Since we’re planning to spend the next ~year traveling, this week I’m continuing to divest myself of things that won’t fit in a 55 liter backpack.

And that includes more than 20 hard drives I’ve used over the years: laptop, desktop, usb. With great effort, I’ve consolidated all their data onto one disk, which will be spending the next year somewhere safe and sound (it’s backed up, of course).

But what to do with all the drives? Well, some would say – smash them with a hammer and be done with them. But it would be nice if someone could make use of all these platters, would it not?  So I’m in the process of securely deleting them all so that I can give them away.

Unfortunately, securely deleting 20 drives is no easy matter. It’s not secure to just repartition and reformat – the data is still there, and may include passwords or facebook cookies or other things that could be used against me and my friends.

But, ah, you say, I’ll just zero out the drive, with a command like dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=100M count=5000.

This, sadly, is quite slow, especially given that I’m erasing most of these drives with a USB/SATA adapter.

To make matters worse, writing zeroes is not good enough, according to a famous 1996 paper by Peter Gutmann. He wrote:

The problem lies in the fact that when data is written to the medium, the write head sets the polarity of most, but not all, of the magnetic domains. This is partially due to the inability of the writing device to write in exactly the same location each time, and partially due to the variations in media sensitivity and field strength over time and among devices.

In conventional terms, when a one is written to disk the media records a one, and when a zero is written the media records a zero. However the actual effect is closer to obtaining a 0.95 when a zero is overwritten with a one, and a 1.05 when a one is overwritten with a one. Normal disk circuitry is set up so that both these values are read as ones, but using specialised circuitry it is possible to work out what previous “layers” contained.

So even after you’ve zero’d a drive, or even written random data to it, the old, overwritten value can be obtained through various techniques including magnetic force microscopy and scanning probe microscopy.

Gutmann developed a 35-pass erasure algorithm, known as the Gutmann method, to thwart these techniques and eradicate every trace of the old data from a drive.

And there’s even a handy Linux command, shred, which implements the Gutmann algorithm and can be run against a file or a device node directly.

Now, Gutmann’s paper and the 35-pass erasure method are often cited, but are also at this point quite old. Hard drives have changed a lot since 1996. They’re much denser, of course. And the method by which they encode data on the disk has changed as well (PRML/EPRML vs MFM).

Plus the interesting data is now drowning in a sea of uninteresting data. My password database is a few lonely kilobytes amid gigabytes of binaries and libraries and web caches and so on. And, as several people pointed out to me just after I wrote this, recent research seems to indicate that on modern drives, one pass is enough.

So it’s overkill to pull a “full Gutmann” on these drives before donating them to the local orphanage. And I don’t have the time for that anyway.

But nevertheless, I’d feel better doing at least one pass, right? Unfortunately /dev/urandom is pretty slow for this – far slower than /dev/zero or shred, which are already un-fast. And when you’re erasing 20 drives over USB and trying to stay ahead of the moving truck, speed matters.

Well, it turns out that the ATA command set has included a built-in “secure erase” command (ATA-SE) since 2001. This command performs the entire erasure on the drive itself. Since the computer doesn’t have to shuffle bits over the (in my case) USB bus to the disk, it’s quite a lot faster (though still by no means fast – I’m currently waiting 97 minutes for a 250GB USB drive to secure-erase). Also, it erases blocks that the hard disk had marked as “bad blocks” – so those aren’t recoverable either.

Check out these instructions for using the secure erase command from Linux with hdparm.

But unfortunately there is a sad ending to this story. The ATA spec also includes a command called “freeze lock.” This command tells the drive to disable the secure-erase command. And most BIOSes issue the command to all connected ATA drives on boot.

I think my friend Phil summed this up pretty well:

phik: that's the kind of thing that makes you feel really professionally rewarded
phik: you tirelessly fight your boss to work on something, make a prototype
phik: push it through some god-awful standards body
phik: get everyone to adopt it
phik: and the bios vendors block it

(Luckily, on my thinkpad, ATA-SE is still an option. And it works on about half these USB drives. Hooray!)

Just to, you know, make sure.

No results.

Phew.

It’s a great zoo, but it’s still a zoo. The apes live indoors in a big room the size of a gymnasium. They’re locked in there for the amusement of the throngs of children who smack their palms on the inch-thick glass and squeal. And I’m not an expert on apes, but they don’t look psyched about it.

