My original Blog, Asbestos Den is now no more. With the move to Movable Type, I've merged the archives of both blogs.

These posts will be in the AsbestosDen.org category (the only category I have set up).

… or does this look a lot like route 1 in Waldoboro?

My grandmother passed away recently.

From the obituary posted over at VillageSoup.com:

ROCKLAND (Dec 15): Elizabeth F. Levasseur, 90, died following an extended illness, Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007 at Quarry Hill in Camden.

 

Born June 24, 1917 in Brattleboro, Vermont, she was the daughter of Edward and Carla Ebbinghausen Flood. Educated in Brattleboro, parochial schools she was a 1934 graduate of St. Michaels High School. Mrs. Levasseur attended Brattleboro Business Institute and worked several years as a bookkeeper.

On June 23, 1938 she married Richard J. Levasseur, Sr. in Brattleboro. The couple raised two sons and made their home there until Mrs. Levasseur moved to Rockland in 2003.

She was employed at Brattleboro Vermont National Bank as a window teller. She eventually rose to the position of Commercial Loan Officer, retiring in 1975. Upon her retirement she simultaneously cared for her ailing husband and mother.

For more than 20 years, she served as a volunteer at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and the American Red Cross. She was a lifelong communicant of St. Michael’s Parish.

Predeceased by her husband, Mrs. Levasseur is survived by her sons and their wives, Richard J. and Peggy Joyce Levasseur of Owls Head, Thomas G. and Beryl Levasseur of West Rockport; one brother John Flood of Sturgeon, Missouri; three grandsons, David Levasseur and his wife Traci, Douglas Levasseur, Shawn Levasseur; three granddaughters, Sharon Levasseur, Nicole Prentiss and her husband Richard, Angela Caverly and her husband Todd; eight great-grandchildren, Amanda, Kyle, Devin, Katherine, Nicholas, Levi, Carl, and Helen, as well as many dear nieces and nephews.

Family and friends are invited to visit from 6 to 8 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007 at Burpee, Carpenter & Hutchins Funeral Home, 110 Limerock Street, Rockland, where a Celebration of her life will be held at 11 a.m., Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007. The Reverend Mark Reinhardt will officiate. Interment will be held at St. Michael’s Cemetery, Brattleboro, Vermont, in the Spring.

So much for the opening game of the World Series.

Well, at least it means I'm spared Tim McCarver.

And when the last time the Sox won the Series, I had to deal with the local radio station dropping the game automatically at midnight. With the station being automated there was no one to call and complain to . ($#%#@ Clear Channel) So this could be a sign that this will be another championship for the Sox.

21:15 (ET) update: It got back in time for the bottom of the first, at least. I had been looking forward to the Boston Pops performing the National Anthem, though.

22:58 update:

Ah, that might be the problem, they've switched from the satellite to using a blimp to transmit the signal. ;)

I've never been one to blog about my pets. Catblogging is practically an internet cliche.

But today I took my cat, "Number Six" (named after Patrick McGoohan's character from The Prisoner), to the vets, as she'd been loosing a dramatic amount of weight. I was told that she had a tumor, and that before long she would be suffering. I agreed with the vet that Six should be put to sleep before that happened.

I'm taken emotionally back a bit more than I expected. Then again, she was 16 years old. The longest lived of any cat that I or my family has had, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised that her passing saddens me so much.

Goodbye old friend. I'll miss you.

What if Darth Vader was a day shift manager at a grocery? See for yourself in the short film “Day Shift”

(via Montior Duty)

Hoo boy. I usually don't get into knock-down drag out verbal brawls on the net. They are so hard to keep civil, and rarely influence anyone.

Sometimes, however, someone says something so boneheaded I have to do my best to show the holes in their argument.

Today I encountered such a situation when I read at Jeff Jarvis' blog, "BuzzMachine" where he was attacked over his coverage of Dell's handling of his service call, the overall lack of quality service from Dell, and how Dell fails at handling the PR fallout from such poor service.

Amanda "Strumpette" Chapel somehow tries to twist his personal tale and his journalism about Dell into a form of political agenda. Specifically, she accused him or trying to take over the company via extortion and called him a Communist.

In the comments of both Jeff's post on the topic, and Amanda's original post, I (and others) took issue with Amanda's inflammatory assertion. I did my best to point out the holes in her logic, the weakest being the jump from consumer complaint to communism.

Please read through both, as I've done enough writing on the topic in both places. I don't need to hash it all out again here. (Why be redundant when you can link?)

I will however say that Amanda's credentials as a public relations professional take a hit when one reads from her bio page:

I’ve slept with clients. I sleep with my boss.

Then again, in an unrelated article she made the observation,

You want public attention? Today, the key is skin and confrontation.

