Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.

[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]

My Sites [Tomorrowlands] [The TTU Wiki] [Photos]
View My LJ [By Tag]

Below are the 16 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:

January 5th, 2009
06:31 pm [Link]	New year's, and Legend of Hero: 022-024 Happy New Year! It's been an eventful 2009 so far for me. I've spent a day hanging around at home writing; a day in the hospital; a day roleplaying; a day hiking; and a day at work. (I like those proportions, but I somehow doubt they're sustainable.) kadyg* and I recognized our third anniversary, but the celebration will have to wait for a week or two until we can book a room at the hot springs. I managed to get antibiotics and a tetanus booster and still walk out of the doctor's office less than $200 poorer. roaminrob and I helped kadyg take her first walk across a frozen lake. The big news, however, is that my sister got married. Congratulations, Sarah! Fun facts: This makes the number of days between our anniversaries the same as our difference in age. It's also twice the difference of how old we were when we each got married. And the span between our anniversaries is twice as long as the span between our parents' birthdays. Lastly, if you take the month and date of her anniversary date, 1 and 5, as the starting digits of an integer sequence (like the Fibonacci numbers with different starting values), the 6th term is equivalent to the number of days between our mother's birthday and her anniversary date.*** Thrills! Anyway, before my math geekery makes my readers all run away screaming, SUBJECT CHANGE! Legend of Hero continues its ambitious update schedule -- Monday, Wednesday, Friday -- and since last time I mentioned it here, we've seen Riselmian show off a special move (admit it, RPG fans, you were waiting for that, weren't you?), and the resolution of the Christmas cliffhanger. Today, the heroes return to Earth. Can't tell the players without a scorecard, so there's also a characters page with reams of thrilling statistics and appropriately thematic pixel art. And we're winding down the second major arc this week -- good time to catch up before the heroes all start delving into their own quests! -- * Getting antibiotics for a cat bite**. And if this feels like deja vu ... well, let's hope that history doesn't repeat itself. Starting in on the probiotics WAY earlier this time. Except for the "day in the hospital" thing. `]B=8(` * Assuming you're counting days in a 0-based system. But hey, we're all programmers here, right? This makes my new year's Mean Time Before Cat Bite Failure approximately 14 hours*. I know my MTBCBF has been poor recently, but this is just ridiculous. * If people were hard drives, I would so totally be Western Digital. Current Location: ~spiral Current Music: Johnny Cash, "Folsom Prison Blues" Tags:** american health care is a piece of shit, legend of hero, misc life updates (Leave a comment)
September 20th, 2008
01:05 am [Link]	This definitely calls for an "Oh, snap" John McCain -- yes, John McCain -- just unintentionally made the best possible argument for nationalized health care I've heard this year. Via Krugman: Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform: Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation. Nothing could possibly go wrong; they're all insured through AIG. </snark> Current Location: ~/Brainstorm Current Mood: snarky Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, politics (6 comments \| Leave a comment)
June 18th, 2007
01:45 am [Link]	Baxil Recovery Watch, Day 8 No big news here -- just that intestinal things are back within normal tolerances. The switch to solid food went smoothly; once my body decides that it's ready to start healing, it's pretty efficient at it. Had a huge plate of pasta Saturday after a week off of wheat; no untoward effects. Still going to avoid dairy for another week and chug some next weekend to test out the food-sensitivity thing. This weekend was extremely low-key -- kadyg and I barely even left the house. It was a nice recovery from all the recent excitement. Now it's back to the usual work schedule (and hopefully some TTU writing on the side). Current Location: ~/brainstorm Current Mood: calm Current Music: Groove Armada, "Edge Hill" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit (9 comments \| Leave a comment)
June 13th, 2007
