boy, my sense of timing could use a tuneup. two of my favorite things - information and disease¹ - now taste great together, thanks to google and the harvard medical school.

it’s healthmap. and in these days of the census bureau goofing around with the protocols for the 2010 headcount, it’s a breath of fresh air.

hmmm. they appear to have a jobs listing…²
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¹ see - i didn’t even have to create new categories for this post. that’s how near and dear those topics are to me.
² just kidding! i really like my current job!

would be better if they were optimized for the iphone screen.

so say we all.

(that link will expire in about a month)

awhile back, my laptop was OOC (out of commission) due to a broken dc-in board. jesse, a tech-head friend, was kind enough to fix it in return for some beer and a trout-and-asparagus dinner. for several months, all was well in the world of laloca’s laptop computing.

then, just this week, i noticed the strangest thing. my laptop wouldn’t connect to the house wireless. or rather, it would connect, but it would self-assign an IP address. it was driving me nuts. could verizon’s service really be so bad that the router was konking out at least twice a day?

well, i’m sure it could, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. because i discovered that my laptop connects just fine as long as there’s another computer in the house actively connected to the router.

strange, ain’t it?

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other things i won’t have time to properly blog about:

• two problematic windows in the house were replaced, and a whole passel of storm windows were installed today. they’re burgundy, which is going to necessitate a repainting of the house’s trim. the difference on the first floor is amazing. suddenly, there’s no breeze.
• what with g and me working long hours, the dog’s getting more neurotic. i considered giving him a klonopin yesterday, but decided against it.
• i had to take 4 hours off work for a doctor’s appointment today (and managed to make it from south of 66 to walter reed in half an hour). i still put in an 8.5 hour work day.
• i should sleep more.

for the last several weeks, maybe months, my 12″ powerbook has been out of commission. something about the power input thingy needing to be replaced, according to my friend jesse who diagnosed it - not unlike the cartalk guys - from my verbal description. (”i plug it in and nothing happens. nothing happens no matter which of the 3 power cords i use to plug it in. and they all work on the other powerbooks in the house.”)

so i sent off to ifixit for the proper piece (according to jesse), and it arrived faster than expected.

and jesse came over yesterday to jessefixit.

i won’t bore with all the details, but turns out the last time the powerbook had been stripped down totally - likely when the CD/DVD drive was replaced twice, and when it was still under the applecare warranty - the idjits who “fixed” it botched the job. the heat sink was missing one of two screws it needed to hold it down to the motherboard, and the other screw had come undone and was floating about the innards of the machine. beyond that, the thermal paste had cracked and moved from where it was supposed to be, likely accounting for the excess heat in my lap whenever i had my ‘puter on for more than ten minutes.

luckily, g and james went out to get more thermal paste (and more potatoes and lemons, so there would be enough starch for dinner and i’d be able to make hollandaise for the asparagus), and jesse was able to complete the repair, mostly. the heat sink is still held down by a single screw - hopefully this time it won’t migrate - and i’m under strict instructions not to drop the ‘puter again.

then i made dinner, and it was good. pan-fried trout in butter, garlic, and fresh thyme; oven-roasted rosemary red potatoes, and steamed asparagus. all with as much hollandaise as you could want. james, not liking of the fish, made himself a steak. and gave the snuffster the bone. the snuffster was happy, perhaps happier than the laloca at the prospect of a functioning 12″.

and there ya go. a productive day, despite the disturbing way it began with me developing a nasty allergic rash to something in the bulb section of the merrifield nursery.

and boy, am i tired.

i’m kicking myself for not having taken a camera with me - i thought about it, then decided i’d be too tired/studying/whatever to have a chance to take photos. the architecture is gorgeous. i finally resigned myself to using my phone, ‘cuz i hadn’t even brought a sketchbook.

sometimes i’m an idiot. anyway, one of the greek revival buildings:

not a bad shot, really, but i wanted to get a better shot of the top arch. i wound up piecing it together, and as you can see that didn’t work out so hot.

*swoon* bet you wish you had my toys, eh? (or maybe just my boys…)

i predict it’s gonna be a tad difficult to pry me away from my study for awhile.

my old hard drive, pansy, was running more and more slowly. i ran the disk utility on it. it was red. it said it was failing. this was not good.

james & i went to microcenter. bought a new hard drive. put it in an external firewire case. installed tiger. named it monkey. migrated everything from pansy over to monkey. turned computer off.

james proceded to perform brain surgery on the trusty laptop. took out the battery. removed a multitude of screws. some panels. the keyboard. other stuff. removed pansy. replaced him with monkey. watched james play “which screw goes where?” luckily no extra screws were left over.

popped battery back in. crossed fingers. hit power button (love that it’s the same icon as the power button in my car). watched as monkey booted up lickety-split.

all is now well in this small corner of the world.

query: how can you grow up in the information age and not automatically assume that anything you put online isn’t private? a kid puts up a doctored, racist photo of his school principal on his myspace blog (why do people even use that piece of dreck, anyway? i have yet to see an attractive myspace site), they find out about it, he gets suspended. and he says:

“I never thought [this] would happen,” Arethas says of his suspension. “I figured only my friends would see my profile page.”

um, no. anyone with a ‘net connection will see it. and then there’s this, from a kid arrested for graffiti:

“The police dug very deep to find me,” says one of those arrested in the case, who asked to remain anonymous because of ongoing legal proceedings, and who would communicate only through MySpace. “I didn’t have my name, phone number or any info on me online. I’ve never used my real name, I’ve never had my own Internet connection (always another person’s name), and I never had my address or name at all posted or registered online.”

okay, kiddies, let’s get this through the crania: unless you’ve got some decent encryption or password protection, ANYONE can see what you write if you throw it up on a website (um, isn’t that why we do it? vanity? narcissism?) as far as linking an “anonymous” blog to a specific author, it’s just a matter of connecting the dots…

he was being a brat. i threw his toy out onto the deck. he chased it. muwahahaahahahaahahahaah! (more snuffy photos below the fold)

in other news, i just browsed the slingbox website. my initial reaction to the gadget was about the same as my reaction to the nextel/blackberry ads that ran in the metro for awhile: to shudder violently. (those nextel ads, btw, consisted of a picture of a crackblackberry with the headline, “the end of downtime.”)

unfortunately, there’s a secondary reaction to the slingbox. creeping curiosity… (more…)