It’s pretty well-documented that positive thinking is good for you. So here’s a simple idea: set a password that you type often as a positive message that’s meaningful to you.
Don’t forget to mix it up so your password is secure, use upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols.
For example:
iAm@b3autifulpErs0N
g3Tthing$d0Ne2dAy
You will have a password that is more secure, easier to remember, and you will repeat a positive message in your head every time you type it.
Just a thought!
Google decided they’d had enough of the CAPS LOCK key. For the Google laptop, they changed the caps lock key, instead they called it the Search key.
Of course, classicists were shocked, but in a modern context it makes sense. The caps lock key is seldom used – if you want caps, for shorter lengths of text you can use the shift key, for longer text you can select the text and use an application like OpenOffice, Word, or whatnot to convert the selected text to all caps. Search is now a common computer use, so it makes sense to have a quick key for it.
I read a couple tutorials on how to reproduce this on a Mac, here I present a simple distillation of those instructions. It should take only a minute or two to do.
Step 1.
Download and install the free apps Alfred and PCKeyboardHack. You’ll have to reboot after installing PCKeyboardHack.
Step 2.
Launch System Preferences, and click on “Keyboard & Mouse”. Click the “Modifier Keys” button and set Caps Lock to “No Action”. Click “Ok”. You can close the Keyboard preference window.
Step 3.
Launch System Preferences, and click on the PCKeyboardHack control panel. Expand “Caps Lock, Control” and check off “Change Caps Lock”. Double-click on “keycode” for that line and set it to 105 (that’s the keycode for the F13 key). You can then close the PCKeyboardHack window.
Step 4.
Launch Alfred, which will open the Alfred Preferences. Click “General”, then click on the Hotkey box and CAPS LOCK. Alfred should say it’s F13. You can close the Alfred preference window.
All Done! Now when you press the CAPS LOCK key, it will launch Alfred’s quick search. You can type in a search term, and you will instantly see options to launch applications, or search Google, Wikipedia, and other sources. This is configurable in Alfred, if you want to customize it.
So a while back, I had gallstones. This meant suffering semi-random gall bladder attacks, which left me pale and writhing on the ground in pain.
After several ER visits and doctor examinations, my doctor recommended surgery.
Naturally, I wanted to see what else I could try before it came to actually being cut open and getting my gall bladder removed.
There was a popular remedy I’d seen online, involving fasting and drinking epsom salts to clean you out, then drinking olive oil. So I gave it a shot.
It was horrible. Drinking olive oil straight is dis-gus-ting, so bad that even today, years later, the smell makes me a little queasy. It also didn’t help at all. Ultrasounds before and after showed, if anything, more gallstones after the olive oil. I ended up getting the surgery, which was meant to be outpatient but due to a complication ended up being 3 or 4 days in the hospital.
Flash forward to today – the surgery has been effective, and life without a gall bladder is largely the same as before I had it out. If you’re curious, the only real change is if I have a fatty meal, I’ll have to go to the bathroom 30-40 minutes later.
My mom just forwarded me a quote she found, thanks to Google Books, from Ellingwood’s Therapeutist, an eclectic medical journal from 1914:
If there is an infection of the gall bladder with gallstones, give an ounce of olive oil twice daily, which has a tendency to liberate the stones. This remedy was first suggested by Dr. Horatio Firth of Brooklyn, N. Y., and is on record.
Dr. Horatio Firth is my great-great-grandfather, on my mother’s side. So it turns out that drinking olive oil, the popular remedy I found on the internet, was actually invented or at least popularized by my direct ancestor.
Small space-time continuum, eh?
p.s. Thanks for nothing, great-great-gramps! Bleh.
So this weekend I was playing with my new MacBook Air, getting it all set up with MAMP and whatnot, and one app I debated was Photoshop. I’ve never owned a copy of Photoshop – in college I “acquired” a copy, and since then whoever my employer was at the time has always purchased a license for me to use. I’ve never owned a personal copy. I’ve almost bought it at one time or another, but it’s just so staggeringly expensive it’s always given me pause.
So there I was this weekend, trying to decide, do I install the copy from work on my laptop? (quite legal, I asked the Adobe reps last time they were at work, and they said it was fine, as long as it was only running on one machine at a time, I could install it both places)
On the other hand Photoshop is a beast of an application, massive and bloated, with other unused applications (Bridge? Adobe Updater? WTF?) dangling off it like engorged ticks. Did I really want all that on my fresh new laptop?
