Of all the practical purposes for web 2.0 that have popped up, I am finding that the health industry utilizing it is one of the more interesting of markets lately. As an extreme Twitter fiend with my text messaging totaling over 10,000 SMS messages last month third party Twitter tools is nothing new to me. I was surprised to find however, that should I be diabetic, I could track my habits and blood sugar readings via Twitter and SugarStats.com.

Per their site, SugarStats makes it simple to track, monitor and share your blood sugar levels and other key statistics to help you manage your diabetes online. Having seen the effects of diabetes and the work that can go into maintaining your health I can see this service being very valuable to people that have busy or active lifestyles. If you use Twitter, you can also send a direct message to their service Twitter name containing your stats plus optional comments. The stats get imported into your SugarStats account along with the comments and the date and time the message was received.

No more forgetting what your glucose levels were, worrying about a dead battery in a blood meter whipping out your history, or having a pad and pen handy for jotting notes down. Most people carry their cell phones with them everywhere they go and by using Twitter and SugarStats they will also always have a place to keep their records. Especially handy is the comments for noting at the time exactly how you are feeling, eating, or doing.

SugarStats has also integrated a social networking type option within their service. You could share your stats, collaborate, and exchange messages with those you share with. At the very least this might be valuable for your doctor. Graphs and trends are created from your data so that you can easily visualize your history.

Not a Twitter fan? You can also send your stats to your SugarStats account via email or their mobile web through your phone or PDA browser.

I was ranting on a completely different issue over at Alternageek when the news started a story about a missing teenaged girl. Apparently she met an older man on MySpace, talked to him on the family phone a number of times, skipped school to meet him and never came home.

Having your children go missing or anything bad happening to your children is a parent’s worst nightmare. As a mother of four I am on constant alert and I realize I cannot keep an eye on everything going on at all times especially as they get older and become more independent. However, when it comes to what is going on in my home, darn tootin’ I know what is going on.

Internet access? Monitored via a proxy and firewall, all accesses are logged into a system log, AND the computer is right where I can see it. Even if all the technology blocking and logging fails I am still there to monitor the activities on the computer. If they go to friends houses? Yeah, I talk to the parents to ensure that the computer policies are the same as in my home, if not there will be no computer access while my children are visiting and if they should ever think that is ridiculous then I don’t want my kids there to begin with. Same goes with any other policy such as phone, TV, movies, video games…

What amazes me is that this man called this girl’s house and talked to her on the phone. Her mother thought it was just a classmate. Either this child is a REALLY good liar or something failed here. I know, parent’s are busy people! They don’t have time to stay on top of everything, right? Let me put it this way, my children are more important than ANYTHING else. Period. I want to know who people are when they call. I want to meet them, I want to talk to their parents if it is someone who they have talked to in more than just passing.

Take precautions when it comes to the internet just like you would your home. If you lock your door, subscribe to caller ID, install security systems on your property then for all that is holy, why do you leave your internet unsecured and unmonitored? Bad people on the internet isn’t new and it isn’t hard to monitor your family when they are on the computer. The software is free from most ISPs and the best prevention is to keep the computer screen so that it faces you in a common area when you children are using it.

/end rant

After a conversation with lizze on Twitter about spam and then reading the related blog post, we came up with SDIAF (spammers, die in a fire). This inspired me to play with Gimp, learn to make flames, and create an SDIAF button. Yeah, it is kinda silly, but we all need an outlet. =)

Use it if you like, but please, don’t hotlink to the image, save it on your own disk space.

I like to take a gander at the comments Akismet tags as spam before deleting them every now and again. Today I came across this doozy. It was soooo long I broke it into two giant files rather than one.

After becoming infected with the Harry Potter excitement contagion I decided to wait in line with a friend of mine last night even though I ordered my book online to be delivered on Saturday (he was leaving for vacation at 4am the next day and wanted to have it to take with him). I don’t know what it is about being in a store full of hyped up, costumed fans but whatever it was I had to be a part of it. Under the assumption that the blue wristband we had meant something, we headed back up to the store at 11:00 PM. The line outside was long and it appeared that the store was still open as people were in the cafe and wandering around the book isles. Turns out they were having to keep track of how many people were inside the store and could only let more in when some came out because of occupancy limits and fire code.

