Or you can total up your time spent abroad, or if you spent a lot and have absurdly good records, you can enter the amount that you spent abroad.

So, I have many excuses for my very poor posting frequency in the last couple months, but you know what they say about excuses, so instead I’ll just provide a Nathaniel-ish report of the weekend.

Saturday morning was spent under the kitchen sink, seeking to find and then fix a leak that resulted in the formation of a rather significant puddle in that cabinet every time the garbage disposal was run.  Technically I could have called the maintenance guys for the apartment complex,  but usually their contribution consists of “don’t put big things down it” (we don’t).  Basically the fault lies with shoddy assembly and materials, so I replaced the crappy no-O-ring screw-down PVC connectors and added some caulk.  Amazingly, our sink cabinet now stays dry!

Then Saturday afternoon we spent six hours furniture shopping downtown; first Macy’s, then Jerome’s, then back to Macy’s once we realized how (relatively) crappy Jerome’s inventory was.  We didn’t plan it this way, but Saturday just happened to be a Mother’s Day/One Day sale so we ended up getting a pretty nice sofa for almost half off.

This is a pretty crappy post since I don’t have any pictures to post.  Maybe once the furniture is delivered next week I can upload something.  Really, all of this is supposed to be an inducement to visit SD, since we now have a more comfy seat for your Nintendo-playing fun.  Oh, and a beach a couple miles away, and at least a 70% chance of sun.

I guess I lied: one photo. come visit!

I would assume to no great surprise of most of the blog’s readership, the recent AAPL vs MSFT showdown (conducted by Popular Mechanics) had a decisive winner (hint: not the blue screen of death).  Several interesting details of the contest caught my eye, however.

The ease-of-use and subjective ratings for OSX and Vista were surprisingly similar; it was in the hardware performance categories that OSX destroyed Vista.  The Mac benchmarks for Vista (while running bootcamp) were slightly but consistently better than those of the PC-Vista benchmarks, but even if you subtract the Mac-PC hardware difference, Vista is, as we all know by now, and ugly beast.

Another funny thing - check out the reader comments at the bottom of the article.  The Coke vs Pepsi analogy was made, and it’s an accurate one: the stereotypes still persist and Mac people make fun of PC people, and PC people make fun of Mac people.  I choose to use Mac products because they don’t suck, but that doesn’t mean I blindly follow whatever line Steve Jobs tries to sell me.  anyway, good times.

I found the news that Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata interesting. An Indian company is buying the two main car companies of England. I’ll be Gandhi didn’t see that one coming.

We’ll ignore the fact that buying the two companies in the first place has turned out to be a $3.5 billion mistake. I wonder if they’re going to sell off Volvo too. Maybe Volvo is making them money though?

This post is a little delayed, but better late than never?  Anyway, the ‘07 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter came out a little while ago, and as always I got a good chuckle out of it.  Well, out of the BRK website, as well as the letter.

Seriously, for what is arguably the most respected institution in all of business/finance, it has to be the most basic/simple actively updated website on the web, of any kind.  If you can find another website, updated in 2008 (or even 2007) that is less fancy, please post it.