I am about 3/4 of the way through Mount Sinai's Privacy Policy training and I want to shoot myself. If I read the term "PHI - Protected Health Information" once again, heads will roll.

It is official, I have a summer job in addition to being Mount Sinai's bitch: it is called Party Poker.

I am not a gambler. I am not exactly entirely risk averse, I will take a fair gamble, but I like it better when I can skew the odds in my favor, ie when E(pstate1) + E(pstate2) > 0. See, I did learn something in my fucking economics of uncertainty and information class but my professor still screwed me. Anyway, I was approached by this guy who offered to teach me how to play advanced poker and give me money to get me started in exchange for 15% of my rake should I win. I'm humoring him and going for it. What have I got to lose? Not all that much. What have I got to learn? I whole lot, provided I don't get thrown into jail for tax evasion. I will be writing a separate blog about my experience, and will link it on the side. It will replace the New York Times link.

I plan on detailing my learning experience, as well as any successes (or lack of successes) I have while embarking on this journey of seedy online casino gambling. This whole experience will culminate approximately one year from now when Ted and I go to Las Vegas to exercise our new age-of-majority legal status and play for real on a table (hopefully where the buy-in does NOT cost my law school tuition).

Here goes nothing.

France Debates Downloads, With Teenager as Top Expert - New York Times

In response to Aziz, who claims that the internet is a public commons in which those of limited means should freely be able to absorb culture, yes, you are right. To an extent. To claim further that you have the right to violate copyright because of this "nature" of the internet is...wrong.
In his defense, this kid believes that internet service providers should be paying into a general fund which reimburses artists for the relative "popularity" of their songs (implying the artists and record labels would receive a fraction of what they currently stand to make from a service like Itunes or from selling a CD) but that too is a mistaken notion brought on by none other than ridiculous French Socialist culture. Why should those who choose to pay for legal, agreed to means (i assume that Itunes and other song stores are in effect borderless and if it can be accessed in the USA then there is no technological limitation to it being accessed in France) be forced to subsidize those who are proposing to "pay" artists and record labels for their work through a means that not even the artist wants? I elaborate. I have partially borrowed this argument from a fairly eloquent defense of itunes in suing the pants off of the makers of a company that would port itunes usage to Linux: You cannot pay for something unless the receiver has agreed to a specific method of payment.
You cannot get on a bus by throwing two quarters at the driver and declare the right to board the bus; you have in effect, failed to pay for the item regardless of your having reliquished the money because it is not in the form the bus company accepts. Most buses have signs posted stating the driver cannot deposit the fare for you. Similarly for most items in most stores, you cannot simply give the owner of the store something of approximate value of the item you want and walk out of the store with your good. Those are both examples of unacceptable forms of payment.
Similarly, this teenager is proposing the nationwide institution of what would be considered an unacceptable payment form. Knowing the stupidity of the state legislature and the even more pronounced pigheadedness of the idiotic French people, this method will prevail in France and as bald-faced retribution I hope artists refuse to play their concerts in France. What a brilliant thing to do would be is to throw this rat in jail or sue him for punitive damages equivalent to what he has not paid for.

After having just finished exams, I went to SBR multisport to see if I could get my hands on a nifty pair of Assos shorts. I tried them on. Sweet jesus, I am in love with $275 shorts, as a result. AGH. I am hunting around for alternatives to them and have thus far found a pair of one model down for $140 bucks and that exact pair for 180 bucks from some dealer on Ebay. That is a lot of money for shorts. You had to try these things, though; they were crazy and incredible all in one. Enough on the shorts.
It is rainy today, and coupled with the fact that yesterday my riding buddy Greg gave me a "deep tissue massage" to my ailing right leg in Central Park which left me on the pathway screaming bloody murder (all expletives you can think of) with an enormous black man bent over squeezing the crap out of my leg having left these immense dark bruises and extremely sore muscles today, I will not ride. Good god my leg feels like pain. I can believe that I have immense knots in that leg, however...even I can feel them. I will somehow have to get some orthpedic dude to look at them when I'm at Sinai this summer.
My plan for today is to make a wonderful Shepherd's Pie from ingredients gleaned at my local Gristedes(!). I will have a warmmmm dinner out of the oven tonight and I will have something to do for the whole day. I'm thinking i'll use fresh potatoes, butter, cream, chives, creamed corn, ground sirloin, bread crumbs and some other goodies when i can think of them and it will be an incredible shepherd's pie. Off to 'stedes I go.