I’d like to thank the academy. Seriously though, thanks to the people who made this happen – my publisher (Debra, Carol, Kit and folks at Wiley), my friends (Kat, David, Matthew, Richard, Chris) and everyone else involved.
Jon.
Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Something I found on Amazon.com…
Thursday, February 15th, 2007HOWTO: visit a doctor
Thursday, February 15th, 2007Life in the US is often interesting, from an introspective viewpoint anyway. Yesterday, I decided that this sore throat wasn’t going to get better on its own and needed some antibiotical assistance. So, I figured it was about time to register with a doctor and take care of all that jazz. Actually finding a doctor wasn’t too bad – I just used my health insurance provider’s website to find one down the street, called and got an apointment a few hours later. But when I got there, there was more fun to be had:
- Fill in registration form.
- Fill in more registration forms.
- Fill in background form (all ok so far, overdone, but ok).
- Fill in survey about depression. So I’m not depressed but they wanted to check I wasn’t about to kill myself as part of their paranoid default paperwork for new patients. I was tempted to write that the hassle involved in treating a sore throat was making me re-consider…but it’s not worth assuming a sense of humor exists.
- Fill in survey about domestic violence. Yeah, that’s right. A sore throat requires this kind of information.
- Take my blood pressure, weight, oxygen, heartrate, other vitals.
- See doctor, who repeats most of the above.
- Tell doctor “dude, I’ve got the same symptoms as someone who’s now already on antibiotics, I’m not dying, I just want a prescription and then I promise not to come back until I’m actually sick again”.
- Doctor takes swabs of my throat to send off for analysis (presumably because they can claim this as an additional expense to my insurance company).
- Discover the doctor is actually an OK dude. Originally Canadian and therefore versed in the Province based system in Canada, we had a good discussion about his support for universal healthcare, which local charities are good to donate to (I constantly feel guilt/annoyance that so many people here don’t have health coverage…and it really pisses me off) and the differences between US, Canadian and European healthcare systems.
- Get prescription.
- Go to CVS to claim it. They can’t find me in the insurance database. Phone calls, more waiting (and of course, I’m grumbling about the merits of universal healthcase by this point) and eventually after a wait they are able to process it.
- Got antibiotics.
Thank goodness I only had a sore throat. I hate to think how bad it would be if I actually had anything particularly wrong with me. It’s not that any one thing was annoying/excessive, it’s just the overall experience that’s typically overblown and rediculous. Anyway, they’ve even more than in the UK, convinced me to avoid seeing a doctor here again unless I really feel like hours of fun and enjoyment just to deal with a trivial sore throat 
Irony of the day: being asked a bunch of times for your “social security” number and thinking to yourself “that’s right, social security, because the government here really provide for the people”. I like a lot of things about the US, but nobody is ever going to sell me on how healthcare works here…and now I’ve briefly experienced the whole broken mess for myself. People here do know the healthcare system is broken, it’s just that nobody can agree on how to fix it (read: rightwing types unwilling to pay higher taxes for universal healthcare benefits to wider society).
The number one reason I’m pissed off? Because of the disparity. I get good coverage through my employer, but so many millions of people don’t get anything – I hate to think about their experiences. Health should not be about who you work for, what job you do or how much you can afford to pay…not in an advanced society, anyway. I wish people who vote for fucktarded losers would finally realize this. But they won’t, because it’s not in keeping with unrealistic, unmaintainable tax cuts and general cuts to federal programs in order to spend more on fighting daddy’s war…
Jon
Changing musical tastes…
Sunday, February 11th, 2007It’s interesting (to a limited subset of the populous) how my musical tastes have changed over the last few years. For example, a few years ago, you wouldn’t have seen me in a Borders picking up miscellaneous items from the Coldplay backcatlogue, or listening to Radiohead. But there you go – I guess we all have grow to up, eventually
So, I’m in Borders earlier listening to random stuff, figuring what the impulse purchase du jour is going to be, and decide to go grab a coffee. And, of course, there’s a complete waste of space in the line. Seriously, this guy had “allegedly” been given a stale carrot cake last Thursday and turned up (sans receipt, stinking of booze) to demand they give him items equivalent in value to said item. When they only offered him a free $2.something cake, instead of the $3.whatever he’d apparently spent, he went apeshit. People are great, aren’t they? I mean, seriously, FFS.
