Plaidophile

If you're reading this, you probably know me as "fluffy." You might be aware of what my real name is (or at least my real first initial), but that's probably not the way you think of me in terms of my identity, unless you're one of the few real-life friends who calls me by my real first name (usually because you're a coworker or family member or the like).

I am of course now on Google+, but Google+ has done something insidious: they've taken the same route as other social networks where they champion the real name as being a much more valid identifier than the way that people actually know me. They've always required a "full" name (so I used the standby "fluffy <3" for that), but now they also specifically prevent non-letters in the fields. Sucks to be you if you're one of the people who have legally changed their name to a mononym or to include a numeral; also sucks to be you if you're one of the people who don't want to broadcast their real name to the Internet.

Google's public policy blog shows that they understand the need for pseudonymous identities, but they seem to have completely forgotten that such a need extends to Internet social circles (despite one of their top examples of such a need being Twitter). In particular, while most fields have a "restriction" field (to show who gets to see it), the real name field does not have such a restriction possibility. Just as with Facebook, your real name is your Internet name.

But even worse, when you change your name on Google+, that applies to all Google products, so suddenly GMail and Reader Shared Items and +1 and so on would refer to me by my legal name. I'm concerned that when my GMail for Domains account is finally merged with my apps account, suddenly my email will be sent with my Google+ name instead of my separately-configured email name. It'll also apply to any other identity-based Google services which may come about later. It's very insidious.

It's also a bit interesting how for all the talk they have about the fine granularity of "circles" for item sharing, they don't apply that granularity to the profile information. There's no way to restrict, say, your phone number or your mailing address only to your "friends" and "family" circles, for example — if someone is in a circle then they get all your information. Maddeningly, this is something even Facebook got right.

Oh well. At least they allow a gender of "other." For now, anyway. Who knows when some product manager will get a hair up their butt about being binary-normative.

See also: The case against drop-down identities, which I just found while searching for other thoughts on this issue. It's only going to get worse.

While waiting for CreateSpace to validate my art assets, someone on Song Fight mentioned Mixonic, which I hadn't looked into for a few years, since the last time I checked they were better than CafePress but still pretty terrible, pricing- and feature-wise. Their current prices are pretty good, and beat all the other short-run manufacturers I'm aware of.

However, I have so far had nothing but problems with them, and I will not be using them or recommending their services.

I thought I'd had all the bills settled from my endoscopy last year. So of course today I just got another bill from St. Luke's for $713.72 with no reason given aside from "balance due," saying that there is no more insurance payment forthcoming on this account. The only contact option given was either calling their toll-free number or "access your account online." Knowing that the online access is useless I called the number. I was greeted with an endless cavalcade of data entry, which ended with "our office is now closed; please call back during regular business hours." They could have said that BEFORE I spent 5 minutes entering every bit of information they wanted. Ugh.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what this amount could be for. I am pretty sure that I have paid every bill that came to me. All this shows is: Service date June 24 2010 (the endoscopy), total charges $6430.07, $4044.56 in payments, a $-1671.79 "adjustment," and a balance due of $713.72. I am pretty sick of this whole stupid situation.

And of course my employers moved me over to a new insurance provider this year so who knows what the hell the status is of my previous insurance vis-a-vis handling this issue. Obviously my new insurance company wouldn't be held accountable for this.

St. Luke's billing department is the embodiment of failure and a shining example of what is wrong with the American healthcare industry.

Or, in short, St. Luke's hospital FUCKING SUCKS.

Chase has finally decided to go evil and are now starting to charge a $10 monthly service charge if I don't keep at least $1500 in my checking account at all times, and none of their other account options are any better.

It looks like Bank of America has a free account which just charges for teller access, although I hate those guys and their crappy ATMs (but on the plus side they're a bit more convenient for me in general). Wells Fargo is also pretty convenient, but their no-fee requirement is just as horrible as Chase's. Of course I already have accounts with ING and Charles Schwab which are fine in every way except for ATM access (ING does have one in the Safeway near work, though, and Schwab claims they'll refund all bank-incurred ATM fees but I have to wonder where they pay that from). But in any case maybe the amount of interest that they'd give me would make up for the occasional ATM fee...

Any suggestions that I may have missed? I don't know of any other reasonable banks that have ATMs around here (San Francisco).

An intersection of confluent issues with how Google and GMail handle their various accounts has just made my life much more difficult, again.

So, I bought a Ryobi cordless drill a few years ago. The battery got completely drained since I don't use drills very often, and it won't hold a charge. So I looked at the battery, and the only indication of what it is was "Ryobi 9.6 volt." So I went online to buy a replacement, and there were plenty of "Ryobi 9.6 volt" batteries. There were absolutely no indications other than that for what sorts of batteries fit into which tools. So I bought one.

And of course, the one I got, which says "Ryobi 9.6 volt," has a completely different connector than what's on my charger or drill.

