Cincinnati, is it really as bad as I think it is?

So Vanity Fair wrote an article about Cincinnati, or more specifically the Creationism Museum and attributing all the stupidity it stands for to the entire region.

It resulted in quite the uproar on my twitter feed and a couple of blog postings from one of my favorite local bloggers, Kate.

I read the article and honestly learned more about the museum than I knew before (which was basically just that it physically exists) but otherwise wasn't all that impressed.  It wasn't awe inspiring journalism and it wasn't written to inform, but rather seemed to be a piece written to take up a few columns in between ads for products that aren't meant and aren't marketed for me.  It was what I would call a masturbatory piece.  It's there for the edification of the author and those who dismiss all those who aren't "You" to prove just how much better "You" are than "Them."  More sophisticated, more educated, more everything I'm not.

OK, I'll give you pretty much all of that, you probably are.

But what the subsequent conversation about the article really made me do was rethink my opinion of Cincinnati.

I moved to the Queen City in the summer of 1993.  After my last class at Ohio University, we drove from Athens to Cincinnati where I spent the first several months of my tenure living in a pop up camper in Lebanon while working 80+ hours a week at Kings Island.  (For the record I was only in the camper because my parents hadn't finalized the move down here so there was no house for me to move into yet).

A series of extraordinarily poor decisions on my part led to my lack of return to Athens and probably tainted my overall impression of Cincinnati as a place that I have never been happy in.

I always felt the place was too conservative, too boring, too reclusive, too... not what I wanted.  As a sedentary person by nature, I never set out to prove my first impressions wrong.  I accepted them as fact, carved out my own little niche of friends and even managed to find a woman willing to tolerate me enough to marry me.

But always the opinions remained.  Nothing to do, noone to talk to, and let's face it - living in Jean Schmidt's district isn't doing wonders for my opinions on the local politics.

Then I started following some local people on Twitter.  Starting with my friend Heather I branched out to other local foodies such as Julie, the aforementioned Kate, the always opinionated Thadd, and the man who helped me become the first to monetize Twitter in a non-spammy way by buying Girl Scout Cookies via Twitter, Bob.  These are but a small but vocal segment of the "Bigger Cincinnati World" that was out there.

They are advocates for the region.  They look deeper than I do and find the gems hidden in plain site.  They share what they find.  They enjoy their lives and present it in a way that invites you to join in the fun.

But most importantly they've taken this lazy fat man and made him wonder about maybe giving Cincinnati another shot.

Windows Update error 403 fix

When a user goes to the Windows Update website, they may see an error that reads :

Server Error 403-Forbidden: Access Denied
You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the
credentials you supplied.

As you can see on this thread on the Microsoft community website, this issue appears to have started some time on December 10th, 2009.

Have the user check their Windows Update log file which can be found by clicking Start-Run and typing %windir%\Windowsupdate.log and looking for an entry similar to this at the bottom of the file:

FATAL: Update required for C:\WINDOWS\system32\wuweb.dll: target version =
7.2.6001.788, required version = 7.4.7600.226

The fix I have been able to confirm here is to have the user (assuming they have the correct permissions on their system) download and install this file

This will update the failing dll file to the required version. (please note that this link will only be for this version of the windows update agent, any future updates would have a different link)

EDIT:  I'm seeing some google traffic hitting this post which is great.  If it works for you can you please leave a comment confirming?

A damn dirty tax and spend liberal complains about a TAX?!?!?!

Perusing an old article on Cincinnati.com this portion of the article really stuck out to me:

"A top Hamilton County official has proposed an array of tax increases – for property owners, shoppers, or smokers, among others – to make up for a hole in the fund that paid for construction of the Bengals’ and Reds’ stadiums."

Now to be fair before I begin this rant... I am a smoker.  I've been a smoker for over 20 years now.  I know it's bad for me, I know it's expensive, I know it smells... save your non-smoker cliche's cuz I've heard them and if my mom, wife, and 6 year old daughter haven't talked me into quitting, there's no way you've got a shot.

What bothers me here, and bothers me about sin taxes in general is not the THOUGHT behind them, but rather the application of said taxes.

See, if you keep raising the prices of cigarettes, eventually people will quit.

That's fine, that's GREAT, I'm all for it... but see you're not raising cigarette taxes to pay for something like healthcare, which costs more because I smoke.  You're raising them to pay for a stadium, or a road, or more police officers.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for stadiums, roads, and cops... but if I quit smoking, you've lost that tax revenue I was contributing to pay for those things, so where does this revenue come from?  Suddenly you've got the same hole in the budget to fill because you went with the easy solution of picking on those filthy smokers again. 

We're an easy group to pick on.  We know what we're doing grosses most people out and in my personal experience we're some of the most deferential people in society.  For the most part we don't complain that we have to go outside to smoke, we'll avoid large crowds of people, the elderly and children.  We begrudgingly accept not smoking in restaurants after meals any longer (even though a smoke after a meal is one of the best 20 cigarettes of the day).  Heck you guys don't even want smoking in bars any more, fine.

