What media we have, grandma!

Gee, it seems that in all of the excitement covering underage drinking in the First Family, our ever-vigilant watchdogs in the media have overlooked the imminent implementation of "privacy" rules whose purpose is to assure that the government (and pretty much whoever the government thinks is cool) has access to your medical information.

Then again, the rules were formulated by the Clinton administration, so maybe the rules are above scrutiny by the folks whose job it is to tell us about important things that affect our lives, despite the fact that the rules:

• Give dozens of government agencies access to medical records - including the private notes of a psychotherapist - without the consent of the individual involved.
  
• Let government agencies share records with marketing companies. The rules specifically allow pharmacies to share prescription records "for the purpose of marketing health-related products and services." Consent? Ha!
  
• Do nothing to prevent the government from accessing DNA information and transferring it to "third parties."
  
• Permit police agencies to access medical records without a search warrant.

Nah. There are far more important things to tell us about.

Cheers...

(For more information about the "privacy" rules, go see the Libertarian Party website.)

Computer goings-on...

This morning, when I started Alice and Borg (the two machines at the shop), they immediately "saw" each other and I could access the files on one machine from the other.

About an hour later, they spontaneously stopped "seeing" each other, as evidenced by error messages to the effect that no such other machine existed on the network. Then Borg proceeded to stop seeing itself in its own Network Neighborhood.

I am beginning to suspect network hardware. The cheap hub I bought is tops on the list.

After many frustrations with McAfee antivirus, I sprang for the pro version of AVP, published by Kaspersky labs. It immediately found an infected file on my system, which arrived with some suspicious mail and had never been run. (Whew!) It turns out the file is infected with I-Worm.Magister, which appears to be a bad one, from its description.

I applied for an Internet merchant credit card account today and it should be "live" tomorrow, if the sales flack can be believed. I also upgraded the store's hosting to "Merchant Hosting," which costs a small fortune, but the deal is that the bank will waive the application fee ($299) if that's my level of hosting. The back of the envelope tells me it will take a year for me to break even, so I elected the higher level of hosting.

Now, to create a web page for the store.

Cheers...