Phone versus computer

So I tried out another technological innovation this weekend: I bought a USB headphone for my computer, and installed Skype, which is a service that enables you to make phone calls over the Internet. For $2.95 a month, they offer free calls to any landline or cellphone in North America.

I tried it out this morning using my parents as guinea pigs, and it seems to work pretty well. They had no problem hearing me, nor I hearing them, and I didn’t burn up cellphone minutes talking with them. I did burn up bandwidth usage, but I have more of that than I have cellphone minutes, so it’s all good. So it looks like one of the primary uses of my computer is to serve as a phone. At the very least, it will serve as a backup if my cellphone gets lost or something happens to it.

Yesterday, I was at a party, and I got someone there to show off her iPhone, which she was totally in love with. It has all sorts of interesting applications, including the ability to use Google Maps to pinpoint exactly where you are right now – which would be very handy for me, since I like to walk all over Toronto. It’ll only be a matter of time before I get one – especially since all the major cellphone providers now offer it.

To summarize: the iPhone’s features mean that you can use your phone as if it was a computer. Skype makes your computer more like a phone. I suppose, eventually, there will be no real difference between a computer and a phone.

By the way: somebody at work discontinued her Bell phone service, and got the same sales pitch I did: the claim that landlines provide more reliable 911 service than cellphones do. That seems like the only advantage to having a landline these days. And it’s not much of an advantage.

Flu shot

So I went yesterday and got the H1N1 flu shot, since members of the general public are now allowed to go and get one. I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to get it at all last night – it took me until nearly 6:00 to get to my nearest flu shot clinic (the North Toronto recreation centre at Eglinton west of Yonge), and I figured that the lineup might be huge. The City of Toronto has a website up in which they keep track of the lineups at the various clinics; some lineups were 90 minutes long even before the end of the work day.

When I got there, I discovered that their system went like this: I got into a line outside the building, at which point a hard-working volunteer gave me a ticket for 7:00. I had the choice of staying in line, or of coming back at 7. I chose the latter so that I could go and get something to eat.

At about 10 to 7, I went back and rejoined the outside line, which took about half an hour to make my way through. It would have taken a little less time, but one of the security guards was allowing people who were coming back with tickets to join the front of the line, which slowed things up a bit. Eventually, someone else took over and put a stop to that.

Inside the rec centre, the main North Toronto gym had been turned into a flu clinic. It was actually quite efficient – there were half a dozen people at a desk in front of the gym who were taking down information and putting it into their online records. They even had a swipe machine to automatically enter your driver’s license and health card information.

After that, prospective vaccinees (is that a word?) were led into the gym in groups of roughly eight. We were directed to chairs to wait in. There were about 16 people giving out flu shots, and one person in the room was in charge of directing people to these stations as they became free.

The process of getting the shot didn’t take long at all. The nurse asked me the standard questions, including whether or not I was pregnant. I said no. The shot itself is administered in the shoulder – it wasn’t particularly painful – and then I was told to wait 15 minutes in another group of chairs to ensure that I didn’t have some sort of unexpected reaction to the vaccine. I passed the time by reading about Total Recall: apparently, in the future, memory and broadband capacity will become so cheap and omnipresent that we could all choose to record every moment of our lives and everything we ever read or saw, if we decide to do that. Hmmm. During the time I was there, out of the dozens of people I saw who got the shot, only one person had a bad reaction to the vaccine.

When I got home, my shoulder was a little sore but not too bad, and I felt some fatigue: I don’t remember the hour between 10:00 and 11:00 pm. (Mind you, I was very short on sleep yesterday, which would have affected this.) But I feel okay today. As I understand it (from reading a Globe and Mail article on the subject), the vaccine works by tricking the body into thinking that it has contracted the H1N1 virus when in fact it really hasn’t. The body goes to work producing antibodies to fend off a non-existent invader, thus producing immunity to the virus (and generating some fatigue). This apparently takes 7 to 10 days to work. I wonder what would happen if I actually caught the virus during this period – would I heal more quickly? I hope not to find out.

