HJCotton.net

Over the summer I moved into a rental house, which while more modern and hopefully a little less drafty than my previous “cottage on the hill”, is unfortunately completely stocked with two-prong outlets. I’ve had to invest in a not-insubstantial amount of those chinsy three-prong to two-prong adapters that just never fit in the outlet quite right because the metal tab for the screw is always 3mm longer than it should be. In the basement, I have a rather innocent looking dehumidifier that runs occasionally to empty the basement of the odd high tide; and wouldn’t you know it’s a three-pronger and there’s not a three-prong outlet to be found! Well, except for that lone one on the bare bulb in the far back corner. Hmm…

Let me be quite honest. I have zero experience with and zero knowledge of dehumidifiers. I am far more familiar with the hardly-use-any-electricity-at-all-and-provides-exactly-the-opposite-in-functionality humidifier. I incorrectly assumed that the electrical draw of both appliances would be pretty much the same. Little did I know that my setup of plugging a dehumidifier into a light-socket was the equivalent of plugging an air conditioner into the end of a set of indoor Christmas lights.

On one particularly damp day, the dehumidifier worked extra hard to keep the puddles from forming on the basement floor and succeeded in lowering the humidity to between 8 and 9 on the dial. 8 being the Mojave desert and 9 being the Sahara. With the subterranean desertification project nearly complete and the electrical draw at a maximum, the only three-prong outlet in my whole basement cashed in its chips with a sparking, arcing fiesta into the dry rafters that I could only begin to describe as like watching an over-caffeinated Bear Grylls trying to start a fire in a Libyan match factory factory with flint and steel.

Thankfully, a fire didn’t actually start. To be honest, I didn’t even plug the dehumidifier into that outlet - it was like that when I moved in. I just stumbled upon some charcoal marks one day while I was investigating why a freshwater lake was beginning to encroach on my washer and dryer.

I’m sure there are other people in the world running similarly dangerous setups in their own basements. YOU may be one of these people. Never mind if your house burns down because of it - how on earth would you feel if you burned up the only honest-to-god three-prong outlet in your whole basement? Now that hurts. A three-prong outlet is a terrible thing to waste.

I would know.

Health care is just plain expensive. We can all agree on that. But do you know what I got charged for a physical and a tetanus shot a few weeks ago? $189!

I got the bill in the mail and saw all the prices broken down, plain as day and… well even then that didn’t make it look any less shocking.

I began to wonder what it would be like if you were billed for each action while you were at the doctor’s office.

They called my name, and I followed the nurse into the back. Handing over my paperwork, I took off my shoes and waited while my height and weight were recorded. While trying to slip my shoes back on the nurse mentioned “That will be $19″. I looked at her questioningly; “What, now?!” She nodded with wide-open eyes. I sighed and reluctantly handed over my credit card. She then motioned for me to have a seat in the exam room to take my temperature, heart rate, and BP for the rock bottom price of $23.47. She left and I waited for the doctor. For a long time I waited for the doctor. Being a programmer, I imagined the coding behind the scenes breaking each amount charged to my credit card in half - one half going to the office and the other half being split into each doctor’s new Mercedes fund.

The doctor walked in after a few more minutes and asked me how I was doing. I replied that I was doing surprisingly well for a guy just moments away from having a strange man touch his testicles. That comment didn’t even get me a smile. I was kind of relieved that it didn’t, for I realized that he was going to enjoy the experience just as little as I was.

We got on with the exam. The testing of reflexes in the legs amounts to $3.95 a swing, in case you’re interested. I took deep breaths when asked; and they were as deep as they were expensive. The few minutes using a stethoscope cost me nearly $50. At that point, I just held the card in my hand to give it to the nurse at the appropriate time for her to swipe on the card reader by the door. At the end of of it all, my doctor noted that I was due for a tetanus booster. I agreed to get one and the nurse retrieved a syringe and an alcohol swab while I talked to the doctor for 10 minutes or so. All the while my card was being automatically charged at $2.50 per minute. This is approximately fifty-cents-per-minute more expensive than your run-of-the-mill phone sex call, and arguably less exciting.

