the McPhee Blog

For awhile now I’ve been trying in vain to get the blogroll feature of this template to add some links to my sidebar. They work now, but I had to add them into the code manually. Not exactly ideal for speed of updates, but it works.

I’ve been preoccupied with other projects for the past year now, but I hope to start posting somewhat regularly.

In spite of the title, I really do enjoy reading Scott Adams’ blog. It is a well thought out blog that presents some interesting “philosotainment,” as he calls it. My issue is with his site. I use a mac to browse the internet with firefox and about a half dozen extensions. So for me most websites look and act the way I want them to. I keep my browser filling the legnth of my 21” wide screen monitor and everything behaves according to my settings..

When I go to Mr. Adams site, I immediately center click my mouse on the edge of his page to begin scrolling down the page. However every time I do this it opens his blog in yet another tab. The reason for this is that what looks like the edge of the webpage is actually part of an very long header. There is no reason for the header. It is exactly the same color as his background. If it were to be removed, I would be the only one who would even notice. Now having an unnecessarily long header alone would not cause any problems, but it happens to be a link back to the very page I am on. So, invariably I end up with two tabs of his site opened every time I go there.

This is certainly not one of the worst designed websites I have seen. However, it is one of the few that I cannot conform to my user controlled browsing.

I saw a commercial for a restless leg syndrome (RLS) medication on TV last week. You are almost guaranteed to see a pharmaceutical commercial no matter what show or what time you are watching. The thing that caught me off guard is that among the usual list of side effects was ”an increased tendency for gambling.”

This struck me as odd. Your legs are bothering you at night, so you pop a pill. The next thing you know you’ve just lost your house on a bet. It seems like a bad trade off to me. According the the Mayo Clinic “People who had never seriously gambled before suddenly were losing thousands of dollars at casinos — sometimes more than $100,000” Other compulsive behavioral changes included hyper sexuality and compulsive overeating. [1]

The big pharmaceuticals change the lives of millions of Americans every year. A lot of great life extending drugs have come on the market. I’m just surprised by the trade off that is sometimes required to take these drugs. It is worth consideration that people may be over medicated. If you have high cholesterol by all means take Lipitor. If you have discolored toenails, I’d think twice if the side effects list things like blindness, exploding kidneys, and projectile vomiting. Even when the side effects are rare, they are often really strange.

[1] Mayo Clinic article on Parkinson drugs (also used to treat RLS) – http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/parkinsons-disease/BN00043

Welcome to my blog. Since this is my first post, I will give you a little background on myself. I am an Irish-American artist currently working in the U.S. I was born in Glasgow, Scotland while my parents were working there. I’m doing a lot of photography right now, but I also love sculpture and painting. Currently my online portfolio focuses on my photography, but I hope to showcase my oil painting and sculpture soon. Both this blog and my website are new, so they may change a bit until I settle into something I like.