iPhone
C just got his new iPhone yesterday, and it’s very pretty. I originally signed up to be on the list to get one, too. However, the first thing that happened was that I waited a couple of weeks got the e-mail saying it was in, but after ~40 minutes in the Apple Store it turns out that the employee who put me on the list put me down for an iPhone 3Gs, not 4, so I ended up on the back of the list. Now I keep hearing negative stuff about the iPhone. Plus a new Android phone is coming out for AT&T, and I’ve been saying for months that I’d like to get an Android phone, but there aren’t any good ones from AT&T – now that’s changed, according to the reviews I’ve read.
So for the next week or two, I’ll observer C’s iPhone and see how he likes it. I’ll play with it (when he lets me) and see how I like it. Then I’ll go into an AT&T store and try out the Android phone. And maybe soon I’ll be an Android user instead of an iPhone user.
Random Futurama quotes
We have been back to watching Futurama every night as we go to sleep, after briefly switching to The Simpsons. Using a very conservative estimate, we have watched each and every one of the original 72 episodes approximately 15 times. 20 isn’t an unreasonable estimate, or 30 for C (since he takes a while to go to sleep and thus watches more episodes per night than I do.)
For no real reason, I decided to share two of my favorite quotes that have stuck out to me recently:
From “Fry and the Slurm Factory”, episode 13 of season 1, a parody of Willy Wonka:
The Professor: Who are those horrible orange men?
Glermo: Why, those are the Grunka-Lunkas! They work here in the Slurm factory.
The Professor: Tell them I hate them!
From “Bender Should Not Be Allowed On TV”, episode 6 of season 4, during a clip from All My Circuits, a robot soap opera (and should be read in very dramatic voices):
Monique: Calculon! But I thought you were…
Calculon: Egyptian?!
The last line of each of these are new favorites of mine to throw into everyday conversation.
Health insurance: now it’s personal
I’ve heard the news stories on NPR about how ridiculous the private health care system is when it comes to insurance and billings. I’ve heard about how much time and money is spent just on getting billing figured out – teams of people at the doctors’ offices figuring out different billing codes to different insurances; more teams at the insurance companies to figure out different bills from different providers.
It never really meant a lot to me personally, because I’d been on Kaiser Permanente all my life – a private HMO. I was born at a Kaiser hospital, and was with Kaiser through my parents until I graduated from college. Then I got a job and stayed with Kaiser through my employer. You don’t worry about billing when you’re with Kaiser, because the doctors, billing and insurance are all part of the same entity. But at the end of last summer, I got married and switched jobs – so I needed to get health insurance through my husband’s job, which doesn’t provide Kaiser as an option. Instead, I’m now on CIGNA.
I needed to find a doctor fairly soon, since I could no longer get my birth control shots through Kaiser. So I went to the CIGNA website, found a recommended provider – a doctor at OHSU – and signed up for the standard introductory appointment. I had the appointment in January, and everything went fine. She gave me a prescription for Depo, got me an appointment at the office for my next shot, and everything was fine. Take note here that CIGNA recommended this doctors office as a partner on their site.
Fast forward to April, when I get my next Depo shot. I’ll just briefly mention that even though I had an appointment – the very first appointment of the day, so there was no one before me – they were still running 45 minutes late, so I had to wait 45 minutes to spend about 90 seconds in a room getting a shot.
Fast forward again to a couple of weeks ago. I get a bill from CIGNA saying that they won’t pay the $117 for the shot because I haven’t met my deductible yet. I also get a bill from OHSU saying the CIGNA hasn’t paid the $221 for the vist. So I call CIGNA, and ask why they’re saying I have to pay $117 for a Depo shot, instead of the $20 co-pay that it should be. They say that OHSU billed it incorrectly. So I call OHSU, and (after getting hung up on once) they say no, the billed it correctly, and I should have CIGNA call them. So I call CIGNA back, give them the number and they call OHSU. Then they tell me that OHSU refuses to change the billing, CIGNA refuses to pay for it, so I’m just out of luck.
