Several years ago I wrote a piece about my old GE portable radio. It was just a cheap portable AM/FM/cassette which got lugged around to keep me company while I was painting or doing chores. That radio eventually got relegated to the kitchen and was usually tuned (to the best of its ability) to the local NPR station during dinner prep. Cathy unplugged it yesterday, told me it was emitting a hum which made her nervous, handed it to me and I realized it was finally time to retire it.
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We didn’t ever watch that much TV anyway, so I don’t see canceling cable TV as much of a loss, but there is definitely a feeling of isolation without any TV access and if an emergency were to occur it would be nice to be able to tune in. Well, TV is still being broadcast over the air though it recently went digital. We applied for the DTV converter box at the time (anticipating this move) and I hauled it out to see what we could pull in. I only really wanted one particular channel – Channel 21 out of Garden City (about 25 miles away), PBS. Channel 21 in digital TV land is now three channels (21-1, 21-2, 21-3) and it would be really nice to watch the News Hour once in a while (and not having to stream it over the internet which you can do). It would be especially nice since we’ve actually pledged to the station over the years and now we can’t receive it at all.
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We recently decided to cancel our cable TV service. At $75/mo for what they consider BASIC service, it just wasn’t a good *value*. We still have internet service through the cable company, and that product has been very good. After waiting for an hour on the phone to complete the cancellation, the high pressure sales guy I got transferred to at the ‘disconnect desk’ asked me what he could do to keep me as a customer. I said I’d like to pick which channels I wanted to pay for – I could rattle them off, but suffice to say there are definitely a few (even after the recent cancellation of the Food channel) that I wish I could tune into once in a while. He laughed and said “nobody offers an ala carte option!”
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Some of the sites I run are database driven and allow a lot of user interaction. For users to participate on these sites at some elevated level with rights to create, modify, or delete content I usually set the system to require email authentication. Since most of my sites are fairly low traffic dealing with new applications for user accounts hasn’t been too taxing, but even with Captcha in place (which makes you type in the funky letters you see) there are still plenty of obviously bogus applications.

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We recently had a full physical for one of our kids at the pediatrician. It was a well visit (we get one free a year so theres no co-pay for that), she got two shots, we filled out a questionnaire, they took urinalysis, did a visual test and a hearing test. Oh yeah, they weighed her too. We had an hour wait in the waiting room (our pediatrician has a well room and a sick room which is nice), then she got 20 minutes with nurses and 3 minutes of a doctor’s time. There was a billing mistake so we got to see the bill the doctor sent to the insurance company (normally you wouldn’t see this as it all happens behind the scenes. They billed insurance $685. We know that the insurance will probably pay something less than that, and that the doctors will write off what they didn’t get as a loss – but here’s the problem – the consumer never knows what actually got paid for the service they received, the payer never knows what actual services were performed (or were really required) because they have to take the word of the person billing them, and the provider of the service has an incentive to bill as high as possible because they know the payer is going to negotiate down. This whole system is BROKEN. The first thing we need is transparency so these shenanigans end as soon as possible, but I’m also a staunch advocate for a uniform, government run, single payer system to replace the existing insurance company paradigm.

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