Yes, I know, GIMP. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, open source and fully functional, without the bloat. But not quite the same. Obvious in places, ineffable in others, it just isn’t as good.
I was excited about GIMPshop, GIMP modified to look and feel more like Photoshop, but unfortunately from what I can tell, that project is dead, and hasn’t been updated in a while. It wouldn’t run under Snow Leopard – even after upgrading and downgrading the appropriate libraries that were supposed to coax it into running.
Seashore is nice, a simplified GIMP compiled in Cocoa to be more Mac-like… that might be good enough, but lacks some things and I believe is also based on an old version of GIMP.
Pixelmator I had from a bundle deal, it’s pretty good but lacks the layer blending options I use a lot…
I dunno… is Photoshop a necessity? What do you think?
I’ve been messing with netbooks, hacking them to run MacOS, and it’s mostly worked, but it’s never been a wholly satisfying result. Â Updates are an annoying and sometimes dicy process, and certain things (like the trackpad) never seem to work quite right.
So I finally broke down and bought a real MacBook “don’t call it a netbook” Air (11″).
Carl gave me the handy tip to check the refurbished section on Apple’s site, doing so saved me a couple hundred bucks.
So far? Â I’m very happy with my new Air! Â The screen resolution is just right – a little on the small side vertically, but not as cramped as 800 x 600 netbooks, plenty usable.
It’s pretty light, feels sturdy, and it warm to the touch when it’s been running, but not too hot to actually use as a “laptop”.
I installed the usual base of apps I use for development, plus Shimo and Remote Desktop so I can VPN to work when I need to.
I’ve been thinking about getting a sticker from Gelaskins to decorate it. Â I got a sticker for my phone and liked that. Â Narrowed it down to these 4, kinda leaning towards the leaf…
A few fairly recent marketing concepts should win the marketing equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Â Keep in mind this doesn’t mean they are good for you, or the environment, or anyone besides the companies who came up with the marketing. Â But for them, pure genius.
Bottled Water
Wait, soft drink companies can skip all the sugar, flavor, carbonation, and WORK, and just sell a bottle of plain water? Â And charge the same or MORE than they do for soda? Â Brilliant! Â Hopefully the person who pointed this out to Coke got a big promotion.
Energy Drinks
I think Red Bull was the company to do this first – take soda, put in a little extra caffeine and a few supposedly “special” vitamins or whatnot, shrink the can down, and charge $2. Â They set the bar, and other companies followed in their footsteps.
100 calorie Packs
Take an existing product, shrink it down to a much smaller package, PROMOTE the fact that you have shrunk the size of the packaging, and bump the price by weight way up. Â Not only will people not complain that they are paying more for less, they will actually THANK you for it! Â Genius!
I haven’t updated my LiveJournal blog in a while, so thought I’d import it to my own server, rather than pay for a LiveJournal account…
The WordPress LiveJournal import script worked really well, I think the only data that didn’t make it was Mood and Category…
Will I start blogging again? Â Maybe if I have something to say…
Often, random thoughts occur to me in the shower.
This morning, I was thinking – “do any Roman Catholics actually believe in transubstantiation?”
If they do, it’s a pretty simple test scientifically – test the wafer before and after it enters the body.
You have to take a DNA sample from the ingester to eliminate contamination, but should be an easy test to see if the starch transforms into human DNA, specifically that of Christ. Ditto for the wine.
If it doesn’t stand up to a simple test, what possible rebuttal is there?
If most Roman Catholics don’t actually believe it (and probably many don’t even know what the word “transubstantiation” means), then what does that mean about their beliefs as a whole? Isn’t communion a cornerstone?
Of course, the overall problem with that is I’m applying logic to religion. 😉
Dream last night:
I am driving through Westboro with some friends, and I see the Google headquarters there.
It is a moderate-sized building made of tan brick.
“I’ve always meant to stop in, I drive by all the time,” I say. “C’mon, let’s take a tour!”
We walk inside. To take a tour, I have to sign my name at the security desk. They already have my signature on file, so just signing my name verifies my identity. They give me a visitor badge.
The interior is kind of like a museum, very open. Rather than have offices with doors, most people have a desk in one corner of an open room that has open doorways to adjacent rooms.
I look at the map. “Maybe we should start on the top floor and work our way down?”
A security guard gestures to me. “You should start there,” he says, pointing to a room.
It seems more like a suggestion than an order, so we go there.
It is a square room with a doorway on one side. Along the wall to the right of the entrance are a series of chairs, like the waiting area at a doctor’s office. Straight ahead are a series of windows, placed very high on the wall. They are half-height, like basement windows. On the wall to the left, there is a blocky staircase, no railing, just a series of blocks, leading to a small opening that is carpeted. The rest of the room is empty.
