LadyCrimson

Yeah, there's a SJ school that's apparently closed for a while w/1 confirmed case and some unconfirmed sniffle cases. Because it's rational to at least tell folks what's going on (so cities etc. can take some precautions)...and then people become afraid of being the next one on the list, so to speak and get paranoid. Isn't that always the reason?

About the only things I want to save are pictures (photos, comics, news pics), so I do a lot of r-clicking/save image. Tons of folders for those and most of the time I never browse through them later. So I do know the feeling, kinda. I run across a lot of articles/columns, usually the ones that tickle my funny bone, that I think about saving but ... I know I'll never read them again and forget about 'em in a few hours. But if it's short enough I'll just take a screenie or two of it, instead of saving the whole page/site scripts and all. Heh.

Many articles say it does against at least some viruses. How true this is, I haven't researched enough to know. (edit: ie, there's also random articles that claim they wouldn't, so pick who you want to believe) The reason cited is because they're alcohol based... and the ones you supposedly want are 60% or more alcohol, so read the labels. This also means they can dry out your skin. And they aren't for when your hands are actually grimy/dirt covered. Just for the when you sneeze into your hand/touch someone's keyboard kind of use.

I've heard that gel hand sanitizer helps but never tried it myself so dunno. I usually just avoid shaking hands altogether. Around here, at least, most people still put out a hand upon meeting you. It's habit. I was sick once and when an agent held out his hand, I backed off/shook my head and said "have a cold." He looked at me oddly, smiled, then said "Thank you." I've always been picky about such stuff because I'm contact-allergic to a lot of things that people might get on their hands/clothes and think are nothing (pets, lotions, etc).

There's probably 20 bookmarks that I've used all the time, for a long time. The rest languish in bookmark purgatory for periods of time that are eons beyond the actual existence of most of the pages in question.

This. And please don't offer to shake hands with other people when you're sick and holding germ-ridden tissues in the other hand. Otherwise I might have to offend you by refusing. Thanks.

I did a little gardening so I could surreptitiously glance at the handsome neighbor working on his car ... what? Hubby didn't pass his vehicle smog test for the first time since acquiring the van 12 years ago. Bummer.

This. After reading that great one on Mount & Blade I found a while back, I half-thought about trying to make one myself, but realized that I'd never have the energy to do something like that for long. Edit: Also agree if someone (or more than one someone) wants to make some LP threads, they should be in the Spoilers.

Several other people mentioned XKCD and I was "what's that?" That cartoon is hysterical, I loved it, thanks. And yeah...it's just combo of IRC and forum-posting. The crazy things on IRC in the old days ... ... ah, memories.

Good thing I like fire. Fire is pretty. Hard to build a fire on a cloud.

CNN tech page: Twitter is making some question how people get information Not saying the folks quoted a lot in the article are right or wrong in their specific ranting ... I just thought it was funny since I'd brought it up myself last night. I saw posts like "Don't eat pork and you'll be safe!", and links to dubious disease info/bogs etc. Everyone's a reporter these days.

Hypersnap works well on some things FRAPS doesn't - for instance, you can take a multiple fast screens of your whole browser and thus capture frames of YT /most Flash videos quickly and easily, if for some reason you wanted to. It also works better on some older glide/games that FRAPS doesn't seem to recognize (Dungeon Keeper...). So I like having both of them.

Same here, Aristes. Too much stress lately, I think. Memorial service soon. And the cat poop. Grrr.

Can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not unaware. 10% would mean quite a few houses around us would suddenly be empty etc. and that has an impact on everything. It doesn't change my perspective/opinions, tho.

So I did. I see what you're saying I think ... yes, while I can say that my attitude towards the possibility of a pandemic applies to all such situations in a general way, I wouldn't have acquired said attitude without reading a bunch of books on pandemic possibilities years ago etc. I don't believe I said there was a panic - I said (types of) behavior could contribute to a panic. And when I was Twittering earlier, there were some pretty silly things. They're not all going to be silly things 24 hrs a day - most of it is humorous. Bottom line, usually I blame the media first, yes. They could report the facts of the precautions, the confirmed deaths/cases and the CDC's advice and keep it at that, until they are given more information. Some do. But they often embellish or stretch in either subtle or gross ways to make it more "compelling" and/or to keep you coming back for more day after day (ratings) for a while. Give people info, but don't keep fueling fires with speculation. I think the difference between columnist/blogger and reporter/news becomes less and less. Sigh...I said I'd find such tragic, somewhere up there in my other posts. And if my hubby died, I'd be bawling, sure. If there's reason for personal grief, I grieve, just like anyone else. That does not, to me, equate into being uncomfortable about the possibility that it could happen ... or even uncomfy that it has happened - perhaps my father's long situation "made" me this way, I dunno? I would be "uncomfortable" (angry) if it was 4 billion lost because of human-caused war bombings ... but disease/disasters... not so much. Sad that it happens, yes, but...argh, can't explain, my brain's fried, and getting too off-topic, never mind.

Indeed! The smell they add to such gas here is so distinctive it's almost impossible to not recognize it in an instant if you've smelled it before. Is it different there?

But they would be (more) likely be scattered all over the globe, and even the modern cultures might fall apart ... meaning even more would die in the wake of not having mass-food, production, tech, medicine, for too long etc ... and those left would have to (kinda) start all over and new cultures would pop up. That's far different than 10% dying but maintaining the dominant culture/tech around it. Not to be mean or anything, but I'm not a fan of the high number of our current world population and believe that Nature keeps trying to find a way to balance things again. We keep trying to get around things, dunno if we can forever. So I don't find it 'worrisome' - I find it more a natural cycle or consequence .. or something. ... All right, maybe I am mean ... Minor word edits: I'm never happy with my first draft, darnit...

