Lee.org

Health insurance for an individual is, as we all know, quite expensive. About 6 months ago, I did some hunting around to try and find health insurance for my self. Here’s what I found. I live in NJ so some of this advice might not be appropriate for you.

I’d get a great break on insurance if I had a company with just other employee (must work at least 25 hrs a week or so)

NJ Blue Cross Blue Shield (the “official” provider for NJ..) is freaking expensive. They wanted to charge me $650/month for moderately good insurance.

The IEEE has a good insurance program. You’ve got to be a member for 2 years before being eligible… Since membership is $100/year and it would save me $150/month in insurance, I immediately joined. I’m still waiting for my membership to mature though.

You want to be in a group. 1 person obviously gets more sick, more often than that same person as long as he’s paired up with someone. Hurumph.

NJ law makes it so that I can’t get cheap but crappy insurance. Instead, I must get good, expensive insurance… well, expensive at the least. This differs from many states. I noted that you can get things like $10,000 deductible insurance in California for $90/month

Don’t be afraid to get phone numbers and call on the phone. I sometimes got more done in a 20 minute phone call than an hour browsing confusing medical insurance websites.

I eventually ended up going with a trusted client’s recommendation. I get my Health insurance from Medical Insurance Claims Inc. of Kinnelon NJ. I pay about $370/month for a good Oxford plan… $30 copays, RX paid 1/2.

Here’s some links I collected. They may or may not be useful or still valid:

http://www.workingtoday.org/resources/insurancebenefits.php
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http://www.workingtoday.org/productsservices/products.php
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http://www.asmeinsurance.com/
I have to be a member for 2 years first.
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ACM.org Association for Computing Machinery. $99/year
- Professional Liability Insurance – about $1800/year
- Major Medical – blue shield of NJ 212-476-1111
- Catastrophe Major Medical Insurance – no
- Disability Income – yes
- Auto – 1-800-524-9400 www.libertymutual.com/lm/acm
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Marsh Affinity Group Services 1-800-503-9230 http://www.seaburychicago.com/cwp.asp?assn=ACM
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IEEE computer society – http://www.computer.org/
$95/year to join IEEE and Computer Society as a professional (partial year)
- Comprehensive HealthCare Insurance – must be in IEEE for 2 years. 1-877-886-0110
- Disability Income – 20 units of $130/month, 90 day waiting period: $216/year
- Professional Liability – through Marsh Affinity Group
- Discount Prescription Plan
- msa plan
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Blue Cross of NJ (crappy insurance)
http://www.horizon-bcbsnj.com/members_rates.asp?urlsection=members
Plan: Plan A/50
Effective Date: 4/2004
Deductible: $10,000.00
50% coinsurance
$5,000 coinsurance cap
Monthly Rate: $242.52
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http://www.nationalbusiness.org/
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Small business something or another http://www.nfib.com (but not in NJ)
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insurance quotes at: http://www.ehealthinsurance.com
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http://www.keystonetosuccess.com/
What the frig is is? Just a discount plan? I was referred to this by http://www.nationalbusiness.org/NBAWEB/Premium3600/NBAcontact.htm
Ah… It’s a pharmacy discount
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Nationwide Health Plans–NFIB Ohio
1-800-551-4312, option 4 < — Call
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update 8-1-05 Good to know: When you get your insurance, use a company that provides a real live human being at your service. When something goes awry and you are battling the insurance provider, it will be good to have an agent that knows all of the loopholes and such.

I am right now in the process of getting health insurance in California. It is amazing, I can get very similar insurance in California for $170 that I would’ve paid $370 for in New Jersey. I am going to opt for a less inclusive $100 per month plan. A 70% discount!

I just saw the “Oona Wentworth” episode of Nip/Tuck.

I knew I was done being sick (from my cold) when I realized that I was feeing the full creepiness and disgustingtude of this show. Bravo to everyone who made this masterpiece of …. of…. whatever the heck it is. It’s really on it’s own out there. Nip/Tuck is a great show but I can’t tivo through two episodes…. I need to recover and digest and finally remind myself,”Well, at least I’m not as bad off as that!”