And so I was thinking: now that we have cheap HD video and the internet, we don’t need to do this anymore. Let’s just close all the zoos and use the money to establish a fabulous online library of animal videos, and massive wildlife preserves that you can visit on foot or via jeep safari. In the process, we’ll free up acres of prime urban real estate that can be sold as parkland and residential neighborhoods.

Ok, visiting youtube isn’t the same as going to the zoo, but we’ve moved our freaks from the fairground to the internet, so the idea is not without precedent.

As a vegetarian, I’m used to being in the minority on this kind of thing, but I thought I’d put it out there anyway.

1. For packing the trick is BIT: buy it there. Pack the minimum you think you’ll need and if you forget something, buy it there. Often I don’t end up buying anything, but making this a part of my trip planning helps me relax and pack light.
2. Passport, wallet, housekey, phone & charger. That’s my checklist when I leave the house on the way to a flight. Anything else is a non vital item I figure I can take care of when I get there. You could buy a new phone charger there but this is such an oft-forgotten item that you want it on your checklist lest you find yourself drowning in $30 wall warts. If you take heart medication you might want to add that to your checklist.
3. They’re popular among frequent flyers, but I avoid the Bose noise-canceling headphones because they’re too big (and the travel case makes them even bigger). You can get a pair of in-ear noise-isolating headphones that are just as good, half the price, and 1/50th the volume (that’s volume in cm**3, not db). Slip them in your pocket and travel light. I use a pair from Shure and they’re fine.
4. Luggage with a lifetime guarantee is worth the slight premium in price. Briggs and Riley make a very sturdy bag that’s strong enough you can sit on it during a long pre-boarding wait, and with zippers that rarely break. And when they do – in 5 or 10 years – replacement is free.
5. If you’re tall or otherwise picky about airplane seats, use seatguru.com to understand the seat layout of your flight. Seatguru will warn you about equipment boxes under the seat in front of you, cold seats, or seats with a lot of bathroom traffic.
6. From my wife, I learned to *always* ask for a better price or a free upgrade on hotel checkin. We stayed 10 nights in a $2400/night hotel room with an in-room infinity-edged swimming pool at Jade Mountain in St. Lucia (it’s amazing, check the website) for less than $300 a night because the lady who checked us in shrugged and said “sure” when we asked for a free upgrade. If they say no, no harm done. And you’ll be surprised how often things are negotiable (I was).
7. For overnight flights, don’t take the sleeping pill until the airplane is actually off the ground. I once had an 11pm redeye with a post-boarding, pre-takeoff equipment problem that was announced moments after I swallowed a pill.  Deboard, wait 3 hours, and finally reboard while fighting off the somnolence. Obviously doesn’t apply if you don’t take sleeping pills to fly (good for you).
8. Never drink on a redeye; you’ll be dessicated enough when you land without any help from alcohol or any other diuretic. I avoid caffeine for the same reason.
9. If you travel a lot internationally, it might be worth it to pay the $65/month for AT&T’s international unlimited data plan. It really is unlimited, and as far as I know it’s unique in the world. People from other countries are incredibly jealous that this plan is available to Americans (or people with a US credit history and address).
10. Hotels make bank on the extras: room service, internet, parking, minibar, laundry. Make every effort to avoid these. If you’re traveling light and need laundry done, find a wash-dry-fold nearby; you can often pay them a rush fee for next-day service (sometimes it’s not advertised) and save a bundle. Take an airport express to share the internet cost with your spouse (or tether through your phone with unlimited international data). Grab a few snacks at a grocery store on the way from the airport to eliminate the risk of sating late-night hunger with $12 cashews.

And here’s a selection of tips from others in the same thread:

• Firebug can make that C20 boarding pass be an A1 boarding pass. They’ll never know. (From Ben Maurer) (Nota Bene: not TSA approved)
• If you’re traveling with someone, and you’re on a flight with 3 seats across, book the aisle and window, leaving the middle seat empty.  That seat is much more likely to remain empty than if you leave the aisle or window empty, and if someone does happen to get placed there, chances are they’ll be ecstatic to switch seats with one of you. (from Stefanie Wauk)

There’s nothing worse than being the remote participant on a conference call and struggling to make out the murmured conversations taking place in the conference room thousands of miles away — where the “main” participants are all sitting together, suddenly laughing about something you didn’t hear or understand.  How is this a good use of your time?  You had to get up early for this because you’re in the “wrong” time zone, and now you’re listening to the teacher in Charlie Brown.

