aubreyturner.org

I saw an animated banner ad on some website today (can’t recall which one at the moment) for Ready.gov.  The ad was a list of items that you should have on hand.  It flashed some items then directed you to their site for the full list.  The items specifically listed were a flashlight (I’ll give them this one; everyone should have one), a whistle (WTF?), and a radio (useful in some circumstances I suppose).  Of course they left out an important area of SHTF preparedness, specifically the ability to protect yourself.  And the most effective tool for such a purpose is the firearm.

I followed the link and looked around the site.  They had some practical advice that would be good to follow for any emergency situation (food, water, medical supplies, etc).  But not surprisingly, here’s what Ready.gov has to say on the topic:

Of course, I suppose saying nothing is better than what those GFB (Gun Fearing Bastards) would normally be inclined to say.  They’d much prefer an unarmed herd to a self-sufficient/protecting pack.  The radio and whistle are perfect giveaways to their agenda (sit back and wait for instructions; call for help from the “proper authorities”; don’t try to think/act for yourself).  Until they acknowledge that citizens are the ones who will be on the front lines of anything that happens here at home I have no choice but to conclude that the DHS is fundamentally unserious about its mission.

For the first couple of hours after I got back I had to have gauze pads in my mouth and limit my speech to avoid disrupting the sutures.  The gauze pads made it hard to speak anyway.

Given my penchant for technological solutions, a quick bit of Googling found this demo page for AT&T’s Natural Voices product.  It came in handy today.  I think I’ll keep the link around in case of a laryngitis attack.  It’s tempting to buy one of the products that uses Natural Voices, but it doesn’t seem cost-effective for something I’d use only on occasion.  I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about using demo software for “production” use and not purchasing the full product, though.

Yes, I could have just used a pad and a pen, but I type much faster than I write.  Not to mention that my handwriting varies from illegible to hieroglyphic unless I try really hard (which is slow), in which case it’s just messy.  Back in elementary school when handwriting used to be an area where you got graded, that was often the only thing that kept me off the honor roll.  I usually got all A’s, except for the C’s and D’s in handwriting.  Not that I’m bitter about that or anything…

I went to the surgeon’s office this morning for removal of my impacted wisdom teeth.  They gave me an IV with some kind of sedative in it, so I wasn’t completely out, I just had the sensation that there was some kind of activity going on, but not what it was.  They also gave me a long-acting local anesthetic, so I’m still numb (my lower lip in particular, which makes drinking an adventure). 

However, the local is supposed to wear off in the next few hours, and I’m already starting to get the first distant early warning inputs of coming pain.  They gave me a prescription for Vicodin.  I’ve had it before and I want to avoid using it unless absolutely necessary.  Just one dose taken at night will leave me out of it well into the next day.  However, given the early warnings I’m getting, I just may give it a try.  But if I should post something incoherent and rambling (at least more so than usual), it’s probably just the Vicodin.

I grilled a great big steak this evening because tomorrow morning I go to the oral surgeon to have my wisdom teeth removed (all four).  I’m expecting it will be a while before I can comfortably tear into a steak again.  The wisdom teeth haven’t been causing any pain, but they’re at a rather jaunty angle on the X-Rays and the two on the bottom are impacting the teeth next to them.  However, the main impetus for getting them out now is that the dentist thought she saw signs of the beginning of a condition where they can damage the jawbone (there was some kind of dark spot on the X-Ray).

It’s interesting that when I tell people what I’m having done everyone seems to have a horror story about it.  I’ve been wondering what purpose they serve, but I guess they’re kind of like the appendix.  They’re some kind of genetic leftovers that sit there like a ticking bomb, waiting to cause trouble at the most inopportune moment.

A company has combined available Wi-Fi technology with server-based voice recognition to create a Star Trek-like communicator.

Just as the communicators that Captain Kirk carried down to alien planets in the 1960s version of the Viacom TV show foreshadowed a world with ubiquitous mobile telephones, the two-ounce badge central to the Vocera Communications System was inspired at least in part by the “com badges” that appeared on later versions of the show. Just as Captain Picard would do, Vocera badge wearers can touch the slim device they wear on their uniforms, say who they want to talk to and, assuming that person is wearing his badge, be connected.

