Big Dan’s Site

Health care and President Obama’s mandate for socialized medicine is something I’ve been meaning to write about for while now, I’ve held off so I can form all my thoughts into something semi-concise and not just a long, rambling, wind bag collection of random thoughts pertaining to socialized medicine in America. There are several points I’d like to make. This is going to be a long one but stay with me for the ride.   Here I go.

The current state of health care does not work for a good number of Americans. America’s current system doesn’t work for the working poor these are people who make ‘to much money’  to qualify for state assistance (Medicaid), yet their jobs don’t provide them with affordable or decent health insurance. When we look at it from a business perspective the so called working poor are the ones who do all the physical jobs that make life easier for the more affluent people who can afford private insurance so it’s stands to reason that healthier people mean more able bodied people to work.

Our current system of government provided health care (Medicare and Medicaid) systems are ginormous bureaucracies with volumes of rules and regulations that no one seems to really understand. The system is open to abuse and is abused daily by not only patients but the doctors and other people who provide services. We know it’s broken yet no one is bothering to fix it. If history is any indicator, the government will bungle health care for every American not just the relatively few who receive government assisted health care currently.

An example of abuse: My sister who has medicare/medicaid went for a dental checkup. It turns out she has 10 or so cavities. The office wants her to come back for each tooth separately. Now I personally have had 5 teeth pulled in one session, I know people who have had 2 or 3 root canals done in one day. Why would the office want her to come back separately for each tooth? Simple, every tooth is an office visit charge for Medicaid. Instead of one, two, or even three office visits and doing multiple fillings in one session the dentist wants to rake in the office fee 10 separate times. If this is flagrant abuse of the system, I don’t know what is. Who’s supposed to be auditing the billing? Why aren’t they catching straight forward fraud like this? Shoot a computer program should be able to pick up on situations like this. Why is X patient seeing the same dentist 10 times in one year? Does the patient have underlying conditions that require separate visits? If not, then sorry doctor you can longer take medicaid patients. Period that’s it. Scam the system once you’re out.

The problems are very complex though it’s not just an issue of the working poor not being able to afford private insurance. It’s also an issue of hospitals and other providers overcharging private insurance companies because they know they will pay. The common counter to the overcharging statement is that hospitals over charge to cover all the people who use their services and don’t pay the bill. There may be some truth to that but what about charging a fair price to everyone? This way perhaps some of the people who have to pay out of pocket can actually afford it. Instead of charging over $1000 to walk in to an emergency room to receive basic care. How about $200 for a dose of Tylenol and best yet they give you the generic. For $200 I can get a whole case of the brand name Tylenol.  How can you rationalize that price? There is no way possible, you just cannot. Please don’t feed me the line ‘well the hospital has to pay to maintain it’s facilities and stay on the cutting edge’. Charge the people who use advanced medical care to stay on the cutting edge. Don’t tell me well you’re using up an ER bed that could be used for someone who needs advanced care, I call bull chit. First of all that’s why pretty much every ER has trauma rooms and regular rooms, that’s why you have triage so the worst patients go first and if something catastrophic happened while I was sitting in a room getting a saline drip and the room was need for someone in worse condition than me, you would pull me right out and I wouldn’t have a problem with that.

The problem also extends to wastes of resources, this takes many forms.  Why do we need a phlebotomist to draw blood? Are you going to tell me the same nurse who just stuck an IV in my arm cannot draw a few viles of blood? Are you going to tell me that you cannot save sometime and have the triage nurse take a minute to draw blood if indicated?

Diagnostic tests are another issue a lot of these tests are wasted. Let’s face doctors pretty much guess what’s wrong with you. Wait a second, let me be fair here they hypothesize what’s wrong with you after years of  very expensive education.  They take your symptoms and run them against a list of probable diseases, infections, etcetera in their heads. Sometimes diagnostic tests just confirm the doctor’s hypothesis but other times a gauntlet of tests are run just to be sure they don’t miss something. More often then not the ‘not missing something’ tests aren’t for any other reason then covering their one arse from malpractice law suits which is sad.