05:55 pm [Link]	Baxil Not-Quite-Death Watch, Day 4 The short version: The doctor's visit helped. Medication + blood test + rollback to all-liquid diet have had a dramatic effect (though it's a bit too early to tell if it will last). The presence of kadyg (details), as well as reader sympathy, were tremendous morale boosts. Take me out of the "broken, bedridden, exhausted" column and move me to "jerry-rigged, ambulatory, tired." Blood test showed nothing wrong; the cynics may collect their wagers. ( The slightly longer version ) Current Location: ~/brainstorm Current Mood: recovering Current Music: "Man to Ray," Juno Reactor Tags: american health care is a piece of shit (15 comments \| Leave a comment)
June 12th, 2007
11:49 am [Link]	Baxil Death Watch, Day 3 After very brief recovery last night, GI tract is again in freefall. Struggled out of bed just long enough to realize there was no way in hell I could make it in to work today. Collapsed back in bed to concede defeat and the next time I managed to even so much as look up, half an hour had gone by. Not even Gatorade is getting a pass -- small sips of ice water are all that stay in. That means it's doctor time. Broke down sobbing when I realized this -- feeling very alone, useless, powerless. Ironically, that cheered me up immensely: One of the symptoms of severe dehydration is inability to produce tears while crying. So, as long as I can cry, I'm not dead yet. Will report back in after the professionals patch me up. Current Location: ~/bedroom Current Mood: sick like a sick thing Tags: american health care is a piece of shit (40 comments \| Leave a comment)
June 11th, 2007
11:43 pm [Link]	Gatorade: A modern miracle of science Gatorade Fact No. 1: I don't know how they did it, I really don't. But it's always been my experience with Gatorade that it tastes really good when you need it, and sort of meh when you don't. So: Useful rule of thumb is, if you're thirsty, you drink Gatorade and it tastes meh, you need more plain water. Gatorade Fact No. 2: Gatorade is not properly balanced as an oral rehydration solution. It's quite efficient at dealing with sports fatigue (it is a liquid, and on top of that it has loads of quickly-processed sugars for your body to refuel), but drinking straight Gatorade is Not A Good Thing if someone is into the deep stages of acute dehydration. If you're out, for example, hiking on a long distance trip, make it a practice to keep a packet of oral rehydration salts in your first-aid kit. If you're really concerned about the ~1 ounce of weight, and you'd rather budget energy drinks than emergency gear, then you can alternate Gatorade sips and water sips, 1 to 1, to dilute it for maximum absorption. But Gatorade is hard to restock and all too easy to drink before you need it. ORS are there to save lives, and do their job invaluably when they're needed. Current Location: ~/bedroom Current Mood: still sick Current Music: Yngwie Malmsteen, "Wild One" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, hiking (6 comments \| Leave a comment)
08:26 pm [Link]	Well, that was a waste Dropped kadyg off at the train station much earlier than usual on Sunday -- she had to get back to the city for a job interview. Figured that if I couldn't spend the day with my wife, at least I'd get some productive work done. As if. ( Graphic descriptions of graphic intestinal issues; high whine factor ) So ... um ... yeah. I'm afraid I'm going to need to call mulligan on the writing meme until I've recovered. First story is mostly done (put in a lot of effort on Saturday evening), but I won't post it until I'm actively working on the writing again. Current Location: ~/bedroom Current Mood: sick Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, misc life updates (8 comments \| Leave a comment)
March 5th, 2007
10:29 pm [Link]	Any excuse to use the AHCIPOS tag Today was the big day: A visit to the gastroenterologist for a follow-up on the intestinal woes. It was yet another quintessential health care experience for me. Which is to say, nothing really got accomplished other than a little hand-holding, a little draining of my pocketbook, and an extended argument with billing personnel over insurance. (In this case, since I was stupid and let them xerox my insurance card, they're refusing to let me settle the bill at the 40% cheaper self-pay rate. Sigh.) I really hate to lead off my doctor report with the bad news, because the good news is tremendous: I'm feeling better. Last weekend's relapse cleared back up after a day or two, and I've been holding my breath on it all this time, trying not to jinx it ... but *I'm feeling better.