Ow my eye !

Article = none , personal experience.

So , I already mentioned I failed a GTT (Glucose Tolerance Test) and it's pretty certain I'm a diabetic now (type two).

So they sent me off to the eye doctor to see what kind of harm diabetes had done to my eyes. And I waited for a while , and I saw, a technician I guess. Some guy you see before you see the doctor.

And he did an eye test. And then he had to "measure" my eye.

Which involves putting in eye drops , which I hate , and then he takes this little hand probe thingy and very gently touches your eye with it.

Which of course, is the part where I freak out. Ow my eye ! I can't stand having anything in my eye or touching my eye. It doesn't hurt , he was very gentle, but he had to try a few times. When the probe was coming closer and closer I literally could not make myself stay still. It was awful.

And then I saw the doctor , and she did it again , in both eyes. Repetition didn't improve my reaction , I actually yelled as if in pain. More unpleasant surprise, there wasn't any pain , I just hated the very idea of anything touching my eye.

In Philosophy , there is a belief that you do not deal with the world. You deal with a projection onto your awareness, that your senses draw for you. Your eyes, your ears , etc etc. When I got poked in the eye, this suddenly became crystal clear that I was looking at some kind of natural movie screen and not actually experiancing the real world.

How is that you ask ?

Ever see those blooper reels in DVD's about making the particular movie your watching ? And sometimes someone bumps into the camera ,and it all flexes and the whole view gets distorted for just a moment , and you instantly say "He touched the Camera" ?

Yeah. They touched the camera. Only I wasn't watching any movie. And I wasn't wearing glasses. And the whole world went DING ! and got all distorted for just a second.

PS: She said I have cataracts , but they're not serious to operate on , she wants to see me in a year.

Vancouver Police At it Again

Yet another example of Police Brutality in Vancouver BC , Canada.

At least this time they left the Tasers behind and no one died.

Rise of the Robots

Article = none, personal opinion.

Lost my job a while back (well they announced it , still got a month left before they kick me to the curb). It got outsourced to the Philipines. The dollar a day guys , as I call them.

I phone tech support for my Dell Computer. I get India.

I talk to a guy at work , ask him how long he's been here. Tells me he's worked four call centers the last year. Why you quit so many jobs ? He didn't . They all outsourced to pakistan. Or china. Or in the case of the one we work at at the moment, the philipines.

Dollar a day guys taking over everything.

So I'm thinking maybe retraining, what is it I can retrain in that they cannot outsource to these dollar a day guys ?

I remember an old news article on the internet. It was very very hard to get doctors to move to small towns, so their solution was to build robots that the doctors could run by remote control. Nice color monitors, remote controled hands.. get a doctor on the line to sit in the control booth , great idea.

Now I'm thinking ... they outsourced all the brainy stuff. Book keeping , computer programming , even computer repair. When these robots get going ... they're going to outsource the manual labor to.

We're gonna have dollar a day guys running a robot cleaning shopping centers and stuff. No need for high end artificial intellgence when you can hire a philipino for a dollar a day to sit in a booth on the other side of the world and do it.

so what does that leave for us ?

Does it leave anything for us , any job we can do to earn a living ?

Because you aint selling me your stereo and your nice computer if I can't hold down a job. Or if I only make a dollar a day.

Booksellers take on Ottawa over Amazon's distribution plans

Article



Canada's booksellers are urging Ottawa to block Amazon.com from building a distribution network in Canada, raising the stakes in a showdown over government restrictions on foreign control of the cultural industry.


Thats nice. Why do I care ?


“A few years ago I was disadvantaged from having a partner. That's not to say I didn't succeed. I, as a competitor, was in a position to be able to invest for a long time – losing money – to get to where I got. Many people would not have had the deep pockets that I had and, as a result, may not have succeeded without ... a U.S. or a foreign partner.”


This is why I care. "Deep Pockets" is the relevant term.

Americans come in , open up shop , lose money for a couple of years to put the competition out of business , and then they own the place. Time to raise prices. Their pockets are deeper than any canadian ones because they come from a country ten times our size. And they don't hesitate to use that size advantage.

So unless you all want to be working minimum wage jobs for americans , this kind of thing needs to be stopped. And not just for books. But for everything.

Raising the minimum wage can only do so much. It looks like maybe one of those so called "trade wars" is the way to go , where we stop buying american and they stop buying canadian ...hmm..didn't they already stop buying canadian a long time ago ?

So what have we got to lose ?

Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List

Yahoo Issues Takedown Notice for Spying Price List


Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web.

Shortly after Threat Level reported this week that Yahoo had blocked the FOIA release of its law enforcement and intelligence price list, someone provided a copy of the company’s spying guide to the whistleblower site Cryptome.

The 17-page guide describes Yahoo’s data retention policies and the surveillance capabilities it can provide law enforcement, with a pricing list for these services. Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers.


Yep. You have no privacy online anymore. You really shouldn't be writing emails that have much more info in them than "meet you at the coffee shop as usual".

Only question is , now that it's open to the police, how long before your private emails are open to the spammers ?