Happy Go Lucky
Hello World,
By golly, it seems like only yesterday that we were all dancing around the Maypole, and celebrating the Battle of La Puebla at Cinco de Mayo, and yet here we find ourselves somehow at the last weekend before Memorial Day, when the month will be nothing more than a fond memory. How time flies, and then some. And speaking of time, I realize that I spoke too soon when I said that since I no longer had the old hospital computer that never knew when to change over to Daylight Saving Time, my computers would always have the right time from now on. One of my recent acquisitions is new to me, as they say at NBC, but was already used when I bought it, and I didn't notice until yesterday that it certainly had a different system time than all the rest of the computers in my life. I hadn't thought of it previously, but it came from a specialty shop in California, so when I checked the settings in Control Panel, I was not surprised to find that it was set to Pacific Daylight Time, which I'm sure made perfect sense when it was still out there. Here in New York, it didn't make as much sense anymore, so I changed it to Eastern Daylight Time, and was ready to call it a day and get on with my life, and right on time, to boot. Not so fast! It seems that even after I changed the time zone setting, it was still the wrong time, and I had to go reset the time manually anyway. It was a real slice of yesteryear in my office once again, with (inky black night) shades of Windows 2000NT on my computer, where I had to wait around for 3 weeks for the system time to finally get around to switching over to the right time and catching up with the rest of humanity at long last.
Speaking of last, it certainly wasn't my intention, but I did a heck of a job jinxing the outcome of the Preakness on Saturday, so that we not only didn't have a Double Crown, if there was such a thing, much less a Triple Crown in our sights. The highly touted Super Saver, who was the 9-5 favorite after winning the Kentucky Derby handily, was never a factor at Pimlico, and finished in eighth place out of 12 horses. Meanwhile, Lookin At Lucky, who had been the favorite at Churchill Downs but lost, nosed out First Dude by 3/4 length, so that in an unusual coincidence, it was the second-favorite horses who won in both races. With nowhere else to turn, since Super Saver's jockey and media darling Calvin Borel was no longer the story of the day, the newspapers made a big deal out of Bob Baffert, the trainer of Lookin At Lucky, whose horses have won the Preakness five times, which in another coincidence, is second on the list of all-time winners. I will admit that I don't follow horse racing well enough to be familiar with the trainers, so this Baffert for all of his credentials, basically means nothing to me. So it came as a surprise to read further in the story and find this startling tidbit: "It was the Hall of Famer's first Triple Crown win since 2002, when War Emblem won at Pimlico." [Insert spooky Theremin music here.] Alert readers may recall that I just mentioned War Emblem last week, apropos of nothing, and here he is, turning up once again in a story about someone that I don't even know. So there you have it, sports fans, we've managed to come full circle, just like a racetrack, and wind up back where we started. And while I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it was me who jinxed the favorite in the Preakness, personally I have to wonder about the ghost of Affirmed, the last Triple Crown winner in 1978, and I'd be checking his stall for voodoo dolls of Super Saver and Calvin Borel. Not to mention, War Emblem, thanks so very much not.
Meanwhile at work, I happened to stumble upon the "Savings Beyond Price Letter," which describes itself as "Advanced Savings Strategies and Solutions that Work," which is trademarked, so you know they're serious about it. It comes to us from the editor's desk of Bob T. Yokl, which sounds like a bad joke, but if that was indeed my name, I would certainly be extremely scrupulous about editing this newsletter, so as not to give anyone the opportunity to make fun of mistakes by that "yokel." So it was probably an unfortunate oversight that this item appeared in a prominent location right on the front: "From time to time, we all buy into myths that seem logical and even credible when we first hear them. But over time, we realize these ideas aren't fact-based, but rather founded on antidotal evidence." Now, I realize that I am not a Chief Value Strategist, as our friend the yokel here, so I'm just speculating that when evidence becomes infected with some deadly disease, the emergency response team rushes in with the antidote (in this case, antidotal evidence) to cure it. Of course, I'm not a doctor, and I don't even play one on TV, so that's just a hypothesis on my part, maybe not even a very good one. But after all, I would hope if I was editing a newsletter, that I would at least understand the difference between "anecdotal" and "antidotal," and would not be using one in the place of the other, like any old yokel.
Also at work, we recently had an email sent to all of the hospital computers from our crack IT department, with this arresting subject line:
"Possible maleware infection!"
And here again, I have to point out that information technology is not my field of expertise, and I don't claim to know everything there is to know on the topic. But hazarding a guess on this, I'd be inclined to suspect that this would be some sort of computer virus that only affects men, although how it would do that, I have no idea. Or it could be that gender-based software has just been invented, and those individuals with the Y-chromosome might be specifically targeted for infections. It all seems highly futuristic and supernatural to me, and don't forget, I've been known to jinx a horse race from 500 miles away and two weeks ahead of time. But on the other hand, I would think it would not be too much to expect of our IT professionals at the hospital not to use the term "maleware" when they mean "malware," and we can't even lay the blame at the editor's desk of good old Bob T. Yokl on this one, try as we might.
