Whole Foods

Photo by Michael

Lisa and I walked over to the grand opening of our Whole Foods this morning, arriving a little bit before the speeches and bread-breaking. It is beautiful inside, and actually doesn’t look real yet because everything is so perfectly arranged. The meats section is only wrapped meats—no butcher counter—but they wrap the meat in the back of the store and can get you a custom quantity of something if you find the right person to ask. Everything else is pretty much ideal. The aisles are wide and well-lit, and the overall layout is not as confusing as many Whole Foods locations. There’s a huge prepared foods area, a florist who is really excited about her job and is happy to do custom work of simple bouquets up to weddings, a cheese counter where they are eager to serve samples, a small bakery section, and plenty of produce. Lisa and I shop the periphery of grocery stores far more than the interior aisles, and we are delighted with what we are seeing. And they gave us goodie bags as we left, which was certainly a nice reward for going over for the opening. After so much anticipation, and so many years of disappointments with Wild Oats, it is amazing to have this Whole Foods in our neighborhood. Walking distance from our house!


Bread-breaking, photo by Michael

By the way, non-press photography is not allowed inside Whole Foods. No, really. Especially when every person in local and regional management is walking around the store. As I explained about a dozen times over 45 minutes, [redacted] gave me permission. To their credit, every single person immediately said “Oh, it’s ok then!”


Wide aisles, photo by Michael


Fresh fish, photo by Michael


Fresh fruit, photo by Michael


Bakery, photo by Michael


Fresh flowers, photo by Michael

Where’s my solid-state drive?

Talking to myself here, other than to remind everyone out there to go back up their hard drive. My MacBook hard drive failed catastrophically this morning. I need somewhere to post what I think was on there that I need to restore to somewhere else (or make peace with losing):

Adobe Creative Suite 1.1: reinstall from original disks
Toast: reinstall from original disks
MS Office: reinstall from original disks
PitStop Pro: need to find original disk
Firefox: redownload
GraphicConverter: redownload
OS 10.4: need to find original disks
TextWrangler: redownload

2007 income tax files: new plan: reinstall TT2007, reimport carry-forwards from 2006, redo totals on forms from 2007, and then everything that carries forward should do so correctly for 2008

photos: only missing about 200 photos

web bookmarks: nothing crucial
music: random downloads from musician’s sites, nothing crucial
work files: intermediate stages only, no active projects, so no big deal
web files: everything important is live on the server, and is now backed up to the iMac

Because I have access to customer credit card data from that laptop, I cannot have it fixed by Apple even though it’s under warranty because they won’t guarantee returning the original hard drive. That’s frustrating. Update: Apple is shipping me a replacement hard drive under warranty and has waived the requirement for the original hard drive to be returned. First-tier support was utterly useless (as always), but second-tier sorted it out in one phone call. I can either replace the drive myself or take it to an Apple Store and have them do it under warranty, and the paperwork is supposed to convince them not to keep the original hard drive. The second-tier rep understood that my situation is similar to a lawyer with client files that they cannot risk releasing. Someday Apple will understand that most people have private data on their hard drives, and will stop confiscating hard drives as a matter of routine. Even better, someday Apple will understand that most people have data they care about on their hard drives and make backups as drag-and-drop simple and reliable as they were under OS 9. (Time Machine is cute, but it’s not a real solution.) But then I should probably add a “daydream” tag to this post.

Luke and the local fauna

The first time Luke caught a mouse was when my parents were visiting. We were all sitting in the living room, and Luke came bounding into the front hall with a new toy. Except the new toy was a mouse which had not fully survived the experience of being turned into a toy. We didn’t even know yet that we had mice in the house, though the next few months were quite the adventure for us, for Luke, and for the mice. Luke was better than glue traps, though not as efficient (or clean) as the RatZapper.

Luke also caught at least one blackbird. He trotted into the house with it, saw us, realized that we weren’t going to let him keep it (you could see the thought bubble), and went right back outside in a hurry. He dropped the bird in one far corner of the back yard, ran over to another corner of the back yard, and stood there pretending that he had no idea what we were looking for. That was almost as classic as the time that he found the steaks unguarded in the kitchen, snagged one, and went out to the back deck to eat it. Except that we were already sitting on the back deck.

