No One Thing

I currently have the worst health insurance I have ever had. The deductibles are high – the highest I’ve every had – and the coverage is the lightest. Added to that, the insurance company, Aetna, is making it a pain in the ass to cover doctors and procedures that are medically necessary for my wife and which were trivially covered under previous plans.

Yesterday, it got even better. We received a letter from Aetna stating that in order for my wife to get certain things covered, we had gather an improbable amount of information – much more than the phone rep said was needed in a previous conversation – and get it to them within 5 days from the date of the letter.

The letter was dated the 15th, we received it on the 22nd. It was not certified or in any other way tracked – just another First Class letter. They were asking us to deliver a large quantity of information in the past.

I believe, after all the rest of the crap we’ve been through with this company, that this is deliberate, willful malfeasance – and that sucks, because it means we’re now into the dirty tricks that insurance companies use when they really don’t want to meet their contractual obligations.

On the up side, our broker is going to bat for us. I hope she’s as much help as she seems to want to be. In the meantime, we’ll have no choice but to assume that every Aetna employee is actively hostile to our interests and willing to use dishonest means to avoid fulfilling the company’s contractual obligations – and if this isn’t settled to our satisfaction, and soon, we’ll be going to the state insurance board and the attorney general.

If it’s feasible, I may update later with a redacted pic of the letter – I’m very interested in documenting Aetna’s bad behavior publicly. (They could, of course, avoid this entirely by behaving well. Care to lay odds?)

I got my first Arduino board (and associated goodies) today, and spent a couple hours learning my way around it. Patching together some of the early tutorials, I built a circuit and sketch that caused an LED to fade in and out, at a rate regulated by a potentiometer, with the whole thing turned on & off by a momentary switch. Not earth-shattering, obviously, but I feel like it’s a good night’s play for someone who’s new to the environment and hasn’t wired anything on a breadboard in some years.

Layout is below (click for full size), sketch source after that. I’d post the circuit diagram, but I haven’t taken the time to make the diagram generated by Fritzing not look like ass, and I’m tired.

Next steps will be to bang through some more tutorials, working up to proofs-of-concept for some interactive art pieces I want to do.

 

/*
Circuit:
9 -> 330ohm -> LED+ -> GND

2 -> switch2
5V -> switch3
GND -> switch4

5V -> pot0
A0 -> pot1
GND -> pot2
*/

const int LED = 9;
const int BUTTON = 2;

int brightness = 0;
int fadeAmount = 5;
int fadeSense = 1;

int lastButtonState = LOW;
boolean fadeRunning = false;

void setup() {
  pinMode(LED, OUTPUT);
  pinMode(BUTTON, INPUT);
}

void loop() {
  int buttonState = digitalRead(BUTTON);

  if (buttonState != lastButtonState) {
    lastButtonState = buttonState;

    if (buttonState == HIGH) toggleFadeState();

    if (!fadeRunning) digitalWrite(LED, LOW);

    accountForSwitchBounce();
  }

  if (fadeRunning) {
    analogWrite(LED, brightness);

    int sensorValue = analogRead(A0);

    fadeAmount = ((sensorValue / 1023.0) * 25.0);
    fadeAmount = max(fadeAmount, 1);
    fadeAmount *= fadeSense;

    brightness = brightness + fadeAmount;
    brightness = min(max(brightness, 0), 255);

    if (brightness <= 0) {
      fadeSense = 1;
    } else if (brightness >= 255) {
      fadeSense = -1;
    }

    delay(30);
  }
}

void accountForSwitchBounce() {
  delay(10);
}

boolean toggleFadeState() {
  return fadeRunning = !fadeRunning;
}

I feel the need to repeat my frequent disclaimer: My opinions are mine, and not anyone else’s. They have nothing to do with my employer.

You may have heard that sexism and gender equity are issues in technology and science (where I’ve made my occupational home for most of my life now). The issues, general and specific, have been described amply all over the Internet, so I won’t go into the broader picture here except to say that the problem is real, and that I try to do better and associate with people who do better.

So, today’s specific kerfuffle: There exists a social network for techies called Geeklist. I have an account there (but only because they haven’t implemented account deletion yet). Like young companies building a brand sometimes do, they sell apparel – t-shirts for men and women, and a couple of different styles of panties that look somewhat less unisex. No boxers or briefs for the guys. (Note: As of this writing, it looks like they’ve taken down everything but the t-shirts.) The videos on the product pages for this apparel, as well as another promotional video on Vimeo (also taken down), featured a young, shapely woman dancing around in a Geeklist t-shirt and panty set, and occasionally associating with a fully-dressed, bespectacled man who I guess was meant to be some kind of male geek archetype.

You know, whatever. That shit is sexist and kind of insulting to thinking geeks of both genders, but I have code to write and bigger fish to fry (have you seen what the Republicans are up to lately?). If it were limited to this, I’d have just rolled my eyes and moved on.

