Sorry about the quiet ‘round here the past few days. I was on sick call this past week, which means that when another intern gets sick and is unable to cover their shift, I slide into that shift; last night, that meant covering the general medicine and GI service overnight, after working a full day shift in the ER. It was a lot of fun, though, and it also means that I get to trade back to that intern one of my calls over the next few months.

A little while ago, I mentioned the fact that Planned Parenthood was fighting in court to keep their staff lists out of the hands of abortion protesters. I am very happy to report that they won; the decision (in PDF form) is here. Interesting to me is that the decision specifically takes notice of the grotesque website “The Nuremberg Files” in deciding how much danger staffmembers would face.

The lack of borders on the Internet is making for confusing discrepancies in laws and regulations. Ed Foster’s column in this week’s InfoWorld notes that a company which colocated a webserver in New Jersey is now facing the wrath of the NJ tax collectors, who claim that the presence of the colocated server does make the company liable for taxes to New Jersey on all of its sales. Yet a California judge ruled that a company’s decision to colocate their webserver in New Jersey does not make the company subject to New Jersey jurisdiction in lawsuits. Somehow, all these issues need to be ironed out and made consistent.

Weeeeeeird. Today, I realized that I would have to come home and find an online list of Internet cafes in Anchorage, so that my brother and I can periodically check in with our family on our trip to Alaska next week. When I got home, I started my nightly surfing, though, starting with Zannah’s crib… to find a link to a comprehensive list of cybercafes.

Obscene Interiors is another site that I stumbled onto via a link from someone else’s weblog; I apologize for the lack of specific attribution if it was you that pointed me there, but it’s too great a site to not point out.

Oooooh, this isn’t a good development…

Election-related link of the day:

“Five years after the Republican Congress shut down the government in part because of the money President Clinton wanted to spend on education, four years after Bob Dole embraced a Republican platform that advocated abolishing the Department of Education, Mr. Bush has made an expanded federal role in education a central campaign issue.”

Massachusetts is petitioning for custody of an unborn child based on the fact that the woman carrying the child is suspected of covering up the death of a prior baby. (She has already been declared an unfit mother, and has lost her three living children to the state.)

I hate to admit it, but I’m actually enjoying the pissing contest going on between Dave Winer and Tim O’Reilly (the last salvo of which is here). Of course, it’s only because I know exactly where Tim is coming from. Dave and I have had many private email exchanges in the past, and I’ve learned that they’re pointless because he quickly starts to accuse me of saying or doing things that never occurred. The ironic thing is that his freak-outs almost always occur after I have asked him some question of clarification or justification — ironic because Dave’s the one that believes that anyone who can’t handle questions is a hype artist with something to hide. (And pointedly, in the last email exchange, never once did Dave answer any of the questions I asked; it became a running joke through my subsequent replies.)

At the end of Tim’s post, he proposes two surveys. Dave set one of them up, and for a little while, he was pointing to it; it is located here. I set up Tim’s other question here. Answer away…