Weirdness ...

For some reason, my Atom feed doesn't render properly in Safari. Neither does the Feedburner feed. I honestly don't know why this is, but I'm experimenting with a few things.

A prescription for trouble

SMU doctor wouldn't prescribe Morning After pill to student after being raped

By Allison Denman
Contributing writer
May 02, 2005

Last fall, Lacy, a student at SMU, was raped. The next day, she went to the SMU Memorial Health Center and asked for emergency contraception - often called the "morning-after pill" - to avoid getting pregnant.

However, Lacy, who has asked to remain anonymous, said Dr. Shannon Sims, a doctor at the center, refused to write a prescription for the pill. Lacy, a junior, said Sims told her she did not write prescriptions for the morning-after pill - also known as the Plan B method - because of her religious beliefs.

According to Lacy, Dr. Sims told her, " 'Read between the lines, I'm Catholic, so I don't believe in the Plan B method, so therefore, I have the right to refuse to write the prescription.' "

...

Lacy said she met with Sims, but she refused to fill the prescription. Tehan, Sims' nurse, suggested Lacy meet with another doctor at the Health Center to get the morning-after pill. Lacy did but said the experience was difficult. The second doctor asked her the same questions as Sims. Finally, the doctor wrote the prescription, and Lacy got it filled at the Walgreen's at Mockingbird and Greenville Avenue.

------------------------------------------------------------

Now ... wait a second. This doctor had a choice here.

1. She could have said something like "I'm sorry. I can't prescribe this to you, but here are some people who can."
or
2. She could have been a complete ass about it and made the poor girl feel even worse about everything.

Obviously, she chose the second of those two major options, and I am very much of the opinion that she should be fired because of it. That last paragraph I quoted made it sound like the doctor didn't even give "Lacy" a list of the doctors who would help her or any other information. It was the nurse who did that.

This is just infuriating.

Bonjour to you, too!

Seems I'm a day late to the party, but Apple has actually released Bonjour for Windows.

I've been playing with Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) on Windows for quite a while longer than I've had a Mac. In fact, a bit under three years ago, when I was at the University of Texas at Dallas, I downloaded Apple's Rendezvous code and built the Rendezvous Browser they had written. I managed to find about four Macs on the local subnet and actually got in contact with the owner of one.

For those who don't know (probably most people), Bonjour is primarily a form of multicast DNS and service advertisement. From Apple's site on it (linked above):

Bonjour is an open protocol which Apple has submitted to the IETF as part of the ongoing standards-creation process. In order to provide a true zero-configuration experience, Bonjour requires that devices implement three essential things. These devices must be able to

- allocate IP addresses without a DHCP server
- translate between names and IP addresses without a DNS server
- locate or advertise services without using a directory server

So essentially, it allows you to throw a bunch of computers together and they'll automatically negotiate their IP addresses, and then start sharing services. Apple's Mac OS X contains a version of Apache as well as a filesharing server that works with Apple Filesharing Protocol, an SSH server, an FTP server, a customized VNC server, and a printer sharing daemon, all of which advertise themselves to the local network. They're all turned off by default, but if you want to use them, they're there in the form of checkboxes in the Sharing pane of the System Preferences. Since they're all Bonjour-enabled, all you need to do is turn on Apache (for instance), and everyone with a Bonjour-enabled browser gets a link to that computer's page.

The printer sharing is the coolest part of this in my mind. Every single major manufacturer of network printers has built Bonjour into their printer firmware now, so all you need to do is plug the printer into your network, and all of your Macs can see it and print to it with no further configuration. With this release, the same ease comes to Windows. KDE is building it into version 3.4, so soon, every major OS is going to have an implementation of it. Hopefully, this is the advent of a new ease-of-use in networking such that anyone can just throw hardware together and it'll talk without any problems.