Are my eyes really blue?

So I’m due to have a cortisone shot this week.  This is the ultimate culmination of two years of going round and round on this weird neck thing that went away for a year or so only to rear its head again this spring past – I’ve run out of patience waiting for it to go away on its own and this is the logical next step.

Problem is, in the week leading up to this procedure, I can’t take almost any of the normal NSAIDs. Ibuprofen, naproxen, etc etc – all of them are contraindicated with the upcoming injection. So the doctor who’s doing the injection called in a prescription for Celebrex, which is hepatic rather than renal and thus all right to use in case I need painkillers for the duration.  And I went to pick it up…and Blue Shield refused to cover it.

See, Blue Shield doesn’t see anything in my prescription record that says I’ve taken two other NSAIDs, and they think I should take those first. Despite the fact that everything they cite as an alternative is on the list of contraindicated meds for this procedure. Despite the fact that my primary care physician specifically told me to take prescription-level doses of Advil rather than write a script that she didn’t expect Blue Shield would cover, because it’s an OTC drug.

In other words, Blue Shield is second-guessing my doctors. And incorrectly, given the nature of the problem. The doctor tells me not to use these drugs, and Blue Shield says I must use those drugs. Impasse. The catch is, one of those parties is making decisions based on (presumably) medical training and experience, and the other one is making decisions based on what the three-ring binder says to do.

And ultimately, this is why privately-insured health care will fuck you: because a private insurer’s entire business model depends on them not providing you with the coverage for which you paid.  So far this year, Blue Shield has refused to pay for these meds, and refused to pay the MRI provider because they didn’t have the right pre-authorization. I haven’t delved into that at all, because I’ve never yet gotten a bill, but I fully expect that at some point it will come back to me, at which point, well, if I have to go around seeking pre-authorization for everything I do, what’s the point of paying through the nose for a PPO?  If I want to be in an HMO, I’ll pay Kaiser less money for the privilege.

This is why the teabaggers can kiss my ass: because the bureaucrats between you and your doctor are already here. They have been for years. At this point, the dipshits with their tricorn hats and Medicare scooters are fighting like hell for Blue Shield’s right to keep screwing me while they ride off with their own government-provided health care, and I’m not about to sacrifice myself so a bunch of fucking baby boomers can have gold-plated care in their dotage.

And here’s the thing: I can afford those pills.  Vandy Lifestyle, bitches. $5.71 a tablet means nothing to me. How many people are there who need medication that they can’t afford to pay $180 a bottle for? What are they supposed to do? Well, the doctor thinks you need this, but oops, insurance company doesn’t think you do, so you can lump it or find the scratch to pay for it all yourself? Or forget about the procedure? Get the doctor to write a script for something else and hope that gets covered, then hope that when it doesn’t work, Blue Shield will deign to let you try what the doctor originally wanted to use?

This is why I back Obamacare. This is why I back single-payer.  Perfect? No, but it’s not going to insult my intelligence by screwing me over and charging me for the privilege while telling me this is the greatest system of health care in human history and how lucky I am not to be a poor benighted Canadian or Briton. Non nobis solum, assholes. Not for ourselves alone. That’s what society means.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

We’re a long way from the 90s, technologically speaking.  Removable rewritable media of all types – floppy, Zip disk, CD-RW – have been replaced by flash drives. Token Ring and LocalTalk are long gone; it’s all Ethernet and (more likely) wi-fi these days. Smartphones and tablets are evolving a post-PC world.  I can’t remember the last time I heard the word “Netware”. 

And yet, right there in the middle of everything: Word, Excel, PowerPoint.

Microsoft’s leveraging of Windows to give it a monopoly in the productivity space has left us, in the present day, with the same package everywhere.  There are more Macs in the workplace than ever, the browser wars have returned and given us Safari and Chrome in addition to the revived Mozilla in the form of Firefox, and even Windows itself seems to be headed toward a hybrid desktop-tablet model, but Microsoft Office bangs along, largely uninterrupted by the likes of iWork or Google Docs.

Which is a shame, really.  I don’t know what presentation software was out there before PowerPoint became the standard and then the cliche, but aside from a few Keynote devotees, there’s nothing else out there.  And Excel is literally the only spreadsheet I’ve ever had to support – hell, it may as well be the operating system as far as some users are concerned.  I miss the hell out of WordPerfect – in fact, I still maintain that WordPerfect 3.5 for Mac OS was the pinnacle of word processing and Office still has yet to catch up – but everybody is using Word to this very day.

