January 2012
16 posts
Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired...
The above is the title of a piece in the NY Times about something that concerns me deeply. Essentially it’s saying that a lot of people who’ve gone into engineering and other hi-tech professions are washed-up by the time they make middle-age.
The Times is spilling the beans lately about some of Silicon Valley’s dirty little secrets. First, it was the nasty supply chain issues in...
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Just one of them days
When your wife calls out to you on Saturday morning saying, “Honey…there’s water under the sink!” you get a sinking feeling inside because you know, regardless of what you were planning, the rest of the day is gone. It’s time to play Man Around the House, right guys?
Saturday started that way. So, out to the garage for tools that seem to make sense, see if you can...
“It is important that when pursing our own self-interest we should be “wise...”
Beads of sweat in Davos despite snowy backdrop →
It seems the aristocrats in Davos, SZ, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) are feeling the heat of worldwide unrest about the disparities in wealth and power sending crowds into the streets in just the last 12 months. There’s a sense that the credibility of capitalism is seeping away. The masses don’t have the power of money or position, but they’ve got numbers. The so-called Arab...
Keeping brain sharp may ward off Alzheimer's... →
The other day I posted about how the suggestion that exercise may ward off Alzheimer’s motivated me to keep sweating down at the gym. Now the article above hints that keeping mentally active by reading, gaming, writing and other brain-challenging activities might help too. So now when I’m on the elliptical I guess I should play chess on my phone.
Actually, I have things that wrack my...
Kaiser Permanente offers patients Android app for... →
Way to go, KP! I’ve been a Kaiser member for a lot of years. KP has it’s drawbacks, but all in all I think it’s a good model for many medical practices. They’ve had online medical records for years. Now, it looks like they’re going mobile! Evidently all the info (records, test results) and functionality (email the docs, appointments, ordering meds) will be on my...
Davos Man, meet the #Occupy Man
The World Economic Forum’s wealthy, powerful elite is meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland, for their annual get-together. These people, who are so well-off that they have no personal worries, take some time once a year to fret about the problems of the world and occasionally about us little people. The group is known by the sexist term “Davos Man”, and indeed it’s...
Photographs and timelines: looking for a solution
My wife and I move a year-and-a-half ago. After all the unpacking was finally done we ended up with one unsolved storage problem. We have four big boxes of photograph albums handed down through two generations, and now we’re adding a third generation to them. Most of the pictures are in pre-digital photo-paper form and many are in bulky old albums.
I’m looking for a way to retrieve...
How the iPhone Scuttled the Middle Class →
OK, it isn’t all the iPhone’s fault, but the link above is to a NY Times article that puts together the connection between the success of the iPhone and all the other toys we can’t live without and the decline of manufacturing jobs in Amerika. The basic claim is that the US does not have a large enough system of highly-skilled but low-wage workers who will work like drones to...
Healthcare Delivers Technical Knockout at CES -... →
The author of this article says that, if you could see beyond all the razz-a-ma-tazz TVs and paper-thin laptops at CES this year, you’d find that health care related gizmos had a significant presence at the show. It’s the new big thing. With literally trillions to be spent on health care worldwide in the next few decades, the baby boomers, and smartphones begging for add-ons to make...
The Fat Trap →
From the NY Times. Losing weight is only half the battle. Your body has mechanisms that go into action following weight loss that tend to push you back up toward your former weight set point. The bottom line is that all the persistence and habits you needed to lose the weight are needed for a long time to keep from regaining it. That means you can’t coast after weight loss; you’ve got...
