03:09 - 20.06.07
Digging In
There should be a timer on my computer that limits the amount of time I can spend surfing music on youtube. Just no self discipline at all, as you can tell from the time of this post. I had read that the service is going to expand to nine more countries, molding the options so as to take into account cultural and linguistic differences. Hopefully access will be available to all users though, with an option of translation or subtitles in one's language(s) of choice. In the year or so that I've been watching, I have learned things that probably never would have occurred to me to ask about a given culture, but that provide a great deal of insight into how and why and when and who and what is important to the target audience. A service like that might offer the best form of international diplomacy possible. The one caution would have to be about the comments sections. Sometimes they are great resources for understanding the history and background of a piece, sometimes too there is a lot of laughter and sharing, but they also sometimes become flashpoints of rage for those who are unable to just enjoy the opportunity to hear really great music.
I'm not certain why it is, but a lot of my time since I became ill last year has been spent researching health issues - those that don't necessarily affect me. One of the things I've realized is that the internet is one of the greatest resources, because no one industry or vested interest has the ability to censor what you choose to read. As with the music on youtube, it also allows one access to international studies and information that would likely never be available in a standard medical library, partly because of translation issues and timeliness, but also because of conscious censorship of ideas and practices that aren't used here. Having worked in a tertiary care hospital with critically ill patients, I can attest to the fact that often times there is much more attention given to fads and "treatments or diagnoses of the month" than there is to measuring the real value of a treatment with respect to the best interest of the patients. The fact that they are now called clients speaks volumes in itself. The question has become "how much can we make from this ailment". Witness the doctors who won't treat certain illnesses "because they aren't yet severe enough to be profitable" and pharmaceutical companies who refuse to produce well-tested and effective herbals, because there is no profit in something one can't patent. Doesn't anyone find it obscene that some idiot is actually proposing to patent yoga as their own development. What next - having to ask permission and pay for the privilege of praying if used in a healing context? It amounts to the same thing, doesn't it? There are Canadian researchers who have made a point of patenting the herbal cures they've been taught to the tribes and aboriginal communities in which they study around the world, but they are the exception not the rule. The one weakness I have found in using the internet is that the search engines tend to reflect the "ailment du jour" and the marketed products for that illness. To find scholarly information about the conditions along with accurate accounts of technical terms used and the practices referenced,one has to dig through the first thousand or so "hits" the search engines tend to display. For those people who don't know a lot about their own bodies or the variables that have to be applied to assess any information tendered - whether from an accredited source or not - that can be a fairly dangerous journey.
Today my big trek was to the grocery store. A couple of the women I really enjoy visiting with cashed me through their till. The one woman had promised to bring pictures of her family for me to see. Today she had them at the ready. Beautiful children she has. Her daughter should be running a boutique - just fabulous fashion sense. We were comparing notes about our families as usual when the two of them got in trouble for talking to me too much. I could understand that if there had been a lot of customers waiting to get through the checkouts, but there were three other stations open and only one or two customers at each one. I know because I was trying not to take up too much time and was watching the flow of traffic through the tills. The one lady who was packing seems to have taken a maternal interest in me and is always trying to lift and carry for me even though she is the one wearing a brace on, sometimes, both of her arms. Maybe it is because when she first started she was really intimidated by a line up of customers and I used to try and make her feel more comfortable while she checked my groceries through by telling her what a great job she was doing. Don't know.
Anyway I really do have to get back to the resume thing tomorrow so good night for now.
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