New Hampshire Is Different

The scene is the first visit to a new internist.

Nurse: Do you use a seatbelt?
Patient: Yes.
Nurse: Bicycle helmet?
Patient: Yes.
Nurse: Is there a smoke detector in the home?
Patient: Yes.
Nurse: Is there a carbon monoxide detector?
Patient: Not sure about that. I rent.
Nurse: Are all fire alarms secured?
Patient: Excuse me?
Nurse: Fire alarms.
Patient: I'm sorry, I .....
Nurse: Fire. Arms. Are there any firearms in the home?
Patient: Oh. No. No, there aren't.

Note to self: Find out the annual rate, by state, of death or injury due to firearms in the home.

Adventures in DVDs

Today I made my first DVD, one that is recognized as a playable DVD both by my computer and by the 5-year-old DVD player in the community room at the library. The Friends of the Library had a program a few weeks ago on the history of farming in Rye, NH, in conjunction with the historical society. Partly as an outreach effort, and partly to get the Friends to give me money for our own camcorder, I borrowed a camera from the middle school up the street to record the program. The camera I borrowed records on miniDV tape, and the only outputs are Firewire and standard a/v outputs. I don't have a computer with a/v inputs, so I borrowed a staff member's Macbook and transferred the tape to .dv files. On the Mac I used iMovie to make an .m4v file, but couldn't figure out how to get iDVD to write it to a DVD. My friend Bob took the .m4v file and converted it to a burnable format on a Windows PC using ConvertXtoDVD. Then I took the resulting files back to the library (I don't have a DVD burner on my laptop, but I will in a couple of weeks) and burned them to a DVD with Roxio MyDVD on a Windows PC.

It was another Learning Experience, but a satisfying one. Now we have a DVD of the event that we can loan out to people who couldn't be there, and we can start to build up a little library of these. Maybe we can start an oral history project and interview some of the old-timers before they're gone.

Serendipity

An old friend and former co-worker told me that H-1B visas are still being doled out, even with unemployment figures as high as they are. This topic was of great interest to me just a couple of years ago. While I was a software engineer, I watched as jobs in my field were alternately outsourced, sent overseas, or undercut by immigrants with H-1B visas who typically worked for far less than the average American-born software engineer, at least during their first year or two here. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it only started becoming painfully obvious about 10 or 15 years ago. Just last year, I heard of a public library that hired a webmaster and sponsored his H-1B visa. So I thought it might make an interesting self-directed research project to find out how H-1B visas relate to unemployment in the technology sector and how the allocation of H-1B visas is decided.

I'll start with some figures from the Statistical Abstract, aka The National Data Book, a publication I discovered a few years ago at the Ruth Haas Library at Western Connecticut State University. Of course, it's all online now, but it was so much fun to flip through the pages of the Abstract from 20 years ago and discover a table of the employment figures for various professions, including engineers. That's the kind of serendipity that's hard to duplicate in an online database.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/past_years.html

Got Windows 7?

My first Microsoft operating system was DOS, and after that Windows 3.0. From what I've heard so far about Windows 7, anyone who was using Windows Vista is very happy to upgrade to Windows 7. I've been reasonably happy with Windows XP; it's a stable product. I stuck with XP through the short life of Windows Vista, as did our ILS vendor, which hasn't yet had anything to say about Windows 7 compatibility.

But for once I am looking forward to trying out a new Windows operating system. Windows 7 could solve all my problems with the three wired public computers; they're running Windows XP but, as is so frequently the case these days, we have no media for them. Lenovo has a pretty neat setup by which they store an installable image on the hard drive, accessible only by a key combination and optional password. It provides a time-consuming but reliable recovery for a computer that has been hopelessly compromised by malware. A couple of our public computers have the security password set; I've tried all our standard passwords, but none of them work, so I'm pretty sure a patron must have set it, whether accidentally or deliberately I can't say. Both these machines have problems that make a reinstall necessary, but without media and without the password I can't do much. Buying Windows 7, with the media, solves two problems at once.

Think renters are immune?

When I was fortunate enough to sell my house in Connecticut this summer, I thought I would be insulated from most of the trickle down effects of the banking and mortgage crisis. And so I am—for now—but not because I'm a renter. I live in a building that has been in the same family for nearly 140 years. I'd hazard a guess and say that there is no mortgage on the property, and that it probably pays for itself and then some. It's in a neighborhood of multi-million dollar homes; Senator Judd Gregg lives around the corner, and author Dan Brown lives down the street. I'd hazard another guess and say that a multi-family dwelling like this one could not be built in this community today, nor could it have been for the last 70 or 80 years. So I'm safely housed. For now.

http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/now-even-renters-are-losing-their-hom

The History of the Internet In a Nutshell

http://sixrevisions.com/resources/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/

Where are the serious Republican politicians?

I don't usually read Ross Douthat, but this headline caught my eye. Can serious politicians--of any stripe--get a fair hearing in this age of politics-as-entertainment? Are there any leaders in the Republican Party who are more interested in leadership than in celebrity? Douthat doesn't name anyone who fits that bill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/opinion/23douthat.html