I came across a post on DCist today; the post was published a little over a week ago, but I think th news is still pretty awesome. Apparently, cell phone service will be available in the 20 busiest stations in the DC Metro system. Beginning in mid-October for customers of the four largest cell phone service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-mobile), with service in te other 26 stations within a year.

Better than New York, but the system doesn’t run 24/7.

I no longer want to go to graduate school or medical school, and while a large component of those decisions are rooted in my own personal feelings on the matter given the experiences that I’ve had. However, the graduate shool decision still has a giant “maybe” attached to it.

Med school has been ruled out in my mind largely because I haven’t been able to convince myself that it’s something that I want to do. I know what prerequisites I must fulfill or possess, and yet I have not been enthusiastic about completing them. However, the availability of time has always been an issue. That said, this fact invites at least two questions: first, I time as an still is an issue, and medical shool was an important goal, why did fulfilling the necessary requirements not take priority in my life? Second, clearly my life/work balance is already an issue I have demonstrated vey little skill in managing; what hope would I have in improving that skill should I become a doctor?

Graduate school is, in my mind, a better fit for me than medical school, and yet even there, I’m not sure it’s the right thing for me to do. Perhaps I’ve only had experience in a field of science that doesn’t captivate me the way I would need in order for me to really want to devote my lfe to its study. As far as I can tell, money will always be an issue as long as I am in science, and I think that it will only be with great luck that I could fix that problem within the spam of 10-15 years. In the meantime, it appears that I would be tied to research, unable to travel, build up personal wealth, or own property, though that last point would be possible only with great difficulty. To be honest, I haven’t totally excluded this path in life, but I am actively looking for other options.

If I do choose graduate shool, I am sure it would not be in the field of biology or any other field that would direct me into basic research. I enjoy science and I feel that I am never satisfied by the knowledge that I have and am constantly trying to expand upon it. My interest always has and continues to be te use of computers to solve a wide variety of problems. Every time I learn about some new way of using computers or interacting with them or using them to interact with the world, I get really excited and it instantly become my top priority to go out and find as much information as I can on the innovation and apply or expand upon it.

I suspect that computer science maybe the field I should consider most seriously, but I am concerned about barriers to entry, given that my undergraduate major was not in that field. I have been told that this shouldn’t matter, but it’s one thing for me to know and believe this. It’s another for a recruiter, someone in an HR department, or an admissions office to have the same opinion.

If I can figure out a way to transition from biology and engineering to computer science and engineering as design, even if all I can come up with is at best is a poor excuse for a life plan, I will be extremely excited and motivated to embark upon it.

As a side note I should also add that consulting is also a possibilty as far as future career plans go, but to be entirely honest, I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t been given any explanation as to what it is or what is invoved that leaves me satisfied. As such, I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a good fit for me.

I’ve been listening to/watching a couple political podcasts, Countdown and Rachel Maddow, on my way to and from work every day for a while now. It helps me keep up with everything in a fairly efficient and effective way.

Lately, the issue being discussed in the political world that has piqued my interest has been healthcare reform. What boggles my mind is how long healthcare reform has been an active issue in Congress. It’s not a few months or even a few years. Try a few decades.

Last night’s Maddow show had a segment with video clips of recorded political speeches made by Bill Clinton in 1993, Ted Kennedy in 1978, and President Truman in 1948. That’s at least 61 years that this has been an issue in this country, and currently, certain members of Congress are arguing that healthcare reform legislation is being rushed through Congress.

It’s absurd that healthcare is considered anything less than a right in this country, given the vast material and human resources available. It’s unconscionable that we would deny healthcare to people simply for being poor, unemployed, or just too sick. These are exactly the people we should be providing healthcare to, and in the same manner that the government became the employer of last resort during the Great Depression and then later a primary employer in the nation, the government should formally become the insurer of last resort now, with the aim of also becoming a competitor in the insurance industry.

It’s naive to think that the government isn’t already the insurer of last resort for a significant number of people — the government already supports millions of people through Medicare and Medicaid, as well as through payments to hospitals that treat people who are uninsured. It’s an incidental and informal insurance arrangement, and it is inefficient and expensive for a number of reasons. To believe that it is fine and does not need to change, or that it should only be changed more slowly than it already has is foolish at best.

As part of an effort to actually update this blog regularly instead o letting it slowly die like my old blogspot blog, I’ve been looking at a numer of different way of submitting new posts to this blog.

E-mail is nice, but typically I’m only at a computer either at home or at work… The problem is, only one of those places is an appropriate environment to be writing blog post, at least for me.

I do, however, spend a lot of time commuting, even after having moved closer to work. This presents a pretty good environment for writing blog posts, provided I don’t get motion sickness too quickly. The only issue is, I would need to find some way of efficiently writing blog posts and saving them to be uploaded once I regained acces to an Internet connection.

Surprise, surprise, there’s an iPhone/iPod Touch app that does exactly this, and it’s free! I’m using it now just to test it out, an it’s actually not too bad, though this might be more of a critique of extended typing on the iPod Touch than it is of the WordPress application.

Posting by e-mail to WordPress works using the POP3 protocol, but it’s not over a secure connection by default.  In order to make this work with GMail, enter the POP3 server address as ssl://pop.gmail.com over port 995.  With the appropraite account settings, and provided that your server has the PHP SSL library compiled and installed, this should work.