So we creep slowly on with whatever Microsoft churns up, and maybe something else will get traction but probably not.  Not when we get brand new MacBook Airs with Mountain Lion and the first thing we still install is Microsoft Office.  And then there’s the browser issue. In the previous iteration of the aforementioned browser wars, Microsoft tied Internet Explorer into the OS as tight as they could, to the point where Word is now the default HTML editor (synergy!) and the file systems is still technically being viewed through browser windows. 

The downside, as we all struggled with ten years ago, is that linking the OS to the productivity software to the browser to the email client to the mail server system means that you end up with a nice vulnerable monoculture with a million possible vectors for malware. Which means we have to overlay everything with security and antivirus software, which has to be maintained and updated constantly.  Which is how we had the situation a couple of weeks ago where the Sophos Anti-Virus updater changed its heuristics and decided that every software updater on a Windows system was malware…including its own updater.

And so I’ve spent the last week wrestling with one single Windows laptop, trying to figure out if the spontaneous recurring flash of a DOS window represents an actual infection, damage to the system files as a result of the malfunction, or just some other updater that’s missing or broken and failing to work properly.  And I don’t know if the problem is due to something exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the Windows ecosystem or the result of a flawed attempt to protect it.

This is no way to run computing, people. Underhanded moves made during the Clinton era so that BIll Gates could own the world are still causing problems throughout the IT world fifteen years later.  And it may not get any better, because Microsoft’s much-vaunted Surface tablets focus on having a keyboard and trackpad available for the window-and-pointer set…because they include a traditional Windows environment for backward compatibility.  Everything comes back to working with Windows, because Windows is still the whole shooting match.

We let them get too big long ago, and now we can’t get rid of the results.

So the new BLS numbers are out, the last ones before the election, and they show continued (albeit extremely sluggish) growth.  The economy is turning around – could be faster, but it’s going the right way, more or less.

And sure enough, right on cue, here comes Jack Welch, late of GE, to proclaim that it’s a conspiracy, and that the Bureau of Labor Statistics – which currently has a career interim boss, replacing a Bush appointee who lasted most of Obama’s term; there has never been an Obama appointee running BLS – is cooking the books to help Obama. And all manner of radio hosts and elected Congresscritters jump on the train.

Just like, presumably, every single pollster – including Fox News – was cooking the samples to give Obama a lead in the polls.  I wonder if that same level of skepticism will persist if those same polls show Romney narrowing the gap after the debate.

The right wing in this country has entered a completely post-factual phase.  It makes me wonder just exactly what will happen if Obama wins.  Is Conservatism, Inc. ready to deny the reality of another Presidential election? Will ACORN’s zombie ghost steal a second straight vote? And more important – what are they prepared to do in that instance? How far is the conservative establishment willing to go into the fever swamp?

The answer to that is very very important. And presently unknowable. And Dave Weigel, longtime observer, is a little curious about that himself…

The news comes out that the Harrison twins have committed to Kentucky. This after a huge push from Maryland, the involvement of Under Armor, and the absolute certainty of the Junks from reliable sources that they were in the fold. And yet…UK.

Add this to Noel and Poythress and…oh, why bother. We’re screwed, again, as always. Kentucky is reloading every year with the next year’s starting lineup for the All-Star Futures game while we try to bring in guys who can graduate from Vanderbilt and are willing to keep coming back. And even when we have three first-round NBA prospects on the roster, it’s barely enough to get over once on a Kentucky team that may not have even mentally checked in for the game.

How the fuck are we meant to compete with this?

…Because you don’t need to. The story isn’t in the substance, it’s in the takeaway. How people react is a lot more critical than what was said. Which blows, absolutely, but welcome to the postmodern campaign. If facts don’t matter, why waste your time?

From the sound of it, Obama came out in a prevent defense which does exactly what a prevent does. In this case, it let Romney keep throwing underneath for one quick completion after another. Factually challenged and at odds with two years of stated positions? Who cares? It looked good, and a political press dying for a horserace will gladly float that the GOP team has stopped the bleeding and is hard on the comeback trail.