UPDATE:

"Amanda" is apparently NOT a whore. She's a fictional construct. An amalgamation of five writer's work. These five cowards don't wish to stand behind their statements, and don't have the basic ethics to write under pseudonyms. They instead pretend to be someone they aren't.

"Amanda"s authors are liars, and I wasted my time engaging them in conversation.

Technorati Tags: Business, Buzzmachine, Dell, Dell Hell, Jeff Jarvis

There's been lots of talk about how to better pay for medical costs. Sadly there's been little advancement on controlling the costs save for financial tricks and rationing systems of one form or another.

Technologies have been advancing in many fields and making many aspects of modern life better and more affordable. Medicine has not added the efficiencies that would make medical care more widespread and cheaper.

from TCS Daily - Rebooting Your Doctor, by Glenn Reynolds

Andy Kessler has worked in Silicon Valley for a long time. He's seen the way that improving technology can lower costs and increase capabilities in all sorts of areas, and now he says that it's time for silicon to do for medicine what it's done for so many other fields.

"Doctors hold the expertise. It's imbedded in their brains. ... But in other industries, the expertise is increasingly embedded elsewhere -- in software, in silicon, in routers, in cell phones, in iPods, in Xboxes, in search engines. That's what made Silicon Valley what it is today. You can take intellectual property and embed it on a chip -- to handle telephone calls, move email around, display 3-D graphics for video games and on and on. A dozen guys with no life design the chip and then workerless factories in Taiwan stamp them out by the millions to be shipped in products you and I can buy for under $100. That's scale. ... Yet here is R2. Cancer-identifying expertise is embedded in an algorithm you can buy for $29. Well, you can't buy it. Some weird system of service and reimbursements pays for it. But it's the first crack in the armor."

It's these "certificates of need" that keep any cancer treatment facility from opening up here in the Rockland area. It's rough to travel to Brunswick time and again for chemotherapy. Especially when you need to get someone to drive you all those times. The time and expense of such travel rarely comes into the discussion. There are health care costs as real as any other.

Maybe there isn't enough "need" for a local cancer treatment center, but If someone is willing to take a chance on trying to put one together, they should be able to go for it.

Admittably my information on this example may be out of date. Its based on my memory of articles about the Bob Gagnon Cancer Fund. (I did a quick google search, but didn't find helpful information)

Hospitals outside of Portland have very little competition that would encourage some degree of cost cutting. True, hospitals have a hard time of it financially, but being short on cash leads to asking for more money. If there was competition for services the pressure would be on to be at least as efficient as the "other guy" or better in some way.

One would hope that computerization would make matters better, as suggested in the above linked article. Certainly the paperwork could be improved. Every doctor's office has incredibly huge sets of files and hospitals even more so. Certainly the paperwork of medicine can be made less bureaucratic. Unfortunatly the deep levels of government involvement in medicine and the finances of medicine complicate matters.

I've also wondered why so much of medicine is a nine to five business. There needs to be some innovations that would allow people to get help for a wider number of services beyond the "business hours" when many people are working. Maybe more doctors working on odder schedules could help. One wonders if the problem of people overusing emergency rooms is due to the that medical needs don't happen on a schedule.

If you can buy a carton of milk 24-7 why can't medical help be easier to get after 5 or on the weekend?

True, you pay a premium to get that milk at 2 A.M. and the selection is less, so I'm sure that there will be trade offs with odd-hours medical practices too. But I'm sure that better could be done with a little innovation.

Mind you, that's all just thoughts off the top of my head. Maybe developments are being made, and I just don't know of them.

Technorati Tags: Medicine, Technology

WANTED: Comic collectors interested in a new concept in comic book storage:

Drawer Boxes:

Traditional “Short Box” or “Long Box” forms of comic book storage boxes are simple cardboard boxes with lids, specially sized to hold comic books. Drawer Boxes work like file cabinets. The box of comics slides inside an outer “sleeve” box to create a comic “drawer”.

Your can stack these boxes, and still have access to the comics in the lower boxes. With traditional boxes you have to lift and rearrange the boxes to access all the comics.

The big problem is that these babies are made in Denver. Over half the expense of these would be the shipping costs. To keep the shipping costs down, I'd have to buy a lot of them at once, which would be a costly move for me. I concede that with my collection, I could use a lot of these boxes, but I'd rather not have to order such a huge quantity in one shot. I have tried asking some comic shops here in Maine to carry them, but I've yet to have any confirm if they will.

If I could get a few collectors together who want to get in on spitting up a pallet or two, that'd be great. If I have to, I'll get a pallet load of these all by myself.

UPDATE: Nevermind.

Casablanca Comics will be carrying DrawerBoxes soon. They are located in Portland ME, and Windham ME.

Thanks to them, for making what I'm sure will be a profitable business decision (from my own purchases at least, if nothing else.)

Technorati Tags: Comics, DrawerBox