Thursday, July 15, 2010

A couple of thoughts

Yes I do have a couple of thoughts. I know. Hard to believe. One thought concerns the word verification here on blogger. Don't get me wrong I don't have any complaints about this place it's a much more comfy place than that techno geek, all encompassing, confusing mess over at Spaces. One thing I do find a bit strange here though is the word verification needed to leave a comment. I guess it's a way of filtering out unwanted comments but who exactly does it filter out? It seems the only people who won't be able to comment with this system are people who can't see, can't read, or are really stupid. I don't get it. Now I have not explored this system and I suppose you can make it tougher to leave a comment in some way but on the surface it appears to be a silly way of trying to filter out unwanted comments. If you can read 6 or so letters and copy them in the allotted area you're in. Sure they make them squiggly and slightly difficult to read but how exactly does that stop someone from leaving something nasty on your blog?
It's just a thought.
Another thought,though I have to be careful. I don't want to run out of thoughts before I finish this blog is about medical referrals. Now in general there's nothing wrong with your doctor or dentist, which is the present case with me, referring you to somebody who specializes in a certain area. Four years ago I had a problem with a loose tooth. My dentist referred me  to a periodontist. He told me all kinds of doom and gloom stories about me loosing all my teeth and how I really needed gum surgery. Well what do I know so I had the surgery done. It cost me nearly $2000 with insurance. Of course the surgery was done on the right side upper teeth and my problem was on the lower right. So when all was said and done. I was $2000 poorer and I still had a loose tooth. I expressed my displeasure and the lady at the desk said. "Oh well then let's make another appointment." 
"No thanks." was my reply. I was suspicious of this guys motives.
I went back to my regular dentist and had a bridge installed. All has been fine. Flash forward 4 years. I have another problem with one of my lower teeth. It's the one right next to the canine tooth toward the front. It appears to be forced up and out. It's much taller than the surrounding teeth and is loose. I go back to my dentist and she tells me that I have a few options. A false tooth bonded to the surrounding teeth. A bridge. She also tells me that I should go back to the oral surgeon to get his opinion. I reluctantly go back. He takes what appears to be 100 x-rays of my mouth and in a nutshell tells me I should have all my lower teeth pulled and replaced with implants. Individual implants would cost me around $30,000 and one solid set of lower implants would cost only around $6000. Hey that's a savings of $24,000! This is with insurance. He then shows me pictures of one of his patients. He pulled all her lower teeth out installed these three snap looking things. This is where you would snap your teeth in or out. Pretty neat huh? I am not saying that in the future I won't loose all my lower teeth for all the reasons he told me. Bone loss, potential heart problems. Plenty of doom and gloom. What he said did make sense but though I am aging, hey who isn't, I still am going to hang on to all the natural teeth I have. It all just seemed so radical to me. I have made another appointment with my dentist and told her I want the first option she gave me. I also told her that unless there is some life or death issue in the future, I don't want to be referred out especially to that guy who seemed more interested in his financial heath by milking me and the insurance company out of some cash, not that I have any sympathies for insurance companies, than my dental health. I really have to wonder about the blurry line between a serious problem that needs a referral to a specialist and someone who is just throwing some extra business to a buddy for a quick and needless cash score. Just a thought.
At this point, which is a couple of days after I started this blog I have further investigated the word verification and I guess it's main purpose is to keep out spam. Since when has luncheon meat ever had access to the Internet? Alright that was a lame attempt at humor. Still it's good to know that stupid people will have a tough time leaving a comment.
I have 4 videos of the fireworks on the 4th of July. It's a little late I know but I just couldn't work them in sooner. They are shot off the television and they came out pretty well. I had to edit them down as there is a 100 megabyte limit to videos. I wish I had seen them in person with about a half a million of my close friends but opted for sitting on the couch.

Pay no attention to the third video. It wouldn't upload. It was right at 100 megabytes so I had to cut it down some more.

Well this was the longset time it has ever taken me to throw a blog together. I do like that you can upload videos straight from your computer but it takes forever.
Lets see. Any more thoughts? Let me look through the box where I keep them. Nah. I'm going to save them for another time. Time for me to get out of this chair and get on with the day.
I'm outta here.