On the SUSE Studio team, we had a “level playing field” rule for our weekly meetings.  Even though a lot of us were clustered in Nürnberg, Germany, everyone dialed in to the meeting, putting every single person on an even footing.  There’s no “local” and “remote.”  Everyone has to speak clearly into the telephone.

When we instituted this rule, we noticed the “remote” participants joining in the conversation a lot more often, and the calls went a lot smoother.

This worked well for us. It might help you too. Let me know how it goes.

Pictures of ordinary street life from long ago are fascinating. Look at this picture. It’s New York in the 1880s. Everyone is wearing hats. It probably smells god-awful. And part of you wants to enter that picture and walk the streets for a few hours. Not long enough to contract typhoid, but just for a little while, to see how people walk and talk and what they wear. Right?

This is the same impulse that creates period films and practices creative anachronism. I loved the Sherlock Holmes stories and read all 4 novels and 56 short stories. Same thing.

So sometimes when I’m walking down the street in 2010, I like to remember that I’m walking through a future past. My great grandson (not yet born) would love to switch places with me for a few hours and see what life was like back in 2010.

His interest is attenuated by the huge number of archived youtube videos from this period, but today’s video capture technology will look pathetic compared to what they’re recording in 100 years, and certainly won’t compare to being there. He’ll feel like he’s missing the full picture.

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in the future, so it’s nice to remember that we’re also walking through the past.

Comics are a low-friction way to learn about stuff with which you are totally unfamiliar. A one-page weekly webcomic that teaches you something and is funny is the kind of thing I would subscribe to.

It could be done in the style of  The Cartoon Guide to Statistics and similar books. And it would cover current events in a way that also teaches you about a general principle. For example, you could explain a rifle-shot provision in one particular bill, and readers would learn what rifle-shot provisions are in general.

(Rifle-shot provisions are clauses designed to apply to a single individual/organization without naming names. So they say, for example, this law applies to all hospitals incorporated on February 3rd, 1983.)

Any interested cartoonists want to open a kickstarter project?

An API means you don’t have to write grubby code to screen-scrape their web site, and you can get all the data you need.

For example, recently I was messing around with book information and found that the New York Times has a best sellers API you can use to access their bestseller lists going back several years. Cool, right?

Of course like many online APIs they rate-limit you to 5,000 queries per day. So if you want, say, all the bestseller data from the last ten years, you’d need about two days to grab all of that (assuming there are ~4 updates to the list per month, and you want to grab all 15 of their bestseller lists).

So here’s my proposal. Instead of making us run slow crawlers on your APIs to access historical data, just provide a sqlite database we can download.  It’s easier for everyone.

The API is still useful, of course, for up-to-the-moment data.

Now, commercial websites like the New York Times might want to use the inconvenience of an online API as a way to limit access to their data or to enforce some terms and conditions. But I think in practice it just means that people have to run their crawlers a little longer. And maybe they implemented an API because they thought it’s what people wanted.

In the case of government APIs, this is especially important. All government “open data” web sites should be providing downloadable data sets. If they’re too big, chunk them.

So, keep calling for online APIs. But ask for downloadable datasets too.

It’s about CAPTCHA and it’s our first try at integrating interviews into the podcast. It’s also our first long podcast – weighing in at a hefty 50 minutes of documentary-style goodness.

Our format is inspired most heavily by shows like Planet Money and This American Life. From Planet Money we took the style of weaving the interview clips into the narrative, and opening the show with a clip. From This American Life we took the musical transitions that break up the show into little set-pieces.

Let us know what you think!

On the flight here I watched The Cove. This is a really well-made documentary about a town in Japan called Taiji where local fishermen secretly slaughter tens of thousands of dolphins every year.

The filmmakers smuggled in hidden cameras and hydrophones and managed to capture the killings on camera, despite being dogged by the local police.

Last summer when Stephanie and I were scuba diving in Rangiroa, a pod of wild dolphins swam into our group. They hung out with us for a couple of minutes, swimming around and under and above us in tight, playful loops. It was obvious they wanted to hang out and they came back several times during the dive. I could hear their clicking noises and knew they were imaging me with their sonar.

We saw a lot of life under the sea but when a wild dolphin swims up to you, you get this instant sense that you’re looking at something person-like. It’s like the feeling when someone smart and charismatic walks in the room. It’s nothing like looking at a fish.

So The Cove moved me. Check it out.

Which sounds amazing and convenient and health-conscious, until you realize that for this to be useful, you have to eat food with barcodes.

If what you’re eating has a barcode, it’s not food. It’s a food product.