And then there was the morning of the oppossum, which I think of as a Luke story even though it isn’t. Lisa got up to go to church one Sunday morning, went to the top of the stairs, looked down to the front hall, and exclaimed “Oh, my God!” An enormous possum was chilling out blocking the front door, around where Luke would normally be. We carefully went downstairs (towards the possum, which thankfully was playing, well, possum), grabbed a phone and a couple of other things, and found Luke happily chasing squirrels in the back yard. No indication that he realized his home had been usurped by a far larger rodent. I took Luke around the side of the house and put him in the car, out of harm’s way, while Lisa called the police to see if they could offer any assistance. They sent over an officer, and we took him around through the back door to see our possum. He then spent several minutes talking to dispatch, explaining repeatedly “No, it’s inside their house!” He told dispatch to send over a firefighter with a noose-on-a-stick or net or other animal control device, and shortly a full ladder truck arrived, sirens and lights and much excitement. Dispatch hadn’t bothered to tell the fire department why they were coming to our house. By this point Lisa, the cop, a neighbor, me, and several firefighters are all taking turns peering in at the possum from the back door, and the possum is still quietly blocking the front door. One of the firefighters saved the day by grabbing a 45-gallon trash barrel from our driveway, scooping up the possum (which immediately changed from a funny-looking stuffed animal into a possessed ball of rage), and carting it down to the river. Lisa made it to church on time, while Luke and I took a nice long walk not by the river.

Pallets and forklifts and waybills, oh my!

LTL (less than load) shipping is significantly better for books than individual package shipping in a key way: the boxes are rarely damaged. If you take a half-ton of boxes, put them on a pallet, and shrinkwrap them all together, then the boxes simply don’t get thrown around in transit the way they do if they’re all tossed into a container. Sure, I’ve occasionally received an LTL shipment where a forklift drove into the side of the boxes, but that only damages a couple of boxes. And it’s pretty rare.

It took me a number of years to figure out that I could have LTL shipments held at the terminal for pickup instead of dealing with the difficult logistics of a residential delivery, and it sure makes life easier. The forklift driver yesterday was able to slide the entire pallet straight into the back of my car with a few inches clearance. I’ve always wanted to try doing that, but usually the dimensions are wrong. I was a little disappointed this morning when today’s forklift driver chickened out of trying it with today’s pallet, but I can’t blame him given the dire warnings about the consequences if he screwed up from the terminal manager who was hanging out with some of his drivers by the ramp. So we took the five minutes required to unwrap the pallet and transfer the individual boxes into the car. The staff at the Roadway terminal have all been extremely helpful this year, and I’m glad to read that they are still a union operation.

Evening

As I drive up and out of the tunnel below Boston, the sprawling and slow pastel sunset rises slowly over the horizon. I’ve stolen 30 minutes for myself in this hectic week to walk around Faneuil Hall and the North End. The windows are full of people, and I must have walked past 50 restaurants and bars on my loop. A truly terrible karaoke singer at one lingers in my ears until I find the band playing outdoors at McCormick and Schmick’s. Tour buses are emitting a steady stream of teenagers at one end of Faneuil Hall, while empty and stately horse-drawn carriages circle the other end. The source of the scattered balloon hats appears at the end of my wander, an old and quiet clown entertaining a father and young child amidst the chaos. Lisa’s on a bus to Maine, passing somewhere below me when I pause in the new North End Park, a peaceful slice of green where once stood only noise and rusty steel. I follow only slightly behind for my few miles toward home, hoping she too is watching the vast purpling sky.

Population size: comments

This is a comments thread for the current poll. In your imagined ideal place to live, how many other people live there? I grew up in a village of 3000 people and went to college in a similar-sized place, spent a lot of time in New York City (7,000,000), went to grad school in a city of 50,000 far from any larger cities, and now live in a town of 50,000 very near a city of 500,000. I love knowing lots of people in a small community, but the cultural resources of a large city are very appealing. There are many other factors that affect how enjoyable a community is other than population size, of course, but everything else being equal, how many other people do you want in your local area?