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3-14-05 update: I woke up this morning with alternating and repeating visions of Dr. Bobolit cutting his face off and Adrian pleading for his mother to make love to him. I’m feeling pretty unclean on this fine sunny morning. Yup, pretty darn unclean.

Peercast sits out there quitely. Some day in the not too distant future, people are going to start going crazy for it and products like it. It’s a good idea.

What is PeerCast?
PeerCast is a new, free way to listen to radio and watch video on the Internet. It uses P2P technology to let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of traditional streaming. This means you get to hear and watch stations not normally found on commercially funded sites.
…
PeerCast offers considerable savings for broadcasters because they do not have to provide bandwidth for all of their listeners. A single 56K modem can be used to broadcast a radio station to the entire network.

(I have anarchistic visions of there being a few relay points in tropical desert privacy-haven countries really messing things up for the RIAA)

In a fit of wanting to type faster, I looked into the latest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. After 30 mintues of googling, I’ve decided that speech recognition is still not ready for prime time. :-( (dear reader. Do not dispair. Read my update below!)

I found several blogs and sites that talked about how excited they were at the prospect of how the software could help them, but I never found any followups. That says to me that everyone who tried it got dis-interested quickly. When I first tried speech recognition several years ago, I had a similar experience. After a few days with it, I thought that if I only put more dedication into teaching the computer how I spoke, I could get some use out of it. But I just wasn’t interested in putting that much effort into it. Hence, the waning interest. Well, here we are, 10 years of research, my computer is 200 times faster (!!! 3 Ghz vs 14 Mhz!!!) and the reviews still say pretty much the same thing.

The most useful review was from John Udell’s Weblog. He included a video of him dictating a letter. His was virutally the same experience I had 10 years ago. The recognition had about a 2% error rate. That sounds good until you realize that this posting so far is 203 words… That means there would have been 4 errors in the preceeding text… errors that were spelled correctly and were likely gramatically correct, just not what I intended to say.

So then you have to correct the errors… That can be terribly slow, and error-prone in itself in an audio interface. Listening to John Udell patiently talk to his computer in a carefully moderated voice, and having the machine still make dumb mistakes drove me crazy, and I’m a patient guy.

Grr. I don’t know… Maybe I will give it one try. I tried to type as fast as John was dictating and I very quickly realized that, when it worked well, he was going at like 100 to 120 words per minute. I type at something like 25-40 WPM. I would love to be able to integrate this kind of performance in my typing life! Maybe I could dictate and then edit by hand? I don’t know…

update 4-29-05: I’ve been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 now for two days and I’ve got to say that I’m extremely impressed with it. My previous reservations were unfounded. I’m typing this right now with my voice. It’s pretty darn cool, and yes, I’m going a lot faster than I could type after only one day of training. it takes a little bit of getting used to, speaking to the computer, but really not that much. More importantly, I feel that I’m using a different part of my brain in order to write things. It’s a speaking thing, not a writing thing. That was one thing that I was hoping that I would get out of this.

Woot!

I’ll keep my intrepid readers abreast of how I’m doing with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Oh, and as for the microphone, I’m surprised to say that I’m very happy with a cheap lapel mic that came with my web cam.

Gosh darn it, it’s even becoming easier to say things like “Send that” instead of clicking on the Send button in Outlook.

You know, I have to admit that it’s kind of nice to hear my voice in an otherwise quiet room. It’s better than listening to the mindless, brain sucking television in the background.

Update 5-3-05 I’m convinced.

I am now able to type and about 80 wpm. That’s twice as fast as I have ever been able to type in my life. With more practice and the new headset that will be arriving in a few days, I am fairly confident that I will be able to tie at 100 wpm very reliably. This gosh darned thing is good! There are still a few small issues but they all seem conquerable. For example, right now the integration with Firefox is less than perfect. But there are tools to get past that. I’m really pretty impressed.

Of course, instead of me doing just necessary things faster, I am now becoming more verbose. I think I like that in my Internet life.

Case in point: this is getting to be a pretty long blog entry, isn’t it? It’s not that I’m spending more time writing this entry, it’s just that I’m “typing” a lot faster. Woot!