Going in, I had no worries about whether the vaccine is safe or not – by now, millions of Canadians, most of whom are the most vulnerable to disease, have already been immunized. While I understand that it’s a good idea not to trust the government (especially when the government is led by the Conservative Party), some of the anti-vaccine commenters on various web sites seem to be exhibiting unusual levels of paranoia.

I got the shot because (a) I don’t particularly want to get the flu (I got seasonal influenza in 2007, and I don’t want to go through that again); (b) I felt I had a public health responsibility to do so. If I got the flu, I would likely feel like crap for several days, but nothing really bad would be likely to happen to me; however, during the time that I was contagious, I would run the risk of infecting someone in a high-risk group.

Old and new technology

So today is a landmark of sorts: I got rid of my landline, after having had it for nearly nine years at this location. I hardly ever use the phone, and I was spending $47 per month (including tax) on my landline and a nearly equivalent amount on my cellphone, which I decided was a waste of money. Since I can take my cellphone with me wherever I go, I went with it.

When I called the Bell service centre to cancel my phone, I was expecting their representative to try to talk me out of it, and I was not disappointed. The tactic he used was this: if you call 911 from a landline, your location is automatically detected. From a cellphone (apparently), this doesn’t happen – so what would I do if an emergency happened, I was choking and unable to speak, and I needed emergency services? I worried for a second, but realized: if I couldn’t speak and therefore wasn’t able to breathe, even if they could figure out where I was, I’d likely be dead by the time the emergency response team made it to my apartment building, waited for an elevator to arrive, and then waited still further for the elevator to travel up to my floor. I decided that I wasn’t living life too far out on the edge if I took the risk of doing without that service.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I am constantly amazed by how cheap disk space is these days. I wanted a new external hard drive, and found one for a little over $200, including tax, that offered 1.8 terabytes of space. (A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes or a million megabytes, if you’re having trouble keeping track of metric prefixes.) That is a mind-boggling amount of space: all of my photos, music and videos, put together, take up just over half of it.

When I was in grad school – a little over twenty years ago now – I needed six milk crates to store my music collection, and my computer – an Atari 1040ST – had no hard drive at all. All of its software was stored on external 1.44 MB floppy disks, which were loaded into disk drives as needed. I recall feeling like I was living a luxurious life because my computer had two floppy drives. Now, all my music fits on a piece of plastic that is smaller than a deck of cards, and all of everything digital fits in a box that is smaller than a large textbook. I like this, but I’m still not quite used to it.

Two randoms

On Saturday morning, I had to go to the medical clinic near where I live to get some blood work done. The drill is that you have to go at least 12 hours without eating before they can test your blood, so I hadn’t eaten breakfast when I got there. The clinic was crowded, as it was full of people like me who didn’t want to or couldn’t take time off work to get their tests done.

I had to wait a little over an hour to get everything done. As I was sitting there, reading, I realized that I was in a room full of people who hadn’t had breakfast or morning coffee. The room gave off a distinct low-energy aura. I then realized that the lab technicians who worked there had to spend day after day dealing with hungry, grumpy people. Over and over again. All their working life, unless they got promoted into another medical task or gave it up to become computer programmers or something.

In the basement of my laundry room, there’s a table that, by tradition, is the place where people leave things that they don’t want any more. (Once, there was a giant plush cow left behind, about the size of a small dishwasher. It was unclaimed for over a week – I nicknamed it Laundry Cow.) Last week, someone left behind a copy of Cosmpolitan magazine, with this headline:

Guys Rate 125 Sex Moves

My thought when I read this: women don’t really need to learn 125 sex moves. Most guys are perfectly happy with the following three (3) moves: (1) Show up. (2) Remove some or all of clothing. (3) Do what comes naturally. The other 122 aren’t really necessary.