Aural knowledge

Siddur Audio (in their own words): “Here is a convenient online resource for learning to chant the Hebrew liturgy of the Siddur (Jewish prayer book), whether you just want to brush up on your davening skills, learn to chant the Shabbat services or prepare for your Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah!”

Many of their melodies are the familiar ones to me from the Conservative movement. You can buy individual tracks or audio CDs, but the streaming MP3 files are also free on their site. Some people may be uncomfortable hearing Adonai instead of HaShem in a teaching context, but I think this is a marvelous approach to preserving and passing on melodies. It’s certainly less work to create than the transcriptions I’ve done for the Friday night service and the Passover haggadah, and you don’t need to be able to read music to make use of the resource.

Following the rules

People are very fond of rule systems, and with good reason. We live together in large groups by constructing rule systems that tell us what we should and should not do, which gives us guidance and makes other people’s behavior more predictable. Chaos is only fun in a sheltered environment. So we have layers of laws and regulations, social mores and religious practices, and our own senses of ethics and morality. These are all useful, and they can be viewed as a vast interlocking and overlapping set of rules.

Personally, I want rules to be clear and consistent, learnable, predictable, fair, and justified by reasonable principles. (Other people have other priorities, and friends say that’s what makes the world interesting and fun. Normally I agree, though sometimes it also makes the world frustrating and incomprehensible.) I enjoy learning rule systems, and the only common thread among the academic areas of study that I’ve most enjoyed was that they could all be described as formal systems: math, chemistry, theoretical linguistics, computer science, constitutional law, logic. Much of my work in publishing (though not all) is also related to formal systems, though most often in applied modes: contracts and intellectual property law, style sheets, proofreading, taxes, and navigating the postal service.

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn is that understanding the formal rule system is not enough, because there is frequently no way to force people or organizations to follow even their own rules. Formal rule systems, of course, do not always correspond to actual practice. In some cases, such as traffic rules, it’s obvious that the rules are frequently violated without consequence. But we’re also under the impression that there is a hierarchy of traffic cops and traffic courts that tries to correctly apply the traffic rule system when you are pulled over. In many arenas, that simply doesn’t happen. Intellectual property law is a fascinating rule system, but in practice most issues are either unresolved (as in the case of most copying regardless of whether it is fair use) or resolved in favor of the party with the deeper pockets regardless of merit (Disney/RIAA wins). Fair use is a nice idea, but you, as an individual, will never be able to enforce your fair use rights in any practical or reliable way. The postal service has remarkably clear mail manuals, but when a counter clerk or other postal employee wants to do something else, your mail is under their control. The DMM is only authoritative if the postal employee is willing to defer to it. The Constitution won’t save you from wrongful arrest or prosecution, and the niceties of due process are rarely observed because the court system is designed to intimidate well over 99% of defendants into taking a plea. In common consumer transactions, your only real recourse in the case of a problem is through a chargeback on your credit card, and that only works because the credit card industry values consumers more than businesses. It’s not about right and wrong (as defined by the rules). You may be interested in following the rules, but unless the other party in a dispute is also interested in following the rules, resolution of the dispute falls to the party with control. And many people and organizations aren’t interested in following the rules. This isn’t new, but it’s not something that I learned in school.

A group of people and organizations voluntarily following a shared set of rules seems like a good working definition of a community. A police state may make everyone follow a shared set of rules, but it’s not a community because it’s not voluntary. Our society is composed of many communities, and obviously needs some enforcement mechanisms if it is going to function smoothly. We also learn from interacting with people who have different sets of rules. But in my day-to-day life, I most value the time I spend within a community.

Garden at the start of May

A solitary perfect orange-centered daffodil, spotlit at night. Yellow flowers bursting all around the apple tree, with a trio of lavender phlox and a trio of deep purple grape hyacinth anchoring the rainbow. Red hints, in the buds on the azaleas and the apple tree, new leaves on the roses, and we know there will be white when the lilac opens in a week. The path we laid last year is surrounded by ground covers we can no longer name, sedums near the front steps and some small purple-hearted cover past where we ran out of stones. And everywhere more columbine.

Going to the park

Photo by Michael

Names in orbit

Ad astra per web form.

Not unto us, this glory, but we commend our names to join the chorus. To the stars, to the stars, and there to wish for more.