14 comments:

  1. Get on with the day? It's 6:31pm Paul LOL! Time to git on with the evening eh? You work too hard and those videos were great. The third one works by the way!
    I know it's hard to think of having dentures as I have been staving that off for years,,,hence the closed mouth smile. I have bone deterioration thing but when you age that happens though. Osteeorosis is actually an aging thing they now determine is a disease. Go figure. The verification my friend is for robots and spiders that crawl the web and leave spam. They cannot 'read' and type in letters. I thought I would give you my expertease on the subject. I hope you figure out what to do about your teeth. I gottah pair of pliers an...oh I shouldn't have said that but I do have an opening next Tuesday! Moon shine for numbing!

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  2. Toodie I realized my mistake with the word verification after I did a little searching about. I even mentioned it further down the blog. I started this thing 3 or 4 days ago and kept getting interupted. I edited the videos last week and had to re-edit the third one again because it told me that the upload failed. Now it turns out that it didn't fail. I spent most of the afternoon between doing other things waiting for the videos to upload. I would have posted them sooner but the fire happened. I got my pictures posted on a local news website.

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  3. The videos are great Paul! As for teeth, they are expensive business no matter what you have done. I say keep your teeth as long as you can.
    The verification process is what I dislike the most about blog spot.
    Laughing about Toodie's comment.

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  4. I don't like the word thing either but as you know and as Toodie said..spiders a bots do crawl. They put thousands of comments on the middle son's blog. He keeps most of them because they are well done believe it or not and some are funny yet it spiders and bots.
    I think going back to that oral surgeon is a deal breaker. never again. Keep your teeth till you can't. They, the Doctors you saw must be Democrats. :-) I'll sick the Admiral on them!

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  5. Word verification (or Captcha) is used for comments Paul because it filters out Spam bots which can't match up those letters. If it annoys you for your own blog then it can be disabled on here. Not every blogging site uses it. Blogger does but Wordpress uses Akismet for its spam sifter which also works well.

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  6. I don't like needing to use Word Verification either. But that and comment moderation is the best way to block the recent problem of Chinese Spam linking to Asian porn sites, which has showed up on a lot of Blogger blogs.

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  7. OH EWWWWW! Gerry..say it isn't SO!

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  8. Wow! Your dentists in America must be millionaires by now! Thank goodness we have the National Health! I would always be suspicious when you have to pay, its in their interests to tell you that you need such and such doing (usually the most expensive option no doubt!) By the way, you can switch Word Verification off if you think it puts people off from commenting but you do risk getting spam messages left and we who are ex Spaces know all about Spam don't we?

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  9. Well Technogran I have dental insurance. Those figures, as far as I can tell are with the insurance. This was not my regular dentist this was a "specialist" that I was referred to. It seems his speciality was extracting money. I never had a problem with spam at Spaces I had a problem with Spaces. I had never explores the comment moderation until after I wrote the above blog. Not too smart on my part. Too late!

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  10. I dont like the word thing either. I dont use it yet unless I guess I have too. So far so good.
    I loved your fireworks Paul.
    Nice work. I too love your background you choose.
    Your blog is looking so good and intersting.

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  11. Oh BB, I didn't know (or memory fails me)you have dental insurance! Alrighty then go git your pearls all done, top shelf if yah want. Whaddah lucky man you are!

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  12. I do agree keep your real teeth as long as you can.. as for the implants. whatver happened to a good set of False teeth if need be? I mean nowdays they can do miraculous things with the veneers etc. Love the vids.. and you are so right it is so much easier here to download things to your blog from blogspot. I am leaning way over on this one... I am liking it more andmore every day. YES YES the spam is nasty and the word verification helps tremendous.
    Take care : )

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  13. Well, you don't even know me from Adam, Paul, but I dropped by because of Beth's rave reviews. She was RIGHT! Oh, yeah, I loved it over here and I'm still laughing about the spam. Cracked me up! As for the dentist, ohhhh I KNOW. Been there. It's hard to know whom to trust these days. Like the "whom"? I just realized I wrote that. Wooohoooo me. (I'm going to follow you :D)

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  14. I'm always on guard about doctors and their pill pushing and I'd be on guard if my dentist was pushing an expensive procedure. I didn't get to see the videos, my tmobile stick. Good pictures, storms are pretty.

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