Monkey Brigade, Charge!

Back to Monophasic Sleeping

2011-10-16T20:09:00.001-05:00

Monday was my last day of a polyphasic-sleeping lifestyle. On Monday evening I took my 9pm nap and refused to get up. I knew I didn't have work due on Tuesday that needed to get done and I couldn't coax myself out of bed after 30 mins of sleep. Lately, I had tried "stacking" naps on top of each other after a long sleep-drought, with some success (maybe).

As I return to a regular sleeping schedule, I REALLY want to list pros and cons I notice about polyphasic sleeping. Here are some:

Pro: time. Already I miss all my time. Where did it go?

Con: I usually run hot, but I noticed feeling chilled on the uberman schedule. I wore more clothing inside and outside. I'm already back to feeling warm again. Naturally, I was colder at night, but also during the day, even during the recent warm spell. Now I've switched back to sandals and a t-shirt. I can still tell when it's warm vs cold, but it cold weather doesn't chill me as much anymore. Perhaps I wasn't eating enough while on the schedule.

Con: naps. Naps are wonderful, but if they happen every four hours, they run interference with your life. Near the end, I seemed to be able to stretch them out, but this may have made getting up from my naps even more difficult.

Con: you feel legitimately tired many times throughout the day. Near the end of each awake cycle, you will feel sleepy. It may be gentle, but it is still your body telling you to go to bed.

Con: I gained time to work, but lost social time. Time at work, to meet with students and other faculty, and time at home to spend with my family.

If I think of more, I'll add it as a comment or another post. :)

Two Impressive Polyphasic-Sleep Weekends

2011-10-03T06:08:00.003-05:00

Before I forget any of this, I need to get it down. The last two weekends made use of the uberman sleep pattern. Here's what happened:

Just over a week ago I had potentially the biggest test of the schedule. Since wife and daughter were out of town visiting family, I decided to take a trip to Virginia to visit my college roommate and best man. Since the drive is supposed 7.5 hours long in each direction, I decided to spend FriSat and SunMon driving in order to maximize my time spent with my friend: all Saturday and Sunday. So, just after midnight on FriSat, I took off, headed for VA. I got sleepy right around the Ohio-WV border near Hocking Hills and luckily there was a rest stop right before crossing into WV. (I didn't see any rest stops anywhere in West Virginia the entire trip.) Perfect! After a half-hour I was good to go. The road started getting crazy, though, with sharp ups and downs through the smoky mountains (I was on 33 for most of it). I passed through Seneca Rocks and nearly didn't stop, then saw the State Park in that beautiful valley and stopped for a second nap. While sleeping, the sun rose and I had a gorgeous view of the rocks before I took off. I went up and down Shenandoah Mountain and arrived in Harrisonburg at 9am, much earlier than I'd expected.

Saturday and Sunday were excellent, except for the necessary naps. Also I fell asleep for about 4 hours on Saturday night. Oops! By this time I'd started not to beat myself up over these extra-long sleep periods that kept sneaking in. In fact, I'd decided just to stress out less about any of these things. This helped out the following weekend.

I drove back on Sunday in a less impressive manner. I decided to try and avoid the super-mountainy route and went south on 81 to 64 to cut through West Virginia. Despite napping directly before leaving, however, I was very tired and napped at a rest stop approximately one hour south of Harrisonburg. My next nap again came earlier than expected, and I pulled off of 64 onto a state park in WV (I don't recall the name) to nap. This kept me going until Ohio where rest stops are not rare (what the heck, WV? Also, where the junk are your Waffle Houses?). A big rain storm kicked up in the last leg home, but I made it fine.

Hurrah for the Uberman schedule for making this possible! It was great to see my friend! I realize, however, that it was also important that I felt (mostly) safe stopping and parking at state parks in the middle of the night. Seneca Rocks was pleasant and open; I could see for a long ways. The other one was a little less inviting (also it was completely dark) and I felt decidedly nervous. I'm not sure whether it was even kosher for me to drive up there and park. Hmmm.

(Also, I should mention that I slept a full 8 hours that MonTues. Oops!)

Then, just this past weekend, I travelled to Ann Arbor for the Michigan vs Minnesota game. Awesome! Prior to this, however, I had to decide whether to stay with the polyphasic schedule. If I did, it meant I would have a hard time staying awake between naps, especially during the game. Getting off the schedule, however, meant planning ahead and missing some productive nights. After an extremely productive WedThurs, I decided to stay awake for ThursFri, sleep FriSat and just not worry about it for Game Day. I'm not sure if I planned really well or what, but things definitely worked out. On Friday evening, I fell asleep around 6pm and set my alarm for 1:30am. I woke up, got half-way ready, took a nap (long sleeps don't leave you feeling totally refreshed when on this schedule) finished packing and got on the road by 4am. I stopped in a rest stop on I-75 and napped, then napped a final time when I arrived at 8am in Ann Arbor. At 8:30, I left the sleep-safety of my car and headed off to meet friends. I was parked a ways away and didn't expect to be back to my car until it was time to head home. Yikes! Still, I didn't let myself feel anxious. Instead I walked around, watched the band practice, tailgated, thoroughly enjoyed the game, tailgated again, and went shopping downtown. At the very end, I got drowsy, and returned to my car at 7pm. Ten-and-a-half hours without a nap! This is the longest I have been awake in weeks.

The trip home was a bit tough, but not bad. I sleep right then in the car, of course, and also stopped in a rest area on I-75 as well as a gas station in Urbana on US-68. There was also a break for food at a Waffle House up near Toledo. Yum!

I tried to take a series of naps after getting back to make up for my big break of sleep, but after three or four I gave in and took a long sleep. It's clear I don't always have the willpower upon getting up from a nap to shake off whatever sleepiness remains. This is the biggest signal that I'm not "built for" a polyphasic lifestyle; I have a hard time coming out of a sleep cycle.

The same thing happened last night. Again, I took a long sleep. At this point, on Monday morning, I'm not sure whether I'm going to take this opportunity to go monophasic or try to keep up with the naps and shift back to polyphasic sleeping.

3 weeks of polyphasic sleep

2011-09-16T02:12:00.003-05:00

This last week has been the toughest. Most notably, during the night I've had trouble keeping awake between naps. The worst part comes right after I wake up: I have a very hard time leaving my dream state and returning to the real world. Both I and my wife have noticed this problem. It is especially unsettling to her, because it's clear I'm not in a dependable mental state as soon as I'm awake. With a four-month old, I want to know I can be called on at any time in the event of an emergency. As a scary example: twice now I have been so muddled that I didn't know how to turn off the alarm app on my phone while it was going off. Once my wife had to come out and turn it off herself, after it had woken her up too. I may need to search for a more simple device, especially if I can find something that wakes me up, but not the rest of the house.

In the past 8 nights, I've "messed up" at least five of them, meaning I've overslept. Usually this means I decided to go back to sleep directly after a nap. If I don't realize I need to reset my alarm before doing this, it's especially dangerous. I did not experience WedThurs because I slept through it. Waking up on Thursday morning was not pleasant; I had a headache and was groggy until I napped later in the morning.

Another big con for my current mental state is that I can't trust myself to lie down without having an alarm set. 9 times out of 10, I will fall asleep. That means I can't lie down to hang out with my wife if she's feeding the baby or to watch TV. This is what happened on Wednesday evening. I convinced myself I didn't need to worry; my wife could wake me up if I fell asleep. Well, she did this, but in my sleepy state I told her it was okay and refused to get up.

On the other hand, I really don't want to give up at this point. I am still extremely productive in the evening and have been able to work on looming projects before the deadline gets too near. 1-4:30am is a wonderful quiet stretch of time I have to myself for getting work done and paying attention to the housework. Cleaning the dinner dishes has become my responsibility, and I enjoy doing this in the middle of the night when no one else is awake to mess up the water pressure, etc.

On MonTues and TuesWed, I had a new experience: after a bit of trouble arising from a nap, I hit a period of hyperactivity. On MonTues, this lasted for hours, during which time my mind was more alert than I normally am during the day. Ever. I was as awake as though an airhorn were being blown directly next to my head, without the annoying noise. :) On TuesWed, I spent this time working on writing up a worksheet for my class, which turned out to be spectacular. Naturally, I was bummed on Thursday morning when I realized I had slept through WedThurs.

In all, it seems that I'm not getting enough sleep. I've been reading through some of Steve Pavlina's early polyphasic posts, and this helps me get some hints about how to cope. He got onto the schedule easily within 2-3 weeks.

My wife and I sat down tonight and discussed how to judge whether this project is successful. We agreed that the big test is being able to wake up and exit my dream state immediately. If I can't turn off my alarm reliably, I can't make decisions right away. (And any discussion I have with my wife will probably freak her out.)

Here are my plans:

* 25 minute naps instead of 20. This actually means I will set the timer for 25 minutes, not that I will necessarily sleep that long. I think 20 is a bit dangerously small, especially since I don't always necessarily fall asleep immediately. I am already interested to see whether I will come out of my naps better. I don't know why I hadn't considered this before; I was doing 25 minutes before (back before school started, maybe?) and I don't recall having the same trouble escaping naps. I may even need more time than others if I'm still having some trouble with apneas. Actually, I've had a lingering cough for a while now, and that has been aggravating my asthma when I lie down. This change could make a big difference.

* Sleep on the Sabbath. Byebye FriSat. I'm going to sleep instead. I observe the Sabbath---in my own way (sorry, Grandma)---and thus I'm not working during FriSat anyways. I think historic polyphasic sleepers threw in some 8-hour sleeps, though I don't know how often. We'll see how this goes.

* A long nap in the middle of the night. This gets a little closer to resembling the Everyman sleep schedule (as opposed to the Uberman, which I've been attempting). 2 or 3 hours of sleep as a long nap. Currently, my last sleep was one of these. I had a really hard time getting up from the long "nap" but I have not experienced the same drowsiness that I have had trouble with the past week+. (Unfortunately, I'm not experiencing the hyper-mode mentality, either.) This is the change I'm least excited about; it nearly doubles the amount of sleep I will get each day and seems to stray most from the Uberman routine I so want to adopt.

One thing I notice a bunch is how much I wish more was known about these sleeping habits. Although it's kind of fun to do something so unconventional (what a great discussion topic!) especially alone in the middle of the night, I wish more was known about what I'm doing. What are the health risks? How long should it actually take me to fully adopt the schedule? How will I know when I'm in the Uberman Zone? Is there a chance this is speeding up my aging? Are my telomeres in danger?

I kind of wish there was more support for being polyphasic. It would be great to go to a convention and hang out with other polyphasic sleepers for 21 hours a day and get tips from them. I get the feeling this might be a bunch easier if I were keeping the same schedule as a buddy or something.

TL;DR Been drowsy the past week. I'm not giving up, but I'm going to add in some more sleep.

Two tough nights than an easy one!

2011-09-04T05:10:00.003-05:00

Day is breaking on Sunday morning. It's been storming all night long, but I have been awake without problem. I nearly forgot about my 1am nap and felt like the 5am one was unnecessary. I'm glad I hit them both, but this has been the easiest night to stay awake by far.

The past few nights leading up to this were off-putting, however. On Thursday I had a doctor's appointment; I had to go WedThurs without any food or water and then had to drink a bunch of chalky white dye on Thursday morning so the machines could take good pictures. This dye has given me cramping and back pain ever since. On ThursFri, I could barely stay awake. I think my body kept trying to convince my brain to lead us over to the sofa to lie down and recover. It finally worked; I don't remember anything after 4:45, but at 7am I woke up and realized I needed to get in to work!

In the middle of Friday, the cramps came back, and I was feeling overly drowsy. I fell asleep in the evening for a few hours accidentally, then received some minimal prodding to get me to sleep the rest of the night. I woke up at 5:30 on Saturday morning. Oops.

I could barely sleep on Saturday (First week of college football!) but I managed to lie down for all my naps, and usually got ~5 or so minutes of sleep. I was not sure how the night would go.

And yet, somehow, SatSun went just fine. Better than expected, even. I got the most work done of any night so far.

Let's hope this continues through the day today!

Trouble in Night 6

2011-09-01T00:41:00.002-05:00

I am currently keeping myself awake the seventh night in this uberman attempt. By the morning, I'll have gone a full week without a "regular" sleep cycle. Awesome. I am still not as productive at night as I want to be. Staying awake is a bit more difficult if you know you're going to spend your time attacking a pile of work. Oh well.

Last night was really tricky, and I wanted to point out all the pitfalls I hit. Basically, I stayed up late to play some Magic, pushing my 9pm nap back to nearly 11:30pm. Oof! I made some terrible play mistakes at the very end that cost me dearly! Still, it was super fun to play, and it was nice to think that I had some real freedom in stretching out the cycles.

I realized I was deluding myself. Although these stretches are apparently possible later on, I wasn't quite at that point yet. I hit the hay for my 2am nap, but woke so confused that I almost went back to sleep. Luckily, I would have set the alarm again, but even more fortunately, my wife explained to me that I had already taken the nap; a second one was not a good idea. This is a real problem: rising from a nap so confused that I don't understand it is time to get up and try to get back to bed.

The trouble was not over, however. I was so tired, that I fell asleep sitting up in a chair. I recall looking at the clock around 2:40am and then remember jolting awake at 3:50. Oops! That's the longest I had slept in a long time!

Then things got worse. I somehow found my way back to the bed without an alarm set. I didn't wake up until Liv got me up, too late for me to watch the baby while she goes to her workout. Normally I am her alarm in the morning... oops! When I was awake, I was in a deep confusion and had a real hard time shedding my dream state. This is extremely frightening: when I try to defend or explain what I'm thinking, when I'm thinking about outlandish notions that were prevalent in the dream. I wish I knew how to better deal with this, but when in this midway mindset, you really don't want to lose your dream and are completely convinced that it has merit in reality. Yesterday morning I told Liv something about how I would have been better equipped to stay awake if I had friends willing to fold themselves into a short wall I could lean against. Something like that. Odd.

I'm not sure where I most went wrong, but I'm not planning on stretching out the cycles any more until I am much further into the schedule. We'll see how that goes.

Uberman Sleeping

2011-08-28T05:49:00.002-05:00

I've done some major experimenting with altering my sleep habits lately, and I am realising how helpful it will be to have a log of what I'm doing, so here goes.

Short version: I'm working on changing my sleep schedule so that I only get ~2 hours of sleep per day. If it works, this will be accomplished by taking six 20-minute long naps every day. This is known as the Uberman schedule, a form of polyphasic sleeping. Normal sleep cycles yield about 90 minutes of REM sleep per night, but by training your body with some sleep deprivation, you can jump right into REM sleep in each nap and accumulate a similar total over the course of a day.

As with all dangerous ideas that get in my mind, I read about this stuff in multiple places on the Internet. Links: Wikipedia, Steve Pavlina, who did a really good job logging his own experience.

