Dear Congressman Meeks,

I am very pleased that you have voted for H.R. 3962. I am a very strong believer in universal health care, and feel strongly that this bill will move our country in a positive direction regarding providing health care for all our citizens. Your work on this matter should be applauded.

I was wondering if you or a member of your staff could answer a question for me. I have heard that the bill bans that industry practice of pre-existing conditions. Is this a grandfather clause, or is this clause applicable to only new policies issued?

Again, thank you for your continued support in ensuring health care for all Americans. The future is much brighter thanks to the work of both you and your colleagues.

When my company made me a permanent employee in April, I was given health insurance as part of my benefits package (yay!). Sadly, my insurer has deemed my ulcerative collitis a pre-existing condition and will not cover it until May, 2010. Why is this a problem? I'm relapsing. Badly. On Friday, I went to my doctor and discussed my current condition with him. He wanted to have me undergo another colonoscopy (I had one when I was hospitalized in January) to see how bad the situation is in there and the best course of treatment to help me heal. I had to tell him... and I'm going to bold this for those of you who do not support Congressional health care initiatives...

I had to tell my doctor that I could not have the procedure done because my insurance considers my disease a pre-existing condition and will not pay for it.

He was able to come up with an alternate treatment plan, however, he has done this without knowing the extent of my current condition. I'm sure that his treatment will benefit me and my relapse will end soon, however, my insurance is the reason why I cannot get adequate treatment for a disease that I did not do something to cause myself but inherited. I am still very much in debt from my 10 day hospital stay, have collection companies calling me up the wazoo for medical and lab bills that I cannot pay, and will be in debt for, according to my estimates, the next two years, because I did not have any insurance to cover the costs of my ten day hospital stay. So yes, I am very excited about HR 3962, even though I won't be reading the 1990 pages of it, and yes, I do hope that the banning of pre-existing condition clauses is grandfathered, although it is probably not.

• Infocom book in the works
• How not to handle issues
• Facebook SRPG experiment continues to fail
• That's 8 point 6 million with an "m" (although Raph Koster points out in the comments that the number is now much, much higher)
• Making right out of wrong
• Facebook to (maybe) change SRPG notifications

Now, normally, I wait a year before upgrading to a new Windows OS. Windows ME and Vista were the two exceptions because they. sucked. badly. But with our players being excited and saying positive things about Windows 7, and several guys at the company not voicing any OMFG complaints about it, I decided to upgrade, even though I am an XP user.

I'm not sure why Microsoft is doing this, but if you're an XP user, you either have to do a clean XP install before upgrading to Windows 7, or upgrade to Windows Vista and then Windows 7. This is an odd thing to make users do, and I'm really curious as to why this route was taken. Anyway, as I'm not spending money to upgrade to Vista, I'm going the clean XP install route. The problem with that is you have to manually reinstall all of your applications. The good news is that Microsoft has an application called Windows Easy Transfer which will conveniently gather together all of your files and settings into disk image files and store them on the external hard drive of your choosing.

Sounds wonderful! Except that it's taking so long I've turned 40, 50, 60, 70... just waiting for it to finish. And in true Windows fashion, it is giving me the most ridiculous transfer times I have ever seen. Three hours, five hours, seven hours, two hours. It can't seem to make up its mind! I think it's been running for about 5 hours now. It's 820p. It says it will be done in 2 hours, 15 minutes. We'll see.

My original plan was to purchase a new drive and simply slave the old to it. On the new drive I would have done a fresh XP install and upgrade to Win 7. With my drive slaved, I wouldn't have to worry about transferring files over. I ordered a Seagate 1 terabyte SATA drive, but unfortunately, it just wouldn't work. I kept getting a blue screen error, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to work. I even hooked up my original drive and slaved the Seagate to it. The result? There was none. The Seagate wasn't bing seen at all. Back to Amazon for that one, and I'm stuck doing a slow file transfer of 160 gigs of files and settings.

Windows 7 better come with hookers and ale after all I've done to try to update to it.

Oh, and as a coincidence, my brother Jason is also updating his system, but he's doing a full install. Things were going fine for him until he accidentally unplugged the computer near the end of the install. Poor guy *bigshitgrin*

Update: Robert just linked me to this comic

I've also finally... FINALLY... ported all of my old articles that have been published by third parties through the years, although none recently. Becky asked me about it years ago, so, Becky, it's finally done ^^

• my SRPG experiment is full of fail
• Champions Online violates my desire to play
• my love for Infocom can only grow stronger

you know, i have a lot more interests in my world than just video games. i swear! =P

There's so much wrong, I'm almost inclined to put the book down and not pick it up again, only I have to review it =P

This book is about how the Internet has changed the music industry, but if the author can't even differentiate between the development of WWW as just one part of the Internet... I'm scared, mommy.

P.S. Turns out that my previously described PC problems are still happening, and it's not outlet related. Upgrading the video card. Hopefully that will help =P

Around that time my computer started shutting down spontaneously. Cam and I sat down one day and we did some diagnostics, but everything seemed fine. Then I couldn’t turn my PC on. To be specific: power was going to the motherboard, fans and the like, but nothing would boot. I couldn’t even get into BIOS.

Assuming the worst, I bought new hardware: mobo, RAM, SATA (btw, I LOOOOVE new Windows installs. Very sexy). Same problem was happening, but then it went away.

This weekend I had another shutdown, and I decided to swap out the PCU. Maybe there was a power issue.

So there I am, in bed, reading my sexy kindle, when the cat runs under the bed and my computer powers down.

That’s when I realized what’s going on. I have an extension cord running from an outlet from behind my bed to my desk, where I have all the power strips plugged in. The extension cord sometimes gets loose in the outlet from the beds movement (e.g. when I change the sheets). Because it’s blocked by the bed, I don’t see it, so I didn’t even think that that would be the initial cause of my problem. Viruses can do nasty things, so I, and my friends, assumed it was virus related.

*CRIES*

I SPENT HUNDREDS OF MY MOM’S DOLLARS FIXING MY COMPUTER WHEN I JUST NEEDED TO MAKE SURE AN EXTENSION CORD WAS PLUGGED IN!!!

I mean, I’m happy with my more powerful computer, but that could have been medication money or money to help pay off my medical bills or something 

I've not yet had a lot of time to work with it as I'm pulling some OT today. The buttons will take a little getting used to, I think, as will the little control stick (the k1 has this roll thing button). It's comparatively smaller, but the K1 is angled down from the left, which makes it more ergonomic. the k2 is flat.

crisper screen, and the increased number of greys really does help. i just loaded up a NY Times front page image and it looks like a picture from the paper, not some blah image on a windows 3.x machine.

the keyboard is nicer, and when i was typing my info to register the kindle it didn't take me 9 years. page load is slightly faster, still with the black screen, tho.

my previous purchases were in a "folder" called archived (but i don't yet know if folders are an option on the k2, i don't think so but i hope so). downloading them onto the new kindle was easy, but i had to go onto the amazon site and manually set my ny times subscription to go to the k2.

amazon also doesn't track any samples you download on the customer's kindle page so i will need to go back and request the samples again.

after I spend more time with it (I named it Balthazar), I'll write up a real comparative review.

twobitgames

first two articles are up:

• designing around limitations - about the book racing the beam (Atari VCS)
• remembering the little professor