Frog and Goat

While I was at the doctor’s office yesterday, I wondered why doctor’s offices don’t use kiosks to collect data from their patients. I hadn’t been to my primary care doctor since 2000 (what can I say–I’m healthy) and that meant that I needed to fill out pages of forms telling them, again and again, my name, social security number and birth date. Wouldn’t it have been easier to sit me down in front of a kiosk terminal, have me complete a simple page of information and have a database correlate all that information and spit something out for the clerk or nurse to shove into my file?

Ok, so there are rickety people out there who can barely walk into a doctor’s office and find a place to sit in the waiting room without help from someone–they can get the wasteful pieces of poorly copied forms. The rest of us can sit down and type in or even just use drop-downs and check boxes to complete the endless forms. I know there is a way to ensure all that data is secure so HIPAA is golden.

When, oh when, are we going to drag everyone kicking and screaming into our brave new world?

The experiment to overwhelm my allergies thereby making them “get over themselves” has failed. I went to the doctor today and am on a short course of antibiotics to get over the X-tremeCoughing (sounds so cool when I put it that way). I also have a prescription for an allergy medication. Yeah!

Because I do sound so bad I won’t be conducting the training in Warrenton on Thursday. That’s only the third time since early 1999 that I’ve missed a training day. I guess that’s a pretty good track record.

Now that it is summertime in merry ole Virginia (when it is 85+ degrees I call that summertime), the ritual of nose-blowing and deep chest coughing has begun. I really sound like I’ve just spent the last 48 hours on a bender at the local pub smoking packs of PallMalls one right after the other and quaffing down pint after pint. Now you may think that the whole allergy to nearly every tree that is sending out leaves would get me down, but that is not true. I know that it would be mighty smart of me to retreat into the house and hide behind the closed window air-conditioned goodness but, nay, I say. I like to think of me spending nearly every hour of the day outside on one of the best weather weekends of the year as time well spent. I like to think (no matter how wrongly) that I’m actually doing my allergies a favor by exposing them to every known trigger so that one day I may actually get over it.

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I was reading an article today regarding the idea of a software act. You can read the whole thing here.
The article is interesting but has a glaring error. Here’s the error: “Some spyware is also sold for the explicit purpose of helping spouses to spy on their partners, parents to spy on their children, and employers to spy on their workers. Such programs cause computers to betray the trust of their users”. Computers aren’t betraying the trust of their users. Computers are inanimate objects and as much as we’d like to humanize computers they are still just plastic and metal. The trust of users is betrayed by the spouse, the parent, the employer or anyone who puts spyware on a user’s computer.