Now the pretty weather is back. I just don’t get it.

Today is a cool day. I get to fill out all of the papers for my appointment onto the graduate staff of Columbia’s hospital — it’s like I’m becoming an adult or something. I’m still going to reflexively be looking over my shoulder whenever someone in the hospital asks for a doctor, though…

A slight Freudian slip…

Whoa — today’s Suck rocks. It’s a rant against the move towards skinnable applications (WinAmp, Mozilla/Netscape 6, ICQ), arguing that they tend to make an interface much worse. (I didn’t realize that all of the major skinnable applications are from the same company until just now.)

I needed to get in touch with a company today that has made a point of not having their phone number on their website, and hasn’t responded to any of my email for a week. (I truly don’t like doing business with companies like this.) Of course, they have a domain name, and doing a whois on that domain name gave up their phone number. Too bad for them; at least the customer support agent with whom I spoke was pleasant and helpful.

Articles like this — Why Doctors Hate the Internet — bother me immensely. A refrain I hear throughout the hospital, echoed in this article, is that many physicians resent patients who come in armed with information from the web; they feel that it’s a waste of their time to have to address the patients’ concerns, and that a lot of what patients bring in is worthless or quackery. Why don’t doctors see this as a good time to actually impart good information upon patients? If doctors stop listening, and stop responding to patients’ questions about the information that they get out there, then patients are going to stop asking, and we’ll lose the ability to actually help them learn what information can be trusted and what can’t.

I never ever ever ever thought that I’d see a pro-anorexia website. I cannot put into words how terrible this is. No joke, I bet I have nightmares about this for weeks.

If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times: never compete with an ostrich during mating season.

My two latest toys: an Axis 2100 web camera and the LCD1621 liquid-crystal display. (Not together, mind you — different projects.)