Doctors charge outrageous hourly rates partially because they need malpractice insurance which is mega expensive because there’s no caps on pain and suffering amount. I sincerely believe most doctors are in the business to make people feel better and live a more comfortable life sure the money is an important aspect but I still believe doctors have one of the most noble professions out there. If a doctor makes an honest mistake and it isn’t because they were tired or under the influence of alcohol and drugs the damages should be capped. What the cap should be? I don’t know depending on how bad the mistake was if you can no longer work..The cap should be how much YOU were expected to make for the rest of your career adjusted for inflation and possible promotions. If a doctor’s mistake caused you to lose work or caused you to undergo additional treatments cap it at money lost + cost of additional treatment + nominal pain and suffering.

Capping pain and suffering payouts would allow malpractice insurers to low their rates and in theory therefore allow doctors to lower their fees. As to how this pans out in the real world, we all know how greed people can be.

Here’s what I think we need to do: Utilize more licensed nurse practitioners and Physician’s assistants.  In just about every state LPN’s and PA’s have most of the powers of a doctor such as ordering tests, diagnosing and treating you, writing prescriptions, etcetera. Often times these folks have more real world experience then just out of medical school ER docs. Have a 1 or 2 doctors staff an ER with several PA’s and LPNs. The PAs and LPNs can ‘treat and street’ all the non-serious cases. Let the doctors worry about the serious cases and be there to advise the LPNs and PAs IF they need it. I’d even go so far as to say the easiest cases such as idiots who go to the ER for a common cold, or simple upper respiratory infections and stuff like that should be treated right in the waiting room. Heck if the triage nurse were an LPN or PA, they could diagnose, write a script, and get the patient out of the ER without even taking up a bed in little more than the time it takes to do the triage vitals.

Open 24 hour clinics all over the place. By all over the place, I mean clinics should be just as easily reachable as hospitals.  They don’t need much more than a few exam rooms, a waiting room and basic medical supplies. Staff those clinics with LPNs and PAs as mentioned above. Allow ambulance to take non-life threatening cases to the clinic. Take some of the load of the hospitals while providing cheaper but competent health care.

Face it, so long as hospitals have a duty to provide care and people don’t have insurance there are going to be people who go to the ER for stupid things that a regular doctor should be treating. Clinics will alleviate the pressure on hospitals freeing them up to care for those who really need a full staff of doctors, nurses, and on demand diagnostic testing.

Now you ask who’s going to pay for this. That’s the 100 billion dollar question. I really don’t think it’s fair that someone who went to college, got a degree, and makes a good living to provide for his or her family should have to subsidize health care for someone like me via taxes. It’s just plain unfair. What about people, even the working poor, who make a conscious effort to live a healthy life style..Why should they have to pay additional taxes to pay for the health care someone like me, a fat guy who smokes? That doesn’t seem very fair or even wise.

My suggestion is this:  Instead of lumping everyone into socialized medicine. Let the people who are happy with their current coverage keep it, and not have to pay a dime extra in taxes to subsidize a national health program. Revamp and expand the Medicaid and Medicare systems, set strict standard, weed out the scamming doctors and patients. Now, let average Joe the plumbers buy into the the system instead of saying ‘you make to much money you’re ineligible’. People should be able to buy in on a sliding scale with discounts for maintaining a healthy lifestyle and up charges for living an unhealthy lifestyle. The more you make, the more you pay. Now what happens is commercial insurance can compete with nationalized health care. Affluent people can choose between private and socialized insurance as in theory the prices will be similar for affluent folks.

As for the clinics the need to be built. I’m sure we can slip something in a stimulus package to build them.. Think of all the jobs it will create; perhaps even the government can stop propping up the auto industry under the guise of saving jobs if those clinic building jobs were earmarked specifically already unemployed people.

The whole thing is that the government doesn’t have to make a profit as hospitals owned by corporations do or even doctors with their own practices have to. The government only has to break even with a very small margin of profit for system upgrades. This is how a network of  clinics could work, even if you don’t buy into the medicare/medicate program above cost per visit out of pocket would still be nominal. If people don’t pay their bill you take it directly out of their next federal tax return no questions asked this way the system can support and sustain itself.

What are your thoughts? Do you think my plan pans out or make things worse?

Lots of little things have been keep me away from my blog lately. From it just being spring time and me wanting to be outside with da bird and the bees, hopefully some fine ladies too. ( ), to exercise, to work and the frustration of lack of work, and the chasing around of people to pay there bills boy can that be frustrating. Let me give you quick run down of what’s been going on.

