March 26, 2008

• Dr. Backwardavitz & Electronic Spring Cleaning

  

  I still don’t have my car back and they’re telling me the repairs will take another month and $10,000.  Luckily, the girl who hit me’s insurance company is paying for everything.  I’m feeling much better from the accident, but my left hand and my right wrist are still bothering me, so I went to the doctor this afternoon.  Last year if you’ll recall, I fired my doctor for caving in to big money conglomerate medicine.  Luckily, I rarely get sick, so besides the occasional asthma problem or psoriasis flare-up, I’m pretty lucky.  When my insurance changed in January, I got a new primary care physician in the Cedars-Sinai group.  The doctor I ended up getting was this CRAZY old Jew, who is the most antagonistic person I’ve ever met.  When he walked in the room I was pretending to text, but had my camera phone ready and snapped this picture of him:

  

  Then I shot this video with my phone of him explaining why he doesn’t use computers and only uses an old typewriter.  He had no idea I was taking video…he probably doesn’t even know phones can do that.  LOL.  The video cuts off, but basically he’s trying to explain that he would always have to change the paper in a printer for each prescription he writes. (??) It’s not on video, but I then asked him if he’d ever heard of a laser printer, and he looked at me like I was from another planet.

  Other highlights of my 15 minute visit (that probably cost $150) were:

  • Dr:  “Are you going to sue?” (From the accident).  Me:  “I don’t think so.”  Dr:  “Because if you’re going to sue, you can’t see me, I don’t testify.”
  • Me:  “Do I need X-rays?”  Dr: “What for?”  Me:  “I don’t know, you’re the doctor!”
  • Me:  “This cut on my wrist is very painful.”  Dr:  “That’s NOT a cut, it’s an abrasion.”
  • Me:  “Is it infected?”  Dr:  “Does it look infected?”  Me:  “I DON’T KNOW!!  YOU’RE THE DOCTOR!”

  I could go on, but suffice it to say I NEED A NEW DOCTOR!  I absolutely HATE health care and insurance companies in this country.  I only have to wait 2 more months until I can change providers.  Here’s hoping I don’t have to go back to this joker.

  I wonder what Dr. Backwards would think of my home office:

   

  My boss surprised me with a new laptop the other day.  The one you see on the left is my old laptop and it’s about to die.  The one on the right is my personal laptop that I got for free from Dell last summer.  The one in the middle is my new one!  It’s got an 18 inch high gloss monitor and an integrated webcam.

  

  And the desktop on the other side of the room is my old personal desktop which I mainly let guests use now, and use as a file server.

  

  I’ve been up until 4 AM the past two nights transferring files (email, documents, photos and music, from the old laptop to the new laptop AND to an external hard drive.

  

  I’m also trying to clean all the crap off the old laptop in case they want to try to fix it (and add some memory) and give it to someone else.  It’s absolutley amazing what I’m finding.  Suffice it to say NOTHING is ever deleted.  The Window registry is a very scary place.  Remember that if you ever use your work computer for personal use.  I don’t anymore!

  While installing all of my Firefox add-ons to the new laptop, I found this gem:

  Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on your favorite websites that
  often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus
  now and get rid of them. Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock”
  from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again. You can even replace parts of the banner address with star symbols to block
  similar banners as well. Or choose a filter subscription,
  then even this simple task will usually be unnecessary: the filter
  subscription will block most advertisements fully automatically.

  

  
  This is the coolest Firefox add-on I’ve ever used.  It makes Xanga, Facebook and MySpace SO much faster!  I also like PicLens.  Check it out!

  • 5:39 am
  • 14 Comments