Skepticum

I was following a Yahoo Answers! discussion on whether or not it is bad to give cash as a gift for Christmas. The two main reasons against giving cash were:

1. Cash is impersonal, it’s more thoughtful to pick out a gift for someone

2. If you give a certain amount to someone it creates the expectation that they should give the same to you.

Today I got a card with cash in it, and I thought it was the coolest thing. My teeth are about to fall off from all the candy canes people have been dropping off for me so the cash was actually more personal than impersonal. And the fact that my friend did not worry about me feeling pressured to give a gift of same value to her makes it even cooler.

Here’s to the best gift I got this season:

Tags: Christmas, friendship, gifts, Religion

Americans don’t often get to hear the realities of public health care in other parts of the world, even with the recent debate on universal health care.

Pajamas media reported today that according to UNICEF Romania holds the leading position in child mortality rates, and mothers’ birth-related deaths in the developing world. The costs of universal health care in Romania range from lives lost to underground cash economies where bribing doctors and nurses is the rule without guarantee of good care:

In some hospitals, patients are required to bring their own cotton pads or needles, food is mostly provided by caring relatives, rooms are overcrowded, hygiene is poor. The daily bribe for a nurse is around $40, a surgeon might ask you for $500 or more to perform an intervention. Although employees pay 6.5% of their income and employers another 6% to the public health insurance, the Romanian health care system is grossly underfinanced. While other European countries spend 7-8% of their GDP for health care, Romania only dedicates 3.5% of a much lower GDP ($257 billion).

Not surprisingly, Romanians see the only solution in the private sector:

In this grim picture, the only hope comes from the growing privatization of the medical sector. Although still chaotic and fragmented, the private market is growing faster than in neighboring Bulgaria or Hungary, where public services are better and thus the need for private alternatives less stringent.

Interesting how in one part of the world we see the solution in universal health care, and in Romania some see the solution in private health care. I guess when it comes to death or life situations humans prefer to pay and have some assurance of good care, than not pay at all and play Russian roulette with their lives.

It certainly reminds us that when talking about health care cost is not the only issue, and quality of care, and industry regulation also play a critical roles.

Tags: health, international, policy, Politics

Walking home this evening I had one of the best laughs of the week when I noticed the Christmas Story leg lamp in a window. I was looking from window to window noticing the colorfully lit Christmas trees. After a few windows I expected yet another tree, but found instead this:

Tags: , Christmas, movies

I got tagged by Ben to talk about myself… again. My earlier post with 8 things about me listed some very random things.

The rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.
5. 8 is a magic number. Not three.

Here are some more totally random things about me:

1. I love Charles David shoes, and this one here is my newest purchase.

2. I have an opera season pass.

3. I go alone.

4. I used to work with homeless folk with mental illness and substance abuse problems and I support the treatment philosophy of harm reduction. I have great respect for all the social workers, mental health workers, case managers who bust their asses on the tiniest pay imaginable, to keep people off the streets and out of harm’s way.

5. Being that it’s December I have to say I support HIV awareness programs. Everyone should read POZ Magazine.

6. I speak 5 languages, but it doesn’t mean anything, except that growing up I was exposed to 5 so I had no choice… they stuck. However, I can only write well in 1.

7.  I mostly only listen to grunge music.

8.  I love Chicago. It’s gotta be the most corrupt city in the US but somehow it survives as the big city with the small town feel.

I’m only going to tag 4 other:

Shalini

Dawn

Homar

DiVerL

Tags: snow, winter

It seems Chicago gets the first snow on Thanksgiving, every year.

Tags: Chicago, snow, Thanksgiving

Here’s an update on blogging tools and changes at Skepticum:

Things that Rock:

Tumblr: I added my Light the Atheist Fire tumblr log in the sidebar. I write quick notes on there primarily because it’s easy to tumblog from a handheld. The address is skepticum.tumblr.com .
Blogging via SMS: I signed up with letmeparty.com so I can post to the blog via text messages. I’ve tested this service and it works well (SMS technology limitations aside). This is one project worth supporting.

SEO: Site’s getting good readership numbers and good subscription numbers. SEO is rocking and within a month organic search traffic went up by 300%. The big contributor is All in One SEO.
I eliminated the following:

Blogrush–I’ve had enough of Christian junk, so blugrush is out, for good this time.