At this point I give the phone to my husband, because he is very good at being aggressive in these situations – but in a constructive way, not in an “I’m really angry and going to shout at you” sort of way. He spends a while on the phone with CIGNA, without much luck, then spends another while on the phone with OHSU. The current state of things is that OHSU is going to try to work something out – but I still have no idea whether we are going to be expected to pay $221, $117 or the actual $20 deductible that our plan says a Depo shot should be.
Two of the most routine office visits possible, with a doctor that is a preferred provider for my insurance, and already I’ve spent more time working on straightening out payment than I ever did in 26 years with Kaiser. And the issue isn’t even resolved yet! So now this whole health insurance issue is personal to me. This system does not work. If this is how the private health insurance system works in what should be ideal circumstances, things are very, very broken.
In the mean time, I’m going to Planned Parenthood for my next Depo shot. They will charge me less than $221 (or $117, for that matter.) And the instant one of us gets a job that offers Kaiser as part of the benefits, we’re switching back.
Graduation thoughts
I turned my last assignment and had my last final yesterday. Overall, I’d say my finals went better than I thought they would.
With the academic year over, graduation stuff is everywhere. (Congratulations to Candice, who just finished her masters, and my brother, who graduated from PCC in Architectural Drafting!) So I thought I’d look into what sort of commencement options there will be for me when I graduate in December. As it turns out, not many. If I want to walk, I would have to do it either this August or next June. I don’t really want to walk 4 months early or 6 months late, so I guess I won’t be participating.
It’s too bad, really. I didn’t attend my undergraduate graduation, even though I could have. I kind of wanted to attend this one, though – especially if they had a smaller departmental graduation ceremony. I have worked a lot harder for this degree, since I was working a lot more hours and the classes were a lot more challenging – and I have a life outside of school in a way that I didn’t in undergrad. (You know, getting married…stuff like that…) This time it feels like a Big Deal, in the way that last time didn’t. And C really wanted to get to blow an air horn when they called my name.
The moral of the story is that I will have a really big graduation party, and I will guilt everyone into coming. You HAVE to come, because it’s the only celebration I get! <puppy eyes>
Home stretch
I’ve got a week left until I’m done with finals for this term. It’s going to be really tough – I expect all of the finals to be very challenging, plus I have a project due on next Thursday as well. I always have a really hard time motivating myself to study for finals – there’s no concrete deliverable I have to complete, I just have to “know the material”, so it’s easy to just put it off.
After finals I’m going to take a couple of days off, and then this summer I’ll be working both of my current jobs – 20 hours per week each, which adds up to full time. I am seriously excited to be working only 40 hours per week. Of course, even though I spend far more than 40 hours per week on school or work currently, it’s a bit more spread out, so I’ll have to remind myself how to do 8 hours of work per day all together.
And SUPPOSEDLY my husband will be unemployed this summer. Tuesday was originally supposed to be his last day, but his unemployment has been extended until July 1st. You’d think I’d be happy about this, but I just want him done with the job. I want him barefoot and in the kitchen, making my dinner, where he belongs. :) Seriously, though, this job has been far too stressful to be worth continuing, and we’re all ready for him to have a break to recharge and relax. I’m really hoping his employment doesn’t get extended any longer than July.
Anyway, assuming he does get laid off, between the two of us we’ll have gone from working 120 or so hours per week (in April and May) to only 40 hours. It will be soooo nice.
Impulse race
A week ago I saw a listing for the Tualatin River Trail 10 Mile run. I’d been feeling like I haven’t been running enough lately (I barely get up early enough to get in 3 miles before work in the morning and didn’t do a long run last weekend.) The race sounded pretty and, more importantly, it’s limited to 250 people. I don’t think I’ve ever run in a race of less than 1,000 people, so I was curious.
It was a lot of fun. Since I haven’t been running a lot, I wasn’t sure if I’d need to walk some of it, but I did fine. We ran through various parks and neighborhoods in Tualatin/Tigard, and it was very pretty. After about the first 2 miles, the crowd really started to separate, and there were very few people around. I was following one woman for most of the race – she’d be about 20 yards ahead of me, then I’d reach her or pass her on an uphill, and then she’d pass me on the downhill. But around mile 7, there was a long incline and I passed her…and she never caught up again. By the end I was the only runner for probably 100 yards – that’s how spaced out everyone was. It was a fun little event, and generally well-organized.