* Yesterday, for the first time since January, I ate something rich and quasi-spicy without freaking out about the gut consequences -- in this case, fettucine curry alfredo. Said gut consequences don't seem to have materialized, and I feel tentatively like I can lift my month-long dietary restrictions again. The doctor listened to my symptom history and told me there's no point to a colonoscopy as long as the general trend is toward Better. And it is -- I graphed it out while I was sitting in the exam room waiting for him, and it's been one big roller coaster but each high has gotten higher and each low has gotten less vile. So I'll continue taking the probiotic for a week or two, and chalk this one up as another painful and unnecessary lesson about unfettered capitalism. Speaking of which, this has been a big week on the blog front. In a previous post, I said I didn't have the energy to round up all the political arguments on American health care; but I picked up a full handful just in today's web trawling, so here's some troubling and powerful reading for your (and my) later reference: * http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2007/03/its-time-to-take-health-insurance-out.html The middle class -- not just the poor -- are being increasingly hit by the nation's lack of health insurance; and people who have ever had an expensive condition are pretty much screwed no matter how comfortable they are. Also includes some useful statistics, such as the median U.S. household income being about $46,000. In 2005 kadyg and I were in the top half of American income-earners ... and look at how much good it's done us. (In 2006, what with the hike and her job shuffle, not so much.) * The Walter Reed Medical Center scandal has been hitting the headlines, and has been getting some thought-provoking coverage across the spectrum. Worth pointing out is http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=7945, which examines how an obsessive drive toward privatization contributed to the hospital's woes. Kevin Drum chips in a complementary post to remind us that the VA is still an excellent system, in large part because of its government nature. * The most arresting health care story in the news, though, has been Deamonte Driver's death from not getting $80 removal of an abcessed tooth. bradhicks has been all over this, and is highly worth reading. Another one that LJ'ers might miss is over at Orcinus, where a Canadian examines how that case would have been handled north of the border. Very educational if you haven't heard much about our neighbor's system beyond the right wing's old "socialized medicine" and "long waiting lines" canards. Also, many good wishes and positive energy to gridlore and company, who do have insurance but are going through significantly more dire medical circumstances than I. Current Location: ~calorg Current Music: Internet 70s radio, "Lay Down Sally" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, link roundup (11 comments \| Leave a comment)
February 27th, 2007
07:23 pm [Link]	I'm dreaming of a white ... something It's snowing like crazy outside the office -- about six inches in six hours, which is huge for the foothills -- and roaminrob is advising me not to drive home. While I'm waiting for him and kadyg to pick me up, a few happy updates. First of all, my intestinal condition ... isn't getting worse. It appears to have stabilized at "loose stools and minor discomfort," which is about what it was when it took the downturn two days ago, but still much better than before the meds. So I'm trying to take it easy while the clock ticks down to the gastro specialist's appointment on Monday. I appreciate everyone's suggestions in the last post; if the doc doesn't bring them up as possibilities, I will. Secondly, my financial situation just took a wild and sudden swing. A former roommate who has been gradually paying off an old debt I financed for him decided to clear the books and is sending me a check for $4500. I'll probably be putting this mostly toward its intended use -- nuking credit-card debt -- but this does give me a cushion with which to cover the deductible I'd been freaking out about. On top of that, I've been furiously working on our taxes for the last few days. I was expecting our return to come out as a wash -- Kady and I both earned a lot less last year than usual, but I also got paid a good chunk of money without any withholdings. Turns out that, due to credits and exemptions and self-employment health insurance deductions, we're getting a $550 refund. `]B=8D` That money will go to settle bills, eat out somewhere nice once my stomach recovers, and maybe even fund the tattoo on my ten-year goals list. Many thanks to everyone who sent me public or private offers of financial assistance. I took a wait-and-let's-see approach with them; this isn't exactly what I was waiting for, but I'll gladly take it. I'm heartened that people were so willing to chip in -- because I do know several wonderful people (mostly artists) who have hit similar tight patches and don't have freak strokes of luck like this to fall back on. I would much rather see the money people were willing to contribute go to one of them, the next time a crisis strikes. And if anyone has already put something in the mail for me, when I receive it, I'll set it aside -- if I can get through this without anything going dramatically wrong, I'll re-gift it to someone else deserving. Also, tomorrow is kadyg's birthday. Yay! Current Location: ~yuba Current Mood: relieved Current Music: Vagrant Story OST, "Staff Roll" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, goals (8 comments \| Leave a comment)