Java-heavy scripts: I tested one by one different scripts that might cause page load problems and took out the ones that increased page load times.

Useless and buggy plugins: I removed plugins that were rarely used or that caused site to load slowly, such as polls, Amazon showcase plugin &others .

Upgrades:

WP 2.3.1 upgrade went well with a couple of problems listed below. I also upgraded a number of plugins such as All in One SEO.

Problems:

Since upgrading to 2.3.1 I’m not getting email notifications for comments. Also, some comments get marked as spam, so if you don’t see your comment and you’re not trying to spam this blog find my email on the contact page and let me know.

Blogrolling is still not listing/pinging my site. So I rarely ever show on the Atheist Blogroll as *new* anymore. If you look below you’ll see I still write. If you want to be notified of new posts please subscribe via RSS.

Technorati has been annoying me, either by not loading my favorites or not updating my favorites regularly, so I moved all my favorites to an RSS reader. It was interesting to find that at least 2 of my favorites did not have an RSS feed…

Tags: blogging, mobile, rss, seo, SMS, tumblr, wordpress

For weeks now I’ve been browsing the web trying to find an affordable and most importantly, available Wii console. You see, a few weeks back my best friend got me addicted to Dance Dance Revolution. No, I’m not 12, but I am a sucker for those kinds of active challenges. Ever since then I’ve been obsessing over which console I should buy so that I can feed my addiction.

I am a web marketer IRL and I will confess, I live by the web. I buy most everything online, including groceries when I can (Peapod rules). I do buy clothes from stores but only when I’m in Minnesota, as I found they have a great sense of fashion, available sweaters year-round and 0% tax on clothing. Cook County, which includes Chicago has a 9% sales tax, and there are ongoing tax discussions to raise tax to 11%. No, I didn’t type that wrong. 11% is what the politicians in the area are discussing. So you can’t blame me that I think twice before buying anything from the stores around here.

Back to the Wii. My search ended today. As I said, I looked all over the web, and the only sites that advertise Wii “in stock” are sites I’ve never heard of. Also, they advertise these wii packages for about $360, which is about $100 more than the retail price.

In my confidence that the web rules all other means of trade, I didn’t think to look in stores. Until postifthen recommended calling a store.

I looked at the Nintendo Wii website and saw Sears is a Wii retailer. Wouldn’t you know it, the Sears store down the street from me had one in stock. Even the store clerk was shocked.

Wiiiiii!

Update:

Since I first published this post I found additional creative ways to find a Wii.

Which reminds me, this is the second week in a row where I experience the disconnect between online and brick and mortar stores. Last week I needed a fog machine and I checked the website of a Halloween store. The site told me there were no fog machines available in the stores within my zip code, but they did offer rush shipping (at extra cost) from their warehouse. I needed a fog machine that day so in my desperation I went to Walmart (I think Walmart is like the jesus of stores, we all look to it for salvation), after also seeing on their website that “this item is not available in stores.” I found the fog machine at Walmart… but I couldn’t check it out. The SKU wasn’t in their system… Discouraged I left Walmart and noticed the before-mentioned Halloween store across the street. I decided to give it a try and not only did they have a fog machine, they had two different kinds!

So I think that in this day an age even though the expectation is that retailers would integrate their stock-tracking software with their online platforms and front-ends, many companies aren’t all that well integrated, including large retailers such as Sears.

So if you can’t find a Wii online, and websites tell you they’re out of stock, dust off your phone and call those good-old brick and mortar stores. Who knows, you may find a Wii that didn’t get sold because people like me put all their faith in the power of the web.

Tags: Best Buy, console, dance-dance-revolution, electronics, gaming, nintendo wii, Sears, shopping, video-games, wii, wii-console

As if being from Transylvania wasn’t enough…

Take the What High School Stereotype Are You? quiz.

My household survived another irreverent Halloween party. I had to advertise this year’s party as “not for the religiously sensitive.”

And this is why:

We had so much fun that some members of my household went a little overboard.

Click “continue reading” to see what happened… at your own risk. Parental guidance strongly advised:

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