Plaidophile

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So I just got a gigantic (thousands of dollars) bill for my CT scan a month ago, with an "uninsured discount." This means that Sutter's billing department has most likely either forgotten to bill my insurance, lost the information outright, or made a stupid data-entry error which has caused them to believe that my insurance isn't valid. Either way, this is going to be another giant headache that takes another fucking year to take care of. All for a test that found nothing.

And this is why I should just stop caring about my health.

So my MacBook is well over 3 years old and it's starting to get really aggravating. It's actually still plenty fast, but the original Unibody MacBook seems to have various I/O problems, and I've ended up only using this as a glorified netbook for a while anyway. Meanwhile, OSX Lion is starting to really get on my nerves for a number of thousand-papercuts reasons, while Linux has been getting progressively better and better over the last few years.

So anyway, I've been looking at laptops again and have a pretty short list of ones I'm interested in, but am open to other suggestions as well.

I guess I haven't posted about my butt in a while. I had a CT scan a couple weeks ago, and a colonoscopy a week ago, and neither found anything, so the gastroenterologist is calling it Irritable Bowel Syndrome (which is just code for "we have no idea what's going on but a lot of people have it") and put me on a medication that will supposedly help but so far it just makes me dizzy and tired. (I only started it this morning thanks to a mixup at the pharmacy, though.)

On the plus side I've been back at work most of the time (aside from time off for procedures and doctor followups) and am actually being really productive lately. I mean in the work sense. In addition to the butt sense, I guess.

Butt butt butt.

As part of my ongoing crusade to get Google out of my life as much as possible, I have switched my search engine to DuckDuckGo. It is mostly pretty good (and a lot easier to do in Firefox by installing the search plugin), although there are still a few rough edges.

One of the more annoying things is that it still tries to overcorrect things that it seems as errors, which can make it pretty difficult to look up pages on programming things.

However, there is also a pretty troubling thing in the way that they've implemented SafeSearch; rather than simply filtering the search results to remove adult content, they also remove potentially-adult-material-generating terms from the search phrase itself. They try to whitelist non-adult-oriented uses of words based on phrase matches, but it's pretty clumsy, and anyway it's a pretty stupid way to try to sanitize results. Annoyingly enough, it's also all-or-nothing; you can turn off SafeSearch entirely, or you can try to figure out how to get a phrase through the rather arbitrary filter.

So of course I've taken screenshots of what I'm talking about.

I was using 5ite.com as a cheap VPS for my email hosting. Over the several months that I was using them, I was constantly plagued with frequent outages, and my uptime was nowhere close to the guaranteed 99.9%. No matter how much I complained about this, they did nothing to rectify said guarantee. Often they would go down for a whole day at a time and not respond to any customer emails or even say what was going on via Twitter, nor would they provide any information afterwards.

This morning was the last straw, however; there was another protracted outage yesterday, and when I opened a ticket their response was that they were undergoing "emergency maintenance." Today my server came back up, but lo and behold, the file permissions were all completely broken; it looked like they had done a hamfisted system restore because everything was owned by root:root. User files, temp files, device inodes, everything. So of course, very little of the system actually worked.

Fortunately, I happened to have a backup from several hours before the outage, and was able to restore all my files. To LiNode, where I am setting up e-snail.us anew.

It'll take a while for DNS to propagate for the new mail.e-snail.us address, but hopefully when it does I can hit the ground running with a working email system, modulo the likelihood that I've forgotten to migrate some config files or SSL certs or whatever.