February 25th, 2007
06:59 pm [Link]	I'm beginning to feel like a patient on "House." (Hell, the doctor I've been seeing even looks a little like him.) ... It's back. I've been taking metronidazole faithfully for eight and a half days, as well as probiotics (though skipping a day here and there) -- and just as quickly as the intestinal problems went away, they've returned. I had to take some time off of work today to go home and lie down; I used the opportunity to call the specialist that I had been hoping not to have to see. At this point I'm giving up. I can't get this resolved easily. It (still) could be anything ... from a persistent bacterial infection up to and possibly including colon cancer. And that's what scares me. ... No, not the possibility of a life-threatening illness. If this means a medical intervention that forces a lifelong change in habit, fine; if it means I have six months to live, I'll try to use it well. But what does scare me is the fact that I now have run out of options for dealing with this cheaply. American health care is great ... when you can afford it. I can't. A scary number of Americans can't. I'm working class. I'm holding down two part-time jobs while my wife is changing careers. Neither of us has had employer-provided health insurance since my hike last year. There's a possibility that the private care we bought to fill in the gaps might cover everything after the deductible. There's a certainty that this means $3500 out of pocket; all I've gained myself is a crapshoot against a deep-pocketed and many-lawyered corporation that may or may not violate me up the nether orifice with a huge spiky stick labeled "pre-existing conditions." As much as I don't want to be sick, I am afraid to deal with this. I have already been screwed once that way. I am afraid of the next several weeks, and the next few months. I am afraid because I don't know how deep this goes. I am afraid because the longer this drags on, the deeper in the hole I go -- while I'm still juggling the debt from my hike and my commitment to help kadyg through school. I am afraid because medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in this country -- and because the GOP president and his GOP cronies just fucked America's poor, again, by tightening bankruptcy rules so that I might not even be able to dig out from whatever five-figure medical debt I might accumulate. I am afraid because I don't qualify for Medi-Cal and because California has no catastrophic care coverage (not that Washington state's, when I lived there, helped any). I have a little credit. I have good family. I don't have any kids to support. I am in a much better position than the average workingman would be in my shoes. But I still feel alone and helpless. Right now, I am our household's only income. If Kady has to go to work, she has to give up cooking school; and if this illness forces me to take any more sick days, my income isn't enough to cover basic expenses. And at any rate none of the calculations take into account medical expenses, which -- again -- I just don't know what they'll be. In any other industrialized nation, I wouldn't have to fear dealing with my insurance company. I wouldn't have to fall asleep with the possibility of an illness I can't afford to treat (gods forbid this IS something like cancer). I wouldn't have to deal with the sinking feeling in my stomach when I think about how I might be saddling the woman I love with bills for the rest of her life. I wouldn't have to drag myself to work when I've got cold sweats and need to go to the bathroom every half hour because I can't afford to call in sick. (Well, to be fair, that could happen anywhere. But if I didn't have such panic at the big bills to come, I wouldn't be scraping furiously for every penny I could earn ... as I've said, I have a little credit, and I could afford to sit out a paycheck or two a lot easier than I could afford the $3500 deductible that now stares me in the face.) I wouldn't have to panic about how more insured people file for medical-related bankruptcy than uninsured people -- or how their debts are on average 50% higher. I wouldn't be paralyzed with indecision about whether to keep paying the insurance premiums on the chance my condition is expensive, or let it lapse and use that extra $100/month to pay the bills. Gods