News and Views

In the interest of using this as a diary, I need to document the recent left shoulder surgery, and I’ll provide an update. Two complete rotator cuff tears and bone impingement, and something else I can’t remember right now. Surgery done Feb 7. It is now 4 months (16 weeks), and I am feeling pretty […]

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I recently signed up for Android Pay, and have been using it the past couple of weeks. It’s very convenient. When you pay, you just tap your phone on the card reader. Within a couple of seconds you are done, and the amount is charged to your credit card. It’s accepted at many places, including […]

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Gisele recently had surgery for Spondylolisthesis, “the forward or anterior displacement of one vertebra over another”. In her case when she bent forward or back the vertebra would slide forward or backwards over the one below. There was also degeneration of the disks, but simple disk replacement wouldn’t keep her vertebrae in line, so surgery […]

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In the interest of documenting my travels for later reference, we just got back from 4 nights in San Francisco. We usually stay with Angela, but since she has mice and not much room, we stayed this time in a motel just a 10 minute walk from her apartment. We flew. Had a connection cancelled […]

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I already posted about Oahu (Wahoo!). We only spent 3 full days there, but we were on the Big Island and Maui for 6 days each. Here are some high points. Here’s the kind of paradise I usually think of as Hawaii: or this, on the Hana Highway in Maui: But there are places that […]

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The first time Dennis the Menace went to Hawaii (over 50 years ago), as the captain announced that they were finally landing in Honolulu, Dennis shouted out “Wahoo!”. The flight attendant (they were called stewardesses at that time) said, “Why yes, that’s right Dennis. It is the island of Oahu.” Oahu was lots of fun. […]

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David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the department of psychology at Cornell University in 1999 performed experiments measuring how well people evaluated their own competence. The result was that people who knew very little about a topic generally greatly over-estimated their competence, while experts tended to correctly or slightly under-estimate themselves. It was only after […]

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We spent a week in South Dakota in mid-September. It was even better than we had expected. We flew into Rapid City, near the south-west corner of the state, and stayed in a beautiful hotel in Keystone. Keystone is just a couple of miles from Mount Rushmore; in fact we could see George Washington and […]

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Windows 10 has built-in anti-virus, called “Windows Defender”. It’s nice to have free anti-virus, but I have some concerns about it. First, Defender doesn’t get very good ratings from independent anti-virus testing labs. (4 stars out of 6 on Protection.) My bigger concern is that even if it worked very well, it’s an obvious target […]

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I’ve been on Medicare for 5 months now, and it is so much better than any options I had before. I’m saving about $500/month on premiums, my annual deductible is $166 compared to $6000, after which I pay 20% of better negotiated prices, and many more physicians accept Medicare than my previous insurance. Gisele is […]

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