I last posted about my new TV, it’s great I really like it, I think it’s better than my old one albeit a 9 inches smaller, it’s still better. On the HD TV front I’m really dissatisfied the cable companies are marketing HD TV like it’s the holy grail meanwhile out of the 20 or so HDTV channels I get, I’m lucky if half of them show HD shows all the time, it’s like a bait and switch, IMHO…Anyway, I’ve got my RCA switch hooked up along with my ‘old school’ (PS 2, Game Cube, Xbox [original] ) game consoles they all look 110% better on this TV especially with the games that support 16:9 format. Ya know it’s funny I consider myself somewhat of a geek although I’m not much of a gamer, I think if I’ve played all my consoles combined for more than 6 hours in the last year that would be a lot. Well last year was a turbulent year for me BUT I only switch on my PS2 or xBox to watch a DVD, I only actually play when I’m bored out of my mind, Grand Theft Auto 3 (PS2) and the Sonic Mega Collection (GC) are my favorite games to kill an evening with hence my hesitance to upgrade. If I were to upgrade, I’d buy the PS 3 first as Playstation has always been *the* game console for me but if GTA 3 and Sonic Mega Collection, which is all the old sonic games from Sega rolled into one game cube game CD do it for me, why should I drop $400 on the PS 3?

Other than that I had my Mini Mac hooked to the new TV via it’s VGA (dated computer monitor) input it was nice for while but I decided I wasn’t using mini enough due to it being on the TV stand rather than my desk, so I moved it back over to my desk and switching between the Mini and my workhorse desktop via one monitor. I really like OS X’s presentation style and eye candy BUT OS X, contrary to what the I’m a Mac ads would have you believe isn’t without it’s drawbacks and need of maintenance just like any other OS, don’t be tricked into buying a computer with the Apple upcharge thinking it just works, it doesn’t. However I could use and adapt to OS X very easy if I had a more powerful Mac computer, I’m just not prepared to pay the apple tax for an iMac. For now my Mini is used primarily as my morning/before bed email/feeds/instant messenger checker and whenever I have any ‘heavy’ work to do I switch to my Windows desktop.

What else? Ubuntu 9.04 aka Jaunty Jackalope was released last month I upgraded both my desktop and laptop to it then was shocked!! to see that Intel graphics cards weren’t supported under the new kernel without the driver desktop effects don’t work.  I was shocked only because the community makes such big thing about proprietary, closed source drivers and Intel gave them them the whole source and they still couldn’t make it work. So, I boycotted Ubuntu for about a month but realized how silly it was to discount a whole operating system just because one thing doesn’t work and this weekend I reinstalled Ubuntu on both my desktop and laptop. So far, so good. I’m actually typing this in Ubuntu right now. Although Firefox is abysmally slow under Ubuntu compared to Windows or the Mac. I don’t get it and cannot understand why. It seems other people have this issue and no one has figured it out yet. Firefox still ’ships’ with the Great Britain English dictionary instead of giving the American users their own for some reason too, this makes build in spell checking a minefield of sorts.

Also on the OS front, Windows 7 RC 1 (release candidate) was release at the begining on of May. It’s awesome it’s really what Vista should have been. It’s so good that I’ve wiped Vista off both my Window’s machines and am using W7 RC 1 and Ubuntu (just this weekend) exclusively. Me running a non-stable version as a production machine because I like it so much over it’s predecessor is a major win for MS

Other than that I’ve upgraded to a premium dropbox account after playing with the free (2 GB) account for about a year. For $10 a month I get 50 GB of space which is more than enough for me. I’ve really fell head of heals for Dropbox. It’s not really a back up tool than it is a sync tool. Basically if you have two computers, you put files in your dropbox on one computer and when you turn on your other computer the file automatically updates. Or if you have the other computer on at the same time, it updates as fast as you can upload the file then have the other computer download it. It’s just a great tool, I have nothing bad to say about it. It also supports verisoning which for you non-geek types is where when you change a file the old file is still saved for restoration. It’s saved my kiester a couple of times, by having the auto-save feature of a text editor wipe out my TODO.txt file. one trip to dropbox’s website and the old file (version) is swapped out for the new one. A vast majority of my files are now stored in my dropbox. With dropbox being cross platform whenever I load a new OS, I just install dropbox and let all my files download for a couple of hours.. Presto most of my files are all accessible from the new OS.