Someone had a stronger reaction to it than me. Predictably, it was a female programmer. Her name is Shanley Kane, and she tweets as @shanley. Her initial tweet on the matter:

@csanz @rekatz why the ads with a woman in her underwear dancing around to dupstep?

(@csanz and @rekatz are, respectively, Christian Sanz and Reuben Katz, the founding CTO and CEO of Geeklist.)

OK, great. She has every reason to be annoyed at the public intersection of soft-porn sexism and geek culture, and every right to speak her mind on the topic just as publicly.

At this point, it would be instructive to read the full exchange between the @shanley and the Geeklist guys. I encourage you to read it in its entirety, so that you don’t have to take my word for it when I summarize that @csanz and @rekatz:

• Avoid any meaningful discussion of @shanley’s complaint.
• Tell her they don’t like her tone – a common tactic to avoid substantive discussion.
• Claim that all the women involved with the video were cool with it. (This might even be true, but does not change the fact that the video reinforces crap stereotypes of both genders.)
• Claim that it’s not really their fault or their problem, despite the fact that their brand is all over the thing.
• Tell her she’s unprofessional for not emailing them privately – despite the fact that their offense was public. Clearly, they’d rather make the problem go away quietly – and they clearly saw the problem as the complaint, not their imbecilic video.
• Finally – and here’s the kicker – they try to drag her employer (Basho Technologies) into the discussion, and point out that they are clients of her employer, and suggest that she’s not reflecting well on their brand. (To Basho’s credit, they were supportive of Kane’s right to express her personal opinion.)

Most of this stuff is no more or less than the usual asshattery exhibited by educated men who should know better but somehow remain clueless. In the face of most of this behavior, I might give the bad actors the benefit of the doubt, assume them to be educable, and have settled for expressing myself with a tweet or three. For most of what @csanz and @rekatz said and did, a genuine apology (rather than their half-assed “I’m sorry you were offended” non-apology) would have covered it.

Even if they issue that apology, I still want to delete my Geeklist account and make sure I never support another Katz and/or Sanz venture. Most of their behavior could be described as clumsy or unnecessarily defensive, but forgivable. They went the extra mile, though, to attempt to drag her employer into the conversation and throw in implied threats to her livelihood. This is not the act of a geek entrepreneur out of his depth in the social arena – this is attempting to silence a critic without addressing the issue, by threatening her ability to pay the rent. This goes way beyond casual sexism, or cluelessness, or anything else that should be gotten over with an apology.

I want to be clear on how strongly I feel about this – and, in case of the unlikely event that Katz or Sanz reads this, I’ll address my main point directly to them:

You amoral pricks acted from a position of security to threaten someone else’s livelihood because she criticized you. You are fortunate that I am not one of your investors or on your board, because I would be making your lives all kinds of hell until you either gave me my money back or resigned your positions in favor of better people – and I would be doing my level best to make sure that no respectable investor ever touched one of your ideas again.

The fact that the tactic of dragging Basho into the discussion seems to have backfired (presumably because it is run by better people than Geeklist) matters not at all. What matters is that Sanz and Katz were great enough scumbags to even try it – and I’m not going to give them a pass for it no matter how many months they decide to highlight women’s achievements in technology. This is not a PR problem; this is a problem of people in a leadership position who clearly do not deserve it. I want my Geeklist account deleted and my data off their servers.

And of course, I am not a Geeklist investor, and about four people read this blog, and not many more actually pay attention to me on Twitter. But I have Twitter handles for some of Geeklist’s investors (Crunchbase FTW). Maybe someone should raise their awareness of how Sanz and Katz are representing the Geeklist brand?

(Irony intended.)

So… I’m employed in the normal sense, and winding down my other commitments including Moveable Feast (which I still wish a long and lucrative life).

As is my custom, I’m not going to name my employer here. It’s not top-secret or anything, but I prefer to avoid any confusion between my foul-mouthed ranting and the company’s press releases. My words are mine, the company’s are the company’s, and ne’er the twain shall meet, unless I speak at a conference or something.

I will say that I’m almost 100% focused on mobile development, specifically iOS, which is fun for me.

On a side note: I’m hoping to have a bit more time & money for small personal projects now, including (but limited to) revisiting Guitar Cardio (web and mobile), painting, maybe updating this blog more than twice a year, and taking up the Chapman Stick. We’ll see how all that plays out in practice.

Here’s another of my two-hour specials: IntervalQuiz.com – infinite random questions about chromatic scale intervals.

100% JavaScript, if you’re the sort who cares about that kind of thing.

If you’re following Tim Ferriss’s many tips and refinements to Occam’s Protocol in The 4-Hour Body, you might be taking glutamine after workouts for recovery, or doing a brief, high-dose regimen for intestinal repair. I went with this part of the program, and to that end purchased some unflavored glutamine powder. What nobody tells you is that unflavored glutamine powder tastes like ass.

