Prejudice

Lie and lay. Ensure and insure. Loose and Lose. I hate, sight unseen, people who confuse similar-sounding words.

Does that make me homophonic?

I have to stop reading WebMD

Every time I read WebMD I discover another disease that I'm suffering from. I read the list of symptoms and lo and behold, I have that. According to my self-diagnosis, I have everything from acne to zoster virus. Amazingly, I have stuff it shouldn't be possible to have at the same time. I have insomnia and narcolepsy. I have diarrhea and constipation. I have all the symptoms of both hyperthyroidism and hypothyroidism (I may be the world's smallest giant). I also have anxiety disorder and depression (at least, I do after reading WebMD for a while).

I seem to be particularly prone to stuff that's named after people. I think I have Crohn's disease, Graves' disease, and Reiter's syndrome. I also have Reyes' Syndrome -- and he has mine.

I've decided to stop reading about anything that's named after two doctors as those seem to be the ones that are so unpleasant, no one doctor wanted their name associated with it. That rules out Guillain-Barre', Epstein-Barr, Kreuzfeld-Jacob, and Beri-Beri. OK, that last one isn't really named after the Beri brothers, but its still pretty nasty.

Last week my armpit was hurting. According to my self-diagnosis, I have bubonic plague.

Either that, or my t-shirt is too tight.

Clinically Proven

Carl Zetie has been clinically proven to be effective!*


*This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. Carl Zetie is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Vegetarians not so smart?

From the BBC News website this morning:

"Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, a study says. A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10... Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian - although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken." [my emphasis]

Perhaps they should deduct 10 points from people who think fish and chicken are vegetables.

Video game ratings

With Christmas approaching I have been seeing a lot of video game ads on TV, and apparently the industry has a rating system: E for Everyone, T for Teen, and M for Mature. What I don't understand is, given than most of the ads seem to revolve around rather sad adolescent male fantasies involving guns, cars, and women with extremely improbable anatomies...

...why are none of these games rated I for Immature?

Animals facing extinction: please help

Some of nature's most noble animals are facing extinction. You can help simply by refusing to buy products made from their skins. Without customers, hunters will leave these precious natural specimens alone. The three that I'm most worried about right now are:

-- The silver arctic faux. Somehow it's become acceptable, even among the fur-conscious, to wear faux fur, and many people never even stop to ask themselves where faux fur comes from. The answer, of course, is the artic faux. Act now: ban faux fur before its too late for the silver artic faux.

-- The nauga. Naugas, hunted for their naugahides, almost went extinct once before in the 1930s and are now so rarely seen that some specialists think it may already be too late to save them.

-- The fake leopard. Now so rare that its pelt has become too expensive for anything but shoes, fake leopard coats change hands for ridiculous sums in vintage clothing stores.

Digital technology sucks (but at least Costco is good about returns)

I love how cheap digital devices are getting... but is it just me or are we sacrificing a LOT of quality in the process? In the past two months I've had to return the following shopping list of tech toys:

• Famous brand MP3 player, after 2 days. It wouldn't hold a charge.
• Network attached storage after four weeks. Disk drive died.
• Low-end (but well known brand) USB 2.0 disk drive after less than two weeks. This one was barely even used, it was sitting out on my network for when I finally get around to editing video. Next thing you know: click of death.
• Digital media player, after 20 minutes. Got it installed and running. Upgraded its firmware (you should see the list of bugs in the shipped 1.0 version...). It died, wouldn't even power up. Yep, 20 minutes to go from open box to a $300 brushed aluminum brick. To add insult to injury, the tech I spoke to told me that I really shouldn't upgrade the firmware without contacting tech support first... which kind of makes me wonder why the setup instructions tell you to upgrade the firmware if it doesn't happen automatically.
• Don't even get started on the nightmare upgrade process I went through to get newer maps on my GPS navigation unit...

That's well over half the stuff I've bought in the last six months. And (with the exception of the MP3 player, the cheapest item on the list) I haven't been exchanging this stuff, I've been returning it for a refund and either buying a different brand or deciding forget it, the stuff's not ready for primetime. So not only is this costing companies time and money dealing with the returns, its costing them business.

Now I don't think it's me or that I have some kind of digital touch of death -- I am reasonably technical, worked in IT for the past two decades, and I've successfully done stuff like upgrading memory and drives in my desktops and laptops and installing interface cards. But this stuff, which ought to be an embedded system that just works out of the box, seems to be getting very shoddy lately. I don't know if its the rush to beat competitors to market, or the relentless pressure to drive down costs. Or maybe its that a different breed of developer works on these things now that they contain so much software -- a developer with a hacker mentality of "good enough, we'll fix it in release 2" rather than an engineering mentality of "once it's in the field it's a pain to fix, so do it right". Or maybe its just companies that don't know how to measure what this is truly costing them.

But I've learned one important lesson in all this: Buy stuff from Costco because their returns process is completely painless.

There is a small silver lining to this story. Many of these items came with mail-in rebates. And their processes don't seem to be sufficiently integrated to cancel your rebate if you return the item. So I've gotten about $150 for my pain. Which seems about fair.