The tetanus shot itself costs $29.00. The nurse pressing her thumb on the end of the syringe and moving it forward an inch costs $25. That’s right, there is an ‘inoculation assist’ fee. I asked if they charged patients a ‘wheel chair assist fee’ for use of the wheel chairs I saw near the front door like the yard trailers I used to be so familiar with at the marina. All were oblivious to my attempts at humor, but fortunately for me, the exam was over. I was asked if I had any other questions or concerns as the 63 inches of 25% post-consumer-recycled paper that was my final receipt spewed out from the laser printer next to the card reader with the same kind of intensity as a roll of toilet paper spun by a pair of eager hands. Some health-related questions vied for attention in my head, but I put my card back in my wallet and looked at my supply of cash for a few seconds, and then again at the doctor-nurse team, and then back into my wallet. I gave a huff in an attempt to dislodge some of the stuck together dollar bills, hoping they might be concealing a higher currency denomination, but the move yielded me nothing more than the awkwardness that follows a newbie magician whose trick has just gone wrong. It was like the trick where ripping a twenty-dollar-bill in half turns it into two ten dollar bills, except that my rendition of the trick resulted in the expulsion of some moth flakes and my face getting very red. As blushing from embarrassment is never as great a crowd pleaser as making change for a twenty, I put my wallet back in my pocket and simply asked the nurse, “I don’t have to leave a tip, do I?”

How much privacy are users of social networking sites willing to give up in order to use the service? Sites like Myspace and Facebook have a veritable wealth of information about the users of its services. Everything from addresses, schools attended and companies worked for to a group of supposed friends and a list of hobbies. People have put up with targeted advertising for quite some time on the web. I know that my Myspace profile is being parsed for keywords because it has suddenly decided I have a dire need to buy custom envelopes and find Bob Dylan memorabilia when I log in because of a Kurt Vonnegut quote and an artist’s name I have in it, respectively. That’s the kind of thing you expect though and I don’t really have a problem with it. I don’t have anything there that I don’t already have on this website - it’s essentially public knowledge at this point. Facebook, for a time, seemed a big improvement over Myspace simply because it wasn’t completely overrun with comment-spamming bots and doesn’t allow users to destroy their pages with horrible styling that makes them unreadable. Granted, being able to customize your page is a big deal. Some years ago, and shortly after discovering how to upload an HTML file to some free webspace and having my own website at a URL that took up nearly the entire address bar in my browser, I learned that just because you can have 60 images, music playing in the background and red text on a blue background on a page doesn’t mean that you should. But that’s another story.

Facebook opened up its API to external developers who can create applications for the users of the site - which is really cool and I see that as being a positive thing. I’m even using one that gives me a Kurt Vonnegut quote at the click of a button - now that’s convenient! It’s also something that never would have come about had Facebook not opened up their system to allow outside developers access. What they have also recently done is roll out a service known as “Beacon”, which has been quite controversial. This service tracks a Facebook users movements on participating sites, of which this article) states there are more than 40 of. Actions such as signing up on one of these sites, adding an item to a wish list or purchasing something directs details of that action back to Facebook, where it is then broadcast to your friends list via their news feed. These sites apparently present users with the ability to opt out of having this information sent back to Facebook, but in the article linked to above, data was passed back to Facebook whether the user was logged into Facebook or not and even when opting out of having it sent on the third party site. Clearly, this is a privacy concern. What’s more is that Facebook was making it impossible to opt out of using the service entirely, instead only giving the option to opt out from individual sites. It wasn’t until today that they announced a universal opt-out feature for Beacon. I made sure to log in and select that all important check mark today and I’m sure many others did as well. Maybe this is the kind of thing some people don’t mind, or maybe even find valuable. When a website starts tracking my web surfing actions after I have left their site, warning bells go off for me though. It makes me feel like I need to quarantine Facebook in Opera, do my regular surfing in Firefox, and use IE7 (running under Wine of course - I’ve been on Ubuntu Linux since June of this year) when viewing any of the sites Facebook lists as participating in Beacon. And that’s just not the way it should be.