So, yes, you registered for a website and installed an app on your iPhone, but you’re still eating processed crap. The only difference is, now you think it’s ok. Now you think you’ve finally started to get that whole nutrition thing under control.

Jamie Oliver gave a talk at TED that’s been going around recently. He showed a clip from his TV show when he brought various vegetables around an elementary school classroom, and the little kids couldn’t recognize tomatoes, potatoes, beets, etc.

Humans have cultivated food and changed food for thousands of years. And that’s ok. But we have to distinguish between the good food inventions and the bad ones. They’re not all good.

Domesticated corn: good.

South Beach Living Chocolate Meal Replacement Bars: not so much.

You know what’s a nutritious way to satisfy hunger? Food!

As a little reminder, here is what food looks like:

And for the meat eaters (not me but I don’t hold it against you):

Alex and I released the third episode of our podcast, Hacker Medley, a couple days ago. This one covers node.js, tornado and WebSockets. Check it out!

I’m really enjoying making a podcast so far. It’s nice to be at the very beginning of a totally new learning curve. Our model is Planet Money from NPR; a short, explanatory podcast that’s edifying and hopefully not too boring but also not packed with stupid in-jokes and gossip.

When I was a kid my dad always listened to All Things Considered in the car when he drove us to school. When I was commuting from Munich to Nuremberg every day on the train, I really started to appreciate podcasts and now I have a few favorites. I think podcasts are a commute-centered medium. Most people listen to the radio in the car, and I think with podcasts you can extend that to other forms of commuting like the subway and walking.  Those lucky people who don’t have a commute probably don’t listen to them very much.

Hacker Medley is just a start, and we have a lot of ways to improve, but that’s part of what makes it so much fun. There’s a great video from Ira Glass about the gap between your taste and your abilities that you should watch.

We have a few cool episodes in the pipeline. We hope they’ll be worth your time. Feedback welcome!

Since I’m in his clinic every day, this morning I asked him to take a look at a nagging pain in my knees.

While he was examining my left knee, it made a “clunk” sound.

“Huh,” he said.

“Yeah, it always does that,” I said, “what is that?”

“It’s a clunk.”

He then gave me a really good explanation of where the clunk comes from, which I had never understood in 20 years of clunking. (Apparently there’s a fat pad underneath the knee cap which the knee cap rolls over, and if the fat pad is too big, the knee cap makes a sound when it slips over the hump and clunks into place.)

And then he pulled out his medical recorder and started dictating. “Thirty-two year old male presenting with medial pain and clunk in left knee.”

I thought it was pretty funny, the way he kept saying “clunk,” but when I got home I googled and it turns out that patellar clunk syndrome is an actual medical term.

So then we go to see the physical therapist, and the surgeon tells him what’s up with my knees, and I lie on the table and wait for the therapist to get some supplies.

And after a few minutes he walks into the room with a plunger. Like this:

Which he situates over my knee so as to form a seal, and starts pumping up and down, as if to clear an American toilet (German toilets never clog. Seriously, I have never seen a plunger in a German bathroom).

So this whole knee-plunging frenzy, right on the heels of all that talk about clunking, was in my view pretty comical and I was enjoying it all as a piece of art well worth the physical therapy fee, as long as it didn’t do any actual damage.

That is, until the plunger succeeded in detaching the fat pad from underneath my patella and my knees suddenly felt better than they had felt in years.

The clunk is still there, but I’m looking forward to my next therapy session with these crazy knee geniuses.

I took a plunger home with me, too.

Panasonic GF1. This is my new camera and it’s rekindled my love of photography. It’s small enough to fit in a jacket pocket but it takes phenomenal photos and HD video. Because it’s so portable, I carry it around almost all the time. So I’m actually using it, unlike my big SLR, which sits on a shelf most of the time. And since I’m planning to spend a lot of time traveling in 2010, this is feeling like a brilliant purchase.

Here are a few pictures I took with it. I can’t do it justice so you should check out this great review of using it in the Himalayas.

Big thanks to Garrett for recommending this one.

Pinboard. This is an online bookmarking service. It has a pretty basic design but it’s easy and simple and it works. Their tagline is “antisocial bookmarking.” You can share your pinboard bookmarks with other people or you can set them private. I have my bookmarks set to private by default because my bookmark stream is a record of what I’ve been researching lately and I don’t always want to broadcast that to everyone.