When I grow up, I want to be a...

The five fastest-growing occupations in the United States are registered nurses, retail salespeople, customer service representatives, food preparation workers, and office clerks. Are we properly preparing our young people for these exciting careers of the future?

Healthways and HIPAA

We received letters last year which told us we had fibromyalgia and that Blue Cross had contracted with Healthways to provide support services. We were surprised to be given fibromyalgia by mail, as were many other people. This year we received similar letters which told us that we had other health problems and that CIGNA had contracted with Healthways to provide support services. From what we’ve been able to find out, a number of insurers contract with Healthways to offer support services for various ailments; the insurer periodically sends anonymized claims information to Healthways, Healthways decides what ailments anonymous you might have and tells the insurer, and the insurer un-anonymizes the results and tells Healthways your name, address, phone number, date of birth, and putative ailments. Healthways then contacts you to give you the good news. There are a few problems with this practice:

1. Your health information is supposed to be private. That’s what HIPAA is all about. The insurer is allowed to contract with others (called “business associates”) to perform some of their essential functions, but the support services offered by Healthways do not seem like essential functions, particularly if the patient does not use those services.
2. Your personal data such as date of birth or unlisted telephone number are supposed to be private.
3. The program is opt-out, rather than opt-in. And you can only opt out after your data has been forwarded to Healthways, so all you’re opting out of is harrassing phone calls. You can’t opt out of having your insurer give your personal data and health information to Healthways.
4. Healthways routinely lies about who they are, claiming over the phone that they are part of your insurance company. They aren’t.
5. Healthways refuses to provide a HIPAA notice or a privacy notice upon request.
6. Healthways refuses to remove your personal data from their computers upon request.
7. The insurer’s customer service department initially claims they have never heard of Healthways and would never give your personal information to another company without your permission.
8. The only way to have Healthways remove an erroneous diagnosis from your record is to give them additional medical information.
9. It’s very unclear which way the money flows. Information has value, so Healthways could be paying insurers for access to their subscribers. Services have value, so insurers may be paying Healthways to offer these support services. Healthways claims that the employer’s HR department pays for this program as part of the benefits package, but HR has denied any knowledge of this program (and they usually make sure to mention everything that could conceivably be called a benefit).
10. Oh, and one more thing. It’s really disconcerting to be diagnosed by mail. Especially when it’s a wrong diagnosis.

Perhaps the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Health and Human Services can sort some of this out, if I just fill out the correct sort of form.

On second thought, maybe I’ll go to Yale

15-foot-high flames shooting out of manholes in Harvard Square at 2:30 a.m. I mean, what are the three terrors of the Fire Swamp Harvard Square? Flame spurts, panpipes, and Rents of Unusual Size.

Leave nothing but footprints

If a painting is old enough, then copyright no longer applies to the painting. However, museums still want to control (meaning “profit from”) reproductions of their paintings, and in particular they want to sell copies of photographs of the paintings to schools and publishers and prevent other people from putting those photographs on umbrellas and coffee mugs. They used to rely on copyright law, but this little corner of copyright law changed in 1999 when a district court decision in Bridgeman v. Corel said that photographs of paintings don’t have enough originality to qualify for their own copyrights, at least when the photographs are specifically trying to be perfect reproductions of the original image. Uh oh, said the museums. Woot, said everyone else. I am in ur museum, slavishly repurrducing ur priceless artworks, said photography cat.

Rebecca Tushnet has posted a transcript of the fascinating “Who Owns This Image? Art, Access, and the Public Domain after Bridgeman v. Corel” panel in New York on Tuesday, as well as a link to a very relevant Mellon Foundation study: Reproduction charging models & rights policy for digital images in American art museums. If you’re a fan of copyright law, or you have experience with the museums and teaching art history side of things, this is fun reading.

I’ve been surprised to see museums becoming more amenable to consumer photography over the past 10 years, though some such as the DeCordova are still very opposed. Tripods are still banned from most museums, but image-stabilizing lenses and cameras aren’t. Perhaps the museums realize that this is not a battle they can win on the access front while still remaining open to the public. Unless they can convince people that photography inside a museum is as much a security threat as photography on a train.