soapbox

With my moving down to Boston, I feel it is no longer reasonable that I continue my fight against modernization by refusing to get a cell phone. I won’t go into the many reasons why I dislike them, sufficed to say I think they herald the end of civilization, but now I find myself weighing the prospect of having 2 land line phone bills vs. 1 shared cell phone plan.

So, since this is my first time I’d like to request input from all of you as to what I should look for in a cell phone plan and in a cell phone from said plan. Neither Kathy nor I talk on the phone that much and we’ll primarily be calling either each other or family back in New Mexico.

What says the council in this my hour need?

One of the founding fathers of Rock ‘N’ Roll (along with Chuck Berry and Elvis) has left us… More commonly known by his stage name, Bo Diddley (79) suffered a heart attack yesterday.

Any news site will have a little article, but I encourage the blog readership to invest a little time learning about the man and his music. Mick Jaggar perhaps said it best - “watching Bo Diddley was university for me.” If you want just one link, I recommend very nice obit from the Washington Post.

I only once got to see Bo Diddley in person, but what a great show it was. It was in the late 90s, maybe ‘98 or ‘99, so he was definitely over 70, but the man rocked for almost three hours - and I got to see most of it from the front row! A buddy of mine was working security but he wasn’t feeling well, so I offered to sub for him - so noble of me. I can still hear the “Bo Diddley beat”… bum bum bum bu-bum-bum on that square guitar of his, still with lightning-fast feet.

Seriously, watch some of his stuff on YouTube. I just got stuck for 20 minutes while I looked up a link. Like this.

“Bo, you don’t know Diddley.”

So I just this week had one of my credit cards (involuntarily) upgraded to a “smart” card - it has an RFID chip embedded, so you can use the card like speedpass or other proximity-scanned systems. Now it’s one thing to use this technology to be able to get into your dorm when both hands are full:

…but quite another to have your wallet broadcasting your credit card info. Especially given all the stuff I’ve read about how hackable RFID is (for example, here and here), I’m definitely considering resigning this card to at-home/only-only purchasing. Or maybe just line my wallet with aluminum foil?

Nathaniel, given your spouse’s experience with this sort of payment system (they say it speeds transaction times by 23 seconds and that average expenditures increase significantly with these things), any reassurance? Others? I know that Speedpass wands use encryption but I read an article recently saying that the encryption is pathetic and would take just a few seconds to break.

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.

Apparently I’ve had several messages delayed or gone missing.  So apologies to any of you in blogland for seeming to have ignored your mail, and similarly have any of your received any email from me in the last week or two?  No worries if you’ve just been busy, but it would be nice to know.

-m

Last night I was backing up my computers and I came to a realization that any hard drive smaller than 500 GB is a waste. I have a collection of cute little bus-powered 20, 30, and 60 GB portable drives that are too small to back up any of my computers. Even the 200 GB drive that I bought when I was finishing writing my thesis is now too small to back up all the pictures that I have.

Even worse, if I want to do fancy Time Machine backups using the features in MacOS X 10.5, I really need 3 times the space of the hard drive being backed up just to ensure that incremental backups are kept well into the future. For my iMac, this means that I need to get a 1 TB drive.

Luckily, those drives are for sale now and don’t actually cost any more than the 200 GB drive did 2 years ago.

You have more RAM than I do, you run 10.5, your emacs colors are awesome, and yet I’ve been treating you like crap the last few days. I’m sorry.