help you if you're American and poor. You're only one crisis away from the choices that are now scaring me witless. Our leaders have decided that the social safety net isn't worth paying for ... and this is the price, and worse, much worse, that some Americans are paying for their decision. And I hate how I know the fear won't go away . Being poor in America is not just about giving up desires (like that dental work I've been putting off or that six-year-old computer I'd love to upgrade) -- it's about giving up stability, about knowing the slope down is even slipperier than the slope up. Even with a stable job, you're one crisis away from juggling bills, which then puts you one crisis away from maxing out credit cards, which then puts you one crisis away from payday lenders, which then puts you one crisis away from homelessness. When you're poor, you learn to fear bad luck. You learn to live with that fear, all the time, because you're always looking down at the precipice, knowing that once you start sliding there's precious little you can rely on to keep you from hitting bottom. "Dear gods, I hope this one isn't the slide that sends me there." If you have some time today, please write a letter to your congressman (assuming he isn't some corrupt kool-aid drinker like my district's John Doolittle). Every American needs guaranteed health care. It won't solve the problems of American poverty, but it's a necessary start -- and given the country's bankruptcy statistics and the demonstrated success* of other countries' universal plans, it's the place to start. -- * Look, I've spent an hour writing this post and I don't have the energy to go through every single one of the arguments again. Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly and John Cole at Balloon Juice have both spent a great deal of time documenting our system's comparative failure; here's a representative sample. Current Location: ~calorg Current Mood: upset Current Music: Scott Peeples, "Gerudo Valley OC Remix" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, politics (31 comments \| Leave a comment)
February 23rd, 2007
02:22 am [Link]	Back-end work In more ways than one, that's been the theme of my last two weeks. Largely, the work has been behind the scenes; and for various reasons I haven't had the energy to keep my journal updated. February's been rather a frustrating month here at Chez Baxkat, but I feel like some breakthroughs are finally being made. Case in point. On the creative front, after finally getting my Tlands scripts working again, I've been throwing all my writing time into PERL instead of English. This has meant putting the TTU Wiki temporarily on hold, but I'm still rather happy with the work I did there throughout January. The page on The Meeting especially stands out -- bursting with new detail on an event I've never officially described or deeply explained. The upshot of this change in focus is that the resurrection of my website continues; as of early this week the adult-file script has been brought back to full working order (see e.g. Titania's Toys). Because the adult.cgi source code was by freak chance preserved, it was the easiest one to tackle -- the big challenge was to reconstruct my cgi libraries, and by starting with the adult script I could retrieve their old syntax, context and naming from existing code. Now that the template library is back up, virtually the only thing I need to do for the comics display script is to rebuild the template it used, most of which I can reconstruct from archive.org; and then the contact page script needs some of the logfile code I used in the adult script. After which Tlands is firing on all cylinders. In other technical news, Tlands now -- for the first time ever -- has one of those little address-bar graphics! ("Favicon.ico" for you web geeks.) Any page on tomorrowlands will show you the icon now. A subtle touch, but I got sick of seeing failed requests for it in the server logs. And I've been gradually cleaning old e-mail addresses off the site, replacing them with links to my Contact page. Once upon a time, it didn't hurt to have vanity e-mail addresses to help sort out mail by subject, but in these days of address-harvesting spambots, every extra e-mail address that gets placed on the web means another daily tidal wave of crap. A month or two back, I turned off the e-mail wildcard on my domain (i.e. anything at tomorrowlands.org gets delivered to me); now, of the 13 addresses I used to list, I'm down to 7, and my daily spam load has plummeted from about 700 (!!) to more like 250. Once the contact page is fixed I can nuke three more and I might even be able to look at my e-mail without wincing. On a financial front, there's been a lot of activity too. Lovely Wife kadyg