Actually, my rational thought and reason for not being worried are my own. The guy in the last news quote just gave a good example I liked. The other news info/links are mostly to make a point that reading a headline, then doing a Google for "swine flu", then assuming what you read about "swine flu" on wiki/google etc. + what the headlines say = oh noes! is not rational. Not to mention, can contribute to unnecessary panic/misinformation. Try Twittering swine flu and see all the ridiculous posts... hah. CDC and such have to take precautions, and they have to tell people about said precautions ... then the news blows it all out proportion by tossing out scary figures that may not have anything to do with the eventual science(?) of a current situation. I hate the news (edit: even when I know it's a good tool, as well). 2nd edit: And now back to your usual humorous panic and stuff!

A lot of those infections are not necessarily Swine flu cases. Reporting that you have sniffles doesn't make it so. Here's what I get from Newsday: And here's the NYT:

I was under the impression that it was a bit early to give very accurate mortality rates in humans - certainly not as a fact. They're guessing based on non-human swine flu virus figures and recent numbers. Long-term mortality rate could be way off in one direction or the other, for various reasons. Anyway, what I meant is that, 5-10% of the population dying off wouldn't exactly endanger the human race. Not even close. It might endanger some cultures (most likely "poor" ones), and would certainly impact business and governments and it'd be tragic and all that - especially if most of those deaths occurred in a short couple of years or something. But a lot of us "modern" cultures would probably survive and it wouldn't take forever to adjust in whatever way we had to, It'd become just another illness to keep us home from work, albeit a more dangerous one, and a reason to pass laws about people staying home when they're sick no matter what (it's amazing how many people go to work with full-blown colds and flus, which - unless you have to work to make your $5 a day to feed your family - I think is really rude, even if it's not deadly...). Precautions are one thing. But panic isn't yet anywhere near justified. Things like this pop up and then disappear for unknown reasons and have for ages. It could be that after a while we'll find that people who have had it become a lot more resistant to it (or something else), so future generations wouldn't consider it any worse than our current influenza. Could be that it'll suddenly mutate into something with a much lower transmission-success ratio, dropping deaths per year to a "tolerable/more ignorable" level. Who knows. I'm not worried yet. If mortality rates are more like 50%, I might start.

I'm about as scared as I was when China had the SARS scare. Someday a fairly literal human-wiping pandemic may occur, but I don't think this is the one. It's not fast enough and its mortality rate isn't high enough. But it does make me glad I'm not in school/work in an office. Maybe Michael Jackson will soon experience a resurgence of popularity as a fashion trendsetter/designer.

But why did that heavy metal guy die a few years back because he couldnt afford an operation? Because actual operations are expensive, while allowing people into the office and having a doctor look at you, tap your knees and say "yes, you're sick, here's a reference for an expensive dude you can't afford." is not. I believe Emergency Room check-ins can't be entirely refused, but that doesn't mean they're going to perform the major surgery when you have no insurance to pay for it.

--Realizing I don't have Firefox spellcheck on this other computer, and wondering what kind of idiotic gaffes I've made all day. The spellchecker fails in many ways, but the one thing it's good for is the in-a-rush/half asleep errors/typos... --Discovered Twitter is pretty awesome for sports fans to connect with other fans during live game broadcasts. I don't have a bunch of sports buddies to sit in my living room with me, and I don't like sports bars, so sports-tweets yelling is the next best thing. --Remembering when this thread used to get a page or two or more of posts per day. --My cat still poops on the carpet on semi-regular basis. The carpet is light brown, so it can be like a mine-field in the morning. No, I won't use a cage.

I love zoos. We used to go the SF Zoo every couple of years. But now it's too much hassle to go to SF for something we've already seen a half dozen times.

I think it has more to do with simplicity. Not everyone is a control-freak/tech-geek who cares about or would even use/utilize all the stuff that pc's supposedly are "better" for. (Edit: ie, they don't care about "performance" but functionality/ease of use in what they use a computer for, and that's it ) Now, I'm just generalizing here...I'm sure there's lots of Mac users who pant "ooo pretty," as well as those who want more Mac software support and like to tinker, but well .. then they'll either buy a PC as a 2nd rig or switch to the type of computing that works better for them. Also, for a while at least, Mac did very well at marketing in schools. Thus parents who could only afford one computer would buy a Mac to match what their kids used, and perhaps now it's habit. It's what they're used to, and perhaps they have no reason to change. People like what they're used to. Let's face it - both Mac and PC suck in their own special ways, just like everything else. That really depends on how you use computers. My mother has owned two Macs in 15-20 years. I don't think that's very expensive, even if it might've been a bit cheaper if she'd bought PC/Windows. Obviously, if you're into games or anything else that requires/makes you think you need frequent rebuilding of a rig to keep up with the times, Mac's can be a disadvantage (so I hear, I don't own one). But perhaps a lot of mac users aren't that type of computer user and thus the initial cost doesn't bother them much. Because this is a forum populated by (somewhat) hardcore gaming fanatics who largely use PC's. I find on many such forums, any mention of "Mac" tends to turn into "PC vs. Mac" and then "Mac sucks." Heh