I started about three weeks ago, went for nearly two weeks, but then fell off it due to sickness. I think my first night without a big sleep was August 6th, but on the night of August 18 I had to get a full night of rest because I was running a fever. Those first two weeks were tough. They started off well, but got a bit wearisome. It apparently takes about two to three weeks before it's not a nightly struggle to stay up. It seemed to be getting more difficult for me as time passed, though. There is the possibility that I was getting sick and didn't notice it until very late. Right now I'm very interested in how to stay on the schedule if I do get ill and need to sleep for a protracted period.

The motivation for this experiment is perhaps obvious: Time. The summer was winding down faster than I'd hoped, and I still had lots to do to prepare for the coming semester. As a new dad, I want to be both selfish (spend time with my daughter) and selfless (help take care of the house) when I'm at home. Instead I realized I was going to be keeping up with my classes. When I first started the polyphasic schedule---and got the okay from my wife---my stress level dropped to near zero. Even though my first attempt failed in less than two weeks, the health benefit of not being continuously stressed about having time for everything is enough to push me a second time.

So, three days ago I started again. WedThurs (I am referring to nights by the days they span) of this past week was my last night of regular sleep. I stayed up all ThursFri (aside from naps at 9pm, 1am and 5am) and functioned nearly normally on Friday. FriSat wasn't quite as productive; I had to add a few extra naps (potentially the best way to overcome off-schedule sleepiness) and at the very end of Saturday I had a hard time falling asleep.

I'm currently emerging from SatSun, and this has been one of the best nights I've had. There was a bit of a mix-up with my 1am nap; I accidentally overslept. I think I was overtired heading in to the nap and it didn't quite get it done. I probably turned off my alarm but lay back down in bed. Oops! Dangerous! When I awoke again, I was extremely confused---emerging directly from a strong dream can be very tricky---and it took me a few minutes to get my head on straight. Unfortunately, I was still very tired. My ever vigilant wife convinced me I needed to force myself to get out of bed, so I set the alarm clock further away and took an extra recovery nap at 3am (I hope I didn't oversleep tonight).

I took another nap at 5am, and now I do not feel tired at all. I expect that around 9 I'll feel the usual gentle tug to take my next nap.

My experience from last time is that in the first week it's normal to alternate between good and bad nights, and it seems like Steve Paulina had a similar time. To stay awake between night-time naps, I find it helps to listen to loud music on my headphones. Hopefully this tactic combined with the fact that I was nearly there just over a week ago will help me get acclimated rapidly.

Now it's time to go clean up the yard before my next nap.

Pre-Calculating the cost of my next op

2011-08-17T06:36:00.001-05:00

Okay, it looks like I'm going to have another operation sometime soon here. This time I am determined to find out how expensive this procedure will be ahead of time. How much will I be paying out of pocket? If there is any legitimacy to our health care system, I should be able to figure that number out.

Here's my plan of attack:

* Call provider where service will take place to find out cost of procedure.

* Call Doctor who ordered the test and see whether I should expect any other bills for this op.

* Call insurance to see how they would negotiate that, etc. Have them help me determine final cost, from deductible, max out-of-pocket, etc.

This seems like a huge hassle, but I'm very curious to know just how difficult it is... assuming I can get a straight answer at each of these steps.

Works: roomba CHM... the new one

2011-07-12T17:16:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I tried to clean out my old roomba chm gearbox a bunch of months back. This worked for a little bit, but then the clicking sound came back. Figuring I knew what to do, I opened it up and saw that something had gotten bent. There was not way for me to fix this.

So I ordered the replacement part, simultaneously weighing the benefit of not actually vacuuming with the expense of time and money to maintain roomba. Is this actually worth it? (Despite it being fun, that is.) The new part arrived quickly: a green gearbox---complete with brushes---to replace the old red one.

I immediately noticed the new brushes inside. Woah! The big brush is far more durable and easier to clean than the old ones. I'm not sure if there's any actual difference with the gearbox itself, but this brush is far better than the old. I still recommend having a small pair of scissors (I got some beauty scissors or something) to help clean the brushes out, but I'm way happier with this. I think this brush will last longer than the two previous brushes I went through.

Doesn't work: phone

2011-06-30T12:11:00.001-05:00

I got my first cell phone, a verizon free phone, in 2003 and hated it. I replaced that in 2005 for a sidekick 2, which I loved. Sucky web browser, but great everything else. I wasn't expecting good web browsing then, so I was very satisfied. It finally died in 4 years; not bad. I replaced it with a used sidekick id, as I needed a replacement right away. That didn't go so well, mostly because t-mobile does not have good coverage at my new office in Ohio.

So, last summer, I upgraded to a motorola droid. I love a lot of things about this phone, but it's clearly malfunctioning. When returning to the home screen (launcher) it suddenly decided to clear all my icons. I went back through my apps and created a new "desktop" full of icons. A few weeks later, it brought back my old icons so there were two layers. My launcher was an illegible mess, especially when I tried to move icons around. I fought through to remove the old icons that had reappeared. Later, the icons disappeared again. At this point, a friend recommended the Launcher Pro app. This has solved the problem, except that it often hangs when loading the icons and shortcuts. That's pretty annoying.

I've also had random shutdowns, which I assume is a related problem.

I brought the phone into the store once, but the kid only told me I should shut the phone off, so he just did, without asking me. This closed all the windows in my browser, though he told me after it shouldn't have. He then said my problems should be solved. They weren't.

Other symptoms have included very slow-loading apps (such as maps), a stingy market (it would tell me it was downloading apps and updates, but never install them) and GPS that works fine except when I started driving navigation. Some of these are still issues, but I don't always use all these things.

I still love having this phone (I'm writing this post on it; hooray Blogger app!), but I'd really like it to last for 3 more years and not frustrate me at random times. Let's hope Google fixes this on the software side!

Something that works: car seat + car

2011-06-30T01:14:00.001-05:00

I'm pretty tall---nearly 6'7" (2 meters)---so when our first baby was on the way, it was time to switch out the 99 VW Golf to find something that would accommodate us as well as a newborn car seat. I still can't believe I fit in that golf as well as I did!

We looked at a bunch of cars and seats. Often, the drivers seat of the car was fine, but the passenger seat was not okay for my legs. This happened in a Honda Element, two different Toyota Prius models and every different minivan we checked out. In an elantra touring wagon (we like the wagon/hatchback style over a sedan) I didn't even fit in the driver's seat.

Since the golf had been such a good car, we also checked out the 2010 VW Jetta Sportwagen (TDI). Even if you're not planning on adding children, this is a great vehicle for tall drivers and passengers; I can drive comfortably with the seat in the not-quite-all-the-way-back position. Matching this up with a car seat was a bit more tricky, but we really lucked out on timing.

A new infant seat had just arrived: the Graco Snugride 30. This fits great in the middle of the backseat with both front seats pulled pretty far back. We could even probably push them all the way and squeeze around the car seat if necessary. The snugride helps make this possible by allowing the handle to safely be up over the baby while traveling instead of needing to be behind their head. I don't know why the behind-the-head position is normally required, it's an annoying restriction normally.

So, for simple math: graco snugride 30 + 2010 VW Jetta Sportwagen = comfy 6'7" new parent.

We'll have to see what happens when it's time to find a convertible seat that fits...

Roomba CHM gearbox cleaned

2011-01-05T22:49:00.003-05:00

I was about to order a new CHM for my Roomba. I had read somewhere this was what I needed to do if it kept saying "Please remove and clean roomba's brushes" even after I'd done just that. Luckily, I couldn't remember what the CHM was called (I still don't know what it stands for) so I had to look it all up again.

I happened upon this blog post, explaining that you can clean it out instead:

Please Remove and Clean Roomba's Brushes

This will definitely prove useful in the future when I need to look these directions up again.

I really love Dusty, my roomba, but I hate when she's not running properly. Each time I learn a new trick, it's wonderful, but it often comes at the expense of having a poorly-vacuumed floor while I'm diagnosing the problem or waiting for a new part to come in.

Note to self: When upgrading Kubuntu...

2011-01-05T21:59:00.004-05:00

Twice now WICD has saved me from the terror that is network-manager. Every time I upgrade my version of Kubuntu, it always seems to think I want knetworkmanager to run instead. Then someone rides a bike within a mile of my house and the wireless connection is lost. Killing the manager isn't even enough, for some reason KDE doesn't stop trying to pay attention to it. If it has messed up my wireless connection, the only way I know to fix it is to reboot. Not rebooting is the biggest reason my roommate got me to use Linux back in college.

So, note to self:

When upgrading Kubuntu, uninstall the package: "network-manager" and let wicd do the talking.

Hopefully it won't reinstall it in the next upgrade, but we'll have to see.

Maggiesort

2009-06-02T17:16:00.001-05:00

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

2009-05-29T13:34:00.002-05:00

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

2009-04-28T10:17:00.002-05:00

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!

2009-04-28T10:11:00.002-05:00

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!

2009-04-16T08:22:00.002-05:00

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

2008-06-05T18:37:00.002-05:00

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?

2008-04-10T09:38:00.002-05:00

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!

2008-03-20T10:28:00.002-05:00

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...

Insurance, part 20 (or, the end of dealing with Argent)

2008-03-04T18:50:00.002-05:00

First note: I'm still waiting to hear back about my appeal. The deadline for the insurance company is fast approaching. I'm shocked they haven't gotten back to me yet!

Second note: I think I'm done with dealing with Argent. I settled things with them by sending them less than $12. My evaluation of them is that it's a pretty sleazy way of doing business. I know their job is to hunt down people that owe money to health care services, but they certainly have no intention of giving their victims a chance to actually figure out what's going on. They just want to get their money, and are only interested in claiming it from one source. Now that the story's been completed here, here's how it went:

1) They send me a bill, so I give them a call. They had gotten the account from the Pathologist, who had failed to send me a bill themselves (wrong address, see previous posts). Since I hadn't seen a bill from anyone I had done any business (should it really be considered 'business'?) I was hoping they could explain this to me. I asked whether they could prove to me that it was a real bill, and not just someone asking me for money. The woman on the phone started yelling at me, so I asked for the phone number of the people who had given them the bill. She claimed not to have it. At this point, I should have hung up, assuming that someone was just trying to wrangle money out of me. Luckily I didn't, and I scoured the Internet until I found the pathologist's number myself, confirming the bill.

2) I solved the issue with the pathologist, which took criminally long. During this time, I had to contact Argent again, each time they would complain that the account had been active for a long time. That was far out of my hands, though, and there was nothing I could do about that.

3) Somehow Argent reduced the total from $5-hundred-something to $4-hundred-something, and sent me another bill. I quickly responded by calling the pathologist; something was up here! They confirmed that the bill should be around $12, and promised to contact Argent and have it sorted out. They said Argent would send me another bill with the corrected amount. This was in January of 08.

4) I get a call, last week, from Argent. I called back when I got the message. "You have a bill for $12..." "Okay, I was waiting for you guys to mail me something." "We're not going to mail you for a $12 bill. It costs almost that much to mail you the bill." Are you kidding me? The guy wanted me to pay over the phone, clearly, which I wasn't about to do. The guy asked why I hadn't paid yet, and I explained that the pathologist had told me they would send me a bill. "Oh, you hadn't paid yet because they had told you that." Me: "Yes." Obviously. What else was I supposed to do? If you want me to pay a bill, send me the bill with the CORRECT AMOUNT. I should have demanded that they send me the correct bill, but the guy said I could just mail a check, so I did. Today. Now, hopefully it's over.

5) A big Screw You! to the people at Argent that tried to get me to pay these huge bills I obviously should not have been responsible for. I don't mind being hounded for money they are trying to collect, but I do mind them preventing me from resolving the issue correctly (by not giving me the pathologist's address, by sending me a bill for $4-hundred-some dollars which the pathologist didn't understand and by not sending me a bill for the actual, correct amount). Screw you.

Okay, I guess that was more than a note. It seems that I should probably send the pathologist a complaint about Argent, which they advised at one point if things were going really poorly.

Still, success: I'm done with Argent, and I resolved a $5-hundred-some bill. Sure, it was the smallest, but it was still one of the many issues I've had here. Hurrah!

-Kyle

Insurance, Part 19

2008-02-07T11:06:00.000-05:00

A lot of my issues with health care billing and so forth last year came from the fact that my address was taken down incorrectly when I went through registration for my surgery. (I want to rant on this, but I won't.) My street address was misspelled by two letters (the first two, unfortunately) and thus plenty of bills never reached my doorstep.

I was certain I had given my address correctly (how could I not?). Well, it seems there might REALLY have been some issue with taking down my address.

I'm starting to go through another medical procedure, and thus made another trip to the Boston Medical Center, just this morning. Of course, I went through registration again. I handed over my ID, and they fetched my street address from their database. For some reason, the administrator had to reenter that into a new form. A frown crossed her face: "The computer doesn't like your address."

Are you serious?!??!

She verified the spelling. It was correct. I made sure she had the correct town, which she did. I wanted to scream while she figured out some trick to enter my actual address. This must have been the problem last year. The computer didn't take my address, and was somehow assigned to something else instead. Argh. At least that mystery is (partly) solved now.

Insurance, Part 18

2008-01-24T12:31:00.000-05:00

I sent the appeal on Friday, at the very end of the day. I was supposed to contact the otolaryngologist billing office after sending out the appeal. We had a long weekend, but I returned to the city on Tuesday. That day, I found a notice from a collection agency that my bill with them had been moved to collections.

I immediately called the otolaryngologist. I asked why my account had been moved, and they said it had been on hold too long.

I wish I could disagree with them, but I hate the fact that this has gone on over a year!

I said I had just sent the appeal. They told me I would have to contact this new non-Argent collection agency. (Peter Roberts & Associates)

Ugh.

I just did that. This time I was not greeted with haste and annoyance. I explained my situation and the guy said, "oh, well let's put this on hold then!" I didn't expect that! I asked whether I should send them a copy of my appeal. "That would be great! We have some people here who can help put pressure on the insurance company, blahblahblah..."

Wow! Okay, great! :-P

I'll let you know how that turns out. Right now I'm planning to send copies of my appeal to the following people:

1) This agency.

2) The Otolaryngologist.

3) BUMC

4) Someone at BU in charge of this kind of junk. For this last one I'll write a long cover letter.

More later!

-Kyle

Insurance: Part 17

2008-01-18T16:27:00.000-05:00

Dang. I really don't know what's been happening now.

I got another letter from Argent in the mail today. Just now. I had a few minutes, so I figured I'd call.

Call Argent? No! What would they be able to tell me? "We want your money."?

This bill says it's from the Pathologist again. Okay. But it's neither the $500-some charge it was before, nor the $11 that I actually owe the pathologist. Well... what is it, then? $400-some dollars. Where does this come from? Quick call to the pathologist's billing office. Two points:

1) I ask about my current address. They still don't have it correct. I fix it. Apparently we're only fixing one letter at a time.

