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.

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.

I swear, you will be lots dumber by the end of it. Seriously, wha?

(actually, only the first part is weird.  the last bit is remarkably coherent and well-enunciated.)

When I display posts by category on soapbox (for example to look at all the posts in the POTW category at once), it doesn’t display the images. I guess maybe you set it up that way for a good reason, but it seems like it would be useful to see the images when browsing previous posts? I wondered if that could be changed maybe?

From my research it seems to be that the wordpress “theme has an archive.php or category.php that is using the_excerpt in The_Loop instead of the_content.” [1]

Does anybody know if it’s possible to replace the built-in ethernet on the Powerbooks?  Mine seems to be having trouble passing more than about half the data it tries to send or receive, meaning that about the only thing it’s useful for is pinging another computer at this point.  Frustrating, because I can’t get Maryland’s wireless to work either most of the time, and I can only use my laptop to print if I’m on the ethernet connection in the department because of a firewall.