Speaker For The Diodes - March 7th, 2011

05:24 am - QotD

palmer_kun 2011-02-01		The US is the ONLY first world nation without universal health care. Also, medical expenses are the number one cause of bankruptcies in the US. Medical bankruptcies simply don't exist in other countries.
nineveh_uk 2011-02-02		This is why I argue that the US is not a first world nation. It is a very rich third world nation. First world nations protect their citizenry through universal health care that benefits us all. A country that doesn't do that - through choice, or because it can't afford to - is de facto not first world.

03:09 pm - Overdoing It?

You know how, when you close your eyes, you still see stuff -- blobs and aurorae and other retinal noise, plus afterimages for a while and the insides od your eyelids out of focus if the room is bright?

Well, there's a mouse pointer superimposed. Wee black arrow with white drop-shadow. (And it's persisted way too long to be an afterimage^[*], so it's in my brain, not in my retinas.)

The marathon "back up about a third of the photos I stashed on Mom's computer before I ran out of blank CDs" session yesterday may have been a bit much. (Oh yeah, and I need to get around to posting some of my recent photos, don't I?)

[*] And an afterimage would probably be inverted -- a white arrow with a black border, the negative of the Mac's mouse pointer.

04:38 pm - Language Question

I've just posted a poll at Dreamwidth, with a single question: Have you ever made up a word on the spot because you didn't already know a word for what you meant, and later found your word, with basically your definition, in a dictionary (published before your nonce coinage)?

Apparently, anonymous users are (unsurprisingly) unable to vote. But if you have a LiveJournal, Insanejournal, Blogger, Wordpress, or Gmail account (or any of a host of others), you can log into Dreamwidth via OpenID and then fill out my one-question survey. If you're already logged in at Dreamwidth because you've left a comment using OpenID in the recent past and checked the "leave me logged in" box, this'll be transparent. Unfortunately, I see no built-in "use OpenID right now" button on the poll form, so if you're not already logged in at Dreamwidth, you'll need to (a) go to the OpenID login page first (there's also a "Log in with OpenID" link in two places on the main login page), do the OpenID dance there, and then go back to my entry with the poll in it; or (b) leave a comment over there, logging in via OpenID in the process, and then answer the poll. Or, of course, you can just leave a comment right here and not get tallied in the poll results but still answer my curiosity.

Note that folks stuck in the Facebook tar-pit can't do this, because Facebook is poopyheaded about that: FB allows OpenID logins to Facebook, but does not support using OpenID to log in anywhere else as your FB-self -- they want every other site in the world to add a another, just-for-Facebook, cross-site authentication method, instead of letting their users make use of the generic tool that's already there. Pbbbt! So if you're also on MySpace, Gmail, Deadjournal, Yahoo!, Steam, or Typepad, you're fine, but if you're a Facebook-only user, you'll just have to leave an anonymous comment instead of having your vote tallied above. I'm assuming that if you're reading this anywhere other than Facebook, you probably do have a non-Facebook identity.

... And if you want a Dreamwidth account of your very own, I have some DW invite-codes to give away.