(and it is a bit of a novelty teaching the computer to understand the word “woot”)

update 5-5-05: That’s it, I’m hooked. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 is amazing. I really can type/speak at about 80 wpm. It’s still taking a bit of getting used to but darn it, this thing works. I went out and bought a good dictation headset (an Andrea ANC-750) from Knowbrainer.com and that has improved the accuracy quite a bit (of course, it’s also an excellent gamer headset ;-). I’m thinking less and less about how I speak to dictate after just one week.

Update 5-20-05: I continue to be happy with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 (DNS8). My biggest gripe with it right now is its memory and performance footprint. When it’s running it takes longer than normal to switch between windows, even if DNS8 isn’t engaged. That makes it so that it’s a bother to leave it running on the odd chance I’ll want to issue a “close window” or a “send that” command. Though I admit that I’m a huge short-attention-span-theater window switcher. I have 2 monitors and at the very moment I have 12 windows open. On any day when I’m spending more time writing than not, DNS8 stays running.

Update 9-14-05: FYI I continue to be an avid Dragon NaturallySpeaking user. I got a DMCA takedown notice from copyright-compliance.com last week representing Scansoft saying about this very page (where I gush happily about DNS)…

It has come to the attention of Scansoft that you are distributing unlicensed and unauthorized Scansoft Products.

If anyone can find the unlicensed Scansoft product on this page, I’ll give them a prize.

Update 10-7-05: Sweetness. I just installed another gigabyte (bringing me to 1.5 GB) and all of the lag that I’ve been seeing when moving between programs has gone away. I can now leave Dragon NaturallySpeaking running much more of the time without a strain on my PC.

A few weeks ago I made Eggs Benedict for VC. To do so, I had to plan in advance, learning how to (this’ll show you how much effort I normally spend in the kitchen) clarify butter, make poached eggs, and make hollandaise sauce. It took me almost a dozen eggs to make a good poached egg. But now I know! The hollandaise sauce wasn’t difficult. I got it right the first time but it sure is time consuming. 20 minutes of “constant stirring” is a bother. So this week I tried hollandaise sauce from a mix.

Concord Foods Hollandaise Sauce Mix. “Simply Add water and cook”

It cooks quick enough…. 1 cup of warm water in a sauce pan, add the packet, set to medium-low heat, 6 minutes of constant stirring later and it had thickened.

But for taste it kind of fell flat. It -looks- perfect. Right-on consistancy & color. And it doesn’t taste bad, it just doesn’t jump out at you and say, “I am hollandaise, love and cherish me!” I don’t know, maybe my taste buds were biased by the amount of time they knew was put into real hollandaise. Maybe if I added a little clarified butter and lemon to perk it up. Yeah, thinking about it, I think it was seriously lacking in the tangy-lemon department.

I might try it again sometime but I’ll definitely have to fiddle with the flavor to make it work. That takes away from the ease of use, though if worked correctly, it could still save 15 minutes and setting up that odd double-steamer setup for authentic hollandaise.

For now, out of 5, I give it:
Appearance: 5
Taste: 2

Picasa 2.0 kicks butt. I found the original Picasa a few years ago and loved it. I’ve only been playing with the latest version for an hour or so but it looks like they’ve cleaned up all the shortcomings of the original software and then some. And the best part is, it’s FREE! Google bought the Picasa company and is giving it all away. It looks like their strategy is to get ahead by being a part of the picture making process and being a preferred (but not required) vendor for some photo related services. Darn it, they hope to get ahead by being the best. And I think it might just work.

Get Picasa.

PS. I want to know who wrote the readme.htm. It is wonderfuly written. Uplifting, conversational, tremendously informative, witty without being smarmy, well laid out… The damn thing is a model of what a readme should be.

I include the readme after the cut.

Continue reading ‘Picasa 2: goodness’ »

Halflife 2 is an AMAZING game.

First, the realism is just… unreal. I could gush about that for a long time. The physics are so realistic and the texturemaps and polygons and… [gush gush]

The gameplay is terrific too. I’m occationally a little miffed that the game designers push me “down the tube” in a linear fashion, but I forgive them for the plots they put me into. I’m put in the place of a reluctant hero, struggling to survive and occationally kicking some bad-guy butt.

