With live TV, digital video recorders and You Tube, your mistakes never really go away.

The post, which also includes Rick Santelli’s rant and Obama’s fly-killer routine, is worth a look despite the annoying multi-page format.

The Thai hospitals that offer this service are ISO- or JCI-accredited. My strategy is to take advantage of the price difference to get the lab work done in Bangkok and have it interpreted by my GP here in Hong Kong.

I started out at one of the better-known hospitals (you can probably guess which one). I used them for several years until I got the impression their quality control was slipping. Long waits for answers to emailed questions was one problem. Patients left unsupervised on a moving treadmill during a cardiac stress test was another.

Three years ago, I switched to a second-tier hospital that a friend recommended. The first year was good.

The second visit was a different story. The results of one lab test I paid for didn’t arrive with the written report. More worrying, the verbal debriefing after the check up contradicted the written report, suggesting the lab results had gotten mixed up. When I reviewed the graph and report of my cardiac work up, I was stunned to see the hospital had bound another patient’s results into my report.

Before this trip, I did a quick survey of Bangkok hospitals to see what packages were available. I found a new hospital and made an appointment, without any fuss.

If the new hospital doesn’t work out, there’s always Siriraj Hospital where his Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej is being treated.

Ordinarily, I’d opposed this sort of meddling. But the top end of the market is frothy and thanks to the US Federal Reserve, mortgage rates remain dirt cheap. And with the no money down deals that are still available in the States, this seems prudent.

AOL co-founder Steve Case snapped this shot of CNBC’s remote set up:

So much for the glamor of TV!

H/T: The Business Insider

The new measures will make it easier and less expensive for building owners (and large and medium-sized developers) to covert and redevelop old industrial properties.

But these are all en bloc (ie whole building) deals that will do little  to encourage the organic, bottom up development that creates vibrant communities.

As a result, we’ll end up with more shopping malls and ugly apartment complexes, and fewer of the small business experiments our city needs if it is to redefine itself in the shadow of a modern, open China.

For all its talk about being committed to free market principles, our government clearly prefers centrally planned projects — like the West Kowloon Cultural District and Cyberport — to the small business vitality that has driven Hong Kong’s success.

In Letterman’s Oct. 12* opening monologue,  two gags were aimed at Dick Cheney, one at W. That was followed by shot at John McCain. I tuned-out after he trained his sights on Sarah Palin in the second segment.

It’s doubly odd if you consider the renewed interest the recent blackmail case has sparked in Letterman. This would be a great time to deliver something fresh, especially for former viewers who returned to see if the show was worth watching and for new viewers in Asia, where he recently got distribution on STAR TV.

* Broadcast here the evening of Oct. 14.

“I’ve fallen on hard times. I’m having to pay $20 million to a woman who I believe is the special love child of Bernie Madoff and Heather Mills.”

The inimitable John Cleese, who has launched a one-man show to pay for his latest divorce.

More here.

Ann Stoneham is the foremost expert on this topic, and cannot write her way out of a paper bag. Her uber-competent editor busted her ass for the last 48 hours to try and convert this essay into semi-readable prose

More here.

It’s a very powerful piece of technology and it gave me an idea. Picassa could be the basis of an interesting summer job, a family project or a combination of the two.

I know lots of parents and grandparents who have boxes upon boxes of family photos. Those photos could be the basis of a family history, but without the parent or grandparent’s recollection of who’s in each image, the pictures are little more than clutter.

If you (or your teenager) had a scanner and some time, you could scan the photos and then sit down with your older relative to identify and tag the people in each photo. You could also record the discussion of who’s in the photos. It’s a safe bet that the process would spur a range of interesting memories.

I spent some time using Picassa this week and was surprised by how good it was. It would be nice to have the ability to ignore all of the faces in some photos (I have crowd shots of the Rugby Sevens where Picassa wanted to tag 50+ strangers). It would also be helpful to be able to add metadata to the pictures themselves, the way MP3tag does to MP3s.* And Picassa guessed the identifies of some faces that were little more than blurs in the background. But these are minor quibbles for such a useful piece of free software.

* There’s a discussion of that issue here.