had been hoping to go to cooking school this week ... that fell through in a flurry of bullshit from student loan agency Sallie Mae. A loan mistakenly flagged as abandoned on her credit report (the collection agency for it says it was paid; the school it came from says it doesn't exist; but either way it's Not A Problem) is holding up the financial aid request that would have gotten her started. We've shifted our plans to April, the fallback date when the next set of classes start. It hasn't been fun trying to get all that straightened out, but at least progress is finally being made. (Plus, I got my car smogged and can get the registration ironed out. Yay.) On the health front, it's been a roller-coaster but the end is in sight. ( The details; not nearly as amusing as last time ) So it looks like the original diagnosis (that the test failed to detect) may have been accurate after all: Clostridium difficile-induced colitis. Between that and giardiasis, I've now taken metronidazole for two of its top three uses. If I can somehow contrive to come down with amoebic dysentery, a Bacterial Bingo winner is me. Current Location: ~/computer_desk Current Music: "If I Had $1,000,000," Barenaked Ladies Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
February 11th, 2007
11:06 pm [Link]	Catching up on Teh Medical And now, the complete saga behind my previous post and subsequent silence. Thursday 2/1: Head home from work early. Spend day suffering from a condition often described using the adjective "explosive." Thursday night: Add adjective "bloody" to relevant phrase. Right: Strict liquid diet. Add "regurgitation" to Experience section of résumé, but add nothing to toilet bowl thereby. Add "doctor visit" to to-do list. Friday morning: Sick day. Doctor offers preliminary diagnosis of pseudomembranous colitis, which I guess makes sense, maybe, a little, because I've just come off of antibiotics for the cat bite and even though it's an improbable infection it would be one of the ones the meds wouldn't touch. Doctor prescribes battery of tests, all involving stool samples. Friday evening: Oh, wait. Tests? What we have here is a failure to excrete. My body decided Thursday to go on a shooting spree, started firing wildly, and so come crunch time I'm completely out of ammunition. In desperation, I break liquid diet to eat a can of beans. Mmm, fiber. Very early Saturday: Deliver stool samples to hospital. I don't normally time my gastronomical intake-to-outflow speed, but I think that's the Guinness records people on line two. Saturday: Cancel the Toon game. While there is plenty of humor in my situation, I'm on day 2.5 of the Gatorade fast and in no shape to communicate said humor to the players. Sunday: Feeling (financially) poor enough to stagger to work and double over in an office chair for eight hours instead of staying home and doubling over on the couch. Tentatively eat some BRATs. Decide to start self-medicating and buy some wildly expensive probiotics that still seem cheap compared to cefuroxime. Discover PmC and giardiasis share a common cure, which would just be a quiet irony if it weren't for me still having half a bottle of metronidazole on hand. Justify using it on the basis that doc offered to get me on meds on Friday and I declined -- then expecting to have test results by Saturday morning. Monday morning: After constipation so vicious that half my family tree has staggered off to drink prune juice, I examine pencil-sized stools and proceed to disregard the first rule of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Doctor tells me that, no, Bax is not dying, you dimwit; no matter what it says on the Internet, fecal impaction takes weeks to develop. I may, however, have an intestinal condition often described using the adjective "occult" and need to follow up with him in a week to make sure Bax really won't die. Monday: Arrive late to both jobs due to ripple effect from doctor visit. End up standing up and running around for the majority of the afternoon due to covering for a cashier that called in sick. Strike back in my own clever way: Call home and whimper about it. Survive a nearly 16-hour day ... somehow. Tuesday: I find out the results of the C-Diff test: negative. In other news, there is a medical test known as a "C-Diff." This cheers me up immensely. I can now add to my résumé that my hack-fu is so strong I have cdiff'ed my FPU.