Maggiesort

In the spirit of having links I don't want to lose, Maggiesort is among the best:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zybl598sK24

Roomba long-exposure photo

I love my roomba, "Dusty". She will be vital to helping keep my new living quarters clean (no matter where that is...).

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the co-founder of iRobot at my graduation. I will have pictures up, I promise!

But, here something awesome: a long-exposure picture of a roomba cleaning:

http://gizmodo.com/5246099/long%20exposure-shot-of-a-roombas-path-shows-beautifully-organized-chaos

Enjoy :)

-Kyle

Dumping Firefox Tabs

I've been enjoying the following pages. I don't want to bookmark them, but I don't want to lose them either:

Awesome:
http://i40.tinypic.com/21c9phc.jpg
http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/7929/timemachine.jpg
My Melbournian roomie is excited about that second one...

Potentially useful in a car-buying future:
http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/845/car-shopping-on-the-offensive-8-aggressive-buying-tactics
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/hot_lists/high_performance/features_classic_cars/showroom_turncoat_comes_clean_feature/(page)/1

Bonus!

Big Month!

April has been officially crazy! Here's what's happened:

1) Passed Thesis Defense

2) Accepted Job

3) Finished and Submitted Thesis

4) Got Engaged!!!!!!!


Wooooooooooooooooooo! What an excellent month!

Soon!

Soon I will be done, meaning my thesis will be turned in and I will not be a stressful caged monkey any longer.

I have all these neat and silly things to write about, but I will only be able to tell you about them if you remain safe this week.

Safe? What's he talking about?

Saturday is Raptor Awareness Day! (Facebook) The original date was tomorrow, but it has been moved to Saturday. This is not soon enough! Just as letting the terrorists know of our plans makes us less safe, telling all the raptors out there that we are going to raise awareness of them will only bring them to act before Saturday's events are underway! Now even the stupid ones will do more than their share of hunting. Raptors are intelligent, but if I were to be hunted, I'd want to be caught by one of their smartest hunters. Like one who dressed up in human clothes to trick his roommates into a false sense of security.

Raise your awareness ahead of time. This way you will only fall prey to the most dedicated of our their kind.

And, yes, soon I will be able to talk about other neat things, like using my Neo with Linux, etcetc.

AIMbot

I decided to write myself an AIMbot. This does not mean a bot for helping me aim better in FPS games (since I've never really played much of them beyond GoldenEye and Perfect Dark), but a bot for the AOL Instant Messenger. I ran into some difficulties, and wanted to mention them somewhere so I don't have to keep all my tabs open in my Konqueror/Firefox windows. Good? Great. :-P

If I forget a step in here, I'll fix it later.

To build my bot, I went straight to the AOL source: openAIM. Sweet! They have official junks for writing bots. Perfect. Unfortunately, I had a massive problem with the openAIM web interface. Notably: whenever I clicked on a link to look at a related feature/page/forum/something, it logged me out of my account. This happened many times, to the point where I'm not sure I could log back in anymore. Also, it then redirected me to some unwanted homepage. If I tried to open the same link again, it would then bring me to the same page, but without the logged-in features. Great.

I immediately decided to work in Java. I found this page to be extremely helpful. It basically details how to get the bot up and running (in Windows) and then guides through some of the Java coding of the bot. I wasn't quite sure what to do in Linux, but I used this as a guide and tried to mimic the Windows parts with whatever Linux know-how I had. I didn't think too highly of my Linux knowledge. I'm, like, a newbie who's going on 8-years of running Linuxes instead of Windows. This was really my first foray into changing things in Linux and dabbling in the libraries, etc. I'm very proud of myself ;)

There are two issues with that windows-explanatory page (which is very good) which are not issues for everyone, but were issues for me:

1) I'm not using Eclipse. Or any kind of real environment. I've been doing my coding in KATE, the K Advanced Text Editor (yes, I'm running Kubuntu, tyvm). I know it's not as good as emacs or vim, but I get things done there. Due to this, however, I didn't know how to set up all the project stuff correctly. As it turned out, I didn't need to follow all the weird folder-creation setting that were taking place there. I wound up putting my code into the following folders:

The root of my code:

username@machine:~/Junk/accsdk_linux_rhel4x86_1_6_7/

from here I have a folder: botnameBot/

inside this, I put the build.xml file that was a part of the downloaded package and created two folders:

src/
which has my java file: botnameBot.java as well as the accbuddy file, com directory and accjwrap.jar file all provided by openAIM

lib/
which has symbolic links to the libraries mentioned later.

I wound up getting annoyed with all this distinction and finally put all the links from lib/ into the src/ directory instead. Java doesn't seem to care. I don't care :-P

The second issue here was on how to run all this junk. I'll cover that at the end.

2) I'm not using windows. Thus, I don't care about .dll files, and instead needed the linux libraries. They gave me a link to the linux install notes. This gives instructions on how to download the libraries, then, how to create the symbolic links for them. Very nice :) Unfortunately, I hate downloading packages from sites, as I prefer to use the package maintainer with kubuntu (Adept, or whatever). So, I searched on there for "nss" and found some things that looked reasonably correct.