Much depends on the follow-up and whether Romney’s base is willing to overlook his flexibility. But given that they care far more about landing blows against Obama than any actual policy position, I have to think the only way that Romney doesn’t close the gap here is if somebody comes back with some serious in-depth and aggressive fact-checking.

Oh, and like Josh Marshall says: if you’re complaining about the moderator, you’re losing. I seriously doubt that “he was mean to Jim Lehrer” is going to shift things. On the bright side, we’ll probably have a sudden return to belief in polling by the weekend.

Every teabag retard who gets all oogy-boogy that Obamacare means death panels, and bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor, and you won’t be able to get the care you need, and all that?  We have that right fucking now.  It’s called American private health insurance, and it’s the natural result of what happens when a company has a financial incentive NOT to provide the goods and services for which they were paid.

I will stand in a Soviet-style bread line for bureaucratically-encumbered health care for the rest of my life if it means that Blue Shield and all its sister companies would be reduced to radioactive craters of smoking rubble.  You know why?  Because I’m already standing in the goddamn bread line.  At least I should be spared the indignity of paying out of pocket for the privilege of being lied to about what an unsurpassed quality of health care I’m being provided.

China knows as well as Blue Shield: play your cards right and you can have communism for profit.

“Tech support is here to solve problems, not to enable ignorance.”

I said that. That’s an original quote, unlike so much of what I banter around. And it’s absolutely true and essential for anyone who manages IT to understand this.

I’ve said it often, but the worst thing in the world is when people start to think of the computer support as magicians. It’s all well and good to be a magician, right up to the day the little girl falls down a well and breaks her neck and the villagers get out the torches and pitchforks when you don’t bring her back to life.  If you let your users think you’re a wizard, then you’re going to be well and truly fucked the first time they expect you to do real magic.

It gets worse when you have overlapping IT units with disparate responsibilities.  On two different occasions, I’ve worked at a place with no less than three distinct IT groups who only meet on the org chart at the CxO level – or higher; at my first job, the only place they intersected was in the President’s office.  Not coincidentally, that place had an IT environment that, in 1997, I could only compare to Vietnam (or maybe now to postwar Iraq).  The problem is, users left to their own devices and not educated properly WILL think of all tech support as fungible, and thus become bewildered at best and hostile at worst when told that you have neither access nor authority to address their problem.

The role of an IT manager is to set expectations with the user base.  The first expectation to set is this: there is no magic lamp to rub.  There is no genie that can fulfill all of your IT needs and expectations at no cost.  Indeed, there will be a direct correlation between the complexity of your needs and the costs and issues associated with supporting them.  You can run four versions of Mac OS X, two flavors of Windows, have three kinds of cellphone OS, multiple printers, and still have support for your software, encryption for your security and remote control for immediate support.  It’s also going to require a large permanent staff and a great deal of money.  You can also have an IT environment where very little breaks and there’s very little expense associated with support. You’ll also all have desktop iMacs only, Office 2011 only, OS X 10.7 only, and zero administrative access to the computer.

It never works like that, though.  There’s always a little too much to support and not quite enough manpower or money.  And then there’s always the toy-boy who can’t help tinkering and installing all kinds of unsupported nonsense, or the user whose husband “fixed” her laptop for her, or the one who emails asking how they can upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. (Here’s a hint: look for a youngish guy in a tweed coat and a bow tie, preferably standing in front of a blue police box. Bow ties are cool.)

Again, I’m not asking for everyone to be able to do their own tech support.  I’m merely asking for the same expertise we’d expect of a driver: know which is the gas and the brake, know the difference between drive and reverse, know where the gas goes and what the red and yellow and green lights mean and that you don’t drive on the sidewalk.  Similarly: Know the difference between your computer’s password and your email password. If your email program isn’t working, check and see if webmail is working. If you can’t get on the network, see if the people around you can get on the network or if more people are down.  And when in doubt, yes, turn it off and on again and see if that fixes it.

And above all: if your technician sends you email, read it.  I mean, actually read it. Especially if it tells you what the fix it or who you need to contact for the fix. And if the tech’s name is right there in the sig file, don’t misspell it in the first line of your reply.  I mean, seriously, you may as well just open with “I’m not actually reading what you sent me.”

The tragic thing is that work’s actually going better than it did the first half of the year.