For $5 more I could have just bought a new damn drill. Ugh.

Of course, now I see that there's a "battery number" that I was supposed to match. GOOD THING THIS WAS OBVIOUS.

Why is it that when I watch a Blu-Ray disc on my Blu-Ray player, pretty much every single one starts out with an unskippable 10-minute sales pitch for how awesome Blu-Ray is? It's especially ludicrous when it's from a Sony Pictures film (for example, Moon) where I am watching it on a Sony Blu-Ray player on a brand-new Sony Bravia 3D TV. They can't get any more money from me on this!

I just want to be able to press "menu" and get right to the movie's menu, or better yet, just go straight to the movie, since it's not like Blu-Ray movies need any configuration most of the time (since it's not like the bad old days of DVD where the player didn't know what audio format to use or whatever, and some things were set up with the assumption that peoples' players didn't know how to downconvert 5.1 to 2.0 or whatever).

This is one of those things where it's gotten worse as the studios have gotten more format-savvy, and of course there's a visual aid. (Except it's even more ludicrous than that because the Blu-Ray ad is telling us how much better Blu-Ray is than DVD, which is why I have it on Blu-Ray already.)

(lack thereof)

I have gotten several more bills from them for things which they are still insisting that my insurance isn't covering, all from June. They are now saying it's past-due and threatening to send me to collections. My insurance still says that they have never gotten any actual claims from the hospital. Today I found out that some idiot in the billing department had transposed a couple of characters in my insurance ID, and as far as I can tell they are too fucking ignorant to fix it when they submit the updated claims, and this is just so aggravating.

Today I left another message with their idiotic billing department, and I tried to keep it cool but I lost it and after explaining the situation I kind of lost it and started swearing a lot. Maybe they'll get the fucking message here, but I have a feeling they're just going to hold it against me for being "unprofessional."

I'm just so FUCKING SICK OF THIS SHIT.

Judging by the reviews on Yelp, I am far from the first to have these problems, and will be far from the last. They are goddamned inept, and who knows how many people are suffering for it with ruined credit and being forced to pay thousands of dollars for a routine procedure that their doctor ordered?

In any case, I will definitely not be making use of St. Luke's Hospital or California Pacific Medical Center ever again if I can help it. This is the last goddamn straw.

Their billing department is a total joke.

The first thing that struck me was how different the user interface was. Apple have yet again disregarded their own UI mechanisms in order to make iTunes look different than everything else. The window control "stoplight" is now arranged vertically, and all of the icons in the app are monochrome and low-contrast. Even for someone with normal vision like me, it makes major parts of the UI a lot harder to see and parse at a glance.

They also hid the AirPlay (nee AirTunes) stuff in a little tiny widget in the corner, which makes it much less clear if AirPlay is available, and they just use a gray vs. blue icon to indicate whether it's active. You have to click on it to learn what your particular configuration is. Considering they're really trying to push AirPlay now, this seems like a curious design decision.

I was also a bit annoyed that when I started it up, it was in "group with album art" view, which I usually turn off, but they've done a bit of tweaking to it to make it actually useful (even though the vast majority of my music doesn't have album art) and so I'm leaving it on for now.

So of course I tried out Ping, and was immediately annoyed by the following aspects:

• It requires your real name, which is tied to your billing account
• It requires your gender, which is of course the binary male/female
• You are only allowed to select up to three genres you like. The list of genres is pretty pathetic and mainstream anyway, though.
• There is no way for independent artists to add a profile (hopefully that will change in the future)
• The "privacy" settings are just "do you want to let people follow you?" and nothing like, for example, "do you want this information to be available?" Apparently, no, they haven't learned from Facebook's bad example.
• The only activity it records is actively purchasing and rating things on the iTunes store. So much for Last.fm-style discovery.

On the plus side, iTunes feels much more responsive and less laggy, and it's obviously they've put a lot of work into handling large libraries better. Hopefully they'll address the "too cool for colors" issue on the user interface, and it's not like you have to use Ping.

Somehow I appear to have gone over the 250GB Comcast bandwidth cap this month, and "coincidentally" my connection has been shut off. According to the handy bandwidth chart I usually use about 100GB/month, which actually surprises me since I don't do a lot of torrenting or online gaming. I suspect this is a result of my new hard drive which caused Crashplan to go crazy with re-scanning my whole disk.

At least I can get online via my Nexus One in the meantime. Sigh.

Annoyingly enough, Comcast was supposed to call me to warn me, rather than just shut me off outright. Meh.

When I was en route to Chicago, the battery in my MacBook Pro began to swell, so bad that my touchpad stopped working and when I opened the battery cover, the battery popped out with a great deal of velocity. So I made an appointment at the nearest Genius Bar (which is annoying to have to do), and when my appointment came up (after a few failed checkins) I showed my quite-round battery to the Genius(tm) who immediately just gave me a new one for free, despite my MacBook being about a year out of warranty. It never hurts to ask nicely (although I was prepared to argue for it anyway).

