My health insurance people warned me yesterday that my insurance expires on Saturday, apparently because my fees have not been paid yet. My response: "Don't care, you guys don't cover me even when my insurance is paid for ( Read more... )

kidconcept and I got back from the wilderness of Hoover Forest and northern Yosemite a couple of days ago. After I got over the initial shock of running water, showers, clean clothes, beds, and microwaves, I set about learning how to do cool things with technology. So kidconcept and I put together this webpage with a topo map, a Google Earth feature that ( Read more... )

I am now back in California for a bit to visit friends, family, and the wild. I just saw the new solar panels my parents have put in on the roof. Most days contribute nothing to their power bill as a result, though they do have a mysterious efficiency loss on hot days that may be due to the DC-AC conversion. I'll have to think about it ( Read more... )

It's amazing when after 8 months of spending hours on the phone arguing with incompetent people, of dealing with all the mistakes, broken promises, and truly deceptive statements of benefit, and of probably damaging my credit rating in the process of refusing to pay the debts of my student health insurance company, I finally get through to a person ( Read more... )

If you give billing people your wrong address by mistake, it can cause problems. Especially if you're like me, and you don't really pay attention to such things - you just pay each bill as it comes in. I always would have thought that if the bills were constantly being returned by the mailman to the sender, they would try calling me by phone or ( Read more... )

No offense, Oklahoma.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/Media/Play/15531/1/BoxerSmacksdownInhoffe.wmv/

I think this qualifies as mind candy for nerds. These physicists are actually proposing a card game to test time travel. After a series of mishaps and a long dry spell in the way of interesting discoveries in particle physics, the largest particle collider in the world (the LHC) is slated to turn on next year at a cost of something like $5 billion ( Read more... )

Well maybe not, but I know the cause of my insomnia. It's not caffeine or stress or ambient noise, or anything reasonable like that, it's exercise. The magic number is around 2 hours it seems. If I play ultimate or soccer for more than that length of time during the afternoon, then I probably will be awake all night long no matter what I try to do ( Read more... )

FLASH! FLASH! Boom-cracka crack!
Whooooooooosh FLASH! .... rattle rattle rattle BOOOOOOM! FLASH-ABOOM!

Now where did I put my flux capacitor? 1960 here I come! I'll update again when I get back, in about a year or so ... which might be tomorrow. It depends.

I have slept for two hours in the last two days. It's not that I'm too busy to sleep or too stressed about something (at least not consciously), I just lie in bed and I think "what the hell. I'm not tired. What am I doing here." Then I go eat some toast of something. But I really do feel pretty wide awake. It's bizarre since I'm normally someone ( Read more... )