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.

Generation gaps and the Internet

I just stumbled across a blog by an elderly man in Nova Scotia. He's 93 and has a blog AND a Wikipedia page.

I'm more amazed by the fact of his net-presence than the actual writing. It's just so shocking I guess that someone that old would know or care about blogs and Wikipedia, and really incredible that he's using these mediums to give himself some virtual immortality, and maybe to bridge a huge generation.

I kind of wish all my elderly relatives would start a blog now. Not necessarily for the typical day to day life stuff, but just to share their thoughts on their lives and the world.

Happy "Most Miserable Day of the Year" Day!

(Written in the style of www.girlsarepretty.com, it's just so fitting).

Today is January 22nd. The daylight is short, the temperatures are frigid, snow has been on the ground for as long as you can remember and there's a couple months more of it to come. Your Christmas credit card bills are due, your children and family have all left to go back to their lives, and you have no events in the near future left to plan for. Even "studies" have shown today, January 22nd, to be the most miserable day of the year.

Happy "Most Miserable Day of the Year" day!

Winter, Alaska, and Siberia

I don't know about everyone else, but I am pretty fed up with winter and snow. The Big Blizzard of 2006 happened on 12/20-12/21 2006. A month and 2 days ago. Of course, it's snowed more since then and the temperature has only been above 32 on a couple of days, so the massive piles of compacted, thawed and refrozen snow (I would say 10 feet tall in the parking lot at work) show no sign of going anywhere.

But thankfully, we don't have it as bad as others. About a week ago the temperatures here hovered around -5F through 5'F for about a week when an arctic front came through.

Here's a video made in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the temperature was -45F.

A pan of boiling water thrown into the air, evaporating almost instantly. Video taken in Fairbanks, Alaska, on the UAF campus.

Also, here's a collection of pictures taken by a group traveling across Siberia. The temperature there stays around -50'F.