I’ve tried a few times to write a story about my adventures… but they just don’t hold a candle to the experience of actually being there. Yow, I just said that I was “actually” in a place that doesn’t exist. Metaverse, here we come!

With Stevie! They were fantastic. Stevie said it was the best concert he had ever been to. We both got excited and nervous at the same time when they opened with a medley of old tunes that we both knew and loved. “Uh oh. Is this one song their homage to the first 15 years of the band? Is the rest of the concert going to be jammed with stuff we’ve never heard?” Well, we weren’t disappointed in the slightest. The show was a mix of old and new and darnit if every single song they played sounded like a super-hit to my ears. It was like a 3 hr “Best of” show…. Most bands don’t have 3 hours of best-of material. But they did! :-)

After intermission, their second song was Tom Sawyer, I called Trav (who should have gone, he really should have) and held up the phone. It sounded a little like this.

Rush at Saratoga Springs, Monday August 9th, 2004!

Don’t they sound great on my cell phone?

The bike for Burning Man is sweet. It’s in my back seat right now. From the ad:

MOUNTAIN BIKE, 7 spd Trek, Antelope 820, used 3 times $99.

(It’s actually a 21 speed, but that’s ok) And it was exactly as advertised.

Outlook 2000 had a tiny little feature whereby when your mouse hovered over a web link, the target would appear in the status bar down at the bottom of the window. Outlook 2002 eliminated this feature, making forged emails like this (at right. Click
to enlarge) possible.

The link on that email takes you to this web page (at left). Everything appears to be all on the up and up, right? Wrong. Look closely at that web page… at the top of the email. The address is “http://63.203.30.222/registration/Verify.htm” That isn’t a Paypal address. It’s a thief’s address.

If Outlook hadn’t gotten rid of that little feature, it would have been harder to pull the wool over people’s eyes on this kind of scam. Hmmm…. I’ve been hearing how Microsoft is pushing for an email postage/verification/something system lately. Am I just a wacky conspiracy theorist by suggesting that Microsoft is crippling their own program in order to make their new email verification system more necessary? No, that’s crazy.

It was initially a pain to organize but I’m so glad that I finally got to see Robot Stories with friends! The initial plan was to see it on opening night at The Cinema Village theater in NYC. I had sent out emails and organized so that about 5 friends and I would go to the 7:40 show. River was a late comer so he tried to get a ticket online. But it was sold out. It’s a good thing he emailed me that because I didn’t have tickets yet! I was going to go all the way into the city and meet for dinner just to find out I couldn’t get into the show! Both shows were sold out on opening night so we had to reschedule. Another round of invites went out for the Wednesday 7:40 show. Glenn, Shara, Jim D, Marian, and Marah said “yes”.

What a great evening! It started out with a minor miracle… I found a place to park on 3rd between 11th & 12th. But I realized that I didn’t have any quarters for the meter. A guy parked right next to me so I got out and asked to buy quarters from him. I looked in my wallet and frowned as I noticed that all I had were $20s. He gave me a quarter… yes, that’s right gave me a quarter and suggested that I use the 15 minutes to find more quarters. :-)

I got some quarters at a costume & magic shop right nearby (I’ll have to go back, they had fun things). I walked to the theater and noticed that there was free street parking right in front of the theater starting at 6pm. At 5:40, no one had shown up so I fetched my car and sat in it ’til 6. I parked right in front of the theater!

Glenn showed up at 6 and we met in front of the theater. We walked to the restaurant and met up with Marian and Marah. Dinner was just peachy. The talk was really nice. It’s nice to be social! We went off to the theater and met Jim in front. In we went. We were there 10 minutes before showtime and the theater was packed! There were only about 180 seats or so but.. it was packed! We found 6 seats in the first and second row.

I spent New Years eve in Philadelphia. Saw fireworks right up close! I was there with PPG and several PP friends. PPG’s Sw has an apartment right on the river (no, literally. If you drilled a hole in his living room, you’d hit a parking level and then water!) The party itself was a bit low key for my taste, but the apartment is lovely. Red curtain, amazing modular wall storage up to 18 feet, rice paper lighting, and a winch-operated table!