2) I ask about this bill. She says, "well, you still have a charge with us, and it's in collections." I ask: "And how much should I owe them, 'cause I have an explanation of benefits which shows I owe $11?" Her: "Well, how much is the bill they sent you for?" Me: "$400-some". Her: "What? I'll forward this explanation of benefits on to them so they can send you the correct bill." Me: "So they'll send me a bill, not you?" Her: "Yes, well it's gone to collections. It's been there almost a year!" At this point I wanted to scream, since I have done nothing but try to get this bill out of collections, where it should never have gone. Instead I say "Okay, thanks. Have a good weekend."

On another note, I sent my appeal today. I hope it gets taken care of soon; I'm tired of this nonsense!

Insurance: Part 16

2008-01-10T10:51:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long delay in posts. I know there are people keeping up with this now! Wooo! Thanks for reading, and sorry this is so horrible and boring.

It looks like things might actually be coming to an end. Here's the news:

I received the Explanation of Benefits from this Pathology bill at the end of November (11/29/07, to be exact). A real one. One which didn't simply say "We don't pay for routine examinations". The amazing thing is: this one they covered!

Wow! All I have to pay now is a little over eleven dollars. It took me nearly a whole year, but trying to figure out what was going on saved me over $500. I wish I could say that the time I took off working was worth that amount. It's hard to say when you're a graduate student.

Well, I just opened that bill yesterday. Why so late? 1) I assumed they had denied it and 2) I didn't have time to start writing the appeal until yesterday.

Yes, that's right, I'm writing my appeal to the insurance company. That's the other big news. I hope to send it out by the weekend. Later I'd like to post it up here somehow.

In any case, I guess it paid off a bit to be vigilant. I'm glad I never caved to the Argent people! I will continue to keep you updated... if anyone is still reading this ;)

-Kyle

Insurance Junk, part 15

2007-10-29T10:58:00.001-05:00

Okay, this merits its own post, since I need to keep this as a record for myself.

First, I called the BMC. They like my explanation just fine (surprisingly!) and told me they could put a 30-day hold on my account (the computer won't do anymore than that). They said to call back when they get in touch with me again. They were very nice on the phone, so no problem.

I had gotten a letter from the BMC, but also from the Otolaryngologist, so I opened that up to call them back. I was in for another surprise: the charge here was a new amount! One might think that this was due to some sort of interest or something, except this charge is lower! Crazy!

So, I called up, now being very curious on top of wanting to explain my situation (again). It seems that one of the pieces, an $830 charge on the bill was backed out and resubmitted to insurance because they found a better procedure code to submit with. Wow! This was submitted to Aetna between 9/13 and 9/17.

I asked exactly what I should do now, and the person there (who has helped me through this mire for the past 10 months) simply said I should call back after I hear from insurance.

Now, for my own benefit, here's the sequence of events that needs to occur and what I need to do:

1) Hear back from Aetna about Otolaryngologic bill.

2) Hear back from Aetna about Pathologist Bill.

3) Make sure everything's in order, then submit appeal to Aetna.

4) Call Otolaryngologist to update them.

5) Who knows? I hardly understand how this works!

Awesome.

Health Junk, 14

2007-10-29T10:31:00.000-05:00

Updates are apparently what this is all about. In fact, there are apparently some people reading this, and enjoying the ride of pain that is me trying to figure this out. Glad I can bring smiles to someone :-P (Please feel free to comment if you're enjoying this!)

Well, after still not hearing from the Pathologist Billing people, I called them back this morning. Huge update: Yes the code change had gone through! Hurrah! (Sure, they decided not to call me to let me know the good news, but... why keep the patient in the loop? (I had asked to be let know immediately, every time I called them!!!))

So, now the following things need to happen:

1) hear back from the insurance. Apparently this should take around 30-45 days.

2) Receive the new Explanation of Benefits from insurance. (Is this how I'll hear back? Who knows. Communication in any form with me hasn't exactly been top notch here.)

3) File an appeal of the way my claim was handled.

4) Crawl in a corner and expect them to deny it.

5) Find myself in a horrible hole of debt. Awesome.

I will now go and call all these other people that have sent me letters asking "Where's our money?" I don't blame them; the operation was ten months ago. How am I supposed to explain that it just now looks like my claims are going to be billed correctly? Especially when these bills are not from these people that want their money.

Ugh.

More later. Apparently in 30-45 days.

Health Insurance 13

2007-10-12T09:21:00.000-05:00

On September 20th, I got a message from the pathologist billing saying the account had been brought up with coding and there was a hold put on the account with collections. Okay, I sorta knew that already.

It's been three weeks since then (they were supposed to get back to me in two, which they did, but I hadn't heard from them in another three)
so I just called them up.

I don't really mean to be confrontational on the phone, and I don't exactly think that I was. It's likely that dealing with any of this puts one's nerves on edge, however. The conversation when like this:

"Hello, I was told to get in touch with you if I hadn't heard back in three weeks."

"Okay, well, we left a message for you on the 20th."

"Yup, I got that."

"That's when we sent out your request to coding. It should take about a month from them to hear back."

"Oh. Do you know why it took so long to get to collections?"

"Well, we sent it out on the 20th. We don't have any record of sending it out before then."

"I called back in August..."

"We see a call from you in the first week of September. Oh, and we apparently put it in the bin on August 27th." [she might have said the 25th; I don't recall]

She quickly changed the subject from the fact that my request was sitting in some elusive bin for nearly a month: "Once it's in coding, we can't do anything until we get the response from them. You should get a call in the next week and a half."

"Okay, thanks, bye."

Once I have time to get on the phone and call people again, I'll get to explain to multiple parties that the thirty day extension on each of these bills was completely used up between transfers of my request, from one party to another.

More later.

Health Insurance, part 12

2007-09-17T08:57:00.000-05:00

I just called the pathology billing people again, this time using the account number they had finally given me. I didn't have any time to call last week, unfortunately, so I called them this morning. They said the reason Argent was still getting in touch with me was that the process of removing a claim from collections often takes a month or so. Why the heck is that?

I asked also whether the coding change had taken place. No dice. They said to call back in two weeks if I still hadn't heard.

Health Junx, part 11

2007-09-06T09:31:00.000-05:00

Quick note, since this is my personal method of keeping track of all this info.

Argent called me today, essentially asking me what's up with my charge. I asked whether the pathologist had been in touch with them. No, they said they hadn't. Argh!!! No wonder things aren't getting taken care of! I asked the Argent lady whether she wanted the pathologist's number (last time I had asked them for the number, they hadn't had it, so perhaps they would want to call them now and help get it sorted out, ya think?). "No, that's not necessary." Apparently what is necessary is to keep not trusting me and telling me I need to deal with this thing. I'm sorry I didn't call yesterday when I said I would, but the pathologist billing office said they would call instead and that that would be better. Awesome.

I should next try to figure out why the pathologist didn't call Argent, but I don't have time to do it today. I'm leaving tonight for the weekend, so it'll have to be taken care of next week. Ugh.

I'm glad I get to deal with the lack of communication between these two groups, neither of which I knew even existed four months after my operation.

More later, obviously.

Dealing with Health Junx, part 10

2007-09-05T08:13:00.001-05:00

Part 10? Are you serious?

This is a good one, though. One call to the Pathology billing, and Emily from their office said, "Wait, the bill collectors shouldn't be calling you anymore. Your account should be on hold with them." She said she would call them back and work things out. I've decided not to call Argent back, as it seems every time I talk to them, they do something out of line with what I'm trying to get accomplished.

Emily said that the review on the coding for my bill had been started, on August 27th, and the entire thing should be completed in at most 30 days. She also gave me my account number with them, should I need it in the future.

I also got a message from BMC's special billing office, so I called them back. They said they wanted the money from my bill. I explained my situation (again) and they said they could give me a month (so I have until Oct. 5th) to figure it out. I said that might not be enough time, as I wouldn't necessarily have the appeal filed by then if I don't hear back from the pathology billing in time. Unfortunately, they seem to think I'm avoiding them. That might seem reasonable, until you remember I asked them for my bill in the first place.

I think a lot of these places will be happy when I can finally say to them, "I filed the appeal on blahblahday." I hope that happens soon.

-Kyle

Dealing with Health Insurance, Part 9

2007-09-04T14:04:00.000-05:00

I just talked to Diedre (spelling?) from Argent (bill collectors). For my own use, that number is: 1-800-422-1364 x6355. They said that as of August 28, the bill had been rejected by the insurance. Why was it rejected? The code had had the operation listed as a routine procedure.

Routine? This was the exact problem that I had had before, and that I'd been working since the spring to fix! Argh! The pathologist billing office (I don't know how to get in touch with the actual pathologist) had told me:

1) This was not a routine procedure and shouldn't be getting billed as such.

2) Nothing the bill collectors could do would cause this to be messed up.

Clearly one of those two things is happening. The plan is to call the pathologist back tomorrow, then call Argent and try to explain to them what's going on.

Ugh.

-Kyle

This is what makes College Football so great... unfortunately!

2007-09-01T19:22:00.000-05:00

Hi. I'm a college football fan. More notably, a Michigan Wolverines fan.

I've been pretty excited about the beginning of this season for the past 8 months, ever since watching the Big Ten crumble during Bowl Week in January.

Well, the unthinkable has happened. Michigan lost their opening game, 34-32, against Appalachian State, a AA team (albeit, the AA National Champion for the past two years). We are the laughing stock of the NCAA right now, and it is certainly laughter that is well-deserved. Very few Wolverines showed up to play today, and every single Mountaineer came with the full desire to win.

I've heard a lot from people I know about high-end college teams scheduling fluff teams to play during the season. They think it's disgraceful. Well, today we have seen just how awry things can go in college ball. This is why I love this sport. Every week is do-or-die. Michigan forgot this, and they have perished.

I will not place any blame in this post. I will say that Mike Hart had an amazing game, and the team should continue to play strong, if only to bolster his Heismann chances (and Mesko's too, of course!). Nono, today I am here to defend college football's practice of scheduling these "cupcake" games, though after today's debacle, this defense is likely not needed by many, even the most stalwart NFL-only lovers.

I'm a mathematical monkey, so we'll start by explaining our assumptions and/or concessions.

First, I concede that the college season is short. I don't think there's anything that can really be done about this, mostly because these players are, in fact, students. Yes, I hear all the arguments about how they are not performing real college degrees, etcetc. I can't argue for or against this point, and I'm sure it varies from school to school, but there are certainly players hoping to graduate and get a real degree from these universities.

Secondly, the BCS system needs revamping. Being a computer-science monkey, I think 1) it should be determined whether a REAL and FEASIBLE ranking algorithm exists which satisfies some real, universal traits everyone can agree upon. If it exists, then 2) Voting should be removed from the system, and the algorithm put in place.

Okay, who knows whether we'll even need those assumptions. Here goes.

NFL-only fans seem to claim that these cupcake games are disgraceful. Big teams, such as Michigan, schedule two or three games against teams which they assume they will win. Very seldom is this not the case. These games are played at the big team's stadium, seriously off-balancing the number of home games played (Michigan has 8 home games, in a 12-game season this year).

Seems unfair, yes? Well, I'll attempt to unprofessionally defend the unbalanced number of home games first. As I understand it, the smaller teams are usually willing to come play on the big teams' home turf, as they will reap a large portion of the revenue from the game. Big teams have huge stadiums, thus this revenue comes as a boon to the visiting smaller schools.

Remove those 2 games, and the schedule is 6 home and 4 away, far more balanced. Not perfect, but better.

Still, those games are a cake-walk. In a time of teams striving to schedule 12 games, many teams are still scheduling these teams instead of replacing one of these fluff teams with a stronger opponent.

Arguing this from the NFL-perspective comes with a price, however. The NFL has a preseason, college does not. If you asked NFL teams whether they would like to replace preseason games with real games, they would certainly disagree. This is the same reason college teams do not want to replace their "fluff" games with difficult opponents. Even though tougher opponents would help their strength-of-schedule, college teams need some time to see their team on a low-risk field. In the NFL, the only risk of preseason games is injuries. In college, big teams can actually lose these games, just as happened today.

Thus, it seems to me that the Cakewalk-Games-Make-College-Football-Dumb argument is only valid if you are also an advocate for banishing preseason NFL games.

Please discuss!

Any harassment due to Michigan's loss today is painful, but likely well-deserved. We are the laughing-stock of the nation, and that's just the way it is. Anything can happen in college football, and it happened today, with dreadful results. No more National Championship for Michigan this year, and we're only one game into the season.

There are still plenty of things to cheer for, however. Michigan will still face all its grand rivals this year, and we can only hope for the best. Mike Hart still has Heismann possiblities, and it will be good to see whether the defense can be reassembled. I'm going out to the Oregon game next week, which will be excellent!

It's STILL great to be a Michigan Wolverine :) Go Blue!

Dealing with Health Junx, part 8

2007-08-24T08:46:00.000-05:00

This past week, since my last post, I received a call from the BUMC Otolaryngologic people, and I talked to them about my dilemma. They have extended my account by 90 days, starting from August 20th. This is getting dangerously close to spilling over into 2008! Ugh!

I'm calling the pathologists now, since I haven't heard from them this week (and they said I should hear back from them).

That was mostly painless. It sounds like my account has been put on hold with Argent (they will call me back to confirm this). The lady said that something would be decided in about 30 days, not a week, as I had been hoping. The writing of my appeal has been delayed even further :-\

Ugh.

-Kyle

Dealing with Health Insurance, part 7

2007-08-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

Quick note:

I was just called by Argent, the bill collection people. No, wait, before I write this, I need to talk to the pathologist billing people again, if at all possible.

Calling...

And done. Likely what happened is that since the pathologists had asked my collection account to be flagged, they decided to call me. Instead of just asking me what was up, they acted like I was about to run out of time. Naturally, the lady was very short with me, since I'd had an account with them since April. I asked many times whether this call had to do with the fact that I had just talked to the Pathology office today, but this question was never answered. Instead, she asked other questions of me. Then, she told me she was going to resubmit my claim to insurance. She said she had done that in June (Chickering said no resubmissions had ever been made when I talked to them this morning) but would try it again.

After we were done, I realized that their resubmission might overwrite the resubmission pathology was going to make today. I don't want them to interfere; Pathology's submission will change the code and hopefully fix things! So, as I wrote above, I just then called the pathology people. They said not to worry, their submission would take precedence. They also answered the question the collection people did not: they had probably called me because pathology had asked today for the hold.

Whew! So apparently there's a 60-day hold on my account with Argent, or until they hear back from Chickering, or something. I honestly don't actually know. I just hope I hear back from them soon next week.

-Kyle

Health Insurance, part 6

2007-08-17T11:51:00.000-05:00

This is coming a lot later than I would have liked. Unfortunately, upon reaching Michigan, I found that I could not check my voice mail. Of course, I didn't have very good Internet access there either, but I stole away to the airport to work on things a little bit there. I contacted some people at the BMC, and they faxed some of my statements up to where I was. I looked through the insurance brochure and found a few interesting things.

When I finally got back to Boston this week, I noticed that I still had not received a revised EOB from Aetna concerning my Pathology charges. In order to appeal the insurance decision, I need all the EOBs so I can try to sort things out. Thus, I needed to figure out why this hadn't gone through. Call sequence!

