Is there a way to pull LJ entries into RSS feeds?
Or is there a site that’ll pull in LJs and also other things that are available by RSS?
And if the latter, how easy is it to post to my LJ from that site – or do I have to link directly to LJ to post?
I’ve been “releasing” old books to the wild with Bookcrossing.com id tags – I’ve released a bunch of books either in my clinic waiting room, or in the coffee shop I frequent.
But I’ve only rarely gotten any response. So I get excited when one does get caught. And one just did! The weird part is that I’m pretty sure this is one of the books I left in the clinic but it got entered as “caught” on a weekend and many weeks after I released it. So I’m guessing someone took it home from clinic, read it, and perhaps released it again without reporting on the site? I know almost all the books I release in clinic disappear even though I’ve never had any of them reported as caught on the website.
Other BookCrossers – has your luck been as bad as mine?
I recently started changing where I glue the sticker – I was gluing inside the front cover but more recently I started putting a sticker explaining the concept on the first page of the actual text. We’ll see whether that makes any change…
If a friend was going to tell you something negative about yourself, something that would be tough to hear, would you rather…
Me, I’d rather get the news privately in writing, so I can process it, rather than being hit with it in a conversation where I’d have to think of something to say right off. But I’m wondering if I’m abnormal in this regard…?
Having recognized that I never touch my old medical school library, I have gone through the books and decided to get rid of many of them. At this point, I have electronic access to the newer versions of all the ones I actually use.
So I have large books on basic sciences (biochemistry, anatomy, neuroanatomy, pathology, etc…) and clinical texts (internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry), all old enough that I wouldn’t consider them to be accurate anymore.
What do to with them? K suggested “ask the public library” –
, what would my library tell me?
I’m pretty sure Half Price Books would turn up their noses at them.
Goodwill? I’ve donated a ton of stuff to them over the last year (remember nadeclumo or whatever we called it?) but haven’t tried giving them books yet.
Thoughts?
Yesterday was an interesting day in clinic.
We (the city) found ourselves on the dirty side of a tropical storm/depression and so the rain started sometime between 7 and 8. And got going real good by 9 or 10. End result was flooding galore – street closures, stalled cars, stranded people, water everywhere. About half the roads leading to the clinic were officially closed. It was pretty much impossible to get to us from the west. Metro (public transportation) suspended most of its operations in our area, too.
For the first time since we’ve been there, the water got bad enough to flood the clinic itself – a half-inch or less puddle covering our back exam rooms, cutting our capacity by about a third.
Worse, around 10 there was a brief power outage, and the surge as the power resumed apparently damaged something mission-critical in the building’s air conditioning system. By noon, then, the temp inside the clinic was 80 F and climbing…
And yet the patients still came. I had only one patient no-show for the morning. The afternoon was lighter than usual because I usually leave slots open for the last-minute callers, and by lunchtime we’d decided all last-minute callers would not be offered appointments.. but I still saw a good number of people. Many of these people didn’t have urgent problems – there were a couple kids who needed some shots for the next school year, for example, and several people just there to follow up on long-term conditions.
We physicians were offered the option to cancel our afternoon clinics. I chose not to because they didn’t offer the same option to my staff – my nurses were told that if they went (or got sent) home, they’d have to burn vacation hours to get paid for the afternoon. I thought that was an obnoxious policy decision on the part of the stuffed-shirts upstairs, and chose to keep my clinic open so my staff could get paid for the afternoon. I’m confident my institution lost money on us and it serves them right 🙂
All of which reminds me of what happened recently in New York when the subways flooded. Even though commuting was near-impossible, even though many institutions were without power, even though there were concerns that things could get a lot worse instead of getting better…. very few businesses actually shut down and few employers bothered to try to do anything to enable/encourage their employees and customers to get off the roads. This makes me rather grumpy.
For the first time in two weeks I’m caught up with my clinic paperwork. Sigh.
Ethical question: if a patient who’s never seen me (or anyone at my clinic) before calls ahead of her first visit because she wants me to telephone her so she can ask me a bunch of questions and see if I’m going to be the solution to her problems or if I’m just going to be “like all the other doctors”, am I justified in saying “no, that’s what the first visit is for” and refusing to call her? Especially if I strongly suspect I’ll be JUST like all the other doctors, and she’ll hate me anyway?
(There’s more detail to the story that led me to believe that a doctor-patient relationship between me and her would be of no benefit to either of us, but the core question is whether it’s reasonable for me to refuse to be someone’s doctor in the first place).
My friend’s very precocious daughter asked me the yesterday what I would do if I have to be a doctor for someone I thoroughly dislike. (She used George Bush as an example). I stammered a bit and didn’t give her a very good answer. What do y’all think the answer should be?
As a side note, I’m totally psyched that this friend’s daughter felt comfortable enough to have friendly conversation with me. She’s at that wonderful, amazing preteen age where she’s really starting to put her worldview together, she doesn’t have a lot of female role models (her Dad has custody as a single parent for now), and before this she was always a little too shy to interact much with me. Now that’s a relationship that stands to be beneficial to both parties! I look forward to future challenging questions from her.
