Comment ça va?

Ça va? Where to begin? Je ne sais pas. Tomorrow will begin the insurance wars with AvMed. I am not looking forward to that, but it’s important they learn up front they should pick on someone else. If you think fighting back and fighting back hard doesn’t help, you’re wrong. With all the people an insurance company has to fight every day — after all they’re happy to take your money, but God forbid you want them to pay a claim — they eventually will leave you alone. If your claim is legitimate. But if they realize you’ll go along, they’ll never stop. Trust me, after I filed a formal complaint against Aetna with the State of Florida, Aetna never bugged me again. AvMed is next but they get one more polite courtesy call. When fighting back, you need to be fair, reasonable, and let them work things through their proper channels. Give it a chance. However, if they think three weeks is “reasonable” it’s going to be rough going for them. I refuse to let an insurance company computer and clerk override a decision made by a licensed medical doctor. That is, quite simply, unreasonable.

The advent of smartphones, especially the iPhone, have overloaded the 3G network(s) so bad, the FCC is preparing to act. I wish to point out that those of you who don’t have quad-band GSM phones will be screwed. Big time. Most Verizon GSM phones (as opposed to the CDMA ones) are tri-band. As I’ve always advised friends and family, if you’re getting an international phone get a quad-band phone that automatically selects the correct band. This oversaturation will continue to be a problem.

A survey question for my readers: like most people, I make errors when I blog. I rarely actually edit a post. For example, when someone points out a broken link in the comments, I leave the comment pointing out the error and then make a new comment with the correction. I think this keeps the blog more true to form. (I do make exceptions to add to a post or to correct serious factual errors) It also keeps those who read via RSS from getting old posts suddenly re-appearing. This all came up because over the past few weeks there have been a number of busted links pointed out. Most of them come courtesy of Blogger’s new WYSIWYG interface which I’m not quite used to. Of course, over time, some links just break.

I’ve been listening to my FineTune playlist since I got home. (Go to darsys.net or darsys.com and scroll down and click play.) And while you’re down at the bottom of the page, don’t forget there are ads on the left side bar. It’s okay to go look at some of them.

We were unable to find skates in Pablo’s size yesterday. Sucked for him. And was the world’s shortest visit.

Motivation is currently escaping me. I was going to try and write this and next month, and I just can’t get motivated. I was going to try and read, too. Hasn’t happened — and I’ve got unread Pratchett! sigh. I still find no point at all to Twitter. Do I have one? Sure, but I don’t use it much. Does one really need to delve into the minutia of someone’s life to the minute. Lots of hits on the Nucor topic from all over the country. As usual, everyone finds out about these sorts of things it’s too late to do anything about it. All you Mac people hitting my blog on AT&T’s VDSL product (U-Verse) — it’s okay to contact me and ask for help. I see lots of hits regarding configuration for SMTP and NNTP. NNTP is no longer supported by AT&T so you can’t make it work. But SMTP/POP issues I can help with. E-mail me or IM me. I was studying my logs for all my sites today. It’s really fascinating to see who comes to your site and what they do. Not so much individual IP addresses, but you wonder why an employee of Lockheed would spend damn near 1h 30m on your site during work hours. I don’t care, but you figure his or her employer would. I get lots of things like that. I also learn that on the Interstate web page, visitors from Spanish speaking countries rarely use our Spanish web pages. They are used almost entirely by Floridians and Californians. The most fascinating things to me, though, are the countries we get visitors from and the unusual distributions. This week nearly 1/3 of our traffic was from Aruba. I don’t know.

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