Yes, the US elections matter

A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised by a comment my sister made, she said she was sick of constantly hearing about the US elections, and couldn't understand why everyone was so obsessed with it. As pointed out in one of the recent US presidential debates, international perception of America and Americans took a serious dive over the last 8 years. South Africa is no exception, and the typical opinion of South Africans about Americans is hardly positive. I believe that as a result many South Africans (my sister included) have become largely apathetic to what happens in The States. We are so tired of having American culture shoved down our throats and seeing the American government seemingly shoving around 'lesser' countries in the foreign dealings that we seem to be averse to hearing anything more about them.

The problem is, as much as we hate it, what happens in America really does have an effect on us down on Africa's southern tip. With US consumption as high as it is (despite their relatively small population considering the country's total land mass) there isn't a country in the world that doesn't depend on exports paid for in US dollars. Being such a massive consumer of every resource imaginable, the US also has the means to muscle through deals that affect smaller countries' buying and selling power in the world markets.

Most importantly in my opinion though, the US is seen as a world policy leader by many of the major developing countries. World leaders and citizens are finally waking up to the fact that climate change is a reality, that it is almost certainly caused by human activities and similarly that human activity can be changed to counteract it.

The policy choices made by the next American leadership will not only shape how that country reacts to the threat of climate change, but will influence the behaviour of developing giants India and China. Both of these countries are immensely populous and are only now going through a stage of development America and Europe had the privilege of experiencing while their populations were small enough to not massively impact the rest of the world. Asking these nations to hamper their development while America behaves responsibly to the environment will be difficult, doing so while the US continues to ignore the global consequences of it's people's wasteful lifestyles will be impossible.

I have no doubt that this is the most important election Americans have voted in for at least three decades. The economic and political instability that will forever be George W. Bush's legacy will take radical new policies to repair, and the seriously worrying state of our planet will require leadership willing to make very uncomfortable choices focused on the medium and long term instead of short term re-election goals.

Digsby gets even better

A couple of months ago, I stumbled across Digsby while looking for an app to roll together IM and twitter usage. This awesome app quickly won me over. Besides the expected basic IM support (all major protocols except Skype), it offers:

• A clean, customisable interface. It doesn't go quite as minimal as what I achieved in Miranda, but the tabbed interface and wide selection of skins make for a huge improvement on many other IM clients. The fact that the skins are all script based makes it fairly easy to get your hands dirty and customise the app even more if you are that way inclined.
• Contact merging. Joining contacts across multiple networks is as easy as dragging them onto one another and deciding on a name for the merged contact. There are some small quirks with different statuses across networks, but nothing serious.
• GMAIL, Yahoo, Hotmail, POP, IMAP and  AIM mail support. Each added account has a simple window which shows new mails, with inline options to delete, archive or mark them read to name a few. This great functionality is great for those of us that don't want to keep an email client open and only want to open it when absolutely necessary-but still like to keep on top of things.
• Integration with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and now even LinkedIn. A summary window is available for each of these services, with current status, updates from friends and notifications of important events. It's easy to update your status on each of them straight from Digsby too.

The one major gripe I would have had with Digsby in the past was it's rather large memory footprint. As of this week's release however, Digsby now runs fairly lean and mean. All that's missing now is a portable version :)

SA Medical 'care' has hit rock bottom

(My apologies for the long down time, between the hectic deadline at work recently and all Natz' medical woes, it was unavoidable)

As a chronic disorder sufferer I am something of a hospital and surgery veteran. I have 'fond' memories of these institutions reaching back to the days when our government hospitals were some of the best in the world and medical aid administrators wouldn't dream of paying for private hospital care. Of course it has been well over a decade since government medical care deteriorated to the point where those patients with medical aid would rather opt for private care.

As a fallback, for many years the private hospitals in South Africa offered those fortunate enough to afford their services excellent care. It seems though that the golden age of private medical care is over as well.

Over the last four months my wife, sister and law and nephew have each unfortunately had need of hospital care. Between them they spent time in hospitals belonging to both of the major private groups in SA (Life and Netcare) and had absolutely terrible experiences.

The horror starts with the admission process. In this age of online convenience and practically unlimited storage, the mind boggles at supposedly modern companies that require their clients to provide the same volumes of information (which are already maintained by their medical aid) every single time they visit. What is even worse is that in Life's case the patient must undergo preadmission. This means that a patient is expected to take additional time to get to the hospital before actually coming in for the procedure, just to fill out these forms to provide information the hospital already has from previous visits. One would think this preadmission process would mean on the day of the procedure itself, the patient would be able to walk in and be led to a hospital bed. Au countraire, it is still necessary to wait in reception for admin staff to approve the paperwork. On one occasion we waited in reception for 45 minutes until Natalie was finally allowed to continue to the ward.

