Hillside Meditations

My Windows-(NT, urrgs) driven practice software, which is responsible for the patient´ s database and especially for accounting, really sucks: slow and sluggish, demanding, failure-prone.
I would like to change to….. LINUX!
But unfortunately this does not seem the right time for the migration: medical software packages for Linux do not seem to exist in ways and stages that would allow to base my “business” on.

Commercial packages that once existed seem to have been abandonded, as well as efforts to port existing Windows software.
Free software is not yet usable (see GnuMed) and I am not sure support for it will ever be reliable, although even there some things seem to be on the move.
So migration will have to wait and my practice is still proudly powered by Microsoft Windows. Congrats.

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Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:02:33 -0800 (PST)
From helpdesk@well.com Thu Mar 31 01:03:10 2005
From: Help Desk
Subject: The WELL turns 20, and expands services
To: cjrenner@well.com

So The Well turns 20 years old (which for an online community is really VERY old, indeed) and offers some useful bonuses to its members: webmail (sorely missed in the past; you had to use third-party webmail services which really did not shine so very much) and 100 MB free storage space (10 MB, which we had so far was really very scarce and I often had to pay extra duesfor exceeding that alloted space).
Well-users are going to meet: “Celebrate the 20th anniversary all April, online and off: From a reunion in the WELLtales conference to an Inkwell.vue conversation among pioneers Howard Rheingold, Cliff Figallo and friends; from a contest for the best WELL salute (or parody) to face-to-face parties and activities, this April is time to reconnect and explore.”
I am not going to meet any fellow Wellians, unfortunately, and that is part of my tale with The Well.
I did join in 1994 (Registered: Mon Jun 27 05:33:45 1994, as my .plan tells me), but never really became part of the Well-community, because

• for a long time I simply did not have the technical preconditions to become actively involved (my first dedicated line for internet connection came in 1996). Well.com conferences could not be accessed like Usenet News which I took part in via uucp.


• I did not really find access into this community. Wellians seemed to me very cultured, very experienced in what they were doing, very serious, really, not fooling around as I very often do, high-browish. I did not feel up to them, always felt too “young”, although in the meantime I should no longer be among the youngest well members in terms of age.
  Well members tend to be very refined and I am impressed when I see for example the list of book authors who are Well members, among them Howard Rheingold and Bruce Sterling.


• many things Well seemed very “proprietary”, Californian, Hippieish, not really accessible to me. Well, I just did not make it.


• I did and do find the interface sluggish and complicated. It is a shell account, to be sure, which is fine with me (and very similar to my Linux or BSD shells), but I never got really comfortable with the menu. And never found a way to configure my ssh-client in a way that for example my backspace-key would really work. It is hard when your commands always look something like
  “OK (Return for menu): less gor^?^?^?forward”
  and thus of course will not work.
  
  
• Well officials always seemed a little bit rude, when I contacted them ( not the voluntary helpers, mind you!, they are nice folks usually): for a long time The Well did not provide ssh-access, only telnet and I was loaf to send my password over the internet unencoded; and in some other tiny things they did not really show warmth and affection which I would have needed in order to grow bolder and more involved. (No, I could not have the Mutt-mailer, I do hate pine or elm, perhaps I could have done it myself, but not at that time).

I did not really get into the habot of regularly reading Salon.com, either, which comes saddled on my Well account these days.
So The Well to me has mainly been providing a very stable email address, which has been my primary one since 1994 and online disk space which I have been using for transporting files from A to B.
A @well.com adress is still hip, though, isn´ t it?
Today I am a bit sorry for not having become more of a real member of the Well online community. Perhaps I should have tried more. Perhaps I still will?
Anyone from The Well reading my blog and interested in making me more at home there?

Interesting links about The Well:

• The Well Homepage
  
• Katie Hafner´ s Wired Article which was later on expanded into her book about The Well: The Well: The Epic History of the First Online Community.
  
• the Wikipedia entry on The Well.


• Howard Rheingold´ s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier is interesting in this respect, as well.

well.com

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On http://www.electricedge.com/greymatter/archives/00004589.htm I found a nice essay on one of my favorite problems:

Unread books.
Just yesterday it came to my mind that I have developed a way of “hyper-buying” books: more often than not I find myself navigation through Amazon.de or other online bookstores and then there is that book I like, that I should have read a long time ago, that that would complete my collection on a certain topic, that one opening me on quite a new topic I never delt with and so on. My Amazon shopping cart swells and my parcel service man pants and my book shelves bulge (indeed I am to get an additional big one in a month or two, book case, I mean).
Today I own about 1700 books (1500 at home, 200 in my practice, rawly guessing, may be a few more or less). I love them, I dust them, I insure them, I take photographs of them (just in case they ever get burned and I have to prove they really were there), I sort them, I intend to catalogue them in some kind of book database VSN - and some of them actually get read. A large number of them, perhaps, hope, hope, but the number of unread books is ever increasing and has reached an alarming level by now.

Some of the reasons for unread books collecting here are well described in the link mentioned above, others are that I got too busy to really deal with the topic (which I still tink interesting), or that I grew bored with the subject or the way books deal with it (as with my Wicca books, that I bough rather encyclopedically, before I came to the conclusion that the people writing the books were not really so competent that they could indeed produce valuable knowledge), or that some books have grown outdated (but for some reasons cannot be thrown away, as for example some of my computer books; yes, I really do not use my Commodere CBM 64 machine any longer, but could not really part with all the technical books I bought on that machine), or just that the books delivered today seem so much more urgent and promising than those of last month.