After being in my new apartment for a few weeks, I’ve come across a regular issue with sending mail. When I try to send it from my box, the mailman passes it by and doesn’t pick up my outgoing letters unless he’s got something to deliver to me. I don’t get a whole lot of mail so it can sometimes be days before my mail gets picked up. Seemed like a perfect opportunity for a video blog.

   10-08-07 - The Mail

I have upgraded Wordpress and Gallery in an effort to get people to stop posting links to gay porn. Everything should work just as it did befire, and I can cross off “Stop people posting links to gay porn” off of my list of things to do before I die… if only for a few short weeks.

This past weekend I ventured to Philadelphia to check out the Liberty bell, Independence Hall, and take in the sights of historic downtown Philly along with 6 million other people, Katie and Meghan included. Philly has quite an impressive network of trains that can seemingly take you anywhere you want to go. You actually pay for passage upon boarding the train, and the experience is far more personable than riding in an NYC subway car. I’m accustomed to the train operator mumbling incoherently about what the next station is over the speaker-system, but on these trains the ‘ticket master’ would open the car door and announce, incoherently, our arrival at each station.

While the historic Philly sites were interesting, what I really enjoyed was walking around on the WWII diesel-electric submarine “Becuna” and the 1898-built iron cruiser “Olympia” at the Philadelphia Seaport Museum. Though this one is over 300 feet long, submarines are just plain cramped, and I was only on it for 20 minutes. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in one on a lengthy voyage… especially with four 16 cylinder diesel engines running! The Olympia, on the other hand, was powered by some monstrous steam engines. At full speed it used 600 pounds of coal per minute! Nearby there is a monument dedicated to Christopher Columbus, which sufficiently enraged us and is an opportune time for me to share a quote from the author Kurt Vonnegut:

“1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them.”

Sunday we spent the day near Doylestown PA checking out the Henry Mercer museum and Fonthill. What’s interesting about the places designed and built by this guy are that they’re all ENTIRELY made from concrete. Even the roofs are reinforced concrete. Though a millionaire, he made bookshelves from his era’s milk-crates and recycled things he got for low or no cost nearby. After discovering that a recently acquired couch would not fit in the room he wanted to, Mercer hacked the back corner off and then proceeded to file a chunk of concrete out from the wall in order to get it to fit. Ingenious!

A few weeks ago I had an ‘incident’ riding my bike near Nay Aug Park. I was going down a rather steep hill and going slower than usual because I knew there was a truck a ways behind me that was likely to pass. They came up behind me slowly and got within about 10 feet or so before laying on the horn; which scared the crap out of me and was completely uncalled for. So I slowed down even more. The next thing I know, the truck practically comes to a stop, the windows go down and there’s a truck-load of college guys with popped collars yelling insults at me. For a moment I imagined I was a Captain America jumpsuit away from having my life end in the same cinematic manner it did for the unlucky ‘long-haired freaky people’ in the final scene of Easy Rider. Fortunately, that was not the case and I lived to complain another day.

The streets of Scranton are no place to bike. The problem comes with sharing the road. Drivers in general have no respect for anything not on four wheels. Bicyclists are simply tired of having to deal with being nearly run down every time they ride. The rules of the road apply to both cars and cyclists in the same way; but once you climb into your car, roll up the windows, turn up the music and fire up a call on the cell to make an insignificant life seem just a tad more important, each car on the road for all intents and purposes becomes a separate world. That’s the way I see it anyway; lots of people driving, all in their own worlds and few really paying attention. Anything that causes the least bit of inconvenience in each driver’s perfect, self-contained world is liable to make their blood boil… whether it be watching other drivers display with wild abandon their degree of incompetence behind the wheel, driving too slowly (only 10 mph over the speed limit), or having to wait for an opportunity to pass a bicycle because the opposing lane on a road is blocked by oncoming traffic. The problems between the cars and cyclists are not easily solved because this is the land of the automobile, where he who dies having consumed the most petroleum (preferably on credit) before he dies wins.

