Sunday, January 20, 2008

George Carlin, 'A Place For Your Stuff', and the MacBook Air

My uber-cool sister-in-law gave me the George Carlin Reads To You boxed set. George Carlin's "A Place For Your Stuff" exactly summarizes my dilemma about how to keep my computer 'stuff' handy. Thanks to Apple, 'there's all different ways of carrying your stuff.' Let me explain.

All my 'stuff' is on my 24" Core2Duo iMac. That stuff is automatically copied every hour to an external hard drive via Time Machine so my stuff is safe from a computer hard disk problem. My really important stuff is backed up online using dotMac. Every night at 2 in the morning. Really.

I want to take some of my stuff with me wherever I go. I use my 60 GB video iPod to carry stuff around on but I need to plug it in to another Mac to see my stuff and, let's face it, there aren't a lot of Macs around in the workplace. Right now I use my iPhone to carry important stuff, but there's lots of stuff I can't carry on my iPhone, like the article on how to use Google Reader that I'm working on, or the PDF files I'd like to read.

Going from my iMac to the outside world means I have to leave a lot of stuff behind.....until now. Thanks to the MacBook Air I can now take most of my important stuff with me and it will only weigh three pounds!



Saturday, January 19, 2008

OpenID for Non-SuperUsers

OpenID for Non-SuperUsers


Tuesday, January 15, 2008

MacBook Air

MACBOOK AIR 13/1.6/2GB/80GB-USA  MB003LL/A $1,799.00

Ships by: Feb 6
Delivers by: Feb 11


Thursday, January 10, 2008

16,707 SPAM E-mails In One Month

My group uses Google Apps for Your Domain for one of our domain names. That particular domain had been compromised before it went to GAFYD. A trojan had infected an unprotected office PC and harvested our addresses.

I logged in to the account for the first time in a month today. In one month, Google's SPAM filters blocked 16,707 spams from getting to our inboxes. Thanks, Google.



Tuesday, January 1, 2008

My Predictions for Apple's New Laptop--3G Wireless

The one feature for Apple's new laptop that no one has mentioned but that I'm hoping for is the option to add a 3G wireless card. Give me a 3 pound, 13", solid state memory, 12 hour battery life (or even 8) laptop that is connected anywhere ATT has 3G wireless and I'd pay a premium to get one.



Monday, December 31, 2007

Clark Venable, M.D.

Lifehacker suggested setting up a nameplate site way back in February of 2006. This post is my attempt to get Google to index it: http://www.clarkvenablemd.net/.


Friday, December 28, 2007

Pay For Performance: Physicians Pay For Insurers Better Financial Performance?

I've always been suspicious of the pay for performance movement. Thinking cynically (which I do more and more these days), it seemed to me that pay for performance has the backing of the insurance industry because they could use it as an excuse to pay physicians less. Show me a pay for performance program that actually increases costs to insurers and I'll show you an out-of-work actuary.

Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, has a perspective article in the December 27, 2007 issue of the NEJM titled Is Quality Improvement Improving Quality? A View from the Doctor's Office. I found the following a much better statement of the issue than I could ever come up with:

"I can't help suspecting that underneath all these quality-improvement and pay-for-performance initiatives lies yet another scheme that will work out very well for insurers and very badly for providers and patients."

Unfortunately, it's not free full text, but it should be (meaning you'll need a subscription to read the whole piece).



Thursday, December 27, 2007

NIH-Funded Research to Be Free (After One Year)

I was browsing the Wall Street Journal Health Blog and ran across this item regarding the new federal budget:

"The results of NIH-funded research must be made available for free online one year after they’re published in an academic journal. That’s a big deal, because the NIH is one of the biggest funders of medical research and subscriptions to the academic journals where that research is published can cost thousands of dollars a year.

Some researchers and academic institutions have been pushing for this for years, and the multibillion-dollar journal-publishing industry hired a PR guy known as “the pit bull of public relations” to fight the change."


Medscape CME: An Introduction to the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP)

Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) Module 1: Infection Prevention Update

Maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™ for physicians


Medscape CME: Systemic Lidocaine Good

Annals of Surgery: Systemic Lidocaine Shortens Length of Hospital Stay After Colorectal Surgery: A Double-blinded, Randomized, Placebo-controlled Trial.

1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™ for physicians



Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Health Care Reform Distilled

GruntDoc has an excellent distillation of the choices to be made in health care reform:

"Price.
Quality.
Access.

Pick any two"

Sort of a permutation of C. Everett Koop when he said that Americans want the best medical care in the world, they want it for free, and they want it now.



Sunday, December 16, 2007

Patients pay only 14% of health care costs? Wow.

Free the market; Government interference hampers healthcare reform

"In a system in which medical care seems free or is artificially inexpensive, with someone else paying for one's healthcare, medical costs spiral out of control because we are encouraged to demand medical services without having to consider their real price. For every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out of pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the healthcare system as a whole, patients pay only about 14%."

This article has several nice pieces of data.

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