It was a little before this time that I discovered I wouldn’t be able to be a part of the Twitter stream as I had previously thought. My SMS to web and web to SMS wasn’t working. “Perhaps the gateway is down,” was the response from T-Mobile customer service. SMS to and from other phones worked fine. Thank goodness for the mobile Twitter page although I couldn’t keep up with tweets very well through that.

After hanging out in line for a while we learned that the wristband didn’t really mean anything but the color of our flier determined when we would get in. Everyone that did not preorder had a white flier and would be going last regardless of when they picked it up. My extra trip to Barnes and Noble earlier that afternoon to get a wristband and flier meant nothing in our placement as people just now arriving were getting the same thing. The people with red fliers were the first in and they were the ones that preordered and picked up their fliers very early in the day. Next up were the yellow fliers (also preorders) then blue fliers; the preorders that didn’t appear till the line had formed. Our white flier guaranteed us last.

Barnes and Noble staff did a good job separating the reds and yellows and getting them into the store in a timely manner. The ugliness didn’t start until they decided the one long line of blues and whites should be reshuffled. Basically they told everyone near the front of the line with a white paper to move to the back of the line. The people with white papers in the middle then got to be in the front of the white paper line. This was really aggravating because we had been there standing for much longer than some.

Then the line cutting started. I guess I am a little naive because I was disappointed to find that the majority of folks cheating in line were the older folks with the white hair and the suburban housewife looking folks. I had an older lady yell at me that she had been there for 2 hours (compared to my 5) and how dare I cut in line (he had been making her way with her husband through the line one group a a time for a while). After I asked her how long she had been there and retorted with my time she demanded that I prove I had an “exclusive while paper and blue wristband”. Understand, there was a table with white papers and wristbands about 10 feet from us that they were still handing out to late arrivals. Eventually I lost the will to hold my spot in line and just let her pass. Sometimes it just isn’t worth it.

I want to add that there were more cool people than mean ones. I had some lovely chats with fellow line waiters about the movies and the books. Over all it was a lot of fun to be part of a community like that for a little bit. This is the first time I have ever stood in line for anything.

Once inside the store the line moved crazy fast and it didn’t take long to get to the counter. My friend purchased two copies of the book and a set of audio CDs. They had plenty in the stock so there was no limit to the amount you wanted to purchase. I resisted buying one on the spot since I had already ordered one.
So, here I sit seeing tweets from people that are done reading and wishing I had bought a copy after all that line waiting because mine still hasn’t been delivered. Apparently I am not alone as there are also quite a few tweets from people wondering where their order is.

NOTE: At a little after 1:00 AM CDT my SMS to and from web miraculously came back to life and it appears all my crazy Tweets went through along with my SMS “test” messages. Even though T-Mobile doesn’t typically queue undeliverable SMS messages, the appeared to have done so last night. Sorry to those that got a storm of messages from me. The conspiracy theorist inside me wonders if the gateway was “down” to avoid issues with the spoilers and lawsuits. The technologist in me wants to think that so many people were Twittering or using other SMS type services last night that the gateways just couldn’t handle it. I think the latter theory is cooler. =)

This has absolutely NOTHING to do with technology other than I found it while looking for a birthday gift for my son who turns 13 in less than a week. I can totally see how this would be beneficial to hikers and such but I know that people with fanny packs typically let them hang down quite a bit, and the weight of a pack of water should really weigh it down…. which led to the visual image of someone walking around with a straw in their mouth coming from their groin area. Stupid mental auto play, I am now completely disturbed.

Ubuntu Studio Splash Screen

Originally uploaded by linuxchic.

Sorry, just getting around to blogging this. You can get the same packages in a rollup in the ubuntu universe through apt under the names: ubuntustudio-audio, ubuntustudio-audioplugins, ubuntustudio-graphics, ubuntustudio-video

Ubuntu Universe info on ubuntustudio-meta