Help me! Poison Ivy.

I'm a little dense. The medical field is always using terms which go way over my head and with the rapid pace that things are changing, who can keep up?

For example, I was using Google Trends to check out a theory I had. I thought that the lines for Zanfel and Poison Ivy would show where summer was. I was, of course, right. This was when I noticed the article in the latter entry that caught my attention: Dermatologist Debunks Poison Ivy Myths. Dermatologist? That's the skin guys, right?

Here's a bit I found intriguing, which is why I need help:
"[Dr. Jeffery] Dover said that soap and water is best. Wash your body and your clothes immediately."

Which is what reminded me of something I once read:

What not to do

Of course, I'm not dense. The above book was published by the American Medical Association in 1987. I get it - things change and the American Academy of Dermatology happens to agree with Dr. Dover. The idea is that when you hear the folk wisdom that everyone is too willing to offer, be sure to check on it yourself from reliable sources.

In a related note, Zanfel and it's generic equivalents actually do work if you shell out the $25-40 it costs and follow the odd instructions on the package. I've used it the past few times I've gotten a case of Poison Ivy and it clears up the rash in a few hours.

Fringe - The sad turn.

I love Fringe. But lately, I've been loving it less and less. This past episode almost had me give up on it. I don't want to sound picky: when I searched for Fringe and the floating letters, I was expecting to see other people just as unhappy at their decline as I was, but what I saw was just the opposite. People actually want the letters to stop!

In the first two episodes of Fringe, I thought the floating words of orientation were amazing. Particularly when the words were no longer the focus of attention but still appeared in the background. This, for me, showed that the words were actually part of the diegesis. The show is all about things you and I do not fully comprehend, so the words stood as a way of saying making you ask "Are they really there? or Why couldn't they be?"

Just as you are asked to believe that a computer program can liquefy your brains, you are being asked to believe that large gray letters might be able to exist in the actual environment of the scene. After the second episode the floating letters never appeared in the background, but you still got them. In this past episode, I had to wait about 30 minutes before the first letters appeared and even then, they only appeared twice. So if any of the producers read my blog, I beg of you, please don't remove this unique element of the show from it!

Update 05/13
The letters are back and better than ever. I love this great aspect of this exciting show!

The myth of the iPhone Killer

Right now, there are many phones on the market which proclaim or are proclaimed to be "iphone-killers" by their most loyal fans. These phones include the HTC Diamond and the Nokia 5800 Music Express. The idea of an iphone killer is that there is a phone which is so stable, fast and sexy that it will effectively kill the idea that the iphone is the best phone on the market. These phones are great - they have all the hardware, they've got the sound, the battery life, the gps, the huge amount of memory, the accelerometer (the thing which detects movement). They even have some great apps - the nokia has a touch screen app for browsing photos which mimics the iphone's app. So why then are these phones still not in the same market? Why is it that with all these capabilities, that the iphone is still the best phone out there?

Go to facebook. Go to yahoo. Go to amazon. Go to any site and try to find an application made for your phone. They don't exist. That's not 100% true. Many of these sites are actually supported by Blackberry, but Blackberry lacks the hardware support that these other great phones have, except for the notable exception of the Storm, which has it's own problems (like slow web browsing).

The point is this: no other phone even comes close to the iphone's large application catalog. On top of that, no other phone offers an usable alternative to the iphone's ipod function. Nokia has supposed music management software which is at best a bad attempt. RIM's Storm has no music management software and the HTC Diamond also uses very rudimentary software. But if you want something that downloads podcasts and records ratings and records the number of times that you listen to a song and then makes playlists with that information, the iPhone is your only bet.

The iphone is not perfect. It costs a ton of money. If you opt for the 16 GB model, it's $300 upfront, and then $15 a month just to have the iphone and another $15 a month for the mandatory data plan. The second flaw is that it has a fixed camera lense. The 5800 and the Diamond both have variable focus lenses, which can possibly allow you to focus on objects near the phone, like QR Codes. The next big flaw is that the iPhone has no IR transmitter, so no universal remotes for iphone users. Despite all this, no other device mixes so well all of the good features you could want in a phone as the iPhone does. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Amely - The movie.