Anyway I am going to do something about it - and so here (FANFARE) is my new project:
One Book a Week - I am going to thoroughly read one book every week that is to come, read it and review it (probably on Amazon.de, but I will comment here, as well). And another one is optional, if there is enough time.
50-60 books a year should clear my queue of unread books (my shame pile as I have heard it called) within about ten years. Quite daunting, but every journey begins with a first step.
And just think what interesting person I am going to become on collecting all that knowledge.
So keep tuned, will you?

PostScriptum:
It is somewhat frightening, though, to see how many people reporting in the WWW seem to have “shame piles” of unread books. Will I fail, like they seem to be doing? (No, I am going to show discipline, really, really, you do believe me, don´t you?)

http://www.96db.com/blog/Books/NewYear2004.htm
http://homepage.mac.com/morgannels/gnosis/2003/08/20.html

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I had to add something funny to my blog for today. Something I found following a link on Chicky´ s site:
How to hypnoticize a man.
It is hypnotic, isn´ t it?

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Bernhard at wuseldusel.com filled out the same Quiz thing I posted here on my blog.
Among his answers I found this one:
“If I had one wish it would be: that life in germany gets back to normality again”, which makes me think and wonder.

Is life in Germany not “normal” at the moment?
Why should we think so?

• Unemployment (about 5 million people at the moment)
• a feeling of malaise - is it justified?
• a society changing with so many people from other countries, other cultures, other historical and social backgrounds who have come here and are being integrated and integrating and changing and making everything different
• bureaucracy ever increasing, rules and regulations for everything, rules for rules for regulations for rules, many of them published in an admittedly experimental state, citizens as beta-testers for ever-multiplying control and regulation
• our “own” population seriously aging and declining in numbers. A society with less and less children, and therefore no future and no hope.
• a secularized and secularizing society which looses its faith and therefore its trust and confidence.
• politicians without any visions and greater ideas left, administrating for the day and the moment, producing streams of words that have less and less real meaning.

Is life in Germany “normal”? Can it be “normalized” or are we too far gone for any hope? Or are we simply on a roll of old-Europe-blues and should just remember our own strengths in order to use them and “save” us? What are our strengths, really? Is Germany, is Europe doomed to whimper away?

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• Plan: Reread Cicero´s De Re Publica - might be relevant

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It is difficult to really form a final opinion on this tragedy. Not knowing all the facts despite all the media coverage, really.
I do agree with almost everything said on Logtar´s blog, although the comments are wildly contradictory. No final answer myself, really.
What tortures me, though: Is anybody allowed to let a brain-damaged person starve and thirst to death? Isn´t she suffering, really?
What I feel: I would like her to stay, not pass away. It makes me so sorry to “watch” her die. Just what I feel.
If it was me? No idea, I guess I would want to go, but can I really know in advance? Does life still mean something to Terri Shiavo?
If it was someone I love? I would not want my loved ones to suffer, no. But let them starve to death? I do not think I could stand it.
No solution here - but I do feel something is going in a wrong direction here. Bad feeling, really.
I know healthy people are dying all around the globe at this very moment, I know. I should care more about THEM. But Terri Shiavo now has a face I recognize and remember.
I hope God will care for her, I am sure he will.

Schiavo

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Ok, there was this huge collection of books I carried with me for the Easter days.
Good resolutions but a certain lack in performance, as was to be expected. No, I did not read the whole list of books.
What I really did: I started on the HTML book and I did read Erik Moeller, Die heimliche Medienrevolution,ISBN 3-936931-16-X, a book on how Internet media and Open Source could revolutionize life, the universe and everything.
As for a review on Erik Moeller´ s German language book I hope Amazon.de will publish something I wrote yesterday (German language). Please look up my Amazon.de Reviews. To sum it up: good book (on the internet, its ideas and backgrounds, www, hypertext and its origins, open scource, blogging and blogosphere, wiki, wikipedia and beyond), worth reading, a little bit too left-leaning politically for my taste, but informing and interesting. Main idea: internet and internet media may actually give democracy into the hands of the people.
I did underline some links I think are worth collecting and following and compiled them. You can find them on the sidebar (Cyberspace-Moeller). If you find dead links, please let me know.
A German language interview with Erik Moeller, who is engaged in the Wikipedia project among others, can be found here.

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Only two more Easter Wells I found in the last few days. They are beautiful, aren´ t they?

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Some photos I took with my Sony digicam on my Easter parade with my parents (along the Danube in the city of Straubing). I do have to reread my digicam´ s manual - some buttons remain a mystery to me.

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Metab-L has suddenly vanished from my sight! Urgs.
Metab-L is a mailing list I organized some 10 years ago, which is a major part of my online existence. A pet project with about 800-900 participants.
Since yesterday evening it is gone; the mailman-listserver, to which I have no access other than the listowner´ s interface does not know it any longer; the archives of 10 years are gone, as well.
I am really panicky. Can it be restored?? Unfortunately I cannot reach anyone with access to the listserv at the moment.
Not a good thing, really.
I do hope all that is reversible, cannot think of what to do if not. Backups? Not sure they made any, although I often asked. I did some myself, but unfortunately they are quite old now (my fault).

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