I saw it Saturday night in the city with M&M Sprague & PPG.

What an amazing movie.
- They actually built Minas Tirith! Well, of course they didn’t physically build the whole thing… some parts only exist in a computer. But they still designed every inch of the place!
- I felt Tolkien’s “alternate psychology” so much more intensely when seeing it than when reading. (IE: Gollum and Sam are physical representations of different aspects of Frodo. Denethor represents a Tolkienian archetype)
- I’ll go so far as to say that ROTK (and the other 2 movies… especially combined) is a solid contender to replace the original Star Wars as the Zeus in the pantheon of movie greats.

Friday night: Saw my good friend Marian Heller at Don’t Tell Mama. I (of course) got there a few minutes late AGAIN. I videotaped most of her show. Afterward, Marian, her friend Lisa, her new friend Don K. and myself went out to a very nice meal a few blocks north. NYC restaurants all try so hard to impress… and I’m so easily impressed. :-) Then we went off to Deutch’s Halloween party on 27th and 3rd. The party wasn’t to my liking. I went back to Marian’s after the party. Parking was (miraculously) not a problem near her apartment. Good sleepy-time conversation and a good night’s rest later, Saturday began.

Saturday: Back home for a breather and a nap. Then off to pick up my tuxedo in Woodbridge (see below). Off to pick up PPG. We were off to her company’s owner’s Halloween masquerade party. Wow. The place was wow. I felt like we were in a James Bond movie or at the new Bellagio hotel. One thing I’ll remember is the aquarium (10′ long x 6′ high x 5′ deep) with all manner of fish. For the first time, it didn’t look like “animals in a cage”. The sheer opulence of the whole place, the small section of wall in the dining room that wasn’t painted (oop! I -am- after all a QA guy at heart), The secluded walk around the back of the house. The most delicate chocolate mousse I’ve ever had in my life. I could go on listing… food, band, dancing, easy laughing, enticing the waitstaff, pewter glasses, cosmopolitans…

Sunday: After coming home from the party and sleeping in Edison, we packed up her itty bitty room and moved it all to her new place in Metro 2409! The place is terrific. It doesn’t have a movie theater, pool room, and bowling alley, but it -does- have wonderful country lines and angles, entirely new everything, a white picket fence, a warm homey feeling, a lovely backyard, and a short walk to Everything! We had dinner at Down to Earth in Metro 2409. I hope I never forget the powerful warm “everything is going to be alright” feeling we shared while sitting in the corner in the candle-light, eating chocolate cake.

All 45 megs of it! [removed]

Download it with mad abandon, I now have 10 gig of bandwidth/month. [12-10-03 removed because I’ve got scads of bandwidth but limited space :-( )

I caught the trailer for MR today. I am sad to realize that the Wachowski Brothers only had one Matrix movie in them.

Cyberpunk Highlander. Ugh.

My senator wrote back to me today (via email) about how he’s co-sponsoring federal anti-spam legislation:

Dear Mr. Sonko,

Thank you for contacting me about spam. I appreciate hearing from you on this issue.

The growth of the Internet and the increased use of e-mail have led to the emergence of “spam,” or electronic junk mail. Numerous marketers have begun to send unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) over the Internet. Because this marketing technique is easier and less costly than traditional direct marketing techniques such as direct mail solicitations, e-mail accounts worldwide have been deluged with this unsolicited correspondence.

Spam is not just a nuisance, but it can also bring consumers higher charges for the Internet as service providers are forced to continually upgrade their systems to handle the increased traffic. Spam filters built into MSN and Hotmail servers, for example, block 2.4 billion messages a day. While proponents of UCE insist it is a legitimate marketing technique that is protected by the First Amendment, Congress should enact reasonable restrictions.

Although 35 States have anti-spam laws, there is no federal law specifically concerning spam. Consequently, I have co-sponsored CAN-SPAM, the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act” (S. 877), which would do the following: create criminal penalties for the transmission with knowledge and intent of spam messages with header information that is materially false or misleading; prohibit deceptive subject headings; require a functioning return address for the message recipient to submit a request that he or she not receive future messages; require clear identification that a message is an advertisement; and require that message recipients have an opportunity to opt-out, and for the sender to provide a valid physical mail address.

