(no subject)

Christine is doing quite well: i need to remind myself that the reason she needs bed rest is not because something's wrong but because we're preventing something from going wrong. At this point i read a bit about complications with skin grafts as motivation to keep nagging her to stay in place and bring her whatever she wants or needs. I won't go to the office today, but i won't worry about going in next week.

I'm having some sort of dermatitis flare, with itching everywhere. I'm hoping it dies back soon, but i might self medicate by taking a claritin on top of my allegra. Really, right now the main thing going on in my head is "ITCH. ITCH. ITCH."

I'm drinking keemun today, for the first time in ages. I took some black teas off my mother's hands during the Dec visit, as we agreed that we both needed to drink down our stashes. Part of our problem is that we had lots of tea we don't prefer: the good news is she prefers greens while i prefer black teas. We traded. The Malaysian tea is pretty agreeable, but the Red Label Lipton is an Indian tea and has more of something (tannins?) that disagrees with me. I drink my tea black and on an empty stomach: i can buffer the effect of Red Label with milk, when i remember.

But Keemum -- how i enjoy its mellow, earthy flavors! And it wonderfully doesn't quite affect my digestive system so harshly.

I know i got by a month with no caffeine, but yesterday's attempt to start the day with green tea didn't work. Does it have anything to do with the itchy flare? I doubt it.

(no subject)

I feel tedious. I itch. Itch itch itch.

My nose doesn't itch and my ear doesn't itch. My big toes don't itch either.

I have been barely able to get four hours of work in each day. That sucks.

Yesterday afternoon i did dive into a little obsessive research about how i'm being tracked online. Most entertaining is Ghostery, http://www.ghostery.com/faq, which displays a little box in the corner of your browser with a list of all the tracking going on when you browse. I also played with some of the tools at http://www.privacychoice.org/. In my curious Grey Cat blog i posted my FTC response regarding the Google Buzz. There's a movement to balance the utility of collected data with the interests of the person whose data is being collected. There really are cool optimizations that could be put in place for me if i could aggregate my own data -- the current term is in a personal data bank.

For example, i know my grocery store must have a list of everything i buy when i use my loyalty card. They encourage my sharing of that data with discounts and i currently accept that as fair, but i know others don't. But what if you could export your grocery shopping data to a databank and then use it for your own purposes? Visualizing how much money is spent on what sort of foods, getting a gross caloric or nutritional analysis... Since it's in your own data bank, you can aggregate it with other information you grocery store couldn't: why did your purchased calories drop so dramatically in May? Oh, right, you'd gone on vacation. Did the fact that the amount of carbs purchased dropped over three months make a difference in your health? Compare with your health data. You might find it useful, or you might not, but someone else might. I can think of lots of interesting things that i'd love to datamine out of my own data, and i wouldn't mind trading that information for the insight.

I think the creepy factor is that these corporations that collect data are drawing conclusions without sharing those conclusions and without mitigation. It would be creepy if my grocery store noticed an uptick in calories purchased and started "helpfully" letting me know i was buying more calories than i "needed" -- when i might be supporting an additional person in the house or buying food for others. Just what i'm buying from one grocery store is NOT a full picture of what's going on with me, and we do, with good reason, resent when conclusions are drawn on a narrow aspect of our behavior.

I'm avoiding work. Ought to go.