I sit in one of the chairs and wait. I realize that this is a line to wait to meet Eric Meyer, who is the head of Google’s UI and CSS department [in the dream, not in real life]. People are treating it like going to see the Wizard of Oz or something, they are all preparing the question they will ask. David Evans in there, he is excited, he turns to me, querying “what are you going to ask?” I say I’m not sure yet.
Gradually the line moves along. I watch people crawl out of the little hole, down the stairs, and out of the room, then the next person goes up the stairs and crawls into the little hole. It’s carpeted to act as padding so you don’t hurt yourself whacking your head or arms on the edge of the rectangular opening.
When my turn comes around, I go up the stairs and through the little doorway. On the other side is a good-sized office. Eric Meyer sits behind a mahogany desk. I hand him a scrap of paper I’ve been doodling on.
“Oh, you already know CSS,” he says after looking at the piece of paper, “let’s play a game, then.”
We enter some kind of virtual reality world, I don’t remember how. I am flying a plane of some kind, leading a squadron of planes against Eric. He is a Red Baron of sorts. He’s very good, flying towards the sun, then diving back down, then looping back up towards the sun. It catches most of my squadron by surprise, and he shoots them down. But I anticipated it, and riddle his plane with bullets. It is still falling, crumpled into a ball, and I keep shooting it as it goes down. I am laughing, not in a mean way, but with playful exuberance.
I exit the game, and somehow I am back in the waiting room. Eric is on a gurney, being wheeled out by paramedics. Somehow shooting him in the game has wounded him in real life. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, “I didn’t know!”
He coughs and waves me off, “don’t worry about it,” he coughs again, “you only winged me.” They wheel him off.
I’m not sure where to go next, so I wander through Google, wandering through different people’s office areas.
Then I hear a click-clack sound. It sounds like a old-fashioned newsroom. I follow the sound and it leads me to an old-fashioned office door, wood with a frosted glass window. Gold lettering on the window reads “Typewriter and Fax Department”. I open the door and go in. There are a couple rows of electric typewriters with people typing away on them. There is also a large device, half the size of a refrigerator, that buzzes and clunks. I realize it must be a fax machine. I also realize that a fax machine this old can only accept typed pages, and that is why they have the typewriters.
There are a few people gathered around one desk, and a woman is just finishing typing something. She reads off a number. “Wow,” says another woman, head of the department, “that’s twice as fast as I can type! Everyone, welcome our new employee!”
They are tryouts, where people can show of their typing skills for a chance at a job with Google.
There are a few people waiting to take their turn, at the end of the line, next to me, is an old woman, maybe 80 or 90.
She is there to try out. She is clutching a map and a thermos. She is wobbling a little, so she sits down at a school desk, one of the old ones where the chair is bolted to the desk with a metal arm. She sets down the map and the thermos. I can see the map, showing a red dot in Winslow, Maine. I realize this is where she is from. I mean to tell her that I was born in Waterville and went to high school there, but I never get around to mentioning it. It is her turn, so I help her up. She takes the lid off her thermos and pours some liquid into it. It is cool, clear water. She takes a sip and offers me the plastic cup. I take it and take a large sip. It tastes a little off but is very refreshing. She dotters up to take her turn at the typewriter, and I wander off down the hall.
Then I wake up.
Based on what’s going on in the medical community, a series of consistent themes emerges that provides some insight into what the future of medicine will look like.
Here are some things rising to the top of the discussion of future medicine:
Currently, this is kind of a mess. Some hospitals and doctors can share patient records with each other, some can’t. The ones that CAN often don’t. Usually the patient is cut out of the equation entirely, and will only see their own records if they demand to. There needs to be legislation about this soon, to standardize secure digital medical records and require all health care providers to use them, and make them more easily available to patients. It also needs to ensure patient privacy and make sure insurance agencies won’t take advantage, while at the same time perhaps making anonymized records more available to researchers. Shared data can be incredibly powerful, and increase knowledge about human health as a whole.
Inexpensive sensors can provide continuous monitoring where previously a patient would have to come in and only get a single measurement.
Doctors seem to be both excited and terrified by this prospect. This is unfamiliar territory for many of them. They are used to seeing, for the most part, single data points when a patient comes in for care. They aren’t sure what to do with more data, because they may not have a very good grasp of what is “normal”. They are concerned that more data will reveal “false positives” where, for example, someone’s blood pressure may spike several times a day – this might be normal in a healthy person but doctors fear it might be mistaken for high blood pressure.