Why is it so hard to take a step back and look at the grand scheme of things? There are 6 BILLION people on the planet. Most of them we’ll never meet, but many whom we’ve never met will have touched our lives in some way, from the workers at feed companies in China who poison our pets with industrial chemicals to the tiny Vietnamese fingers who assemble our overpriced footwear. Depending on luck, genetics, and escaping our seemingly innate ability to kill one another, we might have a solid 80 years on this planet of ours. We’ll leave it with nothing and in our time here have nothing more important to give than our time to the people we choose to spend it with. In return, we can only hope that a few good people choose to spend some of their time with us; and that they don’t use it to royally piss us off.

After 5 years I have FINALLY graduated from Penn State…. Worthington. I thought it a prime opportunity to make a video blog about the graduation experience I encountered.

05-21-07 Video Blog on Graduation

MySpace has acknowledged it will be hosting a virtual vote for the upcoming presidential election. (link)

I think this is a really cool idea. But… I’m not sure if MySpace is really the site to be administering the vote. My description of the voting process will likely strike a chord with current users and give those not signed up a taste of what it’s like to use the site.

Upon logging in, you’ll be redirected to your home page, which will inform you that you have new comments on the photos of your latest drinking adventures (but to view them you’ll have to manually sort through all of your photos). Also, there will be a few comments about increasing your penis size from your friends who have inadvertently fallen for a password phishing scheme and lost all control over their account. After you’ve deleted those you’ll go back to check out the latest bulletins from your friends and discover that many have posted new photos of themselves drinking and or surveys that reveal their relationship statistics. There may even be one of those incredibly interesting ones where you count up how many events in a list you’ve done and then repost it saying “I’m 83% Redneck”. For some reason, you’ll be left unsatisfied knowing that the only reason the person who posted that bulletin obtained such a high score was because they got double points for having shot a moose and a family member in the same year.

At this point, you can begin the voting process. It will probably be a link up on the navigation bar, or perhaps in the special space on your home page reserved by Tom, the site’s creator, which he usually uses to dispel notions that MySpace will be charging a fee or closing its virtual doors. More than likely there will be candidate’s profiles listed on this page. Clicking on Obama will result in the most famous (and only) error in MySpace history:

“Sorry. an unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.”

Content with knowing that all of your personal information has been sent in an email to some kid’s hotmail account with a naming convention similar to darth_vader6969, you’ll click the back button, opting instead to check out a Republican contestent. Clicking on Giuliani will redirect you to a page instructing you that you have to log in again. At this point, clicking back will save you from certain embarrasment, and entering your details over again will submit them to darth_vader6969@hotmail.com, who will use them to try and sell low price Cialis to all of your friends using your profile.

Unsure of what to do at this point you might even be tempted to go check out Hillary’s profile. Here, you’ll discover what a million-dollar CSS design budget can turn a MySpace profile into (a page that displays poorly in Firefox and requires side-to-side scrolling). Hillary’s comments will revolve around upcoming political events such as “Letz go clubin’ ths weeknd k hun?” as well as the tell all phrase that you add people to your friends list that you don’t even know: “Thanx for the add. shoot me up sumtime”

Deciding to opt out of the virtual election entirely, you go back to your home page and slowly begin to realize that every advertisement displayed on the page is related to the “Your Interests” field you filled in when you created your profile.

Battered and bruised, you’ll go log into Facebook to see if there are any new, funny groups to join.