I don't know what it is with college students these days. They were pretty illiterate when I went to school, but, today, they're displaying their ignorance online.

Stolen from tje Washington Post

Portsmouth, Va.: An Olde but a Goody

By Diane Daniel
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 26, 2008; Page C02

My Aunt Margaret was aghast. A couple of years ago, I introduced her to a friend and mentioned that she and my mother had grown up in Norfolk.

"Portsmouth!" Aunt Margaret barked. She was used to people getting the two confused or, more often, simply overlooking Portsmouth for larger and wealthier Norfolk. But her own niece?

Last year was pretty heavy with medical expenses, so here's a compilation of links to reading material about the current government health care services.

First, some inspirational/depressing informatin, "Doggedly Persistent, Untying Medicare Knots for the Elderly from the NYT.

FSA - Flexible Spending Account - a savings account that will give you a debit card to pay for copays, drugs and other medical things. It saves money, but, you need to spend the total amount saved every year. You also need to turn in receipts.

I was researching gentrification, and came up on a ton of interesting articles, but this one was particularly interesting because it's from someone who identifies with the displaced.

Brown Kingdom

He sites the origin of gentrification in the decline of locally owned business. True enough, I suppose, but even locally owned businesses tend to spawn remotely owned ones, over time, when the second generations of owners move away to fancier areas, and sell out to ever-larger entities.

The blog is good, with a lot of interesting historical information and opinion.

Ever notice how software installer icons are pictures of boxed software CDs? Chances are, we downloaded the installer from a website. Even when you buy software, there's often a downloadable version that costs a little less. Boxes and CDs are becoming rare.

RIM and NTP are fighting over patents, potentially leading to a shutdown of Blackberry service. When communications are privatized, patented, and intellectual-propertized, you learn to shut the heck up until the "rights" are set straight.

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Week's developments prove BlackBerry shutdown a race against time by ZDNet's Russell Shaw -- The way I see it, this past week's developments related to the potential shutdown of BlackBerry sales and services in the U.S. have everything to do with process.Earlier this week, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued a tentative final rejection of the last of five NTP patents that form the crux of the patent-holding [...]

Haw haw.