Outside of the the tech front and geek stuff:

I’ve been dieting and exercising like crazy since the nice weather got here. I started off walking about a half mile a day with my long Johns on, in the begining of April and I could barely do that, now I’m up to 2.6 miles a day with some resting on the walk, a lot less resting than when I started. I push myself a little further every week, I’m hoping by July to be up to 5 miles a day. That’s probably what’s taken me away from blogging the most; I have to leave by 5p or else I’ll be walking in the dark on the way back and with the bears I just cannot do that. By the time I get home I’m wiped and really only have the energy to force myself to do what I have to.

On the eating front, I’ve drastically reduced my intake. There is still some stuff to cut like how much coffee I drink and late night snacks BUT overall I’m doing very well.

My birthday was two weeks ago. I was wished Happy Birthday many times over via email, forums, facebook, myspace, etc that always brings a smile to my face, so if you wished me a happy birthday and didn’t get a personal thank you, I’m sorry consider this your thank you.

Mother’s Day was nice, I was a little low on funds so it wound up just being flowers and a cake but we still had a nice time. My mom-a-lah is a great woman and treats me better than any man could ask for.. Why do we celebrate her gifts to us only 1 day a year?

Other than that the normally working on issues behind the scenes of my DJ forum and chasing after people for bills they owe me has been the norm lately. I realize this has been a long post covering several topics hopefully you stuck with me. As always, thanks for reading.

After posting my Spammer’s Creed I look in my spam folder here on Word Press and find this site which scraped my Netbook post. The only problem is he did it wrong, he only scraped a snippet of my post and linked back to me twice. I’ll take the link, thank you dummy.

Now look at my name (the first link) in this screen shot.. I lol’ed

Idiot Scraper

NOT!

I cannot be the only person in the world who thinks that if a business cannot survive on it’s own it should fold. We bailed out that banks, the bail out failed a month later we got the secretary of the treasury saying we need to go a different direction so obviously those hundreds of billions you handed out like candy on Halloween did squat. Now you want us, the American people, to believe you’re going to rescue the auto industry, a dinosaur that is no longer relevant?

Now don’t get me wrong I understand there is a whole ecosystem surrounding the auto industry; Hundreds of suppliers that have thousands of worker and factories. Perhaps for that reason we should rescue them but here is what I say we do: Let them go bankrupt and restructure to get the blood sucking united auto workers union under control and manageable.

I think the biggest part of the problem is the union. These guys are getting paid way too much when you add in benefits the manufactures are utterly screwed. When you have some guy getting $40/hr plus benefits and retirement to put tires on a car you’ve got problems. Wal-Mart has guys changing tires for less than $10 an hour and it’s more work than just putting on a set of tires.

Japan, China and all the other nations that are leading the sales numbers for cars don’t have the UAW to deal with and on top of it have much cheaper labor to boot. Detroit just cannot compete with that. Don’t get me wrong unions had their place back when (legal) immigrants were getting taken advantage of because they didn’t know the system and in some industries labor unions still service their people well however UAW union has Detroit over a barrel. The UAW has serviced it’s members well but screwed over the auto industry and is now we’re risking the UAW screwing over all Americans by bailing out Detroit.

Secondly Detroit is putting out utter crap in the last 3 years I can only think of maybe 4 models that appealed to me. I can think of a lot more foreign models that hit my eye. Why?

I say let ‘em fold, get their labor situation under control, and then hire some overseas talent for design.

I’ve been a busy bee this morning. I woke up about 8 AM which is normally the time I’m going to bed. When I woke up it was freezing, I shut the windows and blasted the heat for a little bit. First day of the winter of 08 as far as I’m concerned even though it’s not fall yet.

Been doing some work on my music collection this past week. Found a little program called FixTunes which downloads song information from the internet along with album art then corrects the tags. I found a coupon code that the made the purchase only $10. I found out later that there’s free programs that do the same thing but FixTunes worked really well it got about 80% of my songs right. The job or retagging my music went from about 12 hours to roughly 2.. For $10 it was well worth it.

Also on the music front, I got this little MP3 player from woot a couple of weeks ago. It’s a Sansa Clip here’s the link: http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=5759. I just finally got around to putting music on it. For a small player it’s pretty nice at only 2 GB it holds just enough to have a decent selection when I walk but not have a hard time finding songs. I plan to use it for walking and stuff like that. My other MP3 Player, a Creative Zen 4GB is nice but it’s bulky and not very easy to navigate. It’s also pretty expensive and I’d rather not risk dropping it while on my walk plus the cold cannot be good for it. This smaller one is cheap enough where if the cold ruins it, it’s not that big of a loss.