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hsapiens responded to the a comment I made in discussion about my last post, and her comments led me to believe I had not communicated effectively – and in doing so had appeared to take a stand on the controversy. Oops. Sadly, I know I am overly prolix in my writing, so I sometimes try to force myself to be brief. And then I fail to communicate at all.
And then in trying to explain myself, I ran on long and then started generalizing… and found myself intrigued by the Harry Potter connection… and eventually realized I’d better make my response a journal entry (with a cut) rather than a comment reply…
hsapiens replied:
Actually, the word is not “merely descriptive.” It was a racist term invented by pro-slavery political campaigns and it has been the term of choice by openly bigoted types for keeping uppity blacks down and maintaining the purity of the “white race.”
I acknowledge this word’s historical use may have left it irretrievably stained with unacceptable connotations. Since I just learned the word, I really feel unqualified to judge that question. I was trying to explore a different point, which is that there are some words that are implicitly judgmental in their denotation, where others have simply come to have unsavory connotations.
Consider another word that uses the mis- root: Misbegotten. it means (according to Answers.com)
So anyway, I was musing about the qualitative difference between words that have become bad because of their usage, as opposed to words that started out calling the situation bad. To me, that has some bearing on whether you might choose to continue to use the word. Others may disagree.
On other fronts, the Harry Potter book have lots of themes about the question of segregation versus inclusion. There’s purebloods versus muggleborns, wizards versus other magical creatures (giants, elves, goblins, werewolves), magical creatures versus muggles, and so on. Even the house rivalries present all kinds of issues with respect to stereotyping and prejudice. The wizarding world in Harry Potter seems to be a society with many levels of deeply entrenched racism. So, many fanfiction stories tackle the racism issue either implicitly or explicitly, both with respect to romantic pairings and more broadly. So, is it so bad to have a category for stories in which that’s a central concern? And if it’s OK to have such a genre, what would be a better, less negative word to use to describe it?
So anyway, that’s some thoughts… hope that my comments re-establish my relative neutrality on the issue and return me to the land of pure musing about word roots…
I have a fairly expansive vocabulary… but somehow never managed to come across the word miscegenation. Which two unconnected people on my flist tell me is considered a racist word. So I guess it’s a hot topic for someone.
So I go to my online dictionary and learn what it means. And I guess it’s useful to have words in the language that efficiently describe all the phenomena that occur around you – it’s more efficient to say “miscegenation” than to say “marriage between people of different races or socially-defined groups”. But, the “mis-” prefix on the word does suggest that whoever coined the word probably thought that was a Bad Thing. Me, having gone decades without ever needing the word, I’ll probably forget it soon and go the rest of my life without needing the word. Aren’t there more interesting things to talk about?
Now here’s a term I like: hybrid vigor. Reproduce with someone different from you, so your kids won’t have any nasty recessive traits and will be beautiful and healthy.
I’m on a kick of learning cool stuff about entertaining tools (toys?).
In particular, I’ve gone from ignoring my old ipod, to being an avid listener. I have the car tape adapter thingie which lets my play the ipod through the car. When I do my electronics shopping this week (have decided to hit Fry’s whether or not I make final buying decisions today), I plan to pick up the headphone-to-audio jack adapter that will let me run ipod or computer output through the stereo. And as my previous post shows, I’m giving myself crash courses in home AV system options.
So… what’re your favorite podcasts? I’m fond of several of the NPR offerings (Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk), several newscasts associated with publications such as Nature, Discover, Science… and I’ve come across a few useful ones for honing my medical knowledge. Also I’m enjoying one that reviews Spanish vocab in short lessons (Coffee break Spanish, I think it’s called). And there’s one that features people giving one-minute lessons about random topics which is good for short trips… Several of these are just augmenting my learning jag; I got a cool tip for simplifying hard drive backups yesterday and so now my main working computer is properly backed up with less trouble than ever before…
Also have been on intense learning curve for school and work related projects – have been brushing up my HTML, which I learned at a very basic, unstructured level years ago. Have overlaid an understanding of XML standards and CSS and am picking up some/more PHP and JavaScript skills to expand my capabilities. And I’ve been reading up on a variety of new systems, since my employers are planning to replace our electronic medical record with a completely different system and I’ve been part of that decision process…
My brain is full of new stuff. It feels good!
Not to mention that I’m finding my original profession incredibly wearing right now, and it’s nice to think that my skills in other areas are developing to the point where I can do other things for a living…
I’m considering replacing out a bunch of our AV equipment for K’s upcoming birthday. He’s out of town this week which means that if I scramble around for the next couple of days, I could have it all in place when he got home and he’d have a true (if early) surprise.
But I have soooo many questions because I’m really quite ignorant about this stuff. For example:
– DVD recorders – I hadn’t even realized you could own something that would record onto a DVD without needing some sort of subscription to fancy digital cable or whatever. Has anyone got any experience with them? What format is most likely to be readable by other DVD players? What do I need to know? Can I get a decent-performing unit that records DVDs and also is a DVD changer (say, 5-disk)?
Shopping
– Is Fry’s really cheaper than other sources, or just… bigger? What are other good places to shop in Houston, to get a fair price for a decent product?
– What are good brands these days?
– Any benefit in buying everything in the same brand? e.g. single remote-control action?
Scrappy Blog 