I am so sick of around 70% of the web and so many pieces of software having left-sided menus and left-sided access. I am right-handed, dammit. If you are so concerned about accessibility, make it ergonomic for right-handed users as well.

Prominent examples which annoy me on a daily/hourly basis:

• Gmail: Left sided menu. They implemented the right-sided chat and labels as lab features - but they conveniently forgot to include right-sided menus in the mix! As a result, the lab features don't serve any purpose and merely shrink screen estate for actually viewing the emails.

• Windoze: It ships with the start button on the bottom left corner - the most inefficient corner for right-handed users. Agreed, you can move the taskbar to the right to make the start button be at the right-top corner (the most efficient for me). But moving it also makes the titles of the programs that are open, hard to see without expanding the taskbar and making it all incredibly ugly. Mac ships with a top right corner menu with the whole "taskbar" at the top. This makes me think the Mac GUI department has more right-handed programmers than Microsoft.

• Plone (as supplied by NCI): I hate this NCI version which is so stripped down and bland that no customizations are possible. Its ugly AND has a left-sided menu! Its got light greyish blue text on a light blue background - that's the peak of non-contrasting colours. I guess they are trying to make me and all the PIs blind or something. Yuck. I hate you NCI-modded-Plone!

• /Rant over

One of the many reasons I love (e:strip). Thank you (e:Paul) for right-sided menus. :)

I break out in tears every time I hear this song, even without the accompanying video. If you need to flush out those lachrymal glands, Astor Piazzola is the man for the job. :)

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PS: That is Princess Maxima of Netherlands. She strangely looks a lot my advisor in Rochester...

You are writing furiously and suddenly you come up against the dreaded WORD BLOCK! In my opinion, this is far worse than the writer's block. In contrast to the much-maligned writer's block, the word block doesn't deal with that murky uncertain ghost of your writing-future. It makes what you already wrote look like rot. The word block casts an unsatisfactory dirty shroud on the ghost of your writing-present.


To me, this is unacceptable. Thus, I declared war against word-blocks this morning. I then realized that I was poorly armed with just a Roget's Thesaurus. What I needed was a weapon to put my thoughts into pithy words. For every time I wondered, "what IS THAT word????" and for every time some miserable word dangled from the tip of my tongue but didn't quite make it to the brain, I needed a sort of white book for reverse look-up of thoughts. And lo and behold, the unknown angel of word-block rescue exists! It's called the one look reverse dictionary.

I realize it might be a bit rash to declare victory against word-blocks already, (for all I know, the word-block camp may have hidden WMDs headed for my document) but the ghost of my writing-present is nodding pretty appreciatively.


Do (e:strip) peeps have any other hidden writing-block-busters? As we all know, stockpiling is half the victory (besides being extremely handy for threatening, manipulation and such other nifty uses). :)

I am so in love with the Gmail theme changing thing! I have been changing my theme once every hour for the past 6 hours. Is that excessive?



I hope not. Because I have 24 more themes to go through.

WHOOOOOOOPPPPPPPPPPEEEEEEEEE, GMAIL THEME MANIA! :)

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PS: I am just a Rahmbonics theme away from attaining complete self-destruction (distraction?). Thank goodness they don't have political-obsession themes... YET.

PPS: Maybe I should *design* a Rahmbonics theme! HEHEHEHE.

PPPS: Maybe I should just quit working on this ridiculous PhD and start stalking political celebrities full-time.

PPPPS: Um. Yeah. Scratch all those bad ideas,. TINY. GET BACK TO WORK!

PPPPPS: It's a sign of pure and unadulterated insanity that I am addressing myself as TINY (besides writing recursive post-scripts to myself). Ugh.

Due to the enormous amount of pubmed whoring I do on a daily basis, I have a search engine plugin for Pubmed in my Firefox quick search bar. I accidentally searched for today's quota of Rahmbonics in Pubmed. Lo and Behold, he has an indexed publication!!!

Emanuel R. Politics and HIV: statement from Representative Rahm Emanuel (IL-5). Posit Aware. 2006 Jul-Aug;17(4):49.


Of course, I simply had to go and hunt the full-text version down.



I learned about some new Rahmbonics for my D.iary O.f D.aily O.bsession, {DODO}.

Did you know that:
-- Rahmbo supports the Ryan White CARE act that funds treatment for AIDS patients when no other resources are available. (Among 402 others in the Congress).

-- He voted for the AIDS assistance bill (H.R. 1298, the U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act)

Critical Note: Though the global funding aspect is great, the Anti-Prostitution pledge in this bill is despicable and counter-productive. As a medical professional, I think this sort of a reactionary approach to AIDS prevention and control will get us NOWHERE in our fight against HIV. In my dictionary, people who drafted this pledge are prime examples of what the terms "moronic" and "insular" actually mean. Two thumbs down to Bush and other crazies who heads are firmly under six feet of religious fanatic hard-packed dirt on this issue. Emanuel talks about the funding aspect of this bill in the Posit. Aware publication but not about the anti-prostitution pledge. I am dissatisfied over this glaring omission.

-- He voted to pass H.Con.Res.30, a bill supporting the goals and ideals of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

-- Co-sponsored:
H.R. 3859, the Early Treatment for HIV Act (ETHA),
H.R. 4792, the New United States Global HIV Prevention Strategy to Address the Needs of Women and Girls Act of 2004
H.R. 1409, the Assistance for Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children in Developing Countries Act of 2005
H.R. 1413, the Women and Children in Crisis and Conflict Protection Act of 2005.

On the whole, that's an excellent record against HIV except for the one major blemish-by-association -- the Anti-Prostitution pledge. I wish I knew how Rahmbonics stand on this issue. Till then, I can't believe the title of this blog without reserve.