* I spend the day mentally writing the cdiff man page and wondering whether 'c' should stand for "color," "category," or "context." Context wins. Tuesday night: Feeling well enough to head to Go night with roaminrob; I claw to a 34-32 win (6-stone handicap) in the one game I play. I am justly proud of this; I actually won by catching my more-experienced opponent's mistake. In other news, dammit ... DAMMIT! The negative cdiff (`Error: No response from output device`) means PmC is off the culprit list. The metronidazole, it does nothing! Wednesday: Mercifully feeling much better. Procrastinate on updating LJ in favor of finishing the final secret level of "Cave Story." So now you can probably guess what I was doing last weekend while sick. Thursday: Still not dead. Eat dinner with a man who has interviewed the Dalai Lama. Stand under stage lights to audience applause while being paid for tech support. Umm ... wait. When was Rabbit Hole day again? Friday: See Saturday. Saturday: I meant this Saturday, not the previous one. Dammit ... I hope I didn't just throw my entire readership into an infinite loop. Saturday evening: No medical news. On the other hand, Toon game was loads of fun. And the word "colon" was used one fewer time than the phrase "Great, now the laser has a weapon." `]B=8D` Sunday: The remaining test results (for several strains of food poisoning) arrive, a mere 168 hours of processing later. Go modern medicine! And they're all negative. Meaning that apparently there was never anything wrong with my colon in the first place. Well, shit. If I'd known that I'd have ordered the sushi. -- * Food Processing Unit, natch. Current Location: ~/computer_desk Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, geekery, wordplay (7 comments \| Leave a comment)
February 3rd, 2007
01:34 am [Link]	Never a good time There is never a good time to deal with dry heaving, severe intestinal distress, and blood leaving from orifices it oughtn't. But it's especially a disappointment because today was Imbolc ritual downstairs. Had I been well enough to stand for the duration, I would have been one of the ritual's dragons. A bit of typecasting, perhaps, but still a role I would have loved to play. At least this time kadyg dragged me out to YubaDocs and I got in and out of the door for $100. The hospital bill from the cat bite is $600 and counting. More updates when my gut and I have negotiated a peace treaty. Current Location: ~/computer_desk Current Mood: sick Current Music: "Tutorial," FF Tactics OST Tags: american health care is a piece of shit (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
January 22nd, 2007
11:39 pm [Link]	Nifty links of the moment This is where I would normally put a Further Confusion wrap-up, but I ended up reading other peoples' journals before getting around to updating my own. So, without further ado, a bunch of great links ganked from others. Department of Space: A Google Maps-type star map for the entire Traveller setting, complete with borders, star system data, shipping routes, jillions of names, etc. The full impact of this doesn't really start hitting you until you scale down step by step and see how big the map is. (via comments in a momentrabbit post) Department of Aerospace: The Russians built two counterparts to the Mir space station. Where are they now? If you answered "Nobody knows," you're only half right, and that's the less interesting half. (h/t xiphias) Department of Decoding: Here, have a cipher to decode. And if you happen to have solved that one already, have a harder one. (h/t chipuni and soreth, respectively) (The first one's cheatable ... if you know where to look. I'll link to the web resource I used in comments, but I'll screen it for several days.) Edited to add: Department of American Exceptionalism: This article should be required reading for anyone who still has any respect for the American health care system. (The rest of us can just cite its statistics as we agitate for a sane alternative.) Via annafdd via jinian. And a second health care link I couldn't wedge in anywhere else. Current Location: ~calorg Current Mood: rushed Current Music: Orbital, "The Saint theme" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, geekery, link roundup, riddles (4 comments \| Leave a comment)
January 18th, 2007
01:02 am [Link]	ow So, our cat decided to celebrate Appreciate a Dragon Day by ... politely waiting until after midnight to freak out and savagely bite my arm. I've had cat bites before, but this one was a lot worse than I'm used to. At least one fang left a gap the width of a pencil eraser and tore down into muscle. I tried to tough it out by cleaning the area and irrigating the wound, but after a night of bleeding and a day of increasing pain and restricted range of motion, I went to the hospital. The doctor wasn't at all helpful, but I did at least get a prescription for antibiotics. (If the bite made it that far down, I'm not taking any chances.) And after spending probably about $200 on medical care, I was relieved to see that our friendly local drugstore had a special deal on the drugs I needed: Buy ten boxes of