Earlier this week I also ordered a Sansa Express 1 GB MP3 player for mom as she wants a little music player. I just got an email from Woot saying they “really want to get rid of them” so they’re sending me two. Awesome! Everyone loves free stuff, me included. :p However, the seller “really wanting to get rid of them” makes you one about the quality of the product. Well it’s cheap enough anyway, I may use the extra one as a spare.

This afternoon I got a doctors appointment. Get this their making me come in early because my usual appointment time of 4:30 is now reserved for kids to come in after school. Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the reasoning of setting aside time after school for the kids but I’ve had a standing 4:30 for a good month. The reason why I go at 4:30 is because the office closes at 5 and the docs like getting out on time a 4:30 appointment insures I’ll be out of there pretty fast; as this office has a walk in policy which is BS if you ask me. I have an appointment you see me first not some idiot who cannot figure out that you need to schdeule and appointmet to see the doctor but what do I know..

Yet it’s 89 degrees out there. For many parts of the US, Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer. Here in upstate NY all the summer visitors to our little tourist town have gone home we’ll have a few stragglers here and there until Columbus Day. After that it’s all over with until Memorial Day weekend. It’s funny on Labor Day Monday the change is immediately visible, the grocery store goes from being packed all day to virtually empty except for the locals, traffic through town is cut in more than half, there are no sirens wailing through town on weekend evenings. As Summer turns into fall and winter creeps in the changes do not come as fast. By the beginning of November the town becomes virtually empty after 5 PM, stores close earlier, traffic trickles to virtually nonexistent by 7 PM, there are no cars parked (presumably by people going out to party whom car pool to bigger towns) in the parking lot across the street at 1 AM thus there is no car doors slamming or cars peeling out in the middle of the night which is nice.

Funny thing is when I was a teenager I would almost dread Labor Day weekend as afterwards my town was like a ghost town and I’d be out of work as a DJ as the bars closed for the winter. No money plus no new people to meet and hang out with was and still is a drag but as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to realize and even enjoy the peaceful winters. Getting from point A to Point B is a helluva lot easier traffic even during rush hour (if it can even be called that) is light. I feel much safer walking around town where there are no sidewalks as most of the people passing me are local and know the intricacies of the tight curves the roads have and know to slow down around them unlike a majority of our tourists whom it appears have never seen an open road and think it’s okay just to put the petal to the metal. Our small town stores go back to being small town stores which customer service is always great. The big stores no longer have hundreds of customers squeezed into only 4 or 5 checkout lines.

Yes, as winter creeps in it’s quieter, easier to get around, and generally a better life it sometimes seems as if even the pace of life slows down after Labor Day. As winter creeps in it’s easier for me to stay inside and get work done on my ever expanding lists of websites to maintain and create content for as I cannot stand the cold. Perhaps that’s the worst part of winter, the cold if it weren’t for that I’d love it.

So tell me: Small tourist town life cannot be all that different around the world? Do you enjoy the tourist boom or the local down time more?

Another rhetorical question.

Ever since I’ve been a young teenager I’ve been a night owl. Half the times I couldn’t get up for school because my body just wouldn’t let me fall asleep before 1 or 2 AM. I’ve read a couple of studies that a majority of teenagers are this way and that the school day should start later as for the most part the first 2 or 3 periods of class time are practically useless to them.

I never grew out of being a night owl. As much as I love being out in the sun and enjoying the spring/summer/fall weather, I just cannot seem to stay on a ‘day schedule’, unless I have to.

The only time I’ve ever been able to stay on a day schedule is when I’m working a 9-5, although since I’m a teenager I only worked a couple of 9-5 jobs the rest were either in bars and clubs as a DJ which is a night job or a couple of other jobs that were over night positions.

Working on the internet building and managing websites probably contributes a little bit as I truely don’t have a schedule to keep and often times I have to meet with clients when it’s convienent for them in their time zone which can sometimes be in the middle of the night for me, especially with Australian and European clients.

Staying up nights has it’s positives; For instance shopping is whole lot nicer when people aren’t bumping into you with carts you don’t feel so rushed. Traffic is virtually nothing so driving is pleasant and relaxing. Generally at night it’s quiet therefore I’m able to concentrate on what I’m doing without interruptions.