In other technology news, we were having a problem at work with email in and out of the hospital server, so that it was becoming increasingly unpredictable as far as what messages would get through. This is old news to Bill and myself, where we have always numbered our notes to each other, so we can tell at a glance if any of them have been delayed, duplicated or missing altogether. But we were recently having a serious problem with our vendor for specialty surfaces over some outstanding invoices, and in an effort to straighten things out, I had sent an email to the credit manager with the payment information. Satisfied that this would address their concerns, you can imagine my chagrin two days later, when I got a notification from the network's auto-responder service that the message was never delivered, and thanks so very much not. Anyone who knows me can tell you that I'm not easily thwarted, so my next step was to print my original email, and then fax it to the credit manager instead, so at least I was sure that she received it. As cutting-edge technology goes, this is sort of the 18th century solution to a 19th century problem, and would no doubt remind the Victorians of the early days of mechanized transportation, when the owner of a newfangled motor vehicle would be trying to push it out of a ditch, while bemused onlookers in their carts and buggies would cry out: "Get a horse!" Once again satisfied that this would address their concerns, once again you can imagine my chagrin two days later, when the very same credit manager called me to ask what was going on, since she had heard nothing from us. I described to her the situation with our email's recent unreliability, and said that I had faxed the email to her instead, in an effort to bypass the problem. She promptly went and looked through her old records to see if she had the document in question, chatting away amiably while she was doing that. It seems that when a fax is sent to this particular company, she explained, their Fax Administrator scans it in to the computer and then emails it to the recipient, which in this case, had such a perfectly symmetrical, anachronistically steam-powered circumnavigation in order to come full circle, that I almost laughed out loud. On both ends of this communication, we had taken the most round-about, out-moded, technology-challenged route to solve a problem, and proceeded to go all the way around Robin Hood's proverbial barn to get back to exactly where we started. This would remind me and the dinosaurs of the early days of the wheel, when the Troglodyte would be trying to push it out of a ditch, while bemused onlookers in the trees and caves would cry out: "Get a mastodon!" Of course, that's only based on antidotal evidence, because even the yokels know that the Troglodytes were all wiped out from maleware infections, although personally, I wouldn't rule out the ghost of Affirmed either.
Elle
By golly, it seems like only yesterday that we were all dancing around the Maypole, and celebrating the Battle of La Puebla at Cinco de Mayo, and yet here we find ourselves somehow at the last weekend before Memorial Day, when the month will be nothing more than a fond memory. How time flies, and then some. And speaking of time, I realize that I spoke too soon when I said that since I no longer had the old hospital computer that never knew when to change over to Daylight Saving Time, my computers would always have the right time from now on. One of my recent acquisitions is new to me, as they say at NBC, but was already used when I bought it, and I didn't notice until yesterday that it certainly had a different system time than all the rest of the computers in my life. I hadn't thought of it previously, but it came from a specialty shop in California, so when I checked the settings in Control Panel, I was not surprised to find that it was set to Pacific Daylight Time, which I'm sure made perfect sense when it was still out there. Here in New York, it didn't make as much sense anymore, so I changed it to Eastern Daylight Time, and was ready to call it a day and get on with my life, and right on time, to boot. Not so fast! It seems that even after I changed the time zone setting, it was still the wrong time, and I had to go reset the time manually anyway. It was a real slice of yesteryear in my office once again, with (inky black night) shades of Windows 2000NT on my computer, where I had to wait around for 3 weeks for the system time to finally get around to switching over to the right time and catching up with the rest of humanity at long last.
Speaking of last, it certainly wasn't my intention, but I did a heck of a job jinxing the outcome of the Preakness on Saturday, so that we not only didn't have a Double Crown, if there was such a thing, much less a Triple Crown in our sights. The highly touted Super Saver, who was the 9-5 favorite after winning the Kentucky Derby handily, was never a factor at Pimlico, and finished in eighth place out of 12 horses. Meanwhile, Lookin At Lucky, who had been the favorite at Churchill Downs but lost, nosed out First Dude by 3/4 length, so that in an unusual coincidence, it was the second-favorite horses who won in both races. With nowhere else to turn, since Super Saver's jockey and media darling Calvin Borel was no longer the story of the day, the newspapers made a big deal out of Bob Baffert, the trainer of Lookin At Lucky, whose horses have won the Preakness five times, which in another coincidence, is second on the list of all-time winners. I will admit that I don't follow horse racing well enough to be familiar with the trainers, so this Baffert for all of his credentials, basically means nothing to me. So it came as a surprise to read further in the story and find this startling tidbit: "It was the Hall of Famer's first Triple Crown win since 2002, when War Emblem won at Pimlico." [Insert spooky Theremin music here.] Alert readers may recall that I just mentioned War Emblem last week, apropos of nothing, and here he is, turning up once again in a story about someone that I don't even know. So there you have it, sports fans, we've managed to come full circle, just like a racetrack, and wind up back where we started. And while I wouldn't rule out the possibility that it was me who jinxed the favorite in the Preakness, personally I have to wonder about the ghost of Affirmed, the last Triple Crown winner in 1978, and I'd be checking his stall for voodoo dolls of Super Saver and Calvin Borel. Not to mention, War Emblem, thanks so very much not.