This is why doctors don’t like full-body MRI scans. They are presented with a vast amount of data, and there may be numerous things that appear to be wrong that are actually fine for that person. They don’t have any easy way to sort through these false positives, so they’d rather not use the system at all.
This is a short-sighted view. As I like to say, more data is more fun. What if doctors had yearly full-body MRIs for all their patients, done as part of a yearly check-up? The vast amount of data not only for a single patient but all patients globally would provide huge insights into human health, and what is normal for each person. As we get more data, our methods of parsing it become more refined, software becomes more sophisticated.
Right now labs are slow, expensive, and generally inaccessible to consumers. Doctors are afraid to order tests because of cost, and afraid not to order tests because of lawsuits. But new tests are being developed that are not only better, but cheaper. What used to take a large lab might soon be a small piece of paper, or a cheap “lab-on-a-chip”. Instead of sending samples to a remote lab, tests can be done directly at the point of care, or even remotely, administered by the patients themselves.
Along with cheap labs comes the possibility of cheap genetic testing. The Army already has a portable genetic analyzer, used mainly for identifying bodies on the battlefield. Currently most doctors wouldn’t know what to do with genetic data if a patient gave it to them. But as the process gets cheaper and faster, genetic testing may become a standard part of medical care. Databases of genetic information cross-referenced with conditions and gene mapping will make this genetic data more and more useful. Maybe science will even begin to understand epigenetics.
Cellphones are one of the most prevalent pieces of technology in the world. Each generation is more sophisticated. Essentially, nearly every person either owns or has access to a tiny portable computer connected to a global network. Hospitals will take advantage of this, and be able to combine the use of cheap sensors, cheap labs, and cellphones, allowing patients to upload medical data directly from home. In poorer countries, mobile care facilitators – not doctors but volunteers – could serve communities with a backpack with cheap sensors, cheap labs, and a cellphone. Diagnostics could either be run directly on the cellphone, or data could be sent to a server and results returned to the cellphone.
All of this inexpensive and networked medical technology also means the individual has more control over their own health care. Feeling sick? Pop over to CVS and pick up a lab-on-a-chip test that tests for all known viruses and bacteria. Then either view the results locally, or transmit them to your doctor.
Some doctors fear this, believing that individuals cannot handle their own care, that they will freak out over every piece of data. Undoubtedly, some people will obsess over this, but you can’t let a few hypochondriacs ruin the entire concept of personal care. The vast majority of people will benefit from greater patient education and more access to their own health care data.
Currently, the medical system is a reactive one. When I go to my doctor for an annual checkup, he is literally uninterested if there is nothing wrong with me. If there is nothing wrong with you, there is no problem to solve, no puzzle to sort out, so nothing that interests the doctor. But with probability maps from genetic testing and increased focus on national health, this may shift to a more proactive view.
This is just starting to take off now, but has already made impressive strides. It is currently possible to grow a replacement bladder for a patient. Replacement muscle tissue and hearts are in the experimental phases. Through collagen lattices and cloned tissue, it may soon be possible to replace most internal organs with healthy new ones grown in a lab. And since they are based on the patient’s own genetic material, they don’t have the same problems with rejection that make organ donation so tricky.
It may seem like science fiction, but research is already underway, with lots of military funding – the goal eventually being that a soldier who comes home with a leg blown off could simply grow a new one.
And after that, the next logical step is to get the body to do its own repairs, or assist the body in this, so that instead of involving a lab, a patient’s own body can repair damaged organs.
Ok, so this one isn’t directly obvious, but indirectly it’s amazing the applications medical researchers have found for standard off-the-shelf inkjet printers. The aforementioned replacement organs can essentially be PRINTED, layer by layer, from a standard inkjet printer. And those paper lab kits can also be created on an inkjet printer. This means that the technological advancements could end up being extremely cheap to implement.
I had to mention this one after seeing an incredible TED talk on it. Researchers are currently in human testing phases of using a normally toxic gas in very low doses, along with cold, to basically put people into a state of suspended animation. The patient’s body slows to a point of almost stopping, like a sort of hibernation. In this state, the patient needs very little oxygen and can survive damage or blood loss that would normally cause fatal shock. And revival from this state is simply a matter of putting the patient into a warm room and letting them “thaw out”. We may soon see all ambulances and emergency crews equipped with this, allowing them to basically “pause” critical patients so they can get to the hospital to get treatment.