I tried a number of flavoring agents, but I’ve only found two solutions to the flavor problem. One is to just mix the powder with water and drink fast. The other was the discovery that one cup of whole milk will neutralize the ass flavor of 5-10g of glutamine powder – which is handy if you’re doing milk-based post-workout shakes or doing LOMAD/GOMAD.

So I’m a month into Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Body, inspired partly by my brother‘s striking success, and partly by some sketchy bloodwork results at my last check-up. Exhibit 1:

Like the guy at the fish counter once told me: “You don’ want none-a dat.”

Part of the bloodwork-fixing process, of course, involves food. Now, food is something I enjoy, but rarely put a lot of thought or effort into. I’m usually either buying lunch out or having some of whatever my wife made herself for dinner. Unfortunately, my wife’s surgically-necessitated, high-bacon diet is not going to bring down my waist measurement nor my cholesterol. It was up to me to find something that tastes good, takes as little time as possible to prepare, and fits within the relatively strict but straightforward rules of the various diet protocols laid out in 4HB.

I’ve hit upon something I call Concoction – the recipe for which has probably already been independently invented by about 50,000 4HB readers, but which I’m going to document here anyway. If you’re doing the 4HB Slow Carb diet (the one for fat loss), you know that each meal needs a lean protein, a legume, and some vegetable matter. For one batch of Concoction, you need 12-14 oz of canned lean protein. I use line-caught tuna or organic chicken, because I’m a hippie. Today’s Concoction started with tuna:

For legumes, I like red kidney beans or lentils. Today, it was lentils, 1 can:

My favorite veggies are raw broccoli florets or raw baby spinach (organic, of course). Today, though, I’m experimenting with 1 cup of chard, which I hand-shredded thoroughly:

If you’re just doing Slow Carb, the ingredient list ends here. If you’re doing Occam’s Protocol (for muscle gain), you get to add in a quality carb like quinoa, brown rice, or a whole grain pasta. I favor the Trader Joe’s brown rice that I can microwave in the bag in 60 seconds (1 bag = 10.5oz):

Recapping the main ingredients:

• 12-14 oz lean, canned meat
• 1 can lentils or beans
• 1 cup green stuff, chopped or shredded relatively finely
• (optional) 1 bag (10.5oz) brown rice

This is all very healthy, but only so-so on the flavor, so I also add 2-3 teaspoons (I think, it’s not like I’m measuring anything but the greens here) of lime juice:

And to really make it sing, I also add sriracha:

There are many schools of thought on how to correctly use sriracha in food preparation, but I’m with The Oatmeal on this one:

These are my favored flavors; there are many like them, but these are mine. Add whatever works for you to the main ingredients in a big bowl, and mix.

And the outcome? I think it’s delicious, at least with baby spinach. (The chard experiment did not go as well as I’d hoped – too bitter. Plus spinach has all those sexy phytoecdysteroids.) Prep time is however long it takes you to open 3 cans, cut/shred your vegetables, and stir the stuff together – no cooking (except for nuking the rice), one measurement (the veggies), and if you eat out of your mixing bowl you’ve only dirtied one bowl and one fork. One batch of Concoction is about 600 kcal & 94g of protein without the rice, 1000 kcal & 101g of protein with the rice (if I’ve read all the packages correctly). On Occam’s Protocol, I find I usually eat the whole batch in one (sometimes comically extended) sitting, and with shakes and an eggy breakfast I generally hit my food targets. Slow Carb-ers will likely get more than one meal out of this recipe. YMMV.

Next time I get the writing bug, I’ll share some other one-course meal recipes or random findings about the 4HB experience. Short version, one month in: My weight has only gone down a little, but I’m putting on muscle with a rapidity I couldn’t even achieve in college, which means that I’m losing fat beyond what the scale shows. Based on results so far, I recommend the book (or the Kindle version, which I got). Bloodwork gets re-done in August, keep your fingers crossed.

It’s rare that I take two hours off, but when I do, there’s always a chance that something like this will happen: Box Is Awesome!

You know how we have laundry products that claim to make your whites whiter and your colors brighter? In Paris, I’ve seen (so far) 2 products claiming to keep your blacks blacker.

That is all.

Stores in Paris keep odd hours, and there doesn’t seem to be a pattern to it. A pharmacie will be closed on a weekday afternoon, and the one down the block will be open and bustling. Posted hours are a catch-as-catch-can thing. The weirdest one: I don’t think the charcutier up the block (whose quiche lorraine we’re having for breakfast daily) opened at all on Saturday, but we wandered in at 21:00 on a Sunday and he could barely keep up with the foot traffic.

Maybe living in 24/7-land (a.k.a. NYC) has wrecked my brain, but I do wonder what the pattern is that I’m not seeing.

One trick I’ve learned (totally unrelated): When someone tries to hustle you on the street, give them a cranky look and deny understanding French – but do it in Russian. It’s like con man kryptonite.