macaroni and cheese for $105, get the cefuroxime free. ( Go figure, I leave the wound description in the open and lj-cut the political rant. )* -- * "Irrigating" a wound is the technical term for taking a syringe, filling it with water, aligning the syringe with the puncture, and OW OW OH MY GOD OW HOLY SHIT THAT FUCKING SON OF A COCKSMOKING OW PAIN. It is important because sometimes you can wash bacteria out this way. Or else you can shoot jets of water at your bodymeats until they bleed, and the blood washes out bacteria too. Current Location: ~/computer_desk Current Mood: ranty Current Music: U2, "Where The Streets Have No Name" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, best of baxil, politics (39 comments \| Leave a comment)
January 16th, 2004
06:54 pm [Link]	You know it's time to switch political parties when ... The Libertarian Party, on whose e-mail list I remain even though I'm gradually moving leftward on economic issues, just sent me a missive with a plea for money. For them? No. For their previous chairman, Ron Crickenberger, who is suddenly suffering from a painful form of cancer -- and whose health insurance, due to his having lost his job due to downsizing, is a ticking COBRA time bomb. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but the only thing I can feel is schadenfreude. My very first thought on reading that he had no health care because of his unemployment was, "Doesn't that merely illustrate that we should be making every effort toward a single-payer health care system?" The Libertarian Party, true to its roots, feels Mr. Crickenberger's problem is best solved through voluntary contributions and private enterprise. And that's what they're asking for. Good for them. But there are tens of millions of people without health insurance in this country, and hundreds of thousands of those are in equally precarious situations with deadly or serious diseases. Mr. Crickenberger has a large political party to issue a plea for charity on his behalf. Those others do not. Are they less deserving? I surfed through to the LP's policy statement on health care. The primary point of their five-point plan is to establish tax-free Medical Savings Accounts. Would such a plan have helped Mr. Crickenberger? Possibly. Would such a plan have helped the millions who have no health insurance because they've been unemployed for 6 months or more; or working at subsistence wages? The ones who simply can't afford to set aside the $200 or more per month that would be required to provide any sort of basic insurance cushion for a family of four? You've got to be kidding. A single, simple inpatient surgery can cost as much as a new car. MSAs are an upper-class shell game. Then they talk about deregulating the health care industry and privatizing Medicare and Medicaid. I'll concede that competition would bring costs down; that's the way it works. But how do for-profit health care providers make their profits? HMOs and insurers take in a certain fixed amount per worker, per paycheck; they can't make more of a profit by charging more, so the only sure way to bring costs down is to provide less care. This is where we get such quirks of the health care industry as exclusions for "pre-existing conditions." How exactly can our health care system be defined as humane -- or even sane -- when it covers well people and refuses to cover sick people? This is part of a larger and growing dispute I have with the LP: the argument that fairness is either unimportant or a natural consequence of efficiency. Both of those are demonstrably wrong -- not in all cases, but in at least some, enough to knock out the foundations of their principled and unwavering free-market stand and bring them down into the same muck as the rest of us. And the way things are trending -- with income gaps growing, and real wages stagnant for the majority of Americans and continuing to trend down -- pushing for further free-market solutions is not going to increase parity. The Libertarians and I still agree on civil liberties, but I can't justify the economic stance -- especially after seeing what the no-new-taxes cut-cut-cut is doing to Cailfornia. Next time I hit the post office, I'll pick up a voter registration form. Could be time to throw my support to the Greens, or maybe just get disgusted with the system and register as unaffiliated. I'd wish Mr. Crickenberger good luck with his health care problems, but there's a few million folks out there -- including one I know personally, and myself back in 2002 after I broke my arm -- who need the luck a lot more than he does. Current Mood: restless Current Music: Heavy Bones, "Where Eagles Fly" Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, politics (15 comments \| Leave a comment)

Tomorrowlands