Pinboard charges a small one-time fee to join, and I like that too. Paying for a web service that I use makes me feel like they’re not going to sell all my data to some advertising firm when they suddenly realize they don’t have a business model. And they’re not going to put ads in my face while I’m just trying to bookmark things. And I like what they do, so what’s $5, really? The price is based on the number of users they have so it’s gradually increasing. Neat huh?

They have an extra service where they save a snapshot of all your bookmarks (all the HTML, CSS, js, images) at the time you bookmark them so that you never have stale bookmarks. I haven’t signed up for that yet.

Sleep Cycles. This is an iPhone app that uses the iPhone accelerometer to track your sleep. You put it near your pillow and when you toss and turn at night it knows. You set a wake-up time and it rings an alarm to wake you up before your deadline when you’re in a period of light sleep, and will wake up more easily.

It also gives you a little graph in the morning, based on your movements. Here’s my graph from last night:

It’s a cute app and what’s funny is that it’s made me excited about going to sleep at night. Thanks to Mat Wiemann for the recommendation.

Remember the Milk. Ok I’m late to the game on this one. RTM is the biggest todo list tool on the web. For a long time I’ve used a local text file to keep track of my TODOs. But with multiple computers and not carrying a laptop so often and wanting to be able to mark TODOs from my phone, I needed something new.

The great thing about using RTM has been making a completely comprehensive TODO list. Every time I think of something I should do, I put it in RTM, even if I’m not sure what the priority or deadline should be. This is really calming. On some level, I’ve already taken care of the thing, and I can relax about it.

I set RTM as the home page in my browser and whenever I open a new tab I see my TODO list. It’s a lot better than checking twitter all the time. I’ve already got a bunch of stuff done that was lingering for a while.

I joined in 2003 when Novell bought Ximian, the Linux startup I founded with my dear friend Miguel de Icaza ten years ago.

Novell gave me some incredible opportunities and the freedom to work on exciting projects, for which I am very grateful. I learned a lot, and had the chance to work with some wonderful people. It was a great ride.

Now, having just gotten married, and with my latest project, SUSE Studio, out the door, it feels like a natural breaking point and time for something new.

So my freshly-minted wife Stephanie and I are seizing this chance to travel around the world in 2010. We don’t have a fixed itinerary or return date and we want to keep it that way as much as possible.

There’s a lot we want to see and we don’t know what we’ll be able to fit in. So we’re going to see where the wind takes us.

Along the way I hope to find some useful volunteer opportunities, and maybe hack on some just-for-fun projects on the side.

I’ve been working professionally with computers since I was 15 and I love being engrossed in work. But this trip can only really be described as a lifelong dream which we are incredibly grateful to have a chance to do.

We’ll stick around in Munich for a few months first, to deal with some administrivia, and to enjoy the mountains in the winter. After that, there’s no real plan.

It’s likely that when we’re done traveling my next move will be to start a company in the US. It’s hard to imagine myself doing something other than founding a startup. But you never know. I’m open to anything.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to a break and to waking up tomorrow morning to a new adventure.

Also, I just started a podcast, Hacker Medley, which is pretty fun so far. Check it out .

The fact that this was a significant event that I am now blogging about pretty much says it all.

I’m an Internet addict. I check email, IRC, Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News throughout the day. A lot of my friends do too.

So yesterday on a whim I decided to try a one-day pause and see what would happen.

After just a few minutes, it felt like a vacation.

Stephanie and I were in the Alps over Christmas, so we were, in fact, on vacation. But this was something else — being out of touch was a mental vacation. It felt exciting and remote. What a great feeling! Which I immediately felt like sharing on Twitter. Doh!

I have to admit that I didn’t pick a particularly difficult day to go Internet-free. We were skiing in beautiful mountains. But still, several times I had to suppress the urge to pull out my phone and see what was going on.

It was a little bit hard, but it was mostly great. Relieved of the moment-to-moment choice of being here or on the Internet, I never had to worry about whether I was making the right decision. When we got home, I enjoyed doing my laundry and cleaning the kitchen. What else was I going to do?

Aaron Swartz’s much more interesting and better-written post about taking a month offline came to mind. One lovely detail I remember from that is that he spent a lot more time grooming, cleaning his nails.

The general idea that time offline is good for your mental health is not new or controversial. In fact, it’s amazing how uncontroversial it is, even among the Internet elite. Larry Lessig’s much-admired habit of taking a month offline every year is an extreme example, but I don’t know anyone in the software world who doesn’t admire or even envy a week or weekend spent offline. It’s universally recognized as a healthy thing to do.

