This youtube video with Will Ferrell was pretty impressive. I usually steer clear of my political biases if and at all possible, but I just had to throw this in there because I thought some parts of it were funny and I generally have no reason to love insurance companies at all. My favorite was when Turkleton says that if his kid hurts himself falling off of a bike, he should pay for his injuries with his own allowance money. It's then followed up by someone saying, "how else would he learn his lesson?" I dunno, I thought it was funny, but stay away if you're not ready for some propaganda.
Last Updated on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 13:21
MJ Hall of Fame induction
Written by Steven Sust
Saturday, 26 September 2009 22:20
Its not so much that I hate Michael Jordan, it's just that I grew up watching him beat the 76ers and that sucked. He was just so frickin good that it almost seemed worthless to even hope to win. Having said that, I deeply respected him as a player. He worked hard on his game and it was evident by his seemingly effortless shooting and gameplay. I still remember watching some NBA TV special on him when I was 10 and it inspired me to spend countless afternoons shooting hoops at the Cooper School blacktop in the hopes that I might be just a little bit as good as Jordan. That never really happened for me, but MJ continued to dominate such that his hall of fame induction was only a matter of time. (It happened a few weeks ago, but I have only recently been catching up with the world)
Jordan's speech was pretty good with a few humorous jabs at figures(e.g. Pat Riley) or other players in his life, but overall preserved what I thought was essentially Jordan. The pursuit of perfection and competition was a constant theme in his life and he always used it to make himself a better whatever in everything he did. Although occasionally discouraged, he always tried to work to overcome his problems and prove to all of his critics that they were wrong. Scrappy is the most descriptive word that comes to mind.
(Click "read more" on this site's originial post to see the linked youtube rendition of his speech)
I keep telling myself i'm going to finish writing this down at some point, but I keep on getting side-tracked by other things.
This article was pretty interesting(pre-digested perspective here) in that it basically suggested obesity prevention alone wasn't going to help solve our fiscal health-care crises. No surprises there, but that's assuming that the authors chose the perfect mathematical model of life costs and I dont have the mathematical skillz to really know if this was the way to do it. I just hope that people dont get the wrong idea and think that this article is discouraging efforts to lose weight. In fact, you can almost see the authors squirm as they vigorously stick to a strict interpretation of their findings and make the effort to tell readers that losing weight still significantly decreases morbidity and mortality. What really sticks out in my mind is that this topic was brought up during our medical economics classes where one of our speakers said that preventing chronic disease processes like obesity would only increase the number of people who live to old age, which could then lead to other costlier health care expenditures like assisted living for neurodegenerative diseases.
Clean water is one of those things we tend to take for granted and it contributes a significant amount of problems in third world countries that dont have easy access to fresh water. Supposedly, they are working on something to help deal with this problem, but I think they're still working on making this affordable enough. It would be nice if this plan would actually work and not die in some corporate bureaucrat's trash can since it won't make much money.
Last Updated on Saturday, 26 September 2009 20:44
Getting older still
Written by Steven Sust
Tuesday, 01 September 2009 14:45
It might just be the library I'm in now, but I had no idea that Myspace was such a cesspool of porn. There's a kid sitting to the right of me who couldnt be older than 8 looking at pictures of near naked Myspace women on a public library computer and touching himself under the table! Talk about fortitude!
Again, I might just be out of the loop, but I didnt know that was kosher nowadays. I guess I shouldnt be so surprised since he's probably just curious and doesnt know any better. Ok I admit it, I'm just mad because he can look at porn on a public computer, but I cant even load up my UVA e-mail or log into USMLEworld. Where is the justice here?
I hope that the library's system admin is reading what I'm typing right now so that either the kids get barred from surfing myspace porn, or I get to log into my frickin UVA mailbox. In all likelihood, probably nothing is going to happen, but I have learned a valuable lesson here.
Note to self: Wash hands after touching these computers.
Last Updated on Saturday, 26 September 2009 21:43
subsonic
Written by Steven Sust
Monday, 24 August 2009 15:44
I was just about to step out of the house today and wondering if I should bring along my MP3 player, when I suddenly realized that I might not need it. What if I could have all of my home MP3s at my disposal without having to carry my mp3 player with me? That's when I wondered if the people at sourceforge had something cooked up that would allow me to remotely access my music from another computer's web browser, and then there was subsonic. It's like a webserver that you log into and can play music off of.
In short, it is awesome with only a few sore points.
No repeating yet, but the devs say that it's coming in the very next release
Requires that you have either thoroughly organized your music collection or at least labelled the ID3 tags. Otherwise you will spend an eternity looking for your music if you have lots.
Requires a low level of tech sophistication such as being able to find your IP address and performing a port forwarding on your router.
Runs on windows which could be an ugly security problem if you're not careful. (Will consider the linux version later, but windows remains the easiest version that just works dammit)
Did I mention it's free and fairly easy to install?
