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You all probably know that health insurance (and health related things) are a fairly prominent theme in my life… so when I read commentaries like this one I get seriously freaked out. Krugman is a little over the top at times on the “political scale” (perhaps “off the left” would be more accurate than “over the top”). But I think he makes some very interesting points.

I’ve heard this $5,000 vs $12,000 thing before and I am pretty sure that it is at least semi-accurate. My family policy (which isn’t all that great) costs me nearly $4,000 a year of my own money. That doesn’t include anything that the company might be contributing in addition. I have a lot of trouble believing that our current government would do a good job managing health care, but I am fairly certain that it would be better than if we cut all the strings entirely.

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So I have had my bike for a month (and I have yet to post any pictures). I’m still riding to work everyday. Actually, I’ve only missed one day and that was because I woke up late. The funny thing is… I imagine it took me as long to get to work in my car as it would have if I had taken my bike.

My legs don’t hurt so much anymore. The tops of my thighs are still a little tight sometimes, but it’s pretty reasonable. The problem with my backside hurting has essentially gone away. Either I’m getting better at avoiding the big bumps or my butt is getting more tolerant (probably a combination of both). All in all I would recommend to anyone that, if they can, they should give a bike a try. I feel healthier, we’re saving money on gas, and what the heck… maybe I’ll do my part to help “save the planet”.

Now to just see how my body handles the weather as we start to head into fall and cooler temperatures.

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I was working on a project today at work and I stumbled onto a problem. I was displaying the “total size” of a bunch of files. The problem I ran into wasn’t very difficult (I was simply adding Kilobytes and Bytes), but it did bring up a somewhat interesting question. How many bytes are in a kilobyte. I knew it was either 1000 or 1024, but I wasn’t sure. A simple google search yielded the following interesting read:

§ 84. How many bytes does a kilobyte contain?

It just reminds me of a couple things… 1) computer people are silly people at times and 2) I really ought to read Through the Looking-Glass

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So I logged on to my computer here this morning and what did I find… nearly 100 spam messages in my gmail inbox. Usually gmail is pretty good about filtering out spam (I get a couple hundred a day normally, they just don’t usually make it to my inbox). All of the them were sent to cool-stu.com accounts (not my gmail account). So I am turning off my auto-forwarder for a little while. All that means is, if you are sending mail to anything@cool-stu.com, I won’t get it. Send it to my gmail instead.

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I was flipping through my feed reader and stumbled across this story:

Cheap Housing

I also found this link which backed up the story.

That’s just insane. I suppose it puts some perspective on McDonald’s dollar menu.

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So I went riding a couple times over the weekend. Nothing very far or difficult (just a couple miles down the Jordan River Parkway). I live just a block or two from one of the entrances, so it is pretty convenient to hop on my bike and go. More importantly, my body doesn’t really like to sleep in (against the wishes of my head at times). So when I wake up at 6-6:30 on Saturday morning my choices are get on the computer and play some video games, or go out and ride. This weekend I chose to ride.

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I was going over my SlashDot feed-reader and found this article:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/02/1237251

Which linked to this page:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

Woah. Those are some very very cool pictures. If you aren’t familiar with the LHC, you should know that it is the device that when it is started in a few months (three months or so for the first collisions) will destroy the entire earth, and possibly the universe. It all depends on who you ask. I don’t really buy into all that. I just think that if some of the world’s top scientists think that they are going to be able to obtain useful information from it, then who am I to say “no”?

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So yesterday afternoon I did something that some might deem silly…. I bought a bicycle with the intentions of riding it to work. cars are expensive (registration, gas, maintenance, etc)… I’m out of shape (that’s what five plus years of sitting at a computer will do to anyone), and plus, all the cool kids at work are riding bikes. I was feeling left out.

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I have a confession to make. I enjoy reading web comics. There, it’s out in the open now… guilty as charged. Not only that, but I am always on the look out for new comics. Probably the most recent comic to make it into my RSS feed was XKCD. If you are at all geeky and have never seen XKCD you should be ashamed of yourself. I know I was. But I have seen the light, and now eagerly await each Monday, Wednesday and Friday… because that is when the new comic comes out.

My question for you readers… take a look over my list here and tell me what I am missing. What comics do you read?

http://dieselsweeties.com/
http://comics.com/comics/diesel/index.html
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com
http://dilbert.com/
http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
http://www.giantitp.com/Comics.html (both OotS and Erfworld)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/
http://www.pvponline.com/
http://wondermark.blogspot.com/
http://xkcd.com/

The comic doesn’t need to have an RSS feed… but that doesn’t hurt.

The second thing I wanted to post was a link that my friend Eric posted on his blog. I don’t know if any of you role play… but this little comic strip isn’t so far from the truth when it comes to the games I participate in.

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I logged on to Facebook today (for the record, I hate facebook, but I was glad to have logged on today). One of my friends from high school had just joined a new group called “Please Pray for Craig Decker and his family”. Craig is a friend from high school as well, and he was the kind of kid everyone got along with.

However, Craig was also a little crazy at times (almost always in a good way though). This was most evident when 18 months ago, while on a trip to Mexico, he used a firework to accidentally remove his right hand from the rest of his body.

I figured this group had something to do with that. Perhaps some financial hardship over medical bills, or maybe some new complication. I wasn’t at all prepared for what I read though.
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