Why the middle east is so messed up

This website (www.mapsofwar.com) animates the known history of a region in a 90 second clip. Here is the last 5,000 years of the middle east:
http://www.mapsofwar.com/images/EMPIRE17.swf

Call back from insurance!

I am impressed.

The person doing my medical review called me back this morning around 8:30am. We talked a little about me getting the day off and him having to work, just light chat. I asked him what was needed, and how to get it going since it's taken so long.

He said he needs 5 years of medical history from my current doctor office and my previous one (at CSU). He gave me HIS fax number, so I can avoid the Anthem mail & fax sorting/filing system.

Like I said, I am impressed. Rick was nice and professional. If Anthem is the one holding the process up, it is not his doing.

So, since I have today off, I will be going to my doctors and having them fax stuff over. He may have woken me up early on my day off, but it was so worth it to get this process moving and RESOLVE it.

I can taste the victory

Many months ago, I was informed by my health insurance provider that my claims would not be paid due to my account being under medical review. Luckily they still pay for my insulin, but they are not paying for my diabetes education ($1000 roughly) or my bloodsugar test strips ($150/mo).

My account is still under "medical review". I call weekly to check on the "status" and am always told the same thing:
They are waiting on my medical records from my primary physician.

They claim to have sent the request to my doctor twice, and my doctor's office claims to have never received the request.

So I went to the doctor's office, filled out the forms myself, and had them fax the papers to the appropriate location.

That was 3 weeks ago, and they are still "waiting for medical records" from my doctor. Oh, and they added a second doctor to the list (a doctor I haven't seen in about 5 years, back when I was in college).

Today though, there was progress. By some miracle, a very sweet customer service rep (whom I'm sure will be punished for this) gave me the full name and phone number of the person doing my "review".

My next call will not be a nice one. I will plainly ask what is taking so long, explain the efforts I have taken to accommodate their incompetence, and make it clear that I am ready to take this issue to the Colorado Health Insurance review board if the issue is not PROMPTLY resolved.

There, I had to get that out of my system. A breakthrough like this deserved a rant. It's not often you break through the customer service 1-800-# hell and bureaucracy to actually get a name and phone number of the person responsible.

What "Made in China" really means

It's pretty amazing to see how sunglasses are made in China.

And the snow bragging rights go to...

Well, I am relinquishing my bragging/complaining rights regarding the Colorado blizzard of 2006. We had it bad, but not as bad as some

Go check the link out, the pictures are pretty crazy.

The Most Important Image Ever Taken

Just a few thoughts...

• Don't let the "oddball" clip a few seconds in stop you from watching the rest of the video. I think it's there to demonstrate how blissful and ignorant mankind is.
• They neglected to mention that almost everything in the night sky visible to the naked eye is within the Milky Way. We can't even see most of the galaxies without telescopes.
  
• It should go without saying, but just to make sure this is clear: The Hubble Deep Field was not a specific part in the sky that happened to have so much in it and everything else is empty. The entire sky is just as dense with distant objects.
  

A scripting tip for the nerds

I don't know how many of my nerd friends read tihs, but if you're not one of them you can pretty much just skip this post.

I love writing bash scripts. I run cygwin on windows, so I have the ability there too. One of my common tasks in bash is a task such as "For all the files in this directory that match some pattern, do this to them".

Previously my script would have been in the form:

for x in `find . -name '*pattern*' | sed -e s'/ /@/g'`; do
 realname=`echo $x | sed -e 's/@/ /g'`
 dostuffto $realname
done

Notice how I had to use sed to replace spaces with some character, and then unreplace it? That's cuz "for" uses space delimited input, and if there's a space in a filename it screws up.

Last night I accidentally discovered this. It works better in some cases, not as well in others:

for x in *; do
  dostuff $x
done

As it turns out, file wildcards (*) automatically escape spaces and other weird characters, whereas ls does not. I even tried ls -b (which adds escape characters), to no avail. Of course, '*' isn't as flexible for finding files as 'find' is, but for smaller scale searches this kicks ass.

Update:

I finally figured out how to use the -exec option to find, which also fits into this problem.
Here's how to use find to execute commands on the files:

find . -name 'whatever' -exec ls -l '{}' \;

The file is substituted in for {}, and the '' around that takes care of spaces. the \; at the end marks the end of the command to execute.