Of course there are negitives; it always kills my diet and excersise plans as I’m not going walking around my town at 2-3 in morning as there are no street lights where I walk and there’s wild animals out there. There’s been many times I’ve missed company at my house because I slept through them being here. It’s only mom and I here and mom likes the company when I get on a night schedule, we only see each other maybe 2 hours a day, of course that sometimes can be a positive, depending on how you look at it.

What about you? Are you a night owl or early bird?

Yesterday I spent most of the day cleaning and putting stuff away. Mostly what was laying around from Mom helping me unpack on Tuesday.  We’ve already established that I’m a packrat and had a nice discussion about it over on New York Chat, a New York Discussion forum that’s nice enough to syndicate my ramblings here on BigDan.us.

Anyway I had promised pictures of my cleaning fiasco. I ripped apart my closet on Tuesday night and really wished I had remembered to take before pictures. Basically I had boxes of CD Jewel Cases stacked up to the ceiling on the one shelf that I have in my closet. Back in the day when I DJ’ed I switched over to Case Logic Binders, much like these but always held on to my jewel cases in case any copyright issues arose. Years ago I threw out about 200 hundred of them but still have plenty o’ boxes of jewel cases from my purchases since we’ve moved into this apartment. Part of me wants to throw them all out and part of me wants to take the CDs out of the binder and put them back in the cases. However I don’t have all the cases and my room is stuffed already, so no storage.

Stage One: Was cleaning everything off that shelf. Mom was nice enough to put the boxes in her room behind her entertainment center. I then stacked all my new clothes in a column almost up to the ceiling on one side. I now have plenty of space on that shelf for my pants instead of putting them on the bottom on top of the bin.

Stage Two: Folding all the shirts & pants that I currently don’t wear because they don’t fit me. They will eventually fit me again but they’re just wasting space for me to see what’s actually in my closet.

Stage Three: Pulling the big plastic bin out off the floor of my closest and emptying it. This bin had lots of stuff I never used, so I bought a new smaller bin, put stuff I didn’t use in it. That stuff went in the hallway closet. All my newly folded clothes from Stage Two went into this bin and it went back on the floor in my closet.  Now I can store my shoes on top of that bin instead of my everyday clothes.

Here are some pictures and before you ask, no pink wasn’t my color choice.

All nice and neat

Yes all those empty hangers used to hold clothes that don't fit me

Wow I can actually use that space now!

In addition to that I hooked up my PlayStation, GameCube and AV Switcher. No surround sound yet as I need to buy new speaker wire but it looks neat.

Other than that I changed the orientation of my work area again. I like the monitor to my right as I’m right handed and tend to look to my right more than left, naturally. I really wanted to put my monitor stright head on as I had it before but for just a couple of inches of wire my speakers and montior wouldn’t. I really like my tower off in the corner as it gets things out the way. Here are some pictures of that..

This is a lot more comfortable for me.

Almost Zen..if only I could more inches on the speaker and VGA cable

Other than that the trolly (white plastic thing) on the side got sorted and stuff moved around. Now I actually use it for everyday things. My laptop is on a little table beside the main desk as it’s not really often that I use it in conjuction with my desktop and if I need to I can swing over to the table on my right for quick useage.

There we go my room is pretty much all set. I have a couple of more things to do, namely my surround sound which is a PITA job but I’m just waiting for speaker wire. Once I quit smoking and before winter I’d like to throw on a fresh coat of white paint, this stuff looks dingy from all the smoke. Now I just have to keep up with the dust..every day there’s a thin layer of dust all over the place. You wouldn’t believe I just cleaned yesterday by the looks of my keyboard!

I realize it’s been about 2 weeks since I posted any updates to this blog. For that I’m sorry, this blog seems to be the first thing I put on the back burner whenever I get busy. Hopefully I can get myself a wireless router soon so I can use my laptop on the regular and don’t have to worry about taking up too much time on my friend’s computer.

On the Florida front: Things have been pretty good, it’s nice to just spend some time with friends. Yesterday evening I got out for a good mile – mile and half walk. I walked over to my friends mother’s house to babysit. It was about 80 degrees at 8 PM but there was a nice breeze I got to the house just as it was getting dark. I was soaked in sweat but it was nice to get out and walk again, I haven’t really walked much since I since I got here. Exercise always gives me a little high.