Some of them I already had onboard. Great! However, some of them conflict with others, and some of the libraries live in places which are different from the places listed in the above link. People mentioned that on this forum. They are having trouble getting the Java version to run. There are two problems for this:

A) As mentioned, some (two) of the symlinks aren't correct. Look at the second post of the third page, which says to redirect them to /usr/lib/nss/ instead of just /usr/lib/

I did this, but I noticed that the file /usr/lib/nss/libnssckbi.so still didn't exist. Then, I went to the Internets, and googled that sucker up.

I can't find the exact same page as I did before, but I found something like this. Basically, the file was sitting in /usr/lib/xulrunner/ instead. So, I changed the symbolic link there. Done. Figuring out this was one of my proudest linux moments! (Don't laugh.)

B) I needed to set some extra library things, also as mentioned in the forum. I did those, setting the library path variable to the right place:

.../src$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.
.../src$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Finally, here are the commands used to compile and run the bot:

.../src$ javac -cp accjwrap.jar *.java
.../src$ java -classpath accjwrap.jar:. javaClassName botSN botPassWord

After that, you see the following happy messages:

ConnectingACC_S_OK
ValidatingACC_S_OK
TransferringACC_S_OK
NegotiatingACC_S_OK
StartingACC_S_OK
OnlineACC_S_OK

which tell you that you've successfully put your bot online. Yay! :)

-Kyle

Health Insurance, part 22... only half done?

Well, it turns out that I won half of the appeal. How could that happen? I have no idea. The issue, it seems, is that they're willing to overturn the previous decision on the doctor's bill, but not the hospital bill.

This is something that I actually found out about last week. Surprisingly, though, I didn't have time to deal with it all. Suffice to say, I called up the insurance, and had them explain it to me. In order to continue, I need to pursue the following logic:

1) The payment on the hospital bill had been maxed out at $5,000, which leaves about $5,000 left.

2) Although it was an outpatient procedure, the doctor decided that I needed to stay overnight in the hospital. This is apparently where the charges come from.

3) Going into the operation, I didn't see this charge coming, because it wasn't supposed to happen. Therefore, it doesn't seem like it should fall under the part associated with the surgery.

Of course, couple that with the fact that they didn't return a response to the appeal in time.

I still need to talk to the hospital and figure out how this all got charged.

The more recent news is that I'm trying to figure out how to pay for all the few-hundreds of co-payish charges from the doctor bills. Since it went to collections (and shouldn't have) it's all a complete mess. Insurance paid for something, but the doctor's office billing people couldn't tell me what that was for. Additionally, they've differentiated between the doctor and the otolarynologic foundation to the point where they can't tell me what's going on with the other bill. Still, they're connected enough that when I tried to phone the otolarynologic foundation, I somehow reach the doctor's office.

The amount that the collections people want from me is not equal to either of the amounts on my Explanation Of Benefits. Hmmm. I've called them up to have them explain this to me. We'll see what they say.

As people have mentioned to me, apparently part of the strategy is that the patients will just give up. As it is, I'm losing a lot of time working on my thesis, as I'm forced to spend entire or large pieces of the day here at home so I can make all these phone calls.

It looks like I will need to send yet another appeal. In addition, I should send more notices/complaints/something to people at my school.

Ugh.

-Kyle

Health Insurance, Part 21: Looks like a win!

For those keeping score along at home, it certainly seems like a long time since I sent in my appeal (nearly two months). After receiving my appeal, they sent me a letter explaining that they would give me a response within:

30 days for a two-level appeal process

or

30 business days for a one-level appeal process, depending on the plan.

After more than 30 days of waiting, I called them up to find out whether there was a one or two level process for my plan. The person I spoke to didn't know, but told me they would find out then call me back. I spent the next week plus playing phone tag with this person. They left messages telling me to call, but never the result. Finally I just left my own message saying, "Just tell me!" By the time they'd gotten back with that information, the 30 business days were up. The message said that it was a two-level process, and that the decision was coming soon. I almost called back to say "Too Late!!!" but I withheld. I did call back and ask about the status of my claims. Someone new said "it looks like they're all processing to pay".

Processing to pay! I thanked whoever was on the line and danced around my office. I didn't post anything here, however, only out of fear of what could go wrong.

At this point, I've received a very ambiguous letter from Chickering, a congratulatory phone call from the unaggrivating debt collectors and two EOBs from Aetna. Those Explanation of Benefits seem very promising; it looks like my part of the copays will result in around $500. I checked their website and it doesn't look like any other claims or EOBs are processing. I will start receiving these final bills soon, and I hope the ordeal will be over by the end of the month.

Once things are finalized, I would like to post redacted versions of lots of things I both sent and received.

Also, I would like to say again that I'm very lucky here, not because I was wronged here, but because I was able to take the time to wade through all the levels of mishandling beaurocracy.

Still to be done: I need to try to fix my credit, which must have taken a lot of damage...