First: Chickering. Gotta find out why I hadn't gotten it. Answer: They hadn't received a request for resubmission. They said I needed to call the pathologist for resubmission. I looked back through previous posts to find the pathologist's number, but I realized that bigger billing office I had finagled my way to find might be the problem; I probably needed to talk to someone else.

Second: Chickering. I called back, asking whether they had a number for the Pathologist. They did! I'll probably need this one later: (800) 214-2888 (Pathologist).

Third: Pathologist. This is another billing office. I gave them my information, and the extremely helpful lady said she saw where they might have believed it to be listed as "routine" (this is why it was denied by Chickering, even though it's on the same day as my big surgery. Thanks, Chickering). The lady said that it was unfortunately in collections, so they were unable to simply resubmit it. I couldn't believe this. I had contacted the collection agency and billing before about this. How had this happened again? I fixed my mailing address with the billing office and gave them my phone number. The lady was very sympathetic; she came up with the following plan: they would change the billing code and talk to chickering. At the same time, they'll ask the collection agency to put the account on hold, in order to not destroy my credit. (Isn't it already pretty much dead after this entire fiasco?) Hopefully this will all work, though she couldn't say that it definitely would not affect my credit. Ugh.

This would all have been avoided had one of the following two things happened:

1) My address been recorded correctly by BMC. I spelled out the name of my street to the woman who put it in the computer, and my father was sitting next to me. How did it get off by two letters? This prevented me from seeing any bills from people until far too late.

2) Chickering/Aetna had sent me any Explanation of Benefits. They didn't, until I specifically called them up and asked for them. I couldn't even access them online, and no one I talked to knew why I hadn't been sent anything.

Either of these two things would have let me know that I was getting charged for anything before bills were sent to collections.

This has been a nightmare, and the worst part is that I have to be the middleman for the whole thing. There are too many companies and parties that I have had to deal with and are incapable of interacting with each other without a personal request from me.

I can only hope that I actually get this EOB sometime soon.

Before quitting, I will make one more call. This time to the Otolaryngologist's office, to tell them that this whole thing is under review.

Call...

Wow, they apparently have someone there who is well-associated with my account:-P I talked to someone and she said I needed to talk to the person who has handled my account in the past. That person is out of the office, so I left them a voicemail with my name, account number and phone number. I hope to hear back from them on Monday.

Okay, I'm tired and I have plenty of things to actually get done today. I'm sick of being the middle man to fix the incompetence of my insurance and all the different people billing me.

-Kyle

Trip pictures!

2007-06-21T06:04:00.000-05:00

Hey monkeys,

Here are pictures of my weekend in Switzerland.

I decided to run my little java program on my Turkey pictures. There were definitely some errors, but the results are here. I'll take down the older stuff later.

Enjoy!

-Kyle

Health Junk, Part 5

2007-06-04T13:32:00.000-05:00

Calls made since the last post: BMC, Argent, BMC, BU Pathology (twice in a row), BUMC (not a 1-800 number...), some other medical billing people, and Chickering. Here's a quick synopsis:

The BMC people told me that they could not tell me about the itemized things on the itemized list of things I have from them. I would need to call the doctor's office. Additionally, they said that these lists are, in fact, bills (although they don't tell me where to send money or have account numbers listen on them or anything). The lady told me where to send things and what to write on the checks, so now I'll actually be able to pay some of these things that people are waiting for. Amazing!

I called Argent (the collection people) again and this time got to talk to a real person, although she was by far the least friendly person I'd talked to so far. She asked me why I hadn't sent them my insurance card, and I explained that I was in the process of making sure that this charge was, in fact, valid. I certainly wasn't about to pay a bill to people that I'd never heard of for a charge I wasn't sure existed. She didn't seem pleased by this, "of course this is a real bill," she told me. I asked for the number of the B.U. Pathology people that had originally billed me, but they don't have that. I did mention that I had only just heard about this, and she noticed that the address had been changed, but this did little to brighten her tone to me. She said I should fax over the insurance card right away so they could talk to the insurance. I don't have a fax machine, so I decided to call other people before even thinking about doing that.

Now back to the BMC people, trying to track down the pathologist. They gave me a number, which I called. There was a machine, from the pathologist office, stating that if I wanted to report a change in my insurance, I should stay on the line. Otherwise someone would come on the line to help me. This was at 2:40pm, and the machine voice mentioned that the office was open until 3pm.
I waited. Then I was transferred... to a machine that would record my change of insurance information. Must be a fluke... I hung up and dialed again. Apparently one can only change their insurance information with this phone number.

I needed to get ahold of the pathologist another way. I had his name from the Argent people, so I looked him up in the BU directory and called his office number. Nothing. I then called the BUMC (not a 1-800 number! gasp...) and asked for a number for pathology. After two transfers, someone very nice there rooted through their own notes to find a number for me. It's a good one, so here it is: (800) 456-1552.

This is the number of a company who apparently does lots of billing for lots of hospitals/medical facilites/etc. They asked me for my account number, but, since I didn't have a bill from the pathologist, I didn't have one. I said, "I'm trying to locate somebody who does billing for Boston University Pathology." (I took note of that after saying it when I realized how stupid it was. I'm desperate to be billed! Please, someone help me! :-P)

They confirmed that it was a real bill (finally!). I asked why the insurance hadn't paid for it, and they didn't know. They did say that it was pretty strange. Call chickering, they advised.

I look at the Aetna EOB for that charge, and it has a note: "Coverage excludes routine tests, immunizations or exams." Well, this is clearly not any of these. It's not often that I get some sort of pathology that I don't know about that's routine. Thanks. So, another call to chickering.

Despite the fact that I'm getting completely screwed by the lack of benefits in my insurance package, the Aetna people are usually the nicest people I've talked to. Perhaps that's just because they can see the full amount of money that I'm getting fleeced for every time I call. Megan was no different. When I mentioned the charge, she said, "There's no diagnosis with this." I don't really understand what that means, so she explained that whomever billed it hadn't given an explanation for the charges. They assumed it was routine testing and didn't cover it. Megan said I should call the people who were billing me again and tell them to resubmit the charges.

Now, this honestly didn't make any sense to me. The people billing me were now these Argent people, and they didn't even know the phone number of the pathologist. How would they be able to correctly resubmit the bill? Due to my confusion about this issue, Megan offered to call Argent for me. I couldn't exactly refuse this service, so she put me on hold. She came back a few minutes later, saying that they would correctly resubmit the bill.

Whew. And now I'm here. It's 3:40, and I would like to get in touch with the doctor's office and find out about these anethesiology charges. First, however, I need to go to the pharmacy and fill prescriptions before I go on my internship.

More later, as always :-P

Preparing to Send an Appeal (or Dealing with Health Insurance, part 4)

2007-06-04T10:33:00.000-05:00

Thursday, a week and a half ago (the day after the last post) I got on the phone with the health insurance people and went over many of the different issues I was experiencing. The first person explained to me how to access all the information online, so I apologized for not realizing that all my info was so available and went to check it out. (The URL for his is: https://member.aetna.com/MbrLanding/login.fcc?TYPE=33554433&REALMOID=06-36d8cb4d-4ac1-44c7-b12d-a80fba4b718e&GUID=&SMAUTHREASON=0&METHOD=GET&SMAGENTNAME=$SM$VpTDdQeU7wjYENtpG34SqCD6x1pnyGMS%2fwM1025WQGa5dTTcHQxurw%3d%3d&TARGET=$SM$https%3a%2f%2fmember%2eaetna%2ecom%2fMbrLanding%2fRoutingServlet%3fcreateSession%3dtrue .)

The site could be nice. It's very well laid out and easy to navigate. However, the details for the medical claims leave something to be desired. If I look at the details for the "Hospital Incidentals" for my big operation, it has two different places which say "Your Responsibility" at the end of the table, but they have two different values. I called Aetna up again and asked about this discrepancy. Of course, the lady on the other end had to put me on hold, then go figure out what was going on. All the details were naturally not on the page. They were covered in the Explanation Of Benefits (EOB). There's a link to View/Print the EOB, so I clicked on that. I got the following message:

"Your Claim Explanation of Benefits (EOB) is not available. We will send you an email when your EOB is ready to view/print. Please use Email Options on your Personal Profile page to update your email address, if necessary."

Great. My EOB isn't ready to view yet. It's small wonder I haven't received any of these in the mail aside from the one that I had in my hands (covering the Otolarynologic foundation bill). I asked the lady why this feature wasn't working online for me, and she had no idea (she was completely nice, as people always are). She said the best thing for me to do would be to send me another copy of all the EOBs. (Another? I hadn't gotten them the first time!)

She suggested that I file an appeal, using the grounds that I'm a grad student on a limited income. She said to first wait until I had the EOBs in front of me, then file. I received them on Saturday. I have more questions on them (which I'm about to call and ask) but I'm running quickly out of time. I am leaving for Germany for a summer internship on Wednesday and as far as I know, I won't have a phone or Internet access in my room there. Meanwhile, my credit rating is certainly going to continue to plunge!

Okay... calling now...

... at least, I will be when I find a working phone here...

That was very unhelpful. Apparently once you exceed the maximum benefits for a surgery, Aetna also stops performing any negotiations on your behalf. Thus, instead of negotiating down my $4,167 bill (usually they're capable of negotiating it down to 60% or so) they left it as is and forwarded it on to me. Since doctors and hospitals usually expect this round of negotiation with insurance providers, that initial price is often jacked up. Awesome.

The same is apparently true with my $14,000 bill. The insurance company applied its contract with them, but, since the bill went over $5000, the limit of cost was breached and negotiations were not employed.

Now to call Argent and see if they can get the Pathology people to send me a bill (since I still haven't gotten one). I got the voicemail box from the Argent people. I left them a message, though I will likely try calling them back.

Who is next? Oh, I need to ask the Boston Medical Center about the Anesthesia charge showing up on one of my bills. I don't know what this is for, since I already dealt with the actual anesthesia bill and paid my part for that.

Hmm, that line rings and just keeps ringing. No hold, no machines, just ringing. I'll wait until 2 so that lunch breaks are all done.

More later :-\

Two more picture sets...

2007-06-02T16:47:00.000-05:00

And I'm often changing the code between these things...

Boston's Run to Remember, featuring lzl and Kate:

http://cs-people.bu.edu/paithan/pics/RunToRememberBoston2007/

My walk to school on one of the flowering tree days:

http://cs-people.bu.edu/paithan/pics/WalkingToSchool200705/

Photo Album stuff

2007-06-02T11:46:00.001-05:00

I got my Photo Album code running (mostly) though it sometimes doesn't copy/mogrify the pictures correctly. In any case, I uploaded pictures from Anime Boston:

http://cs-people.bu.edu/paithan/pics/AnimeBoston2007/

-Kyle

All the Surgery Bills? (...or Dealing With Health Insurance, Part 3)

2007-05-23T09:50:00.000-05:00

I received the requested bills from the Boston Medical Center yesterday. Although they claimed to have sent these to me already, this is the first I've seen them! Also, they weren't kidding; there are 5 bills. Here they are:

Three bills of $10. These look like copays from visits. I thought I had payed this first two, but likely I had only paid the one from my first visit at the end of last summer, and perhaps I didn't even do that. Still, these seem legit and I can afford them:-P Total so far: $30.

(Note: Yes, I do look at everything and try to figure out whether it's a legitimate charge. There have been too many times where I've talked to someone and asked whether I should be getting charged then have them realize that, no, I shouldn't.)

There is a $338.80 bill from what I think was my sleep test to determine whether I had apnea. Looking at this, the initial cost that was billed to my insurance was $2420! Wow. I know this is going to sound stupid, but I had no idea there was going to be any sort of seperate charge for this---I thought it would be a part of the total surgery cost or doctor's visit cost. Apparently not.

I realize now that doctors have the easiest salesman positions ever. Instead of saying, "I think we should sell you the opportunity to take this test so we can accumulate some more data about you, is that okay?" I was told, "We are going to run this test; please see our administrator on the way out to finalize your test date." No questions, no pitch, not even a description of the charges.

Anyways, continuing. The last bill is, of course, the most painful. This lists charges I accumulated while in for surgery. The amount billed to me is: $4970.31.

Yikes. Before I even start adding up all the things now charged to me, let's describe this one in a bit more detail. The total billed to insurance was $14,312.29. Insurance negotiated it down $4272.98, covered $5000 and then there's another $69 removed as a "late charge write off" (wtj does that mean???).

Additionally, I got the bill from Argent on Monday for "BU Pathology". This one comes to $536.

In total, the money I owe is:
4167.00 (BUMC... see last post) + 4970.31 + 30.00 + 338.80 + 536.00 = $10,042.11, assuming I'm doing my math correctly. I'm pretty sure I don't have that much money.

Yesterday I received an automated call from the "Special Billing Office" at either BUMC or BMC (I don't recall which). The number to call them back is: (800) 597-0817. I'm on the phone with them now...

... and now I'm done with that. Here's a bit of the approximate transcript:

"Hi, how may I help you?"

"Hi, is this the BUMC billing office or the BMC office?"

"Um... do you have an EP number on your bill?" (Maybe it was 'EPS' or something... I'm not sure.)

"Well, I have bills from both."

"You should see an EP number somewhere near your name on one of the bills."

"Um... no, there's nothing like that here..."

"Hmm. What about an account number? If you're calling us, there must be an account number associated with us."

"I have an account number on my Boston University bill."

"Okay, what's that?" I gave him the number. "Nope... that's not one of ours."

I was feeling pretty stupid at this point. "Well, I got a phone call telling me to call this number..."

"Oh, at what number did you receive the phone call?" I gave him my cell number. "Okay, we have your information here." Things went better from here on out. He advised me to call my insurance and request an Explanation Of Benefits (EOB) as it relates to these charges. Apparently they should have already sent this to me, but, of course, I haven't seen this at all. (Somehow, the information from these charges just isn't reaching me. Not only am I not receiving anything from my insurance, but I had to request that these bills get sent to me from the BMC.)

After I get that and make sure the charges all match up, I need to pay up. I quickly asked about any free care. He said that although that's usually reserved for people without insurance, I should give it a try.

Okay, this one's long enough. I'll call the insurance people and update this later.

-Kyle

Dealing with Health Insurance, Part 2

2007-05-21T09:39:00.000-05:00

I just got off the phone with Boston Medical Center. (It's kind of tricky to find a 1-800 number for them, but with a bit of website searching I found one. For my and anyone else's reference, that number is: 1-800-841-4325.) My conversation with the billing person started like this:

"Hi... I have some questions about some bills I didn't receive."

"You have questions about bills you didn't recieve?"

The nice lady told me she would send me something explaining all the different charges I had accumulated. She said I should have gotten something from Walker Associates, their bill-outsourcing people, but I certainly haven't. (Note: this is completely different from the Argent people who called me last week. Who are they billing me from?)

She said there were 5 different bills, and it seems pretty clear that insurance isn't going to cover all of them. Now I'm a bit scared. Do I have other charges that went beyond the $5000? How much money am I going to owe here?

More updates when I see these bills...