Also, having previously been dissatisfied with a compact Logitech keyboard and a Wacom Bamboo Touch, I bought the Bluetooth keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and while it's weird to spend $140+tax on a mouse and keyboard, these are actually quite comfortable, and I have them on a little Ikea lap desk and it's much more comfortable on my wrists than trying to put up with my horrible keyboard tray. Hopefully this will help a lot. Unfortunately, the lap desk is a bit thicker and squishier than I'd like, so I'll have to try a couple others out, but still, not a bad setup, and altogether costs way less than a proper keyboard tray (and a desk that can hold a proper keyboard tray).

So, I'm finally getting around to reinstalling Native Instruments Akoustik Piano on my MacBook, and I'd forgotten how much of a royal pain in the ass it is.

It's been a while since a self-indulgent blog post about my ongoing woes, and seeing as how that's the whole reason to have a blog anyway, I'd might as well update the three of you who still bother to read it.

I finally got the Zegerid today. Of course the pharmacist was really really worried about giving it to me because of the recent Nexium prescription. At the same time, he thought I should be aware that Nexium is "the same stuff," which it almost is (it's esomeprazole which is a kissing cousin of omeprazole), but it's in a time-release formulation and doesn't have the antacid, and that doesn't actually, you know, help for what I need it for. And of course I'm not going to take them both at the same time.

So I finally got a new scrip today, for Nexium (the purple pill), which my insurance was willing to cover. My cost after insurance was still $42 for a one month supply. The cost before insurance was $180! Zegerid looks like it costs over $200 for a one month supply. That's insane!

At least that costs me less than the (not at all effective anyway) OTC version ($20-$30/week depending on brand) but why does the prescription version cost three times as much for what is basically the same medicine plus a time-release capsule?

At least this is just a once-a-day pill. My prescription also only covers two more refills, so maybe the intent is that I take it for three months and then I'm done with it since supposedly the ulcer-causing bacterium will actually be gone by then, and my doctor will be able to suggest something else for maintaining the acid reflux.

So it turns out that while my doctor was on vacation, his fax machine wasn't working, so he never got the request from Walgreens to get the full authorization for the prescription. And of course Walgreens never did the followup on their own, because why should they care? But when I had called Walgreens they said that my doctor was "taking care of it" when my doctor had no idea there was anything to take care of.

Meanwhile my ulcer is back in full force (even with taking the OTC version of the medication, paid for completely out-of-pocket of course) and I'm miserable. I got very little sleep last night, and apparently it'll still take a few more days to get my insurance to clear the prescription.

So as we all know, Amazon provides free shipping for orders over $25. They also have many items which are just barely below $25, such as the Star Wars Trilogy ($24.99), which does not qualify for Super Saver.

They also have many cheap items, such as Charles Leonard Inc. Ruler, 0.06 Inch Increments, 77556) ($0.29) which can be used to push an order past the $25 threshold in order to get free shipping.

Sometimes these items are backordered, and in order to provide items more quickly, Amazon will split an order and eat the shipping cost (which is usually around $3.90 per shipment).

Today I received a rather large box which contained the following:

• A cheap 10-gram wooden ruler
• Plastic packing bags
• A receipt for a $0.29 ruler + $3.90 shipping - $3.90 super saver discount

Suggested alternative to Amazon (which I can now post publicly seeing as how I don't work there anymore): For orders which are $24 or up, offer super saver shipping as an option where the discount simply brings the total price down to $25. I'm sure people would rather pay $1 for shipping than waste natural resources and peoples' time just to save some money.

(The somewhat-ironic thing is that they ended up shipping the Star Wars DVDs with another order anyway. I suppose that their total cost and impact was the same, though, since if it hadn't been for that other order they probably wouldn't have split the order. Still, seems silly.)

So, because of my ongoing stomach issues, my doctor had put me on an acid reducer, and gave me a week's worth of samples, but he said to not bother filling the prescription if it didn't help while I still had samples. A week went by, and my issues cleared up very quickly, so I filled the prescription. The pharmacy, however, had trouble filling it, because insurance denied the prescription — they wanted me to either use a different (cheaper) acid reducer, or get a specific statement from my doctor that the one he prescribed me for is the one I have to take. The pharmacy can't just change the prescription because the closest generic formulation isn't quite the same, so legally they have to get permission from my doctor to change it.

Of course, this week my doctor is on vacation, so I get to wait a whole week for him to get back.

Meanwhile I'm just taking the OTC version of the same acid reducer, but the lower dosage and isn't nearly as effective, and my ulcer is coming back. And of course the OTC version is just as expensive as the prescription version, and isn't covered by my insurance.

So I get to pay out of pocket for a while until my insurance and my doctor can work this all out. Meh.