In case you were wondering why you haven’t heard much from me since Thursday or so, I came down with the flu while out in LA. Since I’ve always wondered why so many healthy, young people get flu shots, I guess it was about time that I got nailed with the actual flu, not a cold with “flu-like symptoms” or whatever. Thursday night, I had a slight cough which I thought was maybe because of allergies, but by the end of dinner I realized I was really getting sick. By the time I was flying home on Friday, I was running a fever, downing Advil, and trying not to breathe on anyone (which is really, really hard in coach). When I got home, I didn’t eat, just changed and crawled into bed. Saturday morning, fever up to nearly 102 ° so it’s time to see the doctor.

By the way, whoever designed the flu test needs to work on improving it… there has to be a better way to test for the flu than sticking a swab up irritated nasal passages as far as possible. It hurts, it’s uncomfortable, and it sucks even if it is just for a few seconds.

Anywho, the point of the story is that the real, actual flu really, truly does suck. I spent nearly all of Saturday in bed. I had no desire to eat anything at all which, if you know me, is the real sign that I’m really sick. I still don’t have an appetite, actually, and only had something for breakfast because Heidi made me (pills, empty stomach, that sort of thing).

Another random aside, I can’t remember when I last had to get a prescription filled, but apparently CVS can. When I gave the pharmacist my card and prescription, she asked me to verify my address. The address they had was my second place in Boston. I think I lived there in 2000 (the Waltham St. place in the South End, for those of you that know). They knew, at a POS terminal in a store in a different state, what my address was five years ago. I’m assuming they have the attendant prescription data too, perhaps?

The implications are interesting. First, where is the data stored? Centrally? If so, they have some pretty good connectivity because she pulled that up within 5-10 seconds. The next question is how that connectivity is arranged. Do they have a private, dedicated network between their stores and their datacenter(s)? Or do they layer their network on top of the Internet (secured via VPN or similar)?

I’m not expert enough to go into all the tradeoffs, but I know more than enough to know that I would prefer the data be stored in secured data centers with dedicated network security staff. If any of that data is replicated out to the stores for speed or other reasons (I can’t imagine CVS would do this, mind you), all one would have to do is break into CVS and steal that computer. Imagine doing it in a high value location like, say, D.C. or the Financial District in NYC.

Like I said, I can’t imagine CVS replicating out the data, so I’m thinking that it would be pretty cool to see how they manage the connectivity between all of their store locations and wherever they store the data. Do all locations get the same connectivity, how do they manage hardware upgrades across locations, etc. A lot goes into making that kind of information available in a few seconds to the pharmacist filling your prescription.

I got this box set from my mother when I last visited her. I had never heard of this comic book, Maus, and was a little wary of the big swastika and mice in camp uniforms on the cover. I remember thinking that a comic book about the Holocaust just seemed wrong.

Heidi told me that these books were well known and critically acclaimed. After finishing the second volume tonight, I can see why. The books relate the author’s process of writing a comic book about his parents and World War II. The Spiegelmans were Holocaust survivors, Polish Jews who through luck, skill, and shrewdness survived. The depth of the story is incredible, conveying the difficult relationship between the author and his father, telling the father’s story during the Holocaust, and exploring the author’s own emotional struggles with writing this story, his father, his mother’s suicide, and describing the horror’s of the Holocaust itself.

I found a couple of sites that go into the scholarship that has come up around these books. One seems to be an abandoned Geocities page listing a number of papers and studies analyzing the text, along with interviews with the author. The other site is an interesting paper examining how the author and people work through personal traumas. One other site that seemed interesting was this analysis of the books for a class on illustrated books.