Arriving at the ward, memories of friendly nurses eager to help are spoiled by the reality of nursing staff who insist on finishing whatever important private conversation they are engaged in before acknowledging the patient's existence. The nursing care itself leaves much to be desired as well. The nurses 'caring' for Natalie ignored her pleas for something to soothe a headache for well over five hours, Vanessa's were oblivious to her drip having missed the vein and causing swelling and those looking after baby Dayle missed the fact that he had become dehydrated while under their care.

The surgical success rate instills no more confidence. A routine wisdom teeth extraction resulted in months of pain and discomfort as well as three follow-up procedures for Natalie. To top it all off, she ended up coming out of the last procedure (which had nothing to do with her mouth) with a chipped tooth.

To add insult to injury, as a combined result of the miniscule dental limits imposed by medical aids and the need for those follow up procedures, we also sit with sizeable medical bills.

A quick visit to consumer feedback site HelloPeter.com shows that our experiences are by no means an exception to the rule, and the templated response to complaints on the site is yet another example of the shortcut approach which seems to be becoming the industry norm. To be fair, the administrative staff at the hospital I complained at has been helpful, but this is after the fact and doesn't help solve any of the problems.

I honestly don't know whether the sudden and massive decline in treatment of patients has to do with massive greed and cost cutting in the industry, lack of training or just staff apathy, but whatever it is needs to be sorted out. We are rapidly approaching a point where our expensive private hospitals are becoming little more than extremely expensive hotels with really big first aid cabinets.

Fully focused and in sync

No this has nothing to do with lame boy bands, but with two great web tools I started using this week.

ScheduleWorld

I previously raved about GooSync, the great synchronization tool dedicated to keeping mobile devices in sync with Google Calendar. Well my complementary year of pro access just expired and I wasn't in a position to pay for a renewal, so I went hunting for an alternative.

What I found was one of the most powerful free services I have ever seen. The developers of ScheduleWorld seem intent on allowing users to synchronize absolutely everything with absolutely everything else. The service allows calendar and contact data to be kept up to date across Outlook, Thunderbird/Sunbird, Evolution, Google Calendar, PDAs, mobile phones, and any service, application or device that supports SyncML. Additionally, ScheduleWorld offers fully featured web apps for editing (and importing and exporting) calendar and contact data, as well as LDAP access to your contacts, RSS or Atom feeds of your ToDo lists and public Fee/Busy links to be shared with contacts.

That's an incredible feature list, and if my use of it over the last couple of days is anything to go by it works well and is completely stable too. With the aid of the excellent SynchWorld Thunderbird addon (which includes a handy contact merge tool), I have my contacts, five Google calendars and a Remember The Milk to do list flawlessly in sync between the 'Bird and my N95. An unexpected benefit of this is that the annoying ThunderBird pauses apparently caused by Lightning's remote calendar updates are a thing of the past, since the SW plugin works just fine with local calendars.

The one criticism I have of the service is the complex and confusing setup process. The huge array of settings and their completely illogical layout, along with bizarre interface quirks are not for the faint of heart. Even the most tech-savvy of users are likely to be left scratching their head when some obscure setting somewhere or apparently (but not actually) correct setting is botching things up. The developers obviously have impressive technical know-how, but they desperately need a user interface specialist on their team.

In conclusion if you have the time and patience to set it up, ScheduleWorld will offer you a means to easily and effectively keep everything imaginable in synch.

 

LeechBlock

Even with the best of intentions, it's tough not to succumb to the lure of the web now and again when some really unappealing task is sitting at the top of your list. Sometimes a little Big Brother control is just what the doctor ordered. FireFox extension LeechBlock offers just that. It allows you to specify up to six 'block sets' of websites and how access to each is controlled by the extension.

Each set of sites can either be manually specified, or read from a file on a server URL. Sets can be blocked according to time of day, day of the week, total amount of allowed time or a combination of the three. The ability to lock access to settings and even to disallow disabling or uninstalling of the plugin makes it possible to really anticipate your tendency to work against your own best intentions.

While complete corporate web lockdown really can suck, if you need a little help in imposing self control when it comes to your browsing habits, give LeechBlock a try.