On an interestingly related note, it seems Michael Moore has a new flick, "Sicko" coming out. It's supposedly all about the health care system here in Americaland. Should be interesting.

I've been a fan of universal health care since I first took a real interest in politics, but actually being in the middle of all the uncertainties and billing run-around sheds an even harsher light on the situation. As the patient, I feel most left out of the loop; it's a strenuous task to aquire all the information I want. Dealing with more than one entity is hard enough, but it looks like I'm going to be dealing with 5 (hospital, doctor's office, 2 bill collectors and insurance?).

Hindsight instructs that it would have been best to attempt to find the price tag for the surgery, then go through my insurance guidelines and see if it fell under there, likely meaning within that $5000. This appears to be a better plan than just asking, "will this be covered?"

There are some flaws with that plan, however. The first of these is that the price tag simply isn't known in advance. When first talking to my doctor about my surgery, he explained that they weren't sure exactly what they were going to remove/fix in my face and throat until they got in there. For example, they were considering removing my adenoids, but they didn't as it wasn't necessary.

Secondly, the price tag is never what is actually gets charged once the insurance is involved. Health insurance negotiates with the medical people to pay a lower price. They apparently have some clout that patients don't have. In any case, had I seen an estimate for the surgery, I might have been scared out of having it done, even if the insurance could have negotiated it down to something within my coverage.

The worst case here is that I could have been scared out of having the operation. I was sick: I wasn't sleeping at night and I was falling asleep (literally, in my chair) at work. My apnea was getting worse and worse, and the usual methods of fixing it, the breathing machines, wouldn't work for me. I was trying to get 9 hours of sleep each night, but felt like I was getting less than 4 hours of the kind of sleep I get now.

... okay, enough ranting. As promised, I will update you when I get those elusive bills :-P

Dealing with Health Insurance

2007-05-18T10:35:00.000-05:00

Hi,

My UPPP was an expensive operation, apparently. I recently received a bill from the BUMC for $4167.00. This has occurred because I've apparently maxed out my benefits for the year, which I think amount to $5000. All on that one operation. I don't know exactly how much was picked up by the insurance, though. I'm hoping to find out about this soon. In any event, it's clear that asking one's doctor and insurance people, "Will my insurance cover this operation?" is not an assurance that you're not going to pay thousands of dollars.

The real confusion here is that a few months ago I was dealing with insurance not paying for my bill. The problem there, however, was not a lack of benefits remaining---it was a lack of understanding the referral I had gotten. (This was fixed, following a brutal round of harassing 3 different people, most of whom were completely nice.) This bill, however, was for less than $3000, and certainly not $4167.00. How did this bill inflate? Should I have shut up, put my trust in the insurance/medical center people and paid the first one?

I just called the people I received the bill from. They told me exactly what the bill said---that I owe a bunch of cashmoney---but couldn't fill me in on why I had gone over my limit with the insurance. Apparently that must have come from charges levied by the hospital. These people represent the doctor. These are two completely different groups, with a complete lack of ability to share information. When I asked whether they could give me a number, they were unable to find an appropriate number to deal with the hospital. Awesome. I'm really glad that the doctor and the hospital that worked together to cut apart the inside of my face are apparently not on speaking terms. I guess that explains why the hospital attempted to feed me ginger ale directly post surgery. Even though over two weeks later I couldn't drink carbonated beverages, I'm sure ginger ale would be perfect for someone who thinks he's gonna choke on ice shavings.

The only thing I get from this so far is that there are, like, 100 people to talk to in order to figure out exactly why and how much you're getting billed for something. Although most of those people are extremely nice, they are, for the most part, completely helpless when it comes to answering the "whys" and "hows".

I have paid $20.46 to the otolaryngology people for what I think are copays and $209 for anesthesia (which was clearly optional).

In addition to all this, I got a phone call from some bill collector earlier this week. He said I hadn't paid some $500 bill. "For what?" I asked. "Well, it says here you had some operation on January second..."

New Baby

2007-02-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

Mmmm, I have a new machine:) Yum! So far I'm quite happy with this baby, which is a T60.

I immediately got to work removing windows and purifying it with some sexy kubuntu. Since I'm not much of a technofile, DJ B-B-B-Bera got to work putting together plenty of the details for me. That man is pretty much amazing with the linuxes. He got around a lot of the issues and made it all sexy-like.

In case I ever have to do this on my own, though, I would definitely use the following resources:

www.thinkwiki.org and this page of initial ubuntu things to get sexed up.

Also, the ubuntu forums are pretty excellent.

But the credit for this belongs with Deb. Thanks Deb!

-Kyle

Rose Bowl suckage, Post UPPP & Septoplasty

2007-01-05T01:20:00.000-05:00

Michigan sucked it up in the Rose Bowl. It's humiliating. It's horrendous. Just bad.

I'm more concerned about the suckage going on in my face, though. On the second, I had some surgery. I had a septoplasty and a UPPP (which stands for Uvulopalatial... um... something... plasty) in an effort to fix my sleep apnea. I wound up having to stay over one night in the hospital, and now I'm back at my parents house. (I'm extremely lucky to have them around to help me recover. I'm definitely not taking their aid for granted.)

Recovery kinda sucks, though. Essentially, my life rotates around a four-hour schedule, because every four hours I get to have more pain meds. In the time leading up to medication-time, the pain really gets fierce. Right now I'm half-an-hour from getting to suck that stuff down again, and writing this little post is probably the best way for me to suffer the least amount of pain. Normally watching TV is good, but it's late, and I was starting to fall asleep. I don't want to fall asleep, because then my throat dries out.

See... the worst part about the pain cycle is actually taking the meds. I have to water the stuff down (I won't mention it by name... mostly because I don't know how to spell it offhand) because it stings. And since I haven't taken the meds in 4 hours, swallowing hurts the most right when I take it. Two gulps of painful pain medication, then about half an hour later I'm feeling quite a bit better.

My biggest fear right now is my tongue. It feels very strange. There are some bumps that could be lacerations or scars of some sort. I don't know whether I bit myself really hard during surgery or what, but it's definitely awkward. I have a post-op appt on Monday, so I'll ask the doctor about it then.

Having said that, afaict, the surgery was a success. My doctor was very good and the BU Medical Center staff was all excellent. A few things could have been better, but I'm also a demanding patient.

Okay... Med time soon. Good night, monkeys. Hopefully I'll be able to get into a semi-painless state before classes start up:-P

Getting Back to Being a Person (Contains BCS Dissatisfaction: Part I)

2006-12-04T22:45:00.000-05:00

(Note: I decided to leave this post unfinished and instead continue it later. If you don't care about college football, then you likely won't care about the continuations... :-P)

The past weeks have been nuts. Last night, 15 minutes before the deadline, my advisor and I submitted our paper to the IEEE Complexity Conference for 2007. We are both still exhausted from this, I think:-P

Anyways, at some point I will probably talk about the result we had, but right now I am far more interested in talking about the Michigan football team.

BCS Dissatisfaction: Part I. (I added this line after the initial posting.)

You see, something very crazy happened this weekend. Something that had Michigan fans very excited. I don't like working without context, so let's see if we can describe the situation.

American college football is composed of a strange rankings system. Since there are so many teams in the nation, it's hard to determine which of any two teams are better. Neither will necessarily play against each other, so judgement calls have to be made at some point. Thus, across the country, there are several different ways to create a strict (no ties) ranking of all the teams. Rankings exist that are generated by computer algorithms, team coaches, the press and others.

This, obviously, leads to problems. Being a Michigan fan, let's talk about the incident closest to my own heart. In 1997, Michigan had a great team, and had an undefeated regular season. Since they were the Big Ten Champion, they went on to play in and win the Rose Bowl. The finished the year with a perfect record. Nebraska had also had a very solid year, also with an undefeated season. They went on to play in a different bowl (I'm not going to look up the parts of the story I don't remember, sorry) and also won. Both teams claimed to be the best in the nation.

At the time, the National Champion was decided by two major polls. However, this year, the polls decided differently on the champion. Thus, the championship was split, which each team claiming the title.

The following year, the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) was born to become more ensure the two best teams would play each other in a bowl game for the national title.

I don't really want to get into all the politics behind this, except to say that it often causes a problem when 3 teams are all heavy contenders. This has happened in the past, and it has definitely happened this year.

If you're not familiar with what happend this year... well... I don't really want to explain what happened. Let's find a link... Try this one. I haven't actually read it myself... but it doesn't appear to be an opinion piece. Feel free to yell at me if it's at all biased (which it likely is a bit:-P).

Essentially, Ohio State is the only top team with a perfect schedule insofar. Michigan and Florida are the two top tier teams with one loss. The point of the BCS is to pick to the top two teams to pit them against each other in the National Championship game.

Coming in to this past weekend, the official ranking (the BCS uses a prescribed combination of human and computer polling to rank teams) had the following teams in the top 4: 1) Ohio State. 2) USC. 3) Michigan. 4) Florida. Due to the fact that Michigan is located to the north, they end their season earlier (brr! It's cold up there!) than either Florida or USC. Thus, USC and Florida were playing this final week, while Michigan and Ohio State had already finished their regular season schedules.

The beat on the street was that USC was going to be playing for the national title unless they blew their chance by losing their last game to UCLA. In that case, the chance would go to Michigan. Florida, it had been "decided" was out of the running due to their loss to Auburn earlier in the season (a solid team, but a team not ranked in the top ten).

The unlikely happened this Saturday night, however, and UCLA toppled long-time rival USC. UCLA was not an impressive force this year, and this result was not expected by anyone. Michigan fans across the country rejoiced! We watched Florida go back and forth with Arkansas (the USC game ended halfway through the Florida game) before pulling out the win, 38-28.

There was some contention between Michigan and Florida, but Michigan fans felt that their team would retain it's standing. That's the view from my standing, however... here are actual points that are debatable. First I'll list points that I think are valid (I'll make points for both sides, I promise! I want Florida fans to enjoy this post too! I'm not a UF hater at all!) and mention who they support (in case it's not immediately clear). Following this, I'll mention points that I think are invalid, and I may comment about them if time permits.

(It's getting late as I write this, so I'll likely not finish it tonight, but I'll note where I break between the writing for the sake of good documentation.)

I have decided instead to reverse the order and list the invalid points, followed by the valid points. For the invalid points, I'll explain why the point sucks.

Invalid (to me) Points:

"Michigan is in the same conference as Ohio State." The BCS is not designed to pit the top two teams from seperate conferences against each other. It's designed only to pit the top two teams against each other. If all the conferences aside from the ACC sucked, then it would be clear to send the best two teams from the ACC to the national title bowl. This is not what happened this year---there are plenty of dangerous conferences---but there should not be a restriction on which conferences the teams come from.

"Michigan already lost to Ohio State. We don't want a rematch for the BCS title." Again, the sole purpose of the BCS is to pit the top two teams in the nation against each other, regardless of whether they've already done that this season. This argument seems equivalent to saying, if the two teams that make it to the Superbowl (NFL) have already played this season, we'll cancel the game and just announce the winner to be the team that won the regular season game. The BCS rankings should not be determined by making sure certain teams don't happen to pair up at #1 and #2. Simply stated, the two best teams should play in the final game.

(I may add more later... This post is unfinished...)

Valid (to me) Points:

Florida played 13 games. Michigan only played 12. Ron Zook quotes this as one of his reasons for putting Florida ahead of Michigan. In college football there is no standardization of the number of games a team must play every year (as far as I know). Thus, teams like Florida, with longer playable seasons, can play more games. This is definitely a good reason to support Florida.

Michigan lost to one team, currently ranked above them at #1, by 3 points. Florida lost to a team, currently ranked below them at #9.

(more to come...)

I will continue this post in another post. I'll title it... um... "BCS Dissatisfaction (Part II)"

Armageddon Loss... don't let it mess everything up.

2006-11-20T16:21:00.000-05:00

There's no way it'll happen, but I'll be a lot happier if Boise State plays for the national title than a lot of other teams.

Michigan lost to tOSU on Saturday. It was a pretty harsh loss. Michigan fans everywhere can't believe how some plays were chosen. Michael Hart is on our team---there's no reason to be punting on 4th and 1 when the game is so close on the line. We are supposed to have the best run defense in the country, but for some reason we couldn't stop Pittman from trotting through our line with the ball.

We contained Troy Smith pretty well, and forced tOSU to use their run offense a lot more than they probably wanted, but we still couldn't pull it off.

I'm angry at some plays. Everyone else at the bar was angry at those same play calls. The strange thing, though, was that the game didn't look like anything I was ready for. Where was Manningham's last-second reception in the endzone? Where were the drives that consisted solely of Hart running the ball on every down? Why did we consistently try to pass on first down... time and time again?

Mostly, however, I'm worried about the aftermath. This is college football. This is a sport played over an entire semester, with a bit of breathing room for finals. Anyone else remember what finals are like? For me they were pretty much torture. I didn't play a sport; I had no other responsibilities. I could focus solely on studying and completing those ginormous exams and projects. Still, they pretty much wrecked me, body and soul. My first year, I was so defeated by spring finals that I came down with a terrible fever an hour after finishing my last exam. My girlfriend had to drive me home because I was so ill. Turns out I was having an episode of strep. Although I fought that attack off, I had three subsequent bouts of strep afterwards, the last one assaulting me in the following fall semester. I couldn't seem to shake it out of my system.

If Michigan plays (tOSU again) for the national title, the BCS system is in Jeopardy. People seem to think that although the other teams in college football appear to suck this year (yes, USC, Florida, ND... I'm looking at you) it would be a disaster to pit the two best teams against each other, only because they happened to play their last game of the season against each other. Solution? Add playoffs to the menu.

Shut up. Playoffs are the worst plan ever. Michigan may end it's season in mid november, but plenty of teams wade deep into december (notice they're located in the south). That doesn't leave any time for playoffs while classes are in session. Where will we schedule these so-called playoffs?

January's a horrible idea. Half of the schools are still on break, while others are already in session. School's harsh, football fans. A lot of football players may be majoring in General Studies, but there are a solid number of science and humanities majors. Don't punish them for playing a sport; keep their season limited to one whole semester, please. Already the title game, on January 8th, encroaches on the spring semester (or winter trimester or whatever). I'm not a fan of this newest change. January fourth is already late enough!

The only option left is to have the students play during their finals. That's idiocracy.

Please do not compare this sport to basketball. Basketball finals are played in the middle of the spring term. This may conflict with midterms, but those are both more flexible and easier than finals. Not to mention, these finals are made possible by the ability for human beings to play multiple games in a week. Football playoffs with 8 teams would be decided over 3 weekends, not in a week.

If the BCS really is in jeopardy (and if you read any of these sports opinion sites, it apparently is) then let's do something right now to save it. I'd rather skip the title game and hand tOSU the championship title right now than force the students to prepare for an academically devastating playoffs series every year.