On that note my allergies have been in high gear, I never had them this bad back home in New York. I don’t what it is in the air, I’m guessing pollen as that’s the only thing that gives me issues back home but I got a bad runny nose, watery itchy eyes and all that. I starting taking  some dollar store allergy pills, they didn’t help much so I got some Benadryl and that helps better. Once I get a few dollars I’m gonna get some Claritin that always helps me.

On the job front: Nothing I applied at another local supermarket, no call back. There’s a Coca-Cola distribution plant not far from here, I was going to apply until I found out I needed a personal vehicle to make deliveries and setup displays; I think that kinda sucks as I don’t have a car. I also applied for Wal-Mart online, I doubt they will hire me as I worked for them for a week or so back in 2003 even though I signed a release form, I didn’t just quit they probably won’t bother highering someone who already quit.

Also, I got Ubuntu installed on my friends computer in a dual boot setup. This way I can save all my passwords and stuff in Firefox under Ubuntu and not have to worry about the crap they download on the windows side getting my passwords and into my files. Ubuntu installed without a hitch on yet another computer!

Other than that not much else, I’m babysitting my friends kids all this week at night when his mother leaves for work until his wife comes home, it’s only about 2 hours and they’re sleeping anyhow so I just look at TV. Tomorrow or Thursday we’re moving to a new house about a mile away from here it’s a really nice place, hopefully I can post some pics once we get in there but for today it’s packing, packing and more packing. It’s just my friend and I moving a whole house with lots of big furnature..Oh boy this is gonna be fun.

Lately, I haven’t been blogging much, I suppose it’s because I’ve been spending a lot of time just “fixing” my computers. Fixing not in the sense that it’s broken but fixing in the sense of customizing. In February, I got my new HP Desktop which came with Vista. I ordered an OEM copy of XP the first day I got the computer. I’ve played with Vista a lot and it’s an okay OS however I really really don’t care for the fact that it was designed to annoy you and I, aka the end user. Microsoft shouldn’t put it’s users in the middle to try and force developers to develop properly. Plus Vista is a memory hog, I don’t like waiting 30+ seconds to log on to my machine when I have a pretty “beefy” system and nothing running at startup other than AV.

On Monday I got fed up with XP because I made some changes and boinked the kernel so I formatted and installed Vista along with Ubuntu.

On Tuesday I wrote that I was disappointed with Acer, I still am but found a work around and got a fresh install of Vista on my laptop. If I could get XP on the laptop, I’d fork over the dough for another OEM copy but XP doesn’t even see the hard drive, I’ve read a few guides XP needs a driver, I suppose I’ll see what I can do

On Wednesday vBulletin released yet another version in the 3.6 series, 3.6.10, which wasn’t support to be, it’s a security patch but required a full updgrade. I ripped my hair out trying to get the custom theme on my DJ forum to work properly with the new requirements for the quick search drop down. Since my search isn’t coded into the navbar template, vB couldn’t auto-update the template. I wound up just linking the word search to the full search page instead of mucking with the new access key schema. I’ll fix it once and for all when I update to the 3.7 which was supposed to be final this week but because of the security issue it won’t be. I was a very unhappy vBulletin customer, apparently the issue has been in the 3.6 code branch for a while, why an update right in the middle of a release cycle when 3.7 is just about to go Gold?

Today, Thursday I formatted my desktop again and this time installed XP. I got all the updates installed and my favorite programs. Roboform, one of my favorite applications gave me trouble with activating again so I had to email their support which gave me an extra activation. Windows doesn’t even complain about all these activations why is Roboform? I just spent $40 on two licenses that in addition to the 3 other licenses I’ve purchased in that past that I forgot my login information for and thus cannot use any more. None the less XP is installed my computer boots much faster and the time from entering my password to a useable desktop is less than 10 seconds, I’m happy with that. Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 went Gold today, so it’s a final release. I’ve been running it since the betas, I downloaded the final release today and installed it alongside XP on my Desktop. For now, XP remains my default operating system. Once Ubuntu’s servers get a break and I can actually download some software, I’ll probably make Ubuntu my default yet again.

Other than that, I started my diet and exercise program this week, I really wanted to post a full post about that earlier this week but by the time I get down mucking around with my computers, fixing technical issues on my forums and the forums I manage, then get out for my walk I’m popped and go stright to bed when I get home. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have sometime to write about my new diet and exercise plan, which has been working out pretty good for me except for tonight, I cut my walk a little short as my back was killing me.

So that’s what’s up! I hope to be blogging more in the near future.