We work so hard to build these always-on webs of interconnectivity, and then we sigh with relief when we manage to disengage from them.

The last time I was Internet-free for longer than 24 hours was in 2005 when I stayed in a Buddhist monastery in California for a week. That was a life-changing event for me. But not something you can do all the time.

Now I’m wondering about including a regular “Internet Sabbath” in my life. Maybe one day a week. Or on weekends, no Internet until evening.

I’ve never done any hiking before and I’m not exactly sure where this is coming from.

So a few weeks ago I bought some boots and on Saturday Stephanie drove me south into the Voralpen to a mountain called the Herzogstand about 45 minutes south of Munich.

It was cold and snowy but the sky was blue and I expected to see a lot of people but for the first hour of climbing I didn’t see anyone. There were only 5 or 6 people on the whole mountain.

I walked along a narrow and steep path all the way to the top, through increasing amounts of fluffy snow and incredibly beautiful landscapes. I’m skittish in the out of doors, and spent half the time worrying about mountain lions and bears, though I have no idea if they exist in the Bavarian alps.

It was much harder than I expected, which made the presence of the restaurant at the top of the mountain all the more insulting when I finally got there. At least it was closed.

On Sunday I was so sore I was limping a bit.

I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, so maybe the urge to hike is some unconscious attempt to counterbalance that.

Saturday’s hike gave me a taste. The next step is to figure out how to sleep outside in the snow.

If you can suggest any good resources online or in the Munich area for the budding outdoorsman, please let me know.

Pictures are here.

One night a few months ago I had sharp stomach pains that got worse and worse and kept me from sleeping. This had never happened before, and it was a little scary.

At 3am, after hemming and hawing, I finally gave in and took a taxi to the emergency room at one of the hospitals here in Munich.

At first I thought the place was closed, because there was just a receptionist on duty behind plexiglas. No one rushing around, and it was a bit dark. She was reading a novel.

I told her about my stomach, and she buzzed me into a room with three hospital beds and some nurses and doctors. An old woman was lying on the far bed near the window, her husband seated in the chair next to her. A nurse told me to take the bed nearest the door. The middle bed was empty. There were no other patients.

Two nurses hooked me up to an EKG immediately. One brought the printout to a doctor while the other took my blood. These are the admittance exams they give everyone who comes to the emergency room — it’s automatic.

Somewhere in the middle of this experience, I realized that I’d shown up at an emergency room in the middle of the night, and I’d been seen immediately.

I hadn’t been asked to sit in a waiting room for 8 hours like the time I had a concussion in Boston.

A few hours later, after my abdominal ultrasound was clear, I poked around the hallway near the main entrance just to confirm what I’d been wondering about.

There was no waiting room.

There were a few chairs in the hallway — six or eight, all empty — but nothing like the hospital waiting rooms I knew from the US.

How was this possible?

A week later the bill for my ER visit arrived. I have no German health insurance so I pay all my health care costs out of pocket. In theory I can send these to my US insurer to get reimbursed but so far that hasn’t worked out very well.

I opened the envelope nervously, and there it was in black and white: 264 euros. The total cost of the best emergency room visit I’ve experienced in my life.

Health care in Germany is not a single-payer model. There’s a public insurance option which is more affordable for families and a private insurance option which offers better care. Some doctors only accept the private insurance because they make more money from it. Poor people get government subsidies to cover their health insurance and preventative care.

The result is that everyone has health coverage, and my uneducated guess is that this is why there was no waiting room at the hospital I visited. In the US the ER is a service provider of last resort for people who have no other option for routine care. And a lot of routine and preventative care is delayed until the issue becomes acute, triggering even more ER visits.

So another system is possible. And the people debating the health care system in the US who have never experienced another system don’t have the whole picture.

(By the way, the routine blood test they did during my admission picked up a previously undiagnosed Thyroid condition called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, which I am treating with a daily pill.)

Our CD is only 30 minutes. That’s all it takes to achieve fluency, right? The CD teaches you the basics of Italian, and gives an overview of Italian coffee, culture, driving regulations, and history since 1920.

And we threw in a few key phrases for attending weddings.

Anyway, it seemed a shame that our guests were the only ones to benefit from this highly concentrated language education resource, so you can listen to the CD here:

1. Introduction
2. Basic Phrases
3. Ordering in a Restaurant
4. Numbers
5. Lightning Round
6. Wedding Phrases

(Thanks to Flavio Castelli for his help with a few parts of the script.)