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Rants and Raves of Dr. Timothy Hain

Professor of Neurology, Otolaryngology, and Physical Therapy/Human Movement Science, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago IL, USA.

Click here to seeing curriculum vitae.

EMAIL ADDRESS: t-hain@northwestern.edu

This space holds helpful information about various things that Dr. Hain has discovered by trial and error, or just felt strongly enough to need to vent.

Rants

• ATT phone service (competition to Comcast).  ATT sets billing traps for their customers.
• Comcast Xfinity residential service (in Chicago).  20 megabits/second, delivered once every 10 seconds.
• Elsevier exploits authors. Actually most publishers exploit authors. I will add more publishers if/when I publish more chapters.
• Software
  • Asterisk telephony-- not ready for the big time yet.
  • efax -- a telephone tech company that doesn't answer their phone.
  • Efilmlite radiology reviewing program (too lite)
• Televox -- watch the fine print !
• Uncivility in business

So-so (or suboptimal perhaps)

• Ad blocking using the "hosts" file -- much faster browsing and less annoyance! sometimes gets in the way.

• Brother MFC-8820D multifunction printer, built like a tank, but has many major software problems. There are workarounds. Dr. Hain has many of these in his clinic.
• Brother MFC-8890DW multifunction printer. "Missing manual" type workarounds for this device.
• Hotel Reviews (Dr. Hain likes his morning coffee).
  • Biltmore Resort in Phoenix, AZ -- no coffee here
  • Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas -- no coffee here either -- because of terrorists (?!)
  • Hotel 140 in Boston -- shouldn't it be "Hotel 'Y' ? (Coffee is OK).
  • New Hankyu hotel in Osaka -- lack of coffee is the least of this hotel's problems.
  • Hotel Regina in Madrid -- no coffee either.
• Concert that are suboptimal
  • Mariochi Vargas de Tecalitian -- bring your ear plugs -- as you can't get away from the overloaded speakers inside.
  • Tangastic (Chicago event) -- you better really like Tango.
• Madrid, the city -- old and expensive.
• Wines of Costco

Raves

• Electric Sheep Screensaver -- this is an awesome and free piece of fluff !   Highly recommended.
• Foxit pdf reader/writer -- very fast and better feature set than Adobe Reader.
• Irfanview -- awesome little program to display and downsize graphic files
• Kyoto, Japan -- beautiful and expensive
• Roboform -- online password manager -- very useful for those of us with 1000's of passwords.
• Thomas Glass
• Concerts
  • Billy Joel/Elton John
  • Too Hot to Handel(jazz-soul-classical-opera fusion)