Random thoughtsQuick RepairA few years ago I bought a headset for my phone and shortly afterward added a headset lifter. The specific units are the GN Netcom 9120-Flex Wireless Headset with Noise-Canceling Flex Boom Headset and the GN Netcom 1000 RHL Remote Answering Device for Headsets. The combo isn’t cheap but the convenience factor is tremendous considering that I can be several hundred feet away from my phone when a call comes in, touch the button on the headset, and the lifter lifts up the telephone handset so I can answer the call. When I’m done, I press the headset button again and the lifter hangs up the phone. That’s the way the system works. Or did work until a few weeks ago when the lifter stopped lifting. Of course the first thing I did was re-do all the set-ups and when that didn’t work I replaced the headset since it has the power cord and most of the electronics. The lifter still didn’t work. Today I shopped online for a new lifter. One of my favorite shopping spots is Amazon.com because I can read the reviews of products before buying. Occasionally I’ll also learn something that saves me some money. Two reviewers had the same advice: If the unit stops working, “tap” it on the side because there’s apparently a known defect in the unit that the “tap” cures. Before placing an order for another unit, I soundly tapped the side of the lifter then pressed the button on the headset. It lifted! Who would’ve known? Child Rape: Exactly What IS Appropriate Punishment?I’ve been holding off commenting about a ruling by the Supreme Court until I cooled off. The problem is, every time I read the newspaper article, I get just as mad as I did the first time I read it. HOW DARE THEY!! “The death penalty is not a proportionate punishment for the rape of a child.” — Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice. The ruling spares two men facing death for child rape; the victims were girls aged 5 and 8. The ruling spares anyone in the future from the death penalty regardless if they rape an infant, a toddler, or any little girl or boy. WTF were those five justices thinking?! Oh, wait. Maybe the sex was consentual. That’s probably it. Or maybe the girls “asked for it.” Child rape doesn’t just cause physical trauma to the victim. Child rape destroys the victim’s childhood. Child rape damages the victim’s soul. Rape is one of the most horrendous crimes that can be done to a child. Child rape deserves the death penalty. By removing the death penalty those justices give child rapists the potential to be released from prison to rape again. And they trivialize a horrible, horrible crime. One Name Change Too Many?A man in New Mexico is upset that a state district judge in Bernalillo County, NM, has refused his request for a name change ruling the proposed change “obscene, offensive and would not comport with common decency.” Variable, who is apparently the same man whose name used to be Snaphappy Fishsuit Mokiligon until he changed it in 2004, wanted a legal name change to “F—- Censorship!” (without the dashes). Actually, he (or anyone else) can call himself anything he wants. Making it legal through the courts is another matter. I wonder what he uses on his passport, driver’s license, and other legal documents. Printing Airline Boarding PassesI normally print our boarding passes online, a few hours before a flight somewhere. That gives me a chance to take advantage of last minute upgrades, change our seats to better ones if available, and print a couple duplicate copies in case our originals get lost. It’s the RETURN flight, when I don’t have my computer that I have to depend on business centers or airport kiosks for our boarding passes. I prefer to have our boarding passes in hand when we get to the airport, and since we usually travel with only one carry-on for the two of us and no checked luggage, we usually can bypass long lines at the ticket counter. This past holiday I finally decided to try one of the “print your boarding pass” machines in the hotel lobby instead of going to the business center to do our Web check-in. The cost was $1/printed page, $.35/minute and/or $5.95/credit card. I inserted my AmEx, was charged $5.95, and then searched through the long list of airlines to find USAir. The first thing I noticed was that the computer used a rollerball instead of a mouse which made maneuvering slower for me than normal. I finally logged in to USAir and retrieved our reservations. I’d usually check our seat assignments but because I was having trouble using the rollerball, I clicked “print” instead. A new window popped up and asked me if I was authorizing a payment of $5 for the 5 pages I was printing. I moused over to “yes” and clicked. Nothing. I clicked again. A new window popped up with a message: “You only have $4.98 left, insert cash or use credit card…” By that time, however, the $4.98 was no longer a valid balance because with each second another penny was gone from the original $5.95 charged to my credit card. So I put my credit card back in the slot but this time nothing happened. Only the cash slot kept flashing for my paper money. All well and good except I didn’t have any $1’s or $5’s with me and putting anything larger in was not an option since the machine “does not dispense change.” My $5.95 continued to go down and was around $1.35 by the time I cancelled out of USAir’s site. Because I had attempted to print the passes, USAir’s site assumed I had successfully checked in. Later in the day, at the business center, I printed duplicate boarding passes. Page 5 was nothing more than a paragraph about airline regulations. In retrospect, if I’d known what each page consisted of, I’d have tried to print the first four pages and my $4.98 should have been enough. Actually, in retrospect, I’d have kept a few $1 bills in my pocket, “just in case.” Would I use one of these machines again? Probably not. But, now I know how they work and I’m hoping that my experience will save just one other person from wasting $5.95 like I did. Plagiarism and PLRMost people surfing the Web have no clue what PLR stands for nor do they understand how it may affect them. PLR stands for Private Label Rights and it is a thriving business on the Web that works like this: someone writes an article then sells most or all of the intellectual property rights to that article. Depending upon the rights being sold, the buyer has the right to resell the article, use it on their website or blog, and/or publish it with themselves shown as the