A more complete version of this post is still in the works. C’mon back in a couple of weeks.
A follow-up to last month’s tip about Lorem ipsum.
A more complete version of this post is still in the works. C’mon back in a couple of weeks.
A follow-up to last month’s tip about Lorem ipsum.
It’s common sense that social media apps, and their persistent use, is messing up the young people. We need only look at the news reports of TikTok mayhem as well as the report from the Surgeon General about Social Media and Youth Mental Health.
The report cites a study that shows that youth who have spent more than 3 hours per day on social media have a doubled risk of poor mental health. Well, as we’ve known for quite a while, correlation does not equal causation. The study didn’t say that high social media use caused poor mental health, only that the behavior is a risk factor. The study’s authors concluded, “This study suggests that increased time spent on social media may be a risk factor for internalizing problems in adolescents.” Those hand-waving verbs, “suggest” and “may,” are a pretty good indicator that there’s a lot that we don’t know.
So, we know that we don’t know. Let’s leave it at that.
If the traditional Lorem ipsum doesn’t excite you, you can Choose your ipsum. For example, you can fetch a shot of caffeinated text from Coffee Ipsum :
Decaffeinated, mazagran, blue mountain galão robusta fair trade foam a dark. Con panna galão cortado, caffeine cup strong redeye ristretto aroma medium caffeine. Redeye crema cup bar , cultivar aromatic, at, caffeine ristretto froth at affogato.Café au lait coffee, java aftertaste aroma galão robust beans. In viennese café au lait, aged trifecta extraction latte shop. Grinder a, white viennese macchiato sweet qui dark.
You can refresh your understanding and use of punctuation from this charming book, Punctuation Personified< , available for free reading and download on the Internet Archive. | Ensign Semicolon |
Twenty-five years ago this month, Apple introduced the iMac and, with it, changed my mother’s life for her last couple of years. (She lived with us for five years until she passed in 2000.) We bought her a Bondi Blue iMac.
With it, she discovered Amazon. She was a voracious reader and buyer of books. Packages with obscure books showed up at our door.
Google gave her new worlds of news from folks such as the then-feisty Ariana Huffington as well as websites on psychology, sociology, history, art, and, of course, books.
She planned and paid for her own trip to Bermuda because she could.
Yes, the operating system on that early iMac was unsteady, requiring frequent attention from the in-house IT support. Mac OS X wouldn’t be available until after her death. Nevertheless, it was neither too soon nor too late to hop on that rickety raft of a computer, pretty and bold like her, to find new worlds.
Update; in the past month, there have been several articles about the 25th anniversary of the iMac.
From August 15:
from The Divine and the Human by Nikolai Berdi︠a︡ev
Karl Hakkarainen
kh@queenlake.com
As many of you know, I carry a pocketful of pens. Even though the ratings for best pens doesn’t include them, I prefer a Cross pen and pencil along with Pilot Razor pens in red (for editing) and black (for writing boldly). This kid, however, has us all beat, writing his notes with a quill pen.
The iPhone is certain to fade into history as another cool Apple innovation, that others soon rushed competitive, like-products to market, blowing away any significant lead Apple might have.
From Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure, Network World January 11, 2008
Three reasons I won’t use Wild Apricot for a blog:
It seemed like a good idea, moving my files from Dropbox to OneDrive and saving on the expense of another synchronization/backup service. Well, not so much.
OneDrive, bless its heart, can’t be included in the Windows 10 search index. This means that, if I want to find a file by name or contents, Windows has to do it all anew, each time. With a lot of files, it can take a minute or more. That might not seem like a lot, but it adds up when you’re doing normal work.
So, back we go.
Operator: …And what is your ZIP code?
Me: zero-one-five-two-zero
Operator: Could you repeat that?
Me: zero-one-five-two-zero?
Operator: Gerald?
Me: Zero
Operator: Gerald? G-e-r-a-l-d?
Me: My ZIP code is zero, um, oh-one-five-two-oh
Operator: And, your phone number?
Me: Z…five-oh-eight…
After last week’s surgery, I needed to make two appointments. One was with the doctor who performed the procedure. The other was with a nurse or nurse practitioner in a particular practice group.
I first tried the number provided to me on my hospital discharge paperwork and wound up in voice mail hell (VMH) with a series of unhelpful prompts that never identified what organization I had reached. Waiting to speak to an operator, I was repeatedly directed back to the VMH loop with prompts for department listing and employee directory, neither of which produced any recognizable result. Rather than choosing a random person from the list, I tried another tack.
My hospital discharge paperwork also provided the hospital’s main phone number. I called that number and explained what I was trying to do.
Operator: We don’t schedule for doctor’s offices.
Me: But this is the number I was given when I was discharged from the hospital.
After a bit of time, the operator provided me with a phone number. I called and listened to three minutes of dreaded hold music (DHM). I hung up, dialed again, listened to three more minutes of DHM, hung up, and tried my luck with the second task.
I went to the Saint Vincent Hospital website to find a number for the department where nurses and nurse practitioners allegedly worked. I could find no department number, only the option to choose a doctor from a list of, I’m sure, very qualified practitioners, but people I never knew. I chose one doctor at random and clicked the Call Now button which opened a popup on my computer and tried to make a call. This particular computer didn’t have my Google Voice set up to allow me to make calls, so the button did nothing.
Back to the Saint Vincent Hospital website, I tried a toll-free number associated with the department and spoke with the operator who thought that my ZIP code started with Gerald. After we’d sorted that out, she gave me the last names of nurses in that department, along with their phone numbers. The third one was 14 miles away, she said. I asked if the first two were in Worcester. “Yes,” she said. I chose the first one because I recognized the exchange. A Google search showed that the number was related to a practice group in another part of the city.
I jotted down the number and called. This time, the DHM was pseudo-Lynyrd Skynyrd interspersed with a series of boops and beeps that led me to the answering service for the Pain Click where I could cancel an upcoming appointment that I didn’t have. I left my name and phone number anyway.
Sandra and I went for a walk, and I told her what I’d not gotten done that morning. She suggested that I use MyChart to ask for help from my primary care physician’s team.
It worked.
Mostly.
I received a referral from my PCP to the department in question along with a phone number for said department. I called the number, listened to DHM for six minutes, followed by a series of telephone rings, followed by four more minutes of DHM, until I finally spoke to a person who was not pleased to be speaking to me (or anyone, I suspect). In spite of that, I received an appointment with a nurse for three days later.
A short while later, I received a message via MyChart from the surgeon’s office, asking if a date two-and-a-half weeks hence was good. I quickly replied that it was.
In conclusion:
This might explain some of what’s going on: Report says there are 19,000 unfilled hospital positions in Mass. The people who are staffing these positions are basically good, hard-working, competent employees who want to help those for whom they care. There just aren’t enough of them.
In addition, several people with whom I’d had contact received what I call field promotions. They are put in customer-facing jobs for which they have neither the training nor temperament. I’m thinking about the phlebotomist who said I’d filled out a form incorrectly. She said, “You did it wrong.” twice. I’d had blood drawn from one arm earlier in the morning. She tut-tutted at the bruise and proceeded to give me a worse bruise on the other arm.