Aside from that, I think everyone should be ready for the event that Michigan and tOSU play again. The way we should really look at this is the following: we have two teams that have risen well above the rest of the field. They played once, and it was close. If it turns out that the other teams are not up to the challenge (Florida and USC will have to win out and win out big to disprove this) then by all means pit the top two against each other, even if it means again. This year does not show flaws in the system, it's just an exceptional year for two well-prepared teams.

This sport is not professional football. Only one team (Boise State does not count... unless they somehow decide to start playing against real teams) has not lost during the regular season---of which the whole thing is the playoffs for this game. Every other team has lost. One of these lost big (ND). One lost a game big teams should not be allowed to (USC). One lost to the only undefeated team. If we've gotta have a title game, put that last team in.

More later, likely... I gotta run to class.

Second sleepless night

2006-11-10T05:44:00.000-05:00

Hello monkeys!

I'm on my second sleepless night this week. I'm still pretty psyched about my project, but I need a few minute break, so I'm blogging like an idiotmonkey.

I might actually have had something to say, but all I can say is that Blogger annoys me. I thought I had this all figured out, but I apparently don't. Why does it take so dang long for the login screen to show changes when I'm logging in? Why does it force me to click on that little thing before I can sign in? It's completely in opposition with all the other nice Google stuff that throw my focus right in the text box I clearly want to use. Of course, it also means I have trouble logging on with my sidekick. Ugh.

I thought I had published my post from a few weeks ago, but it turns out it hadn't been actually posted, just drafted. I thought I would notice that, but apparently not. So... it's up there now. Up and sexy.

I had a lot of people ask me today when I would next be free on a weekend. Unfortunately, the answer for everyone of them was: "I don't know, but not until after the first weekend in December." Yeah. It sucks. Grrr.

So, why the first weekend in December? Well, that's when I submit this result. And between now and then I have an extra hojillion things to get done.

One of those things is the sister-side to my PSPACE-complete proof, which I must now get back to! Ciao, monkeys!:-P

-Kyle

Um... Halloween and awesome luck

2006-11-07T09:33:00.000-05:00

The last few weeks have been a blur. I returned from my trip to Michigan, and continued to play with my latest research problem: Games on the Sperner Triangle. I realized that the game I had been looking at seemed easy, so I tweaked the rules and within a few days I was closing in on a proof of PSPACE-completeness for the strategies!

In the meantime, Halloween was closing in fast, but I had run into a road block for putting together my costume: where was I going to find bright yellow pants... that fit me??? The plan was to go as the man in the yellow hat, and yellow pants were a requirement! I had located a yellow shirt at the Garment district, and a tie at A.J. Wright's, but still no pants.

Well, luck would be with me for halloween. On the saturday beforehand, I went to the bar to watch michigan play northwestern and I happened to win one of the raffle prizes! The prize: XL size Maize pants with "MICHIGAN" printed down the side. I couldn't believe I had randomly gotten pants that both fit me and, by turning them inside out, would suffice perfectly for my costume! (God does exist, you fooligan!)

On Monday night, I went to class and couldn't concentrate (despite the fact that it was the last class prior to the midterm). Instead I pulled out my notebook and continued working through widgets for my PSPACE reduction. I started putting them together, and quickly got lost in the puzzle. Just as class ended, I got the logic in my last widget to work, although it was a bit inelegant. Still, I had finished the reduction! I had my very own result!!!

Unfortunately, I was missing a halloween monkey. I thought that Lzl might pull through with a Curious George costume, but the warm arms of chemistry kept her busy night and day in the lab. I would be missing half of the two part costume for trick or treating.

Luck struck again, however, and a small beanbag george was delivered to me on Monday the 30th just before I put the hat together. Kate sent me a curious george stuffed toy, which fit perfectly in my Garment District Shirt Pocket. BeaUTiful! And with perfect timing! I put together a huge hat (pictures will be available at a later date) out of yellow poster board as a shell around my white top hat. Costume completed! Gabriel took a bunch of fancy photos before I crashed for the night.

Halloween was gorgeous. I got to school in my costume (aside from the hat---I know, I know, but it was too big to take to school!) and showed officemates some of the widgets for my reduction. Ben followed most of my descriptions and quickly realized that I'd completed the whole thing. I saw the problems with my one piece, and resolved to fix it soon, though it wasn't necessary for the overall proof. I played people in my department for pieces of candy (I had bought 8 bags at this point... this was clearly too much, so I started getting rid of it early:-P) and finally suffered my first two losses in the Sperner Game. Still, the game was solid.

I had my result, and I already had a date to present: Friday. As soon as Halloween was over, I'd need to put together my presentation. I was lucky to get the presentation spot, as Steve had just asked me the previous Friday, then almost immediately afterwards, the reduction had fallen together!

I left school early to prepare for the trick-or-treaters. I got home and was ready and waiting around 4:45. (Last year I had been late getting out for the kiddies---that would not happen this year!) I brought a chair outside and sat down with my candy bowl and my flashy hat.

The kids started coming at 6. And I mean, right at 6. Suddenly there were spasms of big gangs. The flocks of kids began to mill around, but I feared they wouldn't all see me, so I descended the stairs and sat down on the sidewalk. Now people at multiple intersections could see me and see that I had candy to give out.

Gabriel came to my aid, helping entertain both me and the candy-grubbing guests. By the time 6:45 came around, we had counted nearly 25 trick-or-treaters. I was exstatic! Last year I had had less than 7; a grave disappointment.

Then, at 7pm, throngs of kids started arriving again! I served candy to Queen Elizabeths and Scream murderers and gangsters and vikings and Grace Ross... and even the occasional uncostumed student. Little kids dressed as cows and parents in pirate costumes! I continued to keep track, continually excited that we were getting a great turn out this year. I didn't count people not in costume, but I did count adults who had put lots of effort into their own get-ups. When 7:50 came around, I was out of candy and I had served 52 trick-or-treaters. At that point, lzl was out holding vigil with me, and we retreated inside, as our supply had dwindled to one KitKat. Apparently 8 bags was not enough!

I had hoped to pay a visit to Hoolia and Steffi at 8, so I scooted over to their new place. Steffi was absent, but Hoolia entertained me before her bedthyme. On the way home I got "awesome hat" comments from everyone I passed; pedestrians and motorists alike. I was on a high the size of a flock of crazy monkeys, feeding on bonus bird parts. I kept singing "52 Kids! 52 Kids!" (to the tune of "Winnie the Pooh! Winnie the Pooh!") to myself. I got home and needed to calm myself down, so... I fixed the problematic construction in my reduction. The proof was now both complete AND extrasexy.

I got to work on my presentation the next day, electing to use transparencies. I (almost) broke the printer, but Scott and Deb jumped on the chance to fix some hardware and saved my buttox. I printed some sexy transparencies, cut them up, and had an awesome talk ready by the time Friday came around.

Although the talk wasn't organized perfectly, and I had some issues with the transparencies, I think it was pretty effective. Certainly people who were intrigued by the game remained very focused and asked spectacular questions. We taped the talk... hopefully I'll have access to that someday:-P

With the talk wrapped up, I had the Sabbath to rest before getting back into gear on Sunday: studying for my neural modelling midterm. 10 hours on Sunday, and 5 hours yesterday (I almost said today; I haven't slept yet...) led to a pretty strong understanding of the material. I cruised through most of the exam, although there were a few places that I didn't quite have down. Hopefully it was thoroughly rocked. The housing of this exam was required... by me... for acceptable gradeage.

Since finishing that exam at around 6:30pm last night, I've been working on writing up my Sperner Game result. ... and writing this. The paper's coming along great, but the STOC and CCC deadlines are almost on top of me. I have no idea how to best get myself moving, so I just started writing and making figures. I've got a meeting this morning with Shanghua; hopefully a lot of this can be figured out then.

As soon as that's done with, I'm off to vote and get to my allergy shots before I crash in my happy bed:-P

Peace Out, Brothas!
-Kyle

Update: Went to the Big House... and stuff

2006-10-25T13:32:00.000-05:00

Hello monkeys,

I had a great weekend! I went to Ann Arbor, stayed with my awesome friend Jeff and his family, and went to the Michigan game on Saturday. Awesome. Awesome, awesome awesome! The Big House (Michigan Stadium) is simply something that excites the soul of a Michigan football fan.

Of course, the fact that they won 20-6 helped too;)

I'm working on my halloween stuff right now. Lots of people already know what I'm doing, but I'll wait to post pics here until I know what's going on.

I was working on a PSPACE-completeness proof for a game that naturally arises from Sperner Triangles. It seems that the game is not likely to be PSPACE-complete, but in P. Thus, I now must come up with a proof of this:)

Of course, this game would not nearly be as sexy. However, I think I can find a similar game which would be PSPACE-complete. Hot and sexy!

I should get back to work on this, though!

sleepymonkeys

2006-10-05T03:47:00.000-05:00

sleepymonkeys.com is a real site. That's awesome. Blawesome even, perhaps, because it has cute pictures of dogs.

Why do I mention this? Because I just went there. I'm sleepy. It's 4:41am in the morning and I'm sleepy.

Luckily, I just realized that the assignment I am working on isn't due for an extra week. So I don't have to worry about finishing it now. That's awesome. I'll finish it on Sunday/Monday/sometime.

I'm back to working on a cool problem. I'm trying to figure out the complexity of the Sperner Game. The problem is that I don't have any background in this kind of junx. I've never reduced anything to P-SPACE completeness before, and that's what I'm shooting for here. Still, if it works, it should be something pretty dang sexy.

It's something I'd like to do on my own, but it appears that I'll have to extend out and search for other monkeys to finish this one up. Still... I'll work on it some more on my own and try to get it to work.

Yesterday (technically two days ago) I saw two lectures. One at MIT was by Professor Goemans, detailing his work on bounded-degree spanning trees. Unfortunately, I got lost at one slide that had a few too much notation for my sleepy and slow brain. I followed the explanation of lots of things. Matroids? Never seen 'em before, but it was clear what was going on. Then he defined the Linear Program, and I started to daze. Bad news. Dazing's been happening a lot to me lately... but... more on that later.

The second lecture was at Harvard, by Mike Sipser. He showed off this sexy letter from Goedel to von Neumann just a year before von Neumann passed away. The letter basically asks a question that would become part of the basis for the P vs NP question. The letter is very cool AND written in German. So, I found a copy on the InterWeb and printed it out today (yesterday). Hot. I can't read it all, but it's hot, and it's inspirational. I don't know why that is, but it's just clear that it is. Hot.

Yes, so I'm sleepy these days. I mean, I think I've been progressively getting worse sleep since I started that whole "adolescence" thing (more than two years ago, for those doubting monkeyfaces!:-P). I recall the first time my cousin Matt woke me up a bunch during the night to complain about my snoring. Ugh. That was annoying. Still, I hate people who snore. Those jerks! I'm trying to sleep!

Okay, yeah, so... I feel more sleepy, and I don't like it. Essentially I did a complete 180 on thinking about options to investigate my sleep apnea, within 1.5 years. The first time I heard that I might have to have some surgery I was like, "no way, sucker!" Now I'm far more interested. Slice open my throat! Drill through my nose! Just give me air:-P

So, yeah, I almost had to delay my appointment with the doctor for a month, due to the their office moving. Instead I'll have my appt at the end of this month (and not early december) at the cost of having to skip a class. I hate skipping class, but... well... I don't have a supreme number of options. It would be great to have any necessary surgery over winter break---just like when I had my wisdom teeth out.

This makes me want to tell the story of the happy drugs... but I won't.

In any case... am I doing work now? Yes. Just not CNS work. I'm shifting gears back to my Sperner Game stuff. Which is a bad idea because I can code late at night but not be creative. Afaik. Afair. Wtjka... not me:-P

I'm leaving around 6am or so. That's the plan.

Back to work!

-Kyle

Go Blue! 47-21 over Notre Dame

2006-09-17T12:27:00.000-05:00

(Note: I thought I had posted this yesterday... Someone mentioned that it was missing, so I posted it today. All the rest of text remains intact from yesterday's version... that means I'm not proofing even now:-P)

Wow. Yesterday was a crazy day.

Michigan defeated Notre Dame (in college football) in South Bend for the first time since 1994. Not only did we defeat them, we stepped in and scored more points in South Bend than any team since Purdue in 1960. 47 points.

And yet, the game felt like a close one. I saw Brady Quinn connect with Jeff Samardzija, and---when he did---they were able to make some big plays. When Notre Dame scored right before the half, putting the score to 34-14, I was nervous. What happens if Mike Hart gets injured? What happens if Henne can't get some big drives through? Nervous.

Of course I was excited. The game was going really well. On the second play of the first Irish drive, Prescott Burgess picked off Quinn and went in for the first score, but one cannot rely on the defense to put points on the board.

Luckily, "Super" Mario Manningham had been unleashed in the first half, with three touchdown receptions from Chad Henne. If things started to go wrong, it seemed we could just "Throw the ball to Manningham!" as John so eloquently puts it.

It wasn't until Lamarr Woodley came through with the fumble return for the final touchdown with 3 minutes left that we could begin to celebrate. During that fourth quarter, we had had failed drive after failed drive, and the Irish seemed to be able to keep their drives alive, making fourth downs, if necessary. No point girth seemed wide enough until the Wood came down and set us further ahead.

The Wolverines outplayed the Irish---that is clear. However, I think it's pretty clear that we were wary of them throughout the game. There was no sit-and-relax-on-our-lead mentality. We needed to shut them down whenever and wherever we got the chance.

So, although the score shows a blow-out, it seemed like a close game right up to the end. It may seem stupid, but thanks to the Irish for putting up a good fight all the way through. We had respect for your team throughout the game, and without that respect, we might well have lost.

It's great to be a Michigan Wolverine! Go Blue!

Gotta tie things together...

2006-09-12T22:19:00.000-05:00

I feel like there are just a bunch of loose ends in my life right now that I simply need to tie down, so I'm gonna fill this post with a bunch of junk.

1) I wrote another big script for setting up little webpages for my pictures. It's clunky and sloppy, but it works pretty well. I'm a fan, and my latest picture collections are examples of the script in action. I won't post the script just yet... but... yeah... all set and sexy.

2) After I post this, I plan on linking to this blog from my homepage. Bonus!

3) I played a bass guitar today. Awesome. I learned some notes for part of the bassline to Spirit of Radio. Davey taught me. Bonus! Thanks Davey C!

4) I switched from Mandrive to Kubuntu, which is awesome. I'm such a fan of "apt-get"ing stuff. Yay Kubuntu. Yay Debian derivations! Yay linux in general! Now I just need to get xine to work and I'll be a complete person again:-P

5) Unfortunately, in the process of this move, one of my greatest projects, my Magic (the Gathering) card database was lost. Eeks! Now I'll have to re-enter my 11k cards! Holy crud!

6) I said something somewhat meaningful about 9-11 yesterday. I'm also a complete slut for webcomics, and I'm surprised that more of them haven't done something about the 5 year anniversary that happened yesterday. One of my newer favorites, however, "You'll Have That" has been, and it looks like he's going to do a whole week of them. There's a link to the comic homepage from my website, but this a link to the beginning of the arc. On the news, the author of the comic says he wants to hear about people's responses to 9-11, but not in a "taking-sides" sort of way... meaning politically. Unfortunately, I don't know how to respond very well without being political on that issue. I think this is again very telling of how my attitude towards the whole event really sucks.