author. There are many writers who are contracted to write articles and even ghost write books for people who may not have the time and perhaps not the writing skills necessary to create the material themselves. Copywriters and ghostwriters charge a decent rate which reflects the time they have invested in producing original content. PLR is different because PLR articles, ebooks, books, and videos are sold multiple times generally at a very low cost. Buyers “should” use PLR material as a starting point or basic outline for their own original work but that’s not a requirement and that means the exact same articles are posted to multiple websites and blogs. It also means that ebooks with the same content are sold with different authors’ names, sometimes with different titles, sometimes with the original PLR title. Search engines take a very negative view of many sites with the exact same wording and some search engines won’t include these sites in their search results. Other search results will have an extensive list of the same PLR articles. PLR articles repeat specific keywords and phrases throughout the article to increase the article’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking. This, of course, backfires due to the high numbers of duplicate articles on multiple sites. So, some people who buy PLR articles run them through programs such as ArticleBuzz which rework the article, changing synonyms and adding specific key phrases designated by the buyer, to make the article appear to be an original creation. The PLR buyer usually has all rights to the articles they have purchased and many buyers become resellers, selling the same package over and over to other buyers who then also become resellers. It is a vicious cycle that adds enormous amounts of poorly written information Welcome To My World, Oprah!Several years ago Oprah (do I really have to add “Winfrey”?) talked about the reason behind her weight gain. It’s her thyroid. I didn’t watch her show so I don’t know if she actually gave the name of the specific hypothyroid problem she has since she is talking about it, maybe more of the medical profession will take note and anyone with similar symptoms will seek early treatment. I suspected she had a thyroid condition for more than two years. The major clue for me was her throat; it was swollen, the way mine was for several years and which is a good visual clue that the thyroid may be malfunctioning. I have photos from 20 plus years ago in which my thyroid looks like a swollen Adam’s apple. I tried to get help when I went to my ob-gyn for my yearly exam. I told him of my extreme exhaustion and uncontrollable weight gain. I didn’t think to point to my swollen Adam’s apple; how could a medical professional not see it? I was desperate for him to make me feel better and his words floored me: “You’re getting older; learn to live with it!” No offer to do any tests (and hypothyroidism is easily diagnosed with a simple blood test), no follow-up visits, no referral to someone who cared, nothing. I was too old for him be bothered to use his training to make my life better. It was the last time I went to see him. Two years later, up 25 more pounds, still exhausted, and after a lot of Web research, I went to my new family doctor and told him I suspected that I had a thyroid problem. I asked him to do a blood test to check my TSH level. It was that easy to discover that I have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, a hypothyroid condition that causes weight gain, fatigue, depression, and a whole host of other nasty (and some potentially life-threatening) problems when it’s untreated. The cure: a simple little pill once a day for the rest of my life. I can pretty much look at a person’s neck and tell if they are an untreated hypothyroid condition. I think Whoopi Goldberg has had a thyroid problem for many years. Next time you see her on The View, check her neck. Oprah’s neck was the same; so was mine. Hypothyroidism sneaks up on a person. One day they’re feeling great and fitting into their clothes and a few months later they’re buying plus sizes and falling asleep in the middle of conversations. Doctors don’t regularly test to see if the thyroid is functioning properly although with more than 10% of the population (primarily at middle age) developing the problem, they should. Oprah wrote about her hypothyroidism in an issue of O Magazine and she said “I decided to give myself July. Yes, the whole month–dedicated to myself, for myself. To regroup. Rejuvenate. Restore my soul.” She doesn’t mention going to the doctor or taking meds or doing the things that most of us must do in order to get diagnosed and get hypothyroidism under control. Very few women have the financial resources to just “drop out” and focus entirely on themselves for a month or more. I’m not convinced that learning to relax, eating healthy foods, and spending time watching beautiful island sunsets is going to take the place of Synthroid or other meds that regulate the thyroid. Don’t get me wrong, I try to relax, I watch the foods I eat, and I love sunsets. But sometimes it takes medical intervention to get the body back on track. As far as the doctor I first told about my problem? I think he might have cared if I’d been 21 and cute. But, since I was 50, tired, overweight, and cranky, he just didn’t want to spend any more effort with me. It was time for me to “learn to live with it” and get out of his space. I’m sure there’s a special reward for men like him; I just don’t expect to be going to the same place to see how he spends his eternity. And Oprah's weight? She gains, she loses, she gains, she loses. It's what you do when you have a thyroid gone wild. Older WomenA friend sent this to me, someone had sent it to her. Time for me to pass it along… When I was married 25 years, I took a look at my wife one day and said, “Honey, 25 years ago we had a cheap apartment, a cheap car, slept on a sofa bed and watched a 10-inch black and white TV, but I got to sleep every night with a hot 25-year-old blonde. Now we have a nice house, nice car, big bed and plasma screen TV, but I’m sleeping with a 50-year-old woman. It seems to me that you are not holding up your side of things.” My wife is a very reasonable woman. She told me to go out and find a hot 25-year-old blonde and she would make sure that I would once again be living in a cheap apartment, driving a cheap car, sleeping on a sofa bed and watching a 10-inch black and white TV. Aren’t older women great? |