Feeling Bad About Feeling Good

Kevin Drum’s translation of the new BushCo health plan proposal:

Current system (for those with insurance): When you get sick you go to the doctor. When your kids get sick, they go to the doctor. You don’t have to quibble over costs or spend time second guessing your doctor over whether a test he recommends is really necessary. As Bush himself says, it seems like a pretty good deal.

Now here’s what Bush is trying to sell: When you get sick, you should spend a lot of time shopping around for doctors to find one you can afford. You should put off tests that he recommends if they’re expensive. You should haggle over the cost of drugs as if you were buying a used car. And when you get home you should worry about whether you made the right decision or not.

Indeed. Of course, if you don’t have health insurance the whole issue is moot, and neither the current system nor the BushCo proposals are good ways of solving that particular problem. But given the existing setup, less worry = better.

Connectivity Report

So a Comcast tech showed up before 8:00AM and fixed our Internet connection. As suspected, it was NOT anything we did. Some hardware downstairs needed to be changed, and the splitter here was also a problem. Those have both been changed out for ‘better’ equipment. We’ll see if that’s the end of it; at this point I don’t really trust anything that a Comcast tech tells me.

So now we get to wait and see if it goes out again or not. This time we’re hedging our bets and have placed an order for DSL from our old DSL provider. We won’t be able to get the 6MB download speeds that Comcast promises, but I’ll settle for slower downloads if the damn thing just stays up and connected 24/7.

The home access outage has put me wildly behind on a number of things but I will try to get back up to speed in the next 24 hours.

Grumpy Valentine’s Day

I’m feeling pretty grumpy this morning. Home ‘net access is down AGAIN — this is the third time since 2006 began and I’m really starting to wonder why we didn’t just get DSL. We brought our modem over to the Comcast office and got a new one, which was supposed to solve the problem, but it didn’t. Comcast said that they have to schedule another service call, and oh by the way, we’ll have to pay for the service call. Um, I think not. We’re using 100% company-supplied equipment and Comcast did the installation and set-up themselves less than 6 months ago. Any problems we’re having are not caused by us, and we should not have to pay for the service call.

Plus, Scott didn’t get me anything for Valentine’s Day, which is also making me feel grumpy. I’m not a high-maintenance kind of girl. I don’t expect expensive gifts or even flowers (although they’re always nice). I would have been happy with just a card. But not getting anything kind of rankles.

And yes I know, V-Day is a totally artificial holiday, I have a wonderful husband who loves me very much and shows it on a regular basis, yadda yadda. I know all of that. That does not change how I feel. If I can find the time to pick out a card for him, he should be able to do it too.

I’m on campus now and need to get some stuff done before classes start. I have the iPod cranked and hopefully that will help improve my mood.

Places You Probably Don’t Want To Work

I have no idea whether or not this is legal. Requiring employees to have what amounts to multiple surgeries in order to perform their jobs? One to put the thing in, one to take it out. Plus possibly others if there’s ever a problem with the implant.

Details:

Two employees have been injected with RFID chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company’s datacenter.

Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.

Although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment, anyone without one will not be able to access the datacenter, according to a Register article.

Ironically, the extra security sought may be offset by a recent discovery of Jonathan Westhues, where the security researcher showed the VeriChip can be skimmed and cloned, duplicating an implant