And I now know that I’m in good enough shape that I can sign up for a 10-mile race on a whim, and do just fine. Last year at this time I was training hard and nervous about running 6.2 miles, and now I can do 10 without any sort of preparation. I want to stay in this kind of shape!
No marathon
I decided a while ago, but forgot to post it here. (Not that I imagine anyone was on the edge of their seats, waiting to find out.) I’m just incredibly stressed out this term – it is a very challenging term and I’m barely going to make it to finals without going crazy. So I want to spend this summer relaxing, and I don’t want to have the stress of finding time to do a ton of miles every week. Plus C’s job is ending in June and he’ll basically have the summer off, while I work full time, so I want to make sure I have enough time to do lots of fun things with him (as well as everyone else I’ve neglected!) Add to this that I’m getting burnt out on my routes that I can run from my house without having to drive somewhere, and it just seems like it wasn’t meant to be. Instead, I’m going to sign up for another half marathon in October – probably Run Like Hell in Bend. Maybe next year I’ll try for a marathon.
From above
Yesterday, as my birthday present to C, we went to a park with C’s son and had a family photo shoot. As we were walking over to the photographer, I felt something hit my head. As it turns out, I had been pooped upon. Some bird shat on my hair and sweater and purse. Luckily, it was on the back side of me, not the front, so we won’t have pictures featuring bird poo. Good times.
Learning in action!
It’s always fun when you get to apply something you’re learning in a class to real life, right when you’re learning it.
I’m taking a Database Internals class, and we’ve spent a lot of time learning about indexes – what kinds there are, how each kind works, the pros and cons, etc. This week we learned about implementing different query operators, different kinds of joins, etc.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, indexes help to make looking up certain information in a database faster. I’ve never see the actual effect myself – all of the databases that I’ve worked with have been little toy databases of my own (with barely any data in them), or pre-established databases that already had the appropriate indexes.
Last night, C needed some help working with some data for his work. He has an ENORMOUS spreadsheet that someone gave him, but he needed to make some changes to it. It either couldn’t be done in Excel or would take a ridiculous amount of time, so he asked if I could do it with an SQL query. I couldn’t actually think of a way to do it in a single query, but I did know a simple way to do it with a PHP script running a lot of SQL queries. So we loaded the data up into a MySQL database I created for it* (and at first the file was actually too large to import into the database!) and I ran my script. It took about a minute to run, maybe a little longer. I tweaked it a bit to fix a couple of errors, and then it worked perfectly.
When finished, I decided, just for fun, to add an index to the table on one of the fields that was used a lot in the query. Then I ran the script again, and it only took ~5 seconds! This was really exciting for me – yes, I’m a nerd. I really enjoyed getting to see the results of indexing in action, just like I’d learned about – and I especially love the fact that I know exactly how and why it worked!
Also, on a side note, computers are awesome. What would take hours and hours of tedious manual labor took only a few seconds with a script and a properly-indexed database. It still boggles my mind sometimes just how fast computers really are!
*Actually, getting the data exported from Excel and into the database was the hardest part, and took a lot longer than either of us expected – partially because the Excel file was so huge that it took several minutes every time we needed to do any operation on the data to get it ready for export.
Final term
The course schedule is up for what will be my final term in grad school (Fall). But, for the first time since starting school, there aren’t any that look especially interesting! And there are very few that I am even eligible to take. There are a total of ten 500-level classes, 5 of which I’ve already taken, and 1 of which I can’t take because I’m not a Ph.D. student. That leaves me with 4 courses. And I’m going to register for 3, so rather than picking which courses I want to take, I get to pick one course not to take. It’s a good thing none of those 4 courses overlap, or my choices would be even more limited!
The good news is that, according to the CS department secretary, there are a couple of other classes that might be added. At least one of them sounds very interesting and generally useful – Intro to Computer Security. So I’m going to wait and cross my fingers that some other classes get added. If they don’t, my final term may be a bit of a let down, unless the other classes surprise me.
