7.17.2005
bacterias & viruses
Is the plural of bacteria 'bacteriae'? Or is bacteria already the plural of bacterium? I don't know and can't be asked to look it up. My bacterial infection is getting better: I can talk, drink liquids, eat foods, and generally engage the world instead of being curled up on my bed. Exciting. Of course, I still have to finish off the course of penicillin, lest the scourge return. Another two days of those nasty-tasting pills... A nice plus for the penicillin course, though. I had scraped my knee while in Genoa (fell down on a cobbled street: it was dark and I was wearing sunglasses due to my regular glasses having been swept out to sea) and, in addition to ruining a pair of trousers which now have holes in both knees, my left knee was not healing properly. The much more minor scrape on the right was healing fine, but the left would scab and then begin to weep and ooze again. It clearly had a minor infection which my body was trying to deal with, and the are just would not heal. Well, thanks to the penicillin, which I was taking for the throat, my knee is also healing up fine. Yay!
As for the viruses part of this blog's title, turn now to the Technology section of today's New York Times. A nice article profiles a few people who, so fed up with viruses and spyware, take the drastic move of ditching the computer altogether instead of wiping it. The photograph which accompanies the article is of one Terrelea Wong. The ditched desktop is some sort of nondescript Wintel machine. The laptop on her lap is an apple powerbook: it looks like mine. :) The article says that " Succumbing to the seduction of all the new bells and whistles, she spent $3,000 on a new Apple laptop" and further says that she will no longer click on pop-up ads or let her friends borrow her computer. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Can we take this to mean that she used to click on pop-ups? Also, why bother: the Apple has great protection from all of this: Safari itself can be set to block pop-ups entirely. Nevertheless, I'm happy when someone switches to Apple, regardless of how undeserving they are.
As for the viruses part of this blog's title, turn now to the Technology section of today's New York Times. A nice article profiles a few people who, so fed up with viruses and spyware, take the drastic move of ditching the computer altogether instead of wiping it. The photograph which accompanies the article is of one Terrelea Wong. The ditched desktop is some sort of nondescript Wintel machine. The laptop on her lap is an apple powerbook: it looks like mine. :) The article says that " Succumbing to the seduction of all the new bells and whistles, she spent $3,000 on a new Apple laptop" and further says that she will no longer click on pop-up ads or let her friends borrow her computer. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Can we take this to mean that she used to click on pop-ups? Also, why bother: the Apple has great protection from all of this: Safari itself can be set to block pop-ups entirely. Nevertheless, I'm happy when someone switches to Apple, regardless of how undeserving they are.