7) I hate Blogger's method for placing links. I dunno if there's another way, but the GUI way is horrendous. It's hard to copy/paste links in, and it already provides you with the http:// as though you're going to hand-enter the link. Why would anyone do that? I actually have gripes with lots of Google products, which I think I'll vent about at another time. I should say that I don't hate Google---I'm quite fond of them (and now especially one of their employees)---but there really seems to be some kind of disconnect between what they're delivering and what their users are looking for. ( <3 Eric Schmidt... <3 ... sigh...)

8) Speaking of You'll Have That, I wrote to the author at one point, having noticed one of the characters wearing a shirt with a big 'M' on it. The comic takes place in Ohio... but I am a big Michigan fan (Go Blue!). I wrote to Wes, the author, and he wrote back saying that that character is (unfortunately) a Michigan fan. Well, even though he's an OSU monkey... I'll still likely buy a book at some point. It's a good comic.

Okay... that's enough for now. Tune in later when this blog continues to suck. Kind of like Sir Sux-a-lot of the band Sucking to the Eighties. Exactly.

9/11, 5 years later

2006-09-11T15:02:00.000-05:00

Yes, I suck at updating. I also don't have readers, so it's cool.

Five years ago was 9-11-01, when planes flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. It was a pretty devastating day for lots of people... myself included. It was a tuesday. The planes struck early. At, like, 8:46 and 9:06am. I don't remember exactly; I'm just going from what I recall. I first heard about it when I was walking through the student union at school. There was a small tv in the hallway near the mailboxes, and people were watching the news, which was showing footage of the planes and the WTC.

I'm very unfamiliar with NYC. I've been there once, on a band trip in high school. We were chauferred around for the better part of a weekend, and we saw a few things, but didn't get a big grasp of the city. There was certainly no chance for wandering and exploring. On top of that, I had no idea what the World Trade Center was. Now, everytime I look at an old picture of NYC, I notice the twin towers immediately (of course). Back then, it wasn't something I thought about or had ever heard of.

Still, I am ashamed of my first reaction to this tragedy. I was cynical. My first thought was that this event would be used inappropriately. I was already not a fan of the Bush administration (2000 was the first time I really started paying attention to politics), and I can't say for certain that I thought specifically that it would be them that would abuse this event.

I should have been sad, awestruck, frightened... anything. Instead I was frustrated and cynical. I'm sure this says a lot about my character. I'm not immediately one to take well to bad news. Once it sinks in, though, I feel it very strongly.

Fast forward a few hours: We are sitting in a friend's dorm room, watching the coverage unfold. We see videotapes of the planes striking the twin towers over and over. We watch the smoke billow from the burning top floors, and the towers collapse onto the streets. People run to escape the clouds of debris and ash. Lives are lost before our very eyes.

I wanted to cry at that point. My girlfriend looked over at me with the whole group there and said, "you're really having a hard time with this, huh?" Yeah I was, but I could only nod back. I wrote a little open letter that night and posted it on my website at the time. I don't know if I still have it, but if I ever find it, I'll put it up. The gist was simple: we should not satiate our grief with violence. We should find a peaceful response to these atrocities. Perhaps instead of blowing this off as a since instance of a few people with unjustified anger, we should investigate how our lifestyles affect the rest of the world. Does the American Way of Life naturally lead to other nations being impoverished?

Most importantly, though, I was taught as a kid not to react violently to other people threatening and attacking me. I did my best to follow that, and I hoped that we could do the same, post 9-11. It sees to me that we have failed in this endeavor.

Alarm script fixed!

2006-07-19T13:58:00.001-05:00

I've been having problems with the alarm script. Specifically, it doesn't work. Sometimes amarok simply doesn't start playing. Sometimes amarok crashes. Well, I fixed the script to check and see if things were playing at the end. If amarok isn't running or isn't playing, then it goes back and tries to get it going again! Here's the script:

DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
killall -9 skype
echo "It's time to wake Kyle up..."
echo "Enabling Randomness..."
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
echo "Clearing the previous playlist..."
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
echo "Stopping amaroK..."
dcop amarok player stop
echo "Loading the Awaken playlist..."
dcop amarok playlist addMedia file:///home/paithan/.kde/share/apps/amarok/playlists/Awaken.m3u
echo "Setting volumes..."
aumix -v 32
dcop amarok player setVolume 68
while [ "$(dcop amarok player isPlaying)" != "true" ]
do
if [ "$(dcop amarok player isPlaying)" != "false" ]
then
echo "amaroK appears to not be running! Let's start it!"
amarok
fi
echo "AmaroK will play in 3..."
sleep 1
echo "2..."
sleep 1
echo "1..."
sleep 1
echo "Now."
dcop amarok player play
sleep 5
if [ "$(dcop amarok player isPlaying)" = "false" -o "$(dcop amarok player isPlaying)" = "call failed" ]
then
echo "Playing failed! Trying again..."
fi
done
echo "Here's the weather"
firefox http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=Boston%2C+MA

This should work just perfectly now!

Sleep, The Regular Walk, Meeting Monkeys, Heterosexual Rights

2006-07-09T09:35:00.000-05:00

Wow... I really need to get back on a regular sleeping schedule. I'll let you all know when that happens:-P I tried to go to bed at midnite last night, but I couldn't fall asleep, and didn't wind up hitting the hay until around 4:30. Of course I woke up around 9:30, and I'm exhausted. Ugh. I have an appointment to be checked out for sleep apnea in 2.5 weeks. I don't know exactly what this appointment entails, but I hope I can get on the road to fixing my poor sleep issues (note, this is a seperate issue from the bad sleep schedule...).

I figured that since I keep talking about "walks" I should post my usual route, which counts (to me) as "one walk".

I had a pretty ridiculous day for randomly meeting monkeys yesterday. I saw 3 Colby monkeys, Ilya and Mary (and her parents!) and another cool soccer fan I met at The Druid. Crazy!

I was browsing Google news recently, and I read about New York's ruling against same-sex marriage. This was last week at some point, I'm pretty sure. These restrictions still make absolutely no sense to me. The only real reasoning for restricting marriage to opposite-sex, as far as I can see, is religious. The thing that really pisses me off is the idea that children require both a mother and father "figure" in order for their childhood to be uncruel. Worst, does this mean that in order for me to be a good parent I have to fill the paternal role in the parenthood?

Clearly it does! Otherwise, if me or any other guy happened to fill the maternal role, then same sex marriages would be viable, because we could fulfill both roles.

I guess I should feel lucky to be in a state where the government isn't enforcing my role in any marriage, be it heterosexual or homosexual. Still, I'm sure all the working mothers and stay-at-home dads across the country would have something to say if they suddenly found that they had to switch roles! I certainly won't speak for others, but I feel like the government is telling me that completely legitimate parenting options are unacceptable.

(I spent some time looking for a link to a quote I had noticed earlier about protecting families, but I can't find it at the moment...)

Back from California, Walx, German Fourth

2006-07-04T23:42:00.000-05:00

Well, I returned from California just about a week ago. I had an awesome trip. Just awesome:)

My sister's new website recently went up. Her life's been pretty crazy lately, especially when you realize that she recently had 16 grandkids! (And over 30 more are on the way in the next two months!) I don't remember the link to pictures of her baby bearded dragons, but I'll post it when I get it. (Congratulations to the parents, Turtle and Matte!)

I got 6 walks in last week, including some of my walking around Mountain View. For most of my time there, I didn't get my walks in... but it would have been much easier to get them there. Here it's simply too humid out during the day to walk anywhere. My body hates me everytime I step outside between the hours of 10am and 7pm.

Up until today, I had gotten 3 walks in this week. Then I walked like crazy today. Here's the gmap pedometer for my traveling today: crazy walking!

Wow, over 11 miles! What the junk was I doing?

Well, over the past month, I've gotten REALLY into the World Cup. Anyone can tell you that Germany's my team. Today I planned to go the Goethe Institut to watch the game. However, I have no Deutsches Fussballbund apparel, so I decided to swing by the Adidas store in Harvard Square. I'm an idiot, though: they're closed on the fourth, obviously!

Then I walked (an indirect route) to the Goethe Institute. I wanted to swing by my office, but by the time I got nearby, I didn't have time any longer. So, my path to the back bay is really convoluted. Especially considering I could have gone straight from my apartment!

Afterwards, I went to my office for a few minutes, then went over to Tommy Doyle's Pub at One Kendall Square for stammtisch. I just don't go often enough... it's so much fun, and I need to keep practicing my german! We left in time to catch the fireworks from the Harvard Bridge (Mass Ave). After that, I led members of our german-speaking contingent back to Central Square, then walked my usual route home.

Whew! Eleven miles! Crazytalk!:-P

Bad walker

2006-05-16T15:40:00.000-05:00

Wow. I failed last week and only walked 3 times:-\ I was hoping to fix a spree of unwalking and get a long walk in on Friday night, but I didn't. I was... too busy winning a magic tournament! Wooooooface!

Yes, Emily and I defeated monkeys of all varieties at Hit & Run on Friday night, then drew to each other (not on purpose). Thus, we won! Sweet!

Still, despite the fact that we're having a minor monsoon, I need to get out and keep walking. I even had someone ask me today whether I had gained weight! Yikes!

Walks, Research, Foreign workers

2006-05-11T00:13:00.000-05:00

This week is not going well in walk-land. So far I've only gotten one in---I just walked home from school. Yikes! This is probably the case due to the fact that it's been raining like unpaid badger blood, and that makes it a bit unpleasant to walk in. Luckily, I have my new/trusty umbrella. Unluckily, it means I still can't sexykick & walk. Hopefully I can find four more walks between now and Saturday. I got in a lot last week... especially when I went on a crazy hike in California.

It's likely that people wish that I would write more about my personal life here... that's likely the only interesting thing I've got going on. However, I do have some interesting research going on! I'm currenly working on trying to prove PSPACE-completeness for a simple game. This is my first time with PSPACE-completeness, so I'm having a bit of a hard time... but it should all work out. I'm also working on doing coding for low-stretch spanning trees (very cool stuff---I promise!) and also coding for some segregation analysis with some econ people here at BU. I also have all sorts of side projects that I wish I had time for (fix scripts, sidekick software, etc, etc).

I really feel like I need someone to explain one of the latest political thingies to me: the protests from foreign workers. If I understand correctly, they're protesting some bill (or were) that would make it harder to immigrate into the US. What I don't really understand is not why it's so easy for foreigners to get into the states without passing customs, but why it's so easy for people to illegally hire immigrants in the US. Any explanations would be good for me:-P

Okay, off to bed in my unheated apartment!

Walks this week

2006-04-19T00:34:00.000-05:00

So far, I've had 3. Two yesterday (back and forth from school) and today (back from school). Awesome.

In other news, everything is going just fine with me. I'm just a happy guy right now:)

Um... I'm sure there'll be more news later.

Walkies, etcetc

2006-04-15T01:59:00.000-05:00

Okay, let's recap... almost the whole last month. Yikes!

1) I got my walks in that week. Don't ask how many... it was either 5 or 6. And that's the target. The following week I think I did 5 before I left for vacation. The week I was on vacation I did not get my walks in, but I got them the week there after. This week I think I got 7 or something ridiculous like that.

Let's try to count: I walked back from school on Monday, then I walked with Phil. On Tuesday I got no walks. On Wednesday I walked back and forth two school (that's 4 so far). On Thursday I walked to school. Then on Friday I got 3 walks! (To school, back from school, and to and from magic!) That makes 8 in total! Sweet. I must look all sexy-like;)

2) There's been a lot of talk about immigrant rights, which I'll admit to not really following well. I haven't done any real research, and my only real gut feeling is that if there are jobs to be had in this country, then people should be allowed to enter the country to work in those jobs. I don't know how "the system" works down there, but I don't know why it seems to favor giving jobs to illegal aliens instead of legal aliens.

3) I've moved back to using Konqueror lately. It doesn't have all the functionality of Firefox, and it seems to have a hard time playing well with Googley things (Blogger included! How can that be?!?). I'll see just how much I can get to work on it, because I think it's cool:-P

4) Speaking of Google, I like Calendar. A friend of mine told me to get in on it, and I did. Fun:) I might even move all my magic-organizing stuff over there:-P

5) I haven't been cleaning up my scripts lately, but I have been enjoying them. Yay!:)

Walkies

2006-03-16T16:06:00.000-05:00

Right. The other point of this blog was for me to keep track of how many times I've walked each week. I try to get around 5 or 6 walks. The length of one of these "walks" should be about as long as it takes me to walk to school---50 minutes.

This week so far I've gotten four walks in. I walked to and back from school on Monday. On Tuesday I walked back from school. Yesterday I walked to MIT (too short, doesn't count) then walked back a long way (counts, way over 50 minutes). Today I walked in to school, and will likely walk back to my apartment afterwards. Tomorrow, however, I doubt I'll walk either way:-
So, I should get in 5. That'll be enough;)

Script 4 done! Also, non-script stuff?

2006-03-08T00:33:00.000-05:00

With some great help from Debajyoti and lots of monkeys on irc (richie, lj, raddykins, srl) on appending strings to files, I got my latest script to work. This one takes the current song playing in amaroK and stores it to a specified playlist. Like the others, it's very specific to my machine, but I'd also like to write in some error checking before I post it. I will soon, though.

In other news, I just took a trip this weekend and took "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis with me. A few people want my input on this, me being a spiritual person without many conservative political tendencies. I read not very far before I found what I think is a break in his logic, and I lost some motivation to keep on going. I dunno whether I'll finish it, but I will take another look and comment on the error that I think I found.

In any case, I would like this blog to not only be about scripts and the size of my wang. It would be nice for some politics and religion to get in here also. I'm extremely open about both, and I'd like to get challenged on my views.

Having said that, I should probably say something about my views:-P

Not yet, though. It's late, and it's time for monkeys like me to sleep.

zzzzz

Playscript is Happy

2006-03-07T15:40:00.000-05:00

First, I should mention that I've posted the sleepscript and the alarmscript here at the bottom. Feel free to scroll down the bottom of this post if you care at all:-P

I (think I've) finished a third script. This one loads a specified playlist, chooses a place at random in that script to start, then plays from there, once the current song (if any) is done playing. It turns off the randomness as soon as it starts playing from the new script, so it'll keep the order once it starts.