Please be assured that I will continue to support practical, sensible regulations that reduce unwanted spam while taking the concerns of legitimate, honest retailers into account.

Thanks again for contacting me.

Senator Frank Lautenberg
http://lautenberg.senate.gov/

So I keep hearing that the USDA’s food pyramid thingy and vitamin recommendations are “outdated”. Everybody who knows anything about vitamins knows that the USDA is behind on the times… So being a person with some desire to do the right thing, I tried to find out what vitamins I SHOULD take.

Nobody friggin knows.

The best I could find is listed below.

http://www4.nas.edu/iom/iomhome.nsf/WFiles/webtablevitamins/$file/webtablevitamins.pdf
biotin 30 mcg ND
Choline 550 mg 3500
Folic Acid 400 mcg 1000
niacin 16 mg 35
Pantothenic Acid 5 mg ND
Riboflavin/B2 1.3 mg ND
Thiamin/B1 1.2 mg ND
A 900 mcg 3000
B6 1.3 mg 100
B12 2.4 mcg ND
C 90 mg 2000
D 5 mcg 50
E 15 mg 1000
K 120 mcg ND

http://www4.nas.edu/iom/iomhome.nsf/WFiles/Webtableminerals/$file/Webtableminerals.pdf
calcium 1000 mg 2500
chromium 35 mcg ND
copper 900 mcg 10,000
iodine 150 mcg 1,100
iron 8 mg 45
magnesium 400 mg 400
manganese 2.3 mg 11
molybdenum 45 mcg 2000
phosphorus 700 mg 4000
selenium 55 mcg 400
zinc 11 mg 40

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/vitamins.html

vitamin A is 5,000 IU. no more than 10,000
vitamin C is 90 mg
folic acid, at least 400 micrograms (women only?)
vitamin B6 1.3 to 1.7 milligrams of
B12 is 6 micrograms
vitamin D is 5 micrograms
vitamin E 22-400 IU

vitamin K is 80 micrograms

I’m just going to keep taking Centrum. And when I start to feel sick, I’ll take extra Vitamin C like my dad demands I do; At least it makes him feel better.

This month’s photo is a shot of the spot my sister will likely be married on this October!

I’m volunteering to help the Panther Valley Property Owners Association with their web site and communications in general. Should be fun.

You should try TVTonic, it’s pretty good. TVTonic is the product I worked on at my last computer job. Think of it as the next step after Tivo… First there was the TV, then VCR, then Tivo, then TVTonic. It downloads large (10-100 megabyte) video files into it’s cache on spec, so when you turn it on (it runs in Internet Explorer), it always has something ready for you. When you merge TV and computers, you can do a lot more than just watch, but this is a good super-short description. You need high speed internet, Windows and 5-10 gig free to use it. They’ve got a 2 month free trial and they won’t spam you or anything dumb.

Something is messed up that when I have to pay $270 to have someone else do my taxes (right before my eyes) and I think I’m getting a bargain. In the short-term sense, yes it -is- a bargain. My H & R Block lady found me several deductions and loopholes in a 1 1/2 hr sitting that I couldn’t have found in 10 hours of research (and then another 5 hours of filling out forms). But why are taxes so hard to do? The states and feds obviously do our taxes for us… that’s how they can send us a refund check for $41.16 instead of the expected $32.14. So if they do our taxes for us, why do I have to pay someone almost $300 to do them, and someone else at the IRS, NJ Dept of Revenue, and NY Dept of Revenue… My taxes get done twice! That’s almost $600 in work being done, for no tangible benefit!

And this is only slightly related but I have to say that when George Dubbya sent every American taxpayer a check for $300 two years ago, I got so friggin angry at him! He was obviously trying to buy us with our own money. Why doesn’t he just double our taxes and then give us a 50% discount? I would like to know exactly how much it cost the government to mail out those 150 million checks. Those costs should have come out of Dubbya’s own pocket.