We've reached a point, however, where the sin tax on tobacco has reached it's peak.  It's come to the point where those who are going to quit because of pricing us out of the market is finally really kicking in, or you're driving us across the river and losing every single bit of new and old tax to Kentucky.  So let's think about the problem, come up with a reasonable long term solution to pay for your projects and leave raising the sin taxes to programs that they actually apply to.

mmkay?

Christmas Creep Cartoon From Hallmark (Yes, Hallmark)

Welcome to the death panel

Read this on Mudflats.net and it was too good not to share:

[cross-posted at The Huffington Post]

I got a phone call from my oldest friend yesterday. We’ve been friends since nursery school, stayed best friends in grade school, high school, college and beyond. We were the kind of friends that had hundreds of “in jokes” and we passed notes, and talked on the phone more than we should have, and drove our parents crazy. We survived Mrs. Nemchek’s Geometry class together. We liked the same music. Neither of us were the “popular” girls, but we didn’t want to be. We marched to our own drummer. We had each other, and we made each other laugh and we were always there for each other without reservation. We got a kick out of the fact that people would routinely ask us if we were sisters, when we looked absolutely nothing alike. There isn’t anyone else in the world with whom I share such a close personal history.

So, it wasn’t unusual to get a call from her. There are times when we talk every other day. Sometimes we seem to go for weeks without a call, but we’re always there in spirit.

“I need to tell you something,” she said. I wasn’t sure whether this was going to be good or bad, but “I need to tell you something” is always important. “I went to the doctor, and there’s something wrong with my heart.”

I wasn’t expecting that one.

My friend has had a series of health problems – a bad car accident resulting in two painful spinal surgeries, asthma, a breast cancer scare, but this was different. Her matter-of-fact tone quickly dissolved into tears of fear and vulnerability. “I can’t believe this. I’m only 43!” This wasn’t supposed to happen.

After her breast cancer scare, the doctor recommended a preventative regimen of tamoxifen, a drug which would help ward off the risk of cancer that her condition indicated might be a problem. But before they started her on the potent drug, they wanted to make sure she had a good healthy heart. A family history of heart disease put her in a high risk group, so the cardiologist insisted on a stress test.

She’s been living through multiple problems with her insurance provider, Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield, so she wasn’t surprised when they refused to pay for the test. She was surprised when the doctor decided to call the insurance company himself. He explained why it was important, and that he felt very strongly and in no uncertain terms that it needed to be done. They still refused to pay for the test. And then the cardiologist did an amazing thing. Outraged at the insurance company, he said that he would pay for the test himself, out of his own pocket. It was important, too important to cow to the insurance company representative whose job it was to deny claims just to increase the profits for the company.

My friend wasn’t even able to complete the stress test. After a few minutes on the treadmill, they stopped it and wouldn’t allow her to continue. Shortness of breath. Chest pain. She’d been experiencing these symptoms lately. She was mowing the lawn this week, and had to stop half way through because she couldn’t catch her breath. She chalked it off to asthma. But it was, in fact, a coronary blockage that was keeping one of the chambers of her heart from getting enough oxygen.

So, instead of starting a regimen of tamoxifen next week, she will be getting a stent in her heart tomorrow. She’s home right now, trying to “do nothing”, and trying not to get too stressed out by the thought that she’ll be in surgery in just a few hours, and never even knew anything was wrong.

If her insurance company had gotten its way, she would never have had that test. The next time she was out mowing the lawn, it could have killed her. “He saved my life,” she said, just as I was thinking the same thing. Yes, doctors are in the business of saving lives from disease, and illness and injury, but they shouldn’t have to be in the business of saving lives from business. “He saved my life from the insurance company, she continued. ”The insurance company… there’s your Death Panel.”

I didn’t even ask her his name, but I’m grateful to that cardiologist in the kind of way it’s difficult to express in words. He saved a wonderful, beautiful life. But how many people are not so lucky? A recent study found out that 45,000 people every year die because they are uninsured. And each one of those 45,000 has a story too. They are someone’s husband, or wife, or parent, or best friend since nursery school.

But my friend has health insurance. She pays $600 every month for it, and yet her coverage denied a test that saved her life. How many fully-insured Americans die every year because we allow the insurance industry to be a for-profit enterprise, making money off of people’s lives? How many die because our current system says that the money made for salaries and bonuses for insurance company executives is more important than they are? More important than your mother. More important than your son. More important than my friend. How long will we accept the harsh reality that the insurance company looks at human beings and sees nothing but a spreadsheet?

“We need a revolution in the health care industry,” my friend agreed. “We should not allow them to profit from our own illness.”

Until then, if you have insurance, get in line. Because whatever you are paying them, it’s only a matter of time before your number is up, and it’s you or someone you love that gets to stand in front of the Death Panel and plead your case. And guess what? They’d much rather pay politicians than pay to save your life. It’s cheaper.