After looking through the extras on The Avengers (downloaded automagically via iTunes the instant it became available) and reading through the online directors’ commentary (found here for those who don’t have DVD), a couple of things jump to mind:

1) The only deleted scene I would have left in would be the Steve Rogers “Man Out of Time” sequence.  That extra couple of beats of him coping with the fact that almost everyone he knew is dead – that Howard Stark’s SON is dragging forty-five, that you’ve got a black President and Buck Rogers phones in everyone’s hand and all the best cars are Japanese or German…he’s truly lost without that costume and a battle to point at. I’m hoping that the forthcoming sequel delves into that more.

2) Apparently Tony Stark’s line about how the arc reactor was “a terrible privilege” was an ad-lib by RDJ, which just proves what a phenomenal actor the guy is. That might have been the most meaningful line in the picture for me, and he just tossed it out there on a whim.

3) The notes on Mark Ruffalo really make a good point of noting that in the end, there are two Hulks – the one Banner chooses to become, and the one he can’t help becoming. There’s a lot in there about breathtaking anger-management issues that bears contemplating…

4) It looks like they intended to do more with Agent Marla Hill, Nick Fury’s aide-de-camp, and a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor.  As it is, she still feels slightly superfluous to me – unless she’s in there as a nod to future use in the same way Hawkeye was in Thor.

5) Along those lines, I find it interesting that only Captain America and, to a lesser extent, the Hulk actually go by their super-heroic names.  Hawkeye and Black Widow are almost universally “Barton” and “Romanov” and Tony Stark, being publicly known as Iron Man, almost always gets called by name.  Only Captain America – who has probably been known that way for seventy years – has something distinct from his real name.  Thor is, well, Thor, and you can pretty clearly tell which is Bruce Banner and which is the Hulk.  Interesting to think about when most people follow the traditional superhero trope that superheroes always have a secret identity and that the hero is the “real” version of them, something Marvel worked on subverting from the beginning.

 

Now I just wonder if the Academy will acknowledge anything besides the CGI…

The die is cast. Management at work is ordering my new iPhone 5 with service on the company dime…on Verizon. Thus severing a relationship with AT&T going back to 1998, interrupted only by a year on T-Mobile in 2004.  So why now, when Verizon has clearly been the top provider in the Bay Area for a decade?

Couple of reasons:

1) LTE.  There’s no beating around the bush: Verizon’s LTE deployment is miles and years ahead of AT&T’s.  It’s been damn near bulletproof on my iPad, which was the big test.  Add to that, this: the Verizon iPhone 5 supports five different LTE bands, including some abroad and some that could conceivably be redeployed in the US.  Which is significant because…

2) Verizon’s iPhones are shipping unlocked.  You can pop a SIM in them and get service with another carrier – and with either AT&T or T-Mobile, I could get the exact same service currently available on my iPhone 4S, never mind what I might find roaming internationally with my Virgin Mobile SIM.  For the first time, I can get a Verizon phone that can not only be used abroad, but with a carrier right here in the US at need.  No hardware lock-in makes for a much more convincing case. Plus I can now use the same phone internationally, which means I don’t even have to retain my unlocked 4S for travel abroad.

3) With the proliferation of Wi-Fi on public transit, it’s now possible for me to have some form of Wi-Fi connection all the way to work except for the portions on foot or on Caltrain.  This takes away a lot of the disadvantage of CDMA at being unable to do voice and data simultaneously. (And since that advantage is technically nonexistent on LTE, I expect that to cease to be a problem as Verizon shifts more and more of its network to LTE.)  Hell, there’s free Wi-Fi at the mall, at every coffee shop, at the airport (and about !-ing time), all over Googleburg – no reason not to use it.

4) Apple has supposedly beaten the longstanding issues with battery life on CDMA devices – to all accounts, the iPhone 5 is an all-day device.  How true that will be with my usage patterns remains to be seen, but for the time being there’s no reason to think I won’t be able to get by with the new gadget. Even on my existing 4S on AT&T, the battery performance under iOS 6 seems to have improved.

But the biggest criterion of all:

5) I’m not paying for it. Whatever the merits of VZW’s plans or data provision or what have you – it’s somebody else’s problem now. My subsidy will go away but I’ll still be a net $40 a month to the good as a result of finally taking the work phone.

Now I just have to wait for company approvals and for the thing to actually ship.  Which by my calculations means I’ll have it just in time for Thanksgiving…