My friend Leah, who I wrote about here earlier, has a blog! The most interesting writing, for me, is talented, well-spoken people who can write well, writing about the sometimes mundane, sometimes thrilling, sometimes workaday pace of their everyday lives. This is why I read Rob, Cynthia and Ian every day. And now a blog.

Thanks to Amazon.com’s amazing new “full keyword search of books” service, I stumbled across a reference to disease called Rukavina type familial amyloid p. Also called Indiana type, presumably becuase so many of our kin settled there, the disease is described as follows:

Indiana type familial amyloid polyneuropathy, a slowly progressive form of familial amyloid polyneuropathy with upper limb neuropathy in the distribution of the median nerves, leading to carpal tunnel syndrome and eventually trophic ulcers; ocular symptoms such as vitreous deposits may occur. Called also Rukavina type familial amyloid p., Maryland type familial amyloid p., and Rukavina’s syndrome.

What’s the chance that a syndrome that leads to carpal tunnel syndrome would be named after my family? Amazing. And decidedly unpleasant sounding. I’ll have to give someone in the Indiana branch of the family a call for practical details.

…thanks for the link from this story about the crazy and deluded software piracy study.

Here’s the latest reply from CBC on the RSS issue:

As previously explained by the customer support representant, CBC does not allow external use of our RSS or XML files. This is a very strict policy to ensure full control by the corporation over the editorial content and branding. If I do understand your interest for a RSS feed, I have the regret to notify you that this service is not available for public use.

This leads me to understand that there actually are RSS and XML files somewhere inside the CBC; they’re just not letting them leak outside.

I can’t claim to understand their “very strict policy to ensure full control by the corporation over the editorial content and branding.”

Probably time to take this higher.

It would seem to me that if I was the CBC, I would want my work product spread as far and wide as possible. They’re a public service, after all, with a primary goal being something along the lines of “the greater good of all mankind.”

So if there was ever a technology that lent itself to eager and quick adoption by the CBC, you would think it would be the web syndication facilities offered by technologies like RSS.

RSS provides the CBC with an opportunity to, at no cost, spread its content to new and interesting audiences.

Thinking that perhaps I’d missed something, and that the CBC actually does provide RSS feeds, I sent an exploratory email to the contact address listed for their Free Headlines service (a complex, proprietary server-side solution that forces syndicators to accept the CBC’s “look and feel” and affords none of the benefits of RSS). To which I received the following response:

Following your request, it is impossible to send you any RSS feed due to our strict policy. We understand your point, but we do not send it to particulars. We hope this will answer your questions

The mind boggles. On so many levels.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Self, please note that if it’s after 1:00 p.m., and you’re starting to feel run down, and you think “maybe I should just skip lunch so that I can save time and get this work done,” what will inevitably result is an afternoon where you are working at 35-50% efficiency. If you take 30 minutes and eat lunch, you’ll bounce back to peak efficiency, and more than make up for the “lost” 30 minutes. Really.

Let me note, for the record, that it is 7:08 a.m. Atlantic Time as I write this. Which is 6:08 a.m. Eastern (which is the time zone my body is still on). I have a lot of work to do today. I’m experimenting with opening up more time on the front end to see if that helps. I will either succeed, or fall asleep on my keyboard sometime around Noon. In any case, I’m off to Cora’s for a Fruit Crunch to give me the energy I need. Catherine and Oliver are back this afternoon at 4:00 p.m. on the jet from Toronto; happy day.

P.S. I note with some interest that it is actually dark this early in the morning.

Update: People are very groggy in the morning. I’m used to seeing my fellow citizens at 11:00 a.m., not 7:08 a.m. I just assumed everyone was as cheery and bright at 7:08 a.m. They’re not.