Interestingly, hospitals are the prime environment for this kind of thing.

It turns out that communication in a hospital is often an amazingly inefficient affair. Nurses and doctors spend a lot of time playing phone and page tag. Nurses need approvals for treatments from doctors who often aren’t easy to find. Paging the doctor usually takes several minutes, by which time a nurse may have left the station where she was waiting. Then the whole process starts over until finally one catches up with the other.

With the Vocera badge, a nurse needs only to hit a button and say the name of a doctor. The request goes over the hospital’s wireless network to the server, which then locates the appropriate doctor and delivers the message more or less instantly. If the doctor is available he or she can respond right back. If not, the nurse can ask for another doctor, by name or by specialty. Say “I need an anesthesiologist,” and the server finds the nearest anesthesiologist and connects him.

All of the components (Wi-Fi, voice recognition, VoIP) of this device are basically off-the-shelf items, but they’re the first company to marry them all together in a convenient package.

My mother has been contemplating getting a new car for quite a while, since she’s been driving a 1995 Ford Thunderbird.  It’s a nice enough car (and it’s got plenty of power), but it’s starting to show its age.  She had been gravitating towards the Ford Focus for a while, so I figured that she’d probably buy one.  When I arrived home on Friday night I noticed that her Thunderbird was still in the driveway, although she wasn’t there.  At first I thought she must have gone to work with her husband (they work at the same place), but later I noticed a set of keys on the kitchen table that had a tag attached that gave the model, color, and stock number for a new Focus, so I surmised that she’d gone ahead and purchased the car.  A little while after that I received a phone call from a salesman at the Ford dealership in Tyler who said he was ‘following up’ with her on the Focus.  Since it wasn’t the same dealership as the keys, I told the guy that she’d already bought one.

Later I learned that the reason she didn’t use the Tyler dealership is that the salesman outright lied to her.  She had gone in to look at the Focus and the salesman had a ZX3 model in stock, but she wanted the four-door.  The salesman told her that there wasn’t any other model of Focus available.  Fortunately, when she expressed interest in the Focus I showed her the Ford website where you can see the different models and compare them.  So she was armed with the knowledge that this guy was lying and she left.

She ended up going to a smaller dealership that was closer to home and where she was treated much better by the sales staff.  They didn’t apply pressure and the salesman made the effort to get her the color she wanted.  This is one of the things that I use to help identify a good dealership.  A lot of dealerships want to move whatever they have on the lot, buyer’s preferences be dammed.  I think the dealer in Tyler must have had some ZX3’s he was trying to move and was going to do whatever he could to dump one of them on my mother.  By doing so, not only did this dealer lose a sale, he lost a customer for life (more than one, actually, since I will now actively discourage anyone I know from going to him), while the other dealer gained my mother’s good will as well as mine.  If I was going to buy a Ford, I would definitely consider this dealer over the one in Tyler.

Sometimes businesses are so focused on the bottom line in the next day or week that they make choices that destroy their long-term viability.  There are only so many people you can lie to before word gets out.

Some obnoxious prick, calling themselves ‘Narco Abiss’ (who gave the email address nabiss@aol.com and who appears to be connected via Pacbell DSL ( adsl-66-127-57-133.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net)), has been commenting on some of my old posts by simply copying the entire post into the comment.  He didn’t bother to add any commentary.  I consider that obnoxious behavior, so I’ve deleted the comments and banned that IP address.

What a wonderful welcome home after returning from my weekend trip to East Texas…

Spring has started moving in here, and while most of the trees are still barren, lots of other things are starting to grow and flower.  While this is one of the advantages of this part of the country (it’s been near 70-degrees each day this week), it’s also a curse.  Spring is also allergy season in Texas and we’re already starting to get a dose of it.  While the Claritin keeps my head fairly clear and allows me to breathe, I still feel like I’ve been drained of energy.  I suppose my body is still trying to fight off the allergens, it’s just that the usual symptoms have been suppressed.

Anyhow, when I get this way I just don’t seem to be able to muster the wherewithal to post to this weblog, even though I see things that I want to write about.  Something about that blinking cursor just saps the thoughts right out of my head and I eventually give up in disgust and go do something else.