Meanwhile at work, I happened to stumble upon the "Savings Beyond Price Letter," which describes itself as "Advanced Savings Strategies and Solutions that Work," which is trademarked, so you know they're serious about it. It comes to us from the editor's desk of Bob T. Yokl, which sounds like a bad joke, but if that was indeed my name, I would certainly be extremely scrupulous about editing this newsletter, so as not to give anyone the opportunity to make fun of mistakes by that "yokel." So it was probably an unfortunate oversight that this item appeared in a prominent location right on the front: "From time to time, we all buy into myths that seem logical and even credible when we first hear them. But over time, we realize these ideas aren't fact-based, but rather founded on antidotal evidence." Now, I realize that I am not a Chief Value Strategist, as our friend the yokel here, so I'm just speculating that when evidence becomes infected with some deadly disease, the emergency response team rushes in with the antidote (in this case, antidotal evidence) to cure it. Of course, I'm not a doctor, and I don't even play one on TV, so that's just a hypothesis on my part, maybe not even a very good one. But after all, I would hope if I was editing a newsletter, that I would at least understand the difference between "anecdotal" and "antidotal," and would not be using one in the place of the other, like any old yokel.
Also at work, we recently had an email sent to all of the hospital computers from our crack IT department, with this arresting subject line:
"Possible maleware infection!"
And here again, I have to point out that information technology is not my field of expertise, and I don't claim to know everything there is to know on the topic. But hazarding a guess on this, I'd be inclined to suspect that this would be some sort of computer virus that only affects men, although how it would do that, I have no idea. Or it could be that gender-based software has just been invented, and those individuals with the Y-chromosome might be specifically targeted for infections. It all seems highly futuristic and supernatural to me, and don't forget, I've been known to jinx a horse race from 500 miles away and two weeks ahead of time. But on the other hand, I would think it would not be too much to expect of our IT professionals at the hospital not to use the term "maleware" when they mean "malware," and we can't even lay the blame at the editor's desk of good old Bob T. Yokl on this one, try as we might.
In other technology news, we were having a problem at work with email in and out of the hospital server, so that it was becoming increasingly unpredictable as far as what messages would get through. This is old news to Bill and myself, where we have always numbered our notes to each other, so we can tell at a glance if any of them have been delayed, duplicated or missing altogether. But we were recently having a serious problem with our vendor for specialty surfaces over some outstanding invoices, and in an effort to straighten things out, I had sent an email to the credit manager with the payment information. Satisfied that this would address their concerns, you can imagine my chagrin two days later, when I got a notification from the network's auto-responder service that the message was never delivered, and thanks so very much not. Anyone who knows me can tell you that I'm not easily thwarted, so my next step was to print my original email, and then fax it to the credit manager instead, so at least I was sure that she received it. As cutting-edge technology goes, this is sort of the 18th century solution to a 19th century problem, and would no doubt remind the Victorians of the early days of mechanized transportation, when the owner of a newfangled motor vehicle would be trying to push it out of a ditch, while bemused onlookers in their carts and buggies would cry out: "Get a horse!" Once again satisfied that this would address their concerns, once again you can imagine my chagrin two days later, when the very same credit manager called me to ask what was going on, since she had heard nothing from us. I described to her the situation with our email's recent unreliability, and said that I had faxed the email to her instead, in an effort to bypass the problem. She promptly went and looked through her old records to see if she had the document in question, chatting away amiably while she was doing that. It seems that when a fax is sent to this particular company, she explained, their Fax Administrator scans it in to the computer and then emails it to the recipient, which in this case, had such a perfectly symmetrical, anachronistically steam-powered circumnavigation in order to come full circle, that I almost laughed out loud. On both ends of this communication, we had taken the most round-about, out-moded, technology-challenged route to solve a problem, and proceeded to go all the way around Robin Hood's proverbial barn to get back to exactly where we started. This would remind me and the dinosaurs of the early days of the wheel, when the Troglodyte would be trying to push it out of a ditch, while bemused onlookers in the trees and caves would cry out: "Get a mastodon!" Of course, that's only based on antidotal evidence, because even the yokels know that the Troglodytes were all wiped out from maleware infections, although personally, I wouldn't rule out the ghost of Affirmed either.
Elle
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 9:03 PM
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