So, if I want to play my playlist named 'Progressive', I type the following:

$ ./playscript.sh Progressive

playscript:
DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
fileString="file:///home/paithan/.kde/share/apps/amarok/playlists/$1.m3u"
echo $fileString
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
dcop amarok playlist addMedia $fileString
sleep 1
if [ "$(dcop amarok player isPlaying)" = "true" ];then
totalSeconds=$(dcop amarok player trackTotalTime)
secondsPlayed=$(dcop amarok player trackCurrentTime)
secondsLeft=$(( totalSeconds - secondsPlayed ))
echo "amaroK is currently playing"
echo "The new playlist will begin playing in $secondsLeft seconds."
sleep $((secondsLeft + 1))
else
sleep 1
dcop amarok player play
fi
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode false

Now, as promised, here are the other two scripts.

sleepscript:
DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
echo "Time to go to sleep, Kyle..."
echo "Stopping amaroK..."
dcop amarok player stop
echo "Setting your machine's volume..."
aumix -v 4
echo "Enabling amaroK's randomness..."
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
echo "Clearing the previous playlist..."
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
echo "Loading the Sleep playlist..."
dcop amarok playlist addMedia file:///home/paithan/.kde/share/apps/amarok/playlists/Sleep.m3u
echo "Playing in 3..."
sleep 1
echo "2..."
sleep 1
echo "1..."
sleep 1
echo "Now."
dcop amarok player play
echo "Go to sleep, Kyle..."
for i in $(seq 71)
do
j=$((70-i))
dcop amarok player setVolume $j
sleep $i
done
dcop amarok player stop

alarmscript:
DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
aumix -v 9
echo "It's time to wake Kyle up..."
echo "Enabling Randomness..."
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
echo "Clearing the previous playlist..."
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
echo "Stopping amaroK..."
dcop amarok player stop
echo "Loading the Awaken playlist..."
dcop amarok playlist addMedia file:///home/paithan/.kde/share/apps/amarok/playlists/Awaken.m3u
echo "Maximizing amaroK's volume..."
dcop amarok player setVolume 65
echo "AmaroK will play in 3..."
sleep 1
echo "2..."
sleep 1
echo "1..."
sleep 1
echo "Now."
dcop amarok player play
echo "Here's the weather"
firefox http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=Boston%2C+MA

Friday's Talk, More Scripting...

2006-02-28T18:16:00.000-05:00

Friday's talk didn't go as well as I had hoped. Still, in the end, I think the important ideas were broadcasted to the audience... I hope:-P

My scripts are working perfectly! I completely believe that it was a problem of telling it to play while the list was still loading.

I had to change the initial volume they set for amarok, because my soundcard is dying and my machine sounds horrible when amarok is pumped to 100%.

Currently they're both riddled with comments, but I'll post them after... probably once I get the schema for lowering the volume correct on the sleepscript.

I'm working on another script to just load a playlist that I tell it to. Seems simple, but I want it to do a few other things too:) I'll keep you all (meaning Radsaq) updated.

DJ is Famous

2006-02-24T11:42:00.000-05:00

DJ, sometimes more well known as, "Deej", is famous for being awesome to computers:

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=13778

It should also be noted that I said I would give him this computer before I gave him my phone. I'll stick to that. Especially since I will never give him my phone;)

As far as the scripts are concerned, they are working perfectly, and I'm quite happy. They are happy, but my soundcard is still sad. It goes back and forth between being happy and unhappy, although not as unhappy as it was when it first became very angry at me. In any case, it will need to be replaced, I just don't see any good time this semester for me to be sending my computer off to Dell and not minding that it's gone:-P

I have a talk today. Things seem to be coming together just at the last minute, but I haven't been worried at all. I wish I had been like this for my quals, except that I might not have passed them then;) Of course, I still didn't. And, as one person is likely to say, if I don't start worrying, then I won't ever graduate.

Well, I'm sure this talk is likely to be sexy, and with sexy talks like this, I'm certain to graduate like a pro:-D

Luck is not on my side

2006-02-21T17:04:00.000-05:00

I got up this morning, and had some extra time, so I decided to modify the two scripts. Now the machine sleeps for a few seconds between loading the playlist and playing. I think the problem before was that it didn't like being told to play while the playlist was still loading. I'll post the scripts when I have the chance.

As soon as I got to school, I tested it again. Everything still worked. So I invited my officemate over to listen to my headphones, and ran the script. She said she heard only a buzz. I turned up the volume... still only a buzz.

I tried it myself. Definitely a buzzing. And faint in the background... some music. Deb checked things out when he returned. Status: bad sound card. Ugh. Not dead, but very ill.

So, in the next few days, I will be sending my machine to Dell... if I'm still under warranty, which I believe I am. I'll have to wait until after the beginning of the weekend, but after then I hopefully won't have to wait long to get it back.

Fixed? No...

2006-02-18T01:02:00.000-05:00

Thanks again to Debajyoti for pointing out where I might be able to find where amaroK stores playlists by default (that place is: ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/playlists/, by the way).

So I changed my scripts to go look for the playlists there. Initially I had complete success, but at this point, it's again unpredictable by me. Sometimes the scripts work, sometimes they don't.

Deb suggested that I look somewhere for amarok-specific help. I think I may take him up on this...:-P

Argh.

2006-02-16T16:15:00.000-05:00

I took a nap last night, and the scripts worked perfectly. I tried to use them for sleeping at night, however, and it didn't work out so well. It took a number of tries to coax the sleepscript to work, and the alarmscript crashed amaroK.

I think that I need to determine where amaroK stores playlists itself, then try accessing them from there.

Using more dcop

2006-02-15T17:40:00.000-05:00

I decided to remove all instances of simple command line amarok calls, and replace them with dcop calls. This seems to "fix" some problems. At least it does with the alarmscript. Well... it doesn't make it perfect, but it does make it more predictable, which is nice:)

alarmscript1.sh is now:

DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
aumix -v 20
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
dcop amarok player stop
dcop amarok playlist addMedia file:///home/paithan/Awaken.m3u
dcop amarok player setVolume 100
dcop amarok player play
firefox http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=Boston%2C+M

Which seems to work just fine. It is annoying that it tells firefox to head to the wunderground page from whichever firefox browser tab is active in some instance of firefox... I'd rather it just start a new window... but whatever. I can worry about that later.

I made the same changes to sleepscript, but it hasn't seem to have helped. Here's the new sleepscript:

killall -9 firefox
DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
aumix -v 6
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
dcop amarok player stop
dcop amarok playlist addMedia file:///home/paithan/Sleep.m3u
dcop amarok player play
for i in $(seq 101)
do
j=$((101-i))
dcop amarok player setVolume $j
sleep 10
done
dcop amarok player stop

This has the following problems:
If amaroK is playing, it dies, and kills amaroK.
If amaroK is running but not playing, it dies, killing amaroK.
If amaroK is not running, it does nothing.

...hmmm, perhaps this script is just junked now.
...
Okay, some more tests have revealed that some of the calls to firefox may be behind the problem. If these calls do not resolve happily, then the whole script becomes unhappy. Is there a way to make this a bit more roboost... er... robust?

This appears to be even more prevalent with the alarmscript now that I've been messing around with my firefox tabs. It seems like one of those calls just keeps on dying. I'm not sure, though... it could be something with amaroK.

I removed the call to kill firefox from sleepscript, and it appears to be working fine now. I'll update if I have difficulties with that again. I'm going to try more alarmscripts, without having any browser windows open... see what happens.

Wish me luck:)

Testing alarmscript

2006-02-15T12:23:00.000-05:00

Okay, I tested alarmscript a bunch more times. It seems to work fine if amaroK is closed, or if the only visible part of amaroK is the little icon in the toolbar (this means it's still running, but what does one call this state?). Then, I tried running it again with full playlists, etc, trying to get it to crash again... but it won't. It's started to work perfectly again.

I just don't understand it.

So then I tried to run the sleepscript while amaroK was playing. This time, it crashes.

Alarmscript starts from no amaroK, then sleepscript crashes it again. Consecutive runs of sleepscript crash it.

It's like only one of them wants to be happy at a time. Awesome. I wonder if there's some issue with the playlists and where they're sitting, etc. I wish I knew where amaroK saves playlists (when you don't specify a location) so I could just have my scripts go access things from there.

No alarm:(

2006-02-15T12:04:00.000-05:00

Again, my alarm didn't work. Of course, amaroK was running when I went to bed. When I woke up, it was gone, and the alarm time had passed.

I'll take another look at the script today if I get the chance.

Onion

2006-02-14T20:06:00.000-05:00

I love The Onion.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/45388

Sleep worked. Alarm Failed.

2006-02-14T17:46:00.000-05:00

Okay, so the sleepscript worked last night, although the alarmscript failed. Here's my shell I/O:

[paithan@localhost ~]$ ./sleepscript1.sh
firefox: no process killed
object not accessible
call failed
amaroK: [Loader] Starting amarokapp..
amaroK: [Loader] Don't run gdb, valgrind, etc. against this binary! Use amarokapp.
QLayout: Adding KToolBar/mainToolBar (child of QVBox/unnamed) to layout for PlaylistWindow/PlaylistWindow
QMultiInputContext::changeInputMethod(): index=0, slave=xim
QMultiInputContext::changeInputMethod(): index=0, slave=xim
QMultiInputContext::changeInputMethod(): index=0, slave=xim
QMultiInputContext::changeInputMethod(): index=0, slave=xim
QColor::setRgb: RGB parameter(s) out of range
QColor::setRgb: RGB parameter(s) out of range
QColor::setRgb: RGB parameter(s) out of range
[paithan@localhost ~]$ at -f alarmscript1.sh 10:30am
warning: commands will be executed using (in order) a) $SHELL b) login shell c) /bin/sh
job 252 at 2006-02-14 10:30
[paithan@localhost ~]$ QMultiInputContext::changeInputMethod(): index=0, slave=xim

When I woke up, amaroK had died. I'm not sure when, but I assume that the alarmscript killed it when it ran in the morning.

I'm of the belief that the scripts don't like running when amaroK is already running. I'll give that a test right now, running the sleepscript.

Okay, on the first test, it failed and killed my running session of amaroK.

On the second, third and fourth tests it worked, but as soon as I quit the script, amaroK died. All three of these tests were run without a running version of amaroK. Also, it is worth noting that amaroK "randomly" chose the same song each time ("Souvenir" by Morphine). It seems to often pick this song when it's in trouble!

On the fifth test, after running amaroK first (but without loading a playlist or anything), the script works correctly. "Control-C"ing the script does not kill amaroK.

After that ctrl-c, I ran the script again. Again, it does fine. Ctrl-c does not kill it. A seventh run does the same. In these cases it is even picking different songs.

After getting the same result for a bunch more times (note that these yield the desired sexiness), I've decided I'll mess with the playlist a bit before I run the script again.

Clear the playlist: Seems to have no negative effects.

Replace with a different playlist: No effect.

Append a playlist: no problem.

Argh... I don't know what the problem was:(

Now I'll try to run alarmscript...

Nope... that killed amaroK! With amaroK dead, we try sleepscript again. Wow, we have the same problem as before: We get Morphine's Souvenir over and over, and "ctrl-c" kills amaroK again. On the fourth try, amaroK has died whilst opening. Thanks a bunch, amaroK, for having a big unremovable icon sit in the middle of the screen on each of my desktops. That is a huge help. Like, help the size of a grizzly bear. (As I found out, clicking on the icon makes it go away.)

amaroK: [Loader] amaroK is taking a long time to load! Perhaps something has gone wrong?

Thanks for the news, amaroK loader.

Further runs of sleepscript do the same thing. So, let's just see what happens with alarmscript.

Hmm, alarmscript starts amaroK and begins to play... yup... Morphine's "Souvenir". It's not even on the Awaken playlist. Looking at this, though, I see that the Awaken list appears directly after the Sleep list in amaroK's playlist. Sleep should not be there. Awaken should clear it off. A second call to alarmscript works. Strange.

Further calls to both scripts all seem to work fine. Gah... I'll worry about this later...:(

On another annoying note, my laptop cuts the sound just after each decrement of the sleepscript. Awesome.

FIRST POST!!!!!!!!!!!11111

2006-02-14T01:58:00.000-05:00

Oh SWEET! I am so lucky! I get to be the first person to post here!!!!!!!

Okay, junk-wrangling aside (no, that's not a reference to Brokeback Mountain), here's what I'm working on now:

I'm trying to write a pair of scripts, both to control amaroK. One of these jives should wake me up in the morning (at a given time) and the other should play sleepy music, while slowly reducing in volume.

Right now they work... kinda. At least, they worked last night, because they put me to sleep and woke me up. However, on Sunday morning, the alarm script failed to work, because amaroK crashed or something, and blahblahjunker. The problem is, I don't think I changed anything between when I went to bed on Saturday night and today when I woke up.

Here's the alarm script: (it gets called with 'at -f alarmscript1.sh X:XXam')

DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
aumix -v 20
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
amarok -s
dcop amarok playlist addMedia file:///home/paithan/Awaken.m3u
dcop amarok player setVolume 100
amarok -p
firefox http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=Boston%2C+MA

I don't recall why those first two lines are there, but Debajyoti worked out that they were necessary... at one point in time. Deb showed me the coolness of dcop, while radsaq helped me figure out how to make the call to addMedia. Note that after it's all done it also gives me my sexy weather:)

Here's the sleepythyme script: (I just call this junker with './sleepscript1.sh')

killall -9 firefox
DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
aumix -v 6
dcop amarok player enableRandomMode true
dcop amarok playlist clearPlaylist
amarok -s
dcop amarok playlist addMedia file:///home/paithan/Sleep.m3u
amarok -p
for i in $(seq 101)
do
j=$((101-i))
dcop amarok player setVolume $j
sleep 10
done
amarok -s

Note that the first thing this wants to do is kill any instances of firefox. It'd be great to get that working. Stupid firefox crashes my computer if it's left idle for too long. Well... it doesn't crash it... but it does get X to start using 99% of my CPU, overheating my laptop, and melting a hole in my desk:-P (Thank you Lapinator for preventing that hole from actually occuring!) Of course, this also prevents anything else from running properly;)

The changes that I made at the end on Saturday night was moving the (first instance of the) line 'amarok -s' further down in the script. I think amaroK was unhappy about being given some command (at which point it starts up if it hadn't already been) then immediately stopping. But, like I said, I think this version of the scripts caused it to crash on Sunday morning (and I woke up an hour late, egads!).
These are the first scripts I've ever (really) written, and any help with these would be great. I will try to do most of the writing of them myself as I update them (I want to end up calling at somehow inside the script instead of using at to call the script).

In other news, I want to get an alphasmart neo. Yay. Also in other news, I'm already annoyed with Blogger. Here are my annoyances so far:

1) I can't seem to turn off Italics at the end of my text using the hot keys. Is this a problem with my version of Firefox?

2) I can't edit an existing link just by placing the cursor inside the linked text and clicking on the link button. This is annoying, because in order to decide where the link will be, I have to highlight text. As soon as I click the link button, it opens a window over Firefox, so I can't go and highight the actual url I want to put in there (generally the url from another Firefox tab).

There's probably an easy work around, but I don't want to have to use Windowy hotkeys to copy-paste:-P

Similarly annoying, is that then when I then close that little window, my cursor has the little link attached to it, and if I put it somewhere it throws it in my text box here. Awesome. Just plain awesome.

Okay, it's just about time for bed for me. Indeed, Kyle is sleepy. Or, he will be if his sleepythyme(pizzapie) script works.