My sister is the manager for an apartment building in the Los Angeles area and Rob¹ works in a telesales center (incoming calls, they don’t do telemarking) for a technology company.  The company recently decided to close their local office and consolidate their sales centers.  The good news is that he was offered a job at another center, which is located in a town in the general vicnity of Denver².  They’ll finally be able to escape the socialist hellhole of Los Angeles.  I may fly out there on the 29th to help them move (i.e. drive their car for them so they don’t have to tow it and can get by with a smaller truck). 

My sister is very excited about the move because she’s gotten very tired of dealing with the people out there in LA.  She mentioned an incident from a couple of weeks ago that nearly made me fall out of my chair.  She was crossing the street near a McDonalds that is close to their apartment and this guy who was in his 20’s stopped in the middle of the street and just stared at my 10-year-old niece.  He tried to talk to her and my sister intervened by putting herself between them.  She said she was so shocked by it she never said anything to the guy and just kept walking.  But this wasn’t the only time things like this have happened.  If nothing else, she’s hoping that the per-capita level of pervs will be lower in Colorado.

I’m just glad they’re finally getting out.  I’ve had a feeling of dread for as long as she and the girls have been living in California.  I know that from my visits to both places, Colorado feels a lot more like home than California ever did.  This will also mean that it’ll be a little easier to visit.  According to Mapquest, the distance from my house to their new apartment is 705 miles, which is something I might be able to manage in one (long) day of driving.

¹ Rob and my sister have been together for nearly eight years now, but they’ve never gotten married.  Except for the ceremony and the piece of paper, they might as well be married, though.  It’s left me at a loss for exactly the right word to use.  Boyfriend just doesn’t cut it, and SO (Significant Other) just sounds weird. 

² Due to a situation with one of her ex’s, who is also a felon, I won’t give the actual town.  You never know if the bastard or one of his friends might be reading this, although it’s likely he’s still in jail somewhere.  That guy never met a cop who didn’t arrest him for something (mostly bad checks and back child support). 

Whenever I do business online I tend to create a new email address for each company I do business with.  Late last week I received a spam email at the address I used when signing up for the online account access feature that Cingular offers.  I rechecked all the account settings as well as their privacy policy and determined that their policy is not to share email addresses with any outside agencies.  Further, I know that the email address that I used has not ever been used for any other purpose (i.e. I’ve never sent anything using it, since I’d have to reconfigure my email client to do so).

The spam was for some kind of cruise website and came from local-newswire.com, which isn’t affiliated with Cingular in any way.  This is actually more alarming than if they’d just sold the email, since it could indicate a breach in their security.  It’s possible that they sold my address, but it seems unlikely since that specifically violates their stated privacy policy.  It’s not that I have that much trust in Cingular, it’s that from what I’ve seen they seem to handle everything in-house when it comes to email advertising.  I also confirmed this when I called customer service to complain to them about the spam. 

If they didn’t sell my address, then it means that either someone explicitly broke into one of their systems and stole the addresses or that one of their systems was otherwise compromised and the addresses were harvested (i.e. through a worm).  The worm scenario is more likely than you might think, given that most of the worms we’ve seen lately have been created by spammers to send spam.  It doesn’t seem like that much of a leap for them to use the worms to harvest emails.  Alternately, it could just be that a mass-mailing worm harvested addresses from an infected system at Cingular and sent out emails to a spammer who took the addresses from them.

Regardless, I know that I never initiated any action that would have resulted in receiving this email.  I know that I opted out of all marketing emails when signing up for the Cingular account.  I know that the email address that I used is not subject to being easily guessable (i.e. it wasn’t a common name, it wasn’t just the company’s name, and it contained an underscore).  I know that none of my systems has been infected by a worm (I run weekly virus scans, use LiveUpdate, have the feature enabled to scan each email that is received, and don’t use any of the Microsoft email clients).  Somehow, either intentionally or though negligence, my email address was leaked by Cingular and picked up by the spamming bastards at local-newswire.com. 

The Cingular customer service rep opened a ticket with their IT support to report the problem, and he said he’d let me know the outcome.  I guess I’ll just wait and see if they turn up anything, although I don’t expect much.  If Cingular was compromised, it would not be in their interest to admit it.