Jon.
Bush: $2.9 trillion mostly spent on FUD
Monday, February 5th, 2007The BBC have an article up on Bush’s penultimate budget (he can’t piss away money so easily after next year). No real surprises so far – I’ll do a little more digging into the finer points for my interest – in that he’s squandering billions on pointless wars while screwing the young and the old out of social medical welfare programs (Medicare) as a means to cut spending in order to avoid future tax hikes.
This is a followup to his laughable provision in his State of the Union speech to not tax those earning under $15,000 (those who already can’t afford healthcare and who won’t be able to) so that they can somehow find money to spend on getting healthcare when, in reality, they need the money for more immediate and essential provisions – healthcare is a luxary to many on very low incomes, one that we should provide as part of a fair and balanced democratic and advanced society.
But Bush isn’t a complete fucktard. No, he’s able to see that the books (he doesn’t read books, but let’s just assume he does for a second) don’t balance in the longer term. So he wants to cut federal welfare program spending in order to avoid tax hikes. Unwilling to allow sanity and reason to interfere (those tending to suggest that one less Iraq war could lead to universal healthcare) – the only solution here is an increase in taxation to provide for the needy – he’ll happily squander billions on fighting his daddy’s war, while ignoring the millions of his own citizens who face the more tragic immediate danger of poor education, disproportionate medical treatment for rich and poor and a widening gap in social classes within US society. But then, only sane people see these real problems.
Un-fucking-believable.
Jon.
Always eat your own dogfood…
Wednesday, January 31st, 2007I recently completed the final transition necessary to declare my home an entirely Fedora-enabled zone. I now have FC6 or Rawhide on my desktops and laptops. I’m still deciding whether to go with CentOS, Fedora Server or something else on my future server installs. It’s only by ensuring I 100% eat my own dogfood that I can be more effective at developing for it. Once you kill yum-updatesd, things get more fun
Yes, I’ll be at FUDCon Boston this weekend (well, not all weekend – I plan to procure some mediocre warm beer, potato chips and a large foam hand in time for Sunday’s game…woooo yeah!).
Jon.
So I bought a TV…
Sunday, January 21st, 2007
Photo: Living room (part 2).
So I bought a TV. I managed to live for almost 4 months without one, but I finally caved and bought one last weekend. On Friday, I committed the heinous crime of getting Comcastic(!) digital Cable with a DVR (PVR, whatever you want to call it today…). Anyway, I admit that I’ve watched way too much TV already but am now totally sold on the DVR/PVR/MythTV concept since I’m able to join the modern age and just “tivo” all the shows I care about. I already re-watched that Bill O’Reilly segment on Colbert just a few too many times…and discovered how to keep such recordings around for the next time I feel guilt at indirectly paying News Corp.
Next step is to hook this up to a PVR of my own or figure out a way to pull the raw feeds off this box without modifying it. Comcast’s “on demand” streaming TV (doubt it’s actually IPTV, but it’s a similar multicast-like on demand streaming concept, I’ll bet) is a nice touch. I can get hundreds of free movies and control playback just like with pre-recorded shows.
Jon.
Jon Masters, Blogger
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007I picked up a copy of Ben Franklin’s autobiography (that he never finished) and am enjoying the additional Poor Richard/Silence Dogood material that was deemed a value-add in this compendium. The coolest thing about Franklin (other than the fact that he was perhaps the first true International Statesman) is that (at his request) his Epitaph read simply “Ben Franklin, Printer”. Of all the things he could have listed, he kept it simple.
Jon.
