Peter's Place

One of the last books that I read during my most recent hospitalization at Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher . I read a paperback version of the novel, which was 505 pages. I began reading Friday evening, but only got through about 15 pages or so. On Saturday afternoon , I began reading in earnest as I was drawn into the story, and then I didn't put the book down until I had finished with it on Sunday evening, a sign to me that my depression was improving as the pace with which I read was more reminiscent of my childhood days, when I wouldn't put a book down until I was finished with it, especially if the story held my interest, which, for some reason, Winter Solstice definitely did. If you're interested in reading the book (which I highly recommend), you can find reviews about it all over the net . There are three pages that I had photocopied, as those passages spoke to me in that certain way that other books have been doing -- therapeutically. Once you get past...

Leave it to the folks at Google to come up with a way that gets people to help develope one of their core technologies free of charge, all the while letting people have fun at the same time. And they make you feel good about wasting away the hours into the middle of the night, by calling it something benign and innocuous, like, " Google Image Labeler ." The premise for this game is quite simple: You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn points depending on how specific your label is. You'll be shown more images until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned througho...

Well, as some of my friends inferred from my absence, I was in hospital again for my chronic major depression . This time, against my better judgment, I went to St. Vincent's Hospital Westchester . The last time I was an inpatient there, I had a therapist basically tell me to go ahead and kill myself, when I told her that I was suicidal . Additionally, their partial hospital program (outpatient services) violated my privacy rights by divulging information about my treatment to family members, without my permission (and the disclosure did not fall within a permissible exception to HIPAA 's privacy rights guarantees). This hospitalization, however, was actually one of my better hospitalizations, and was productive. I think I have a better handle on my depression now, and for whatever reasons the universe has come up with, I've managed to make some progress in dealing with some of the issues that have been weighing me down over the past few years. And, I'm not thinking ...