Going To Sleep Is Free, But

George Carlin, 'A Place For Your Stuff', and the MacBook Air

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My uber-cool sister-in-law gave me the George Carlin Reads To You boxed set. George Carlin's "A Place For Your Stuff" exactly summarizes my dilemma about how to keep my computer 'stuff' handy. Thanks to Apple, 'there's all different ways of carrying your stuff.' Let me explain.

All my 'stuff' is on my 24" Core2Duo iMac. That stuff is automatically copied every hour to an external hard drive via Time Machine so my stuff is safe from a computer hard disk problem. My really important stuff is backed up online using dotMac. Every night at 2 in the morning. Really.

I want to take some of my stuff with me wherever I go. I use my 60 GB video iPod to carry stuff around on but I need to plug it in to another Mac to see my stuff and, let's face it, there aren't a lot of Macs around in the workplace. Right now I use my iPhone to carry important stuff, but there's lots of stuff I can't carry on my iPhone, like the article on how to use Google Reader that I'm working on, or the PDF files I'd like to read.

Going from my iMac to the outside world means I have to leave a lot of stuff behind.....until now. Thanks to the MacBook Air I can now take most of my important stuff with me and it will only weigh three pounds!

OpenID for Non-SuperUsers

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MacBook Air

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MACBOOK AIR 13/1.6/2GB/80GB-USA  MB003LL/A $1,799.00


Ships by: Feb 6


Delivers by: Feb 11

16,707 SPAM E-mails In One Month

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My group uses Google Apps for Your Domain for one of our domain names. That particular domain had been compromised before it went to GAFYD. A trojan had infected an unprotected office PC and harvested our addresses.

I logged in to the account for the first time in a month today. In one month, Google's SPAM filters blocked 16,707 spams from getting to our inboxes. Thanks, Google.

My Predictions for Apple's New Laptop--3G Wireless

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The one feature for Apple's new laptop that no one has mentioned but that I'm hoping for is the option to add a 3G wireless card. Give me a 3 pound, 13", solid state memory, 12 hour battery life (or even 8) laptop that is connected anywhere ATT has 3G wireless and I'd pay a premium to get one.

Clark Venable, M.D.

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Pay For Performance: Physicians Pay For Insurers Better Financial Performance?

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I've always been suspicious of the pay for performance movement. Thinking cynically (which I do more and more these days), it seemed to me that pay for performance has the backing of the insurance industry because they could use it as an excuse to pay physicians less. Show me a pay for performance program that actually increases costs to insurers and I'll show you an out-of-work actuary.

Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, has a perspective article in the December 27, 2007 issue of the NEJM titled Is Quality Improvement Improving Quality? A View from the Doctor's Office. I found the following a much better statement of the issue than I could ever come up with:

Unfortunately, it's not free full text, but it should be (meaning you'll need a subscription to read the whole piece).

NIH-Funded Research to Be Free (After One Year)

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I was browsing the Wall Street Journal Health Blog and ran across this item regarding the new federal budget:

Medscape CME: An Introduction to the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP)

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Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP) Module 1: Infection Prevention Update

Maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™ for physicians

Medscape CME: Systemic Lidocaine Good

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Annals of Surgery: Systemic Lidocaine Shortens Length of Hospital Stay After Colorectal Surgery: A Double-blinded, Randomized, Placebo-controlled Trial.

1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™ for physicians

Health Care Reform Distilled

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GruntDoc has an excellent distillation of the choices to be made in health care reform:

Sort of a permutation of C. Everett Koop when he said that Americans want the best medical care in the world, they want it for free, and they want it now.

Patients pay only 14% of health care costs? Wow.

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Free the market; Government interference hampers healthcare reform

This article has several nice pieces of data.