Emelie.
I saw a movie the other day. It was called Amely or some such. It was one of those "feel good" French flicks. I guess it had a few good things about it, but I couldn't name any off the top of my head. I'd like to give a few words of advice to the director Jean-Pâul Gautier. It's time to take a hint. Movies these days aren't successful or good if they aren't in English. It's about time these Frenchys pulled their head out of their ass and learned English like everyone else. It's no wonder that movies like [Record] and Abry las hojas and the vanishing didn't have any success in their original languages. I might point out that the foreign section of my local video store is always stocked and it has cob-webs on it. Take a hint foreigners: nobody wants to see a movie in any language other than in English. On top of that, I didn't spend 2000 dollars on a tv with blue-ray so that I could have some words blocking the picture. I think the movie studios should get together and block all of the foreign films. So listen Gualtier. Don't waste your time with the crappy gibber-jabber movies. We want English movies. If you don't make them that way, we'll just fix them sooner or later. So I for one will be the first in line at the movies when Emelie comes out in English.

(This is a joke, as you can tell.)

PennyTalk

So you have a friend or some friends and family in the rest of the world? You want to keep in touch, but you don't want to turn your phone into a drain that dials your wallet away? I get it. You saw the Pennytalk ad in the in-flight magazine and it looks to good to be true! What could be the catch? Penny is a services which is a service which supposedly offers international calling for only a few pennies a minutes. This is only slightly true. I think it is highly misleading as you will see, for the majority of the phone calls you make (under about 8 minutes). While the rate is low, there is an enormous base rate. The base rate is 49¢ for every call, whether you can understand the other person or not. So if you have to call two times before you get a good connection.... you can see where this is going. Also, don't worry about saving time with pennytalk. The customer service people regularly take upwards of 10 minutes of getting around to your phone call. Then there's that other issue - Pennytalk makes no intention of making phone calling easy for you, there is no speed dial or quicklist: you must remember that 10 - 17 digit number in its entirety, because you will have to dial it everytime you call. I use AT&T World Connect. This service recently switched from being country specific to worldwide. You use to have to pay 3.99 a month for every country you want a discounted rate to. This is now 3.99, for discounts to the whole world. (That's the equivalent of about 8 calls with penny talk). I've made up some charts comparing AT&T's World Connect and PennyTalk.

In summary, Pennytalk:
- has an expensive connection fee.
- will require more than one call to have an intelligible conversation.
- takes a long time to place a call (no speed dial)
- has bad voice quality.

Go fight about it.

The argument is this: Abortion ends a life, which left to carry out its own course, would have existed. This is a rupture in the natural order of things, and therefore wrong. What I haven't heard about, and am just dying to hear about is the contribution which is just another form of cloning. You are creating life in people who would, through the natural order of things, not have had kids, and not possibly had 8 kids, as is evermore frequent. The church recognizes that it is possible that two people might not be physically able to have children together. The church's answer to people who find themselves in this predicament? An annulment - the marriage never happened. What I'm trying to say by all this is that, just as an abortion is an abnormal, and not by the will of a high power, termination of a life, fertility clinics, which are abnormal ways of starting life, must be seen on equal terms - it's wasn't god's doing. And if you're one of the unfortunate people who find themselves in this position, the churches response to you is "tough luck", you aren't someone who is meant to have children.

A conversation I had with my iPod today.

Me: Hey, how's it going?

ipod: Pretty good.

Me: Yeah? You look pretty full.

ipod: you know...

Me: you still letting that computer boss you around?

ipod: ...

Me: You know, you really outta stick up for yourself, everytime I see you you're changed a bit, you just let him take your shit and then give you new shit, why don't you tell him what to do?

ipod: I know, I know... I don't know what it is. I just feel like I need him so much. Whenever I'm with him I just feel so energized. I feel so much better. Later, I just feel used.

Me: you can't go on like this. One of these days he's just gonna upgrade. You gotta be your own person, you gotta do your own thing, you can't let him control you.
--
I forget how it went after that.