Author: DOuG pRATt

Cranking out the years

With my ‘interesting’ eyes, I can relate to Friday’s Crankshaft.

Crankshaft is one of my favorite comic strips, but when there are flashbacks — tinted brown and framed as if in an old photo album — I have to ignore the “timeline disconnect” in the continuity. Ed Crankshaft is supposed to be a WWII vet who had played ball for the Toledo Mud Hens. For that to be possible he would be somewhere between 85 and 90 years old — too old to make it up the stairs to his apartment over the garage, let alone drive a school bus. His daughter and son-in-law witnessed the Kent State killings of students by the National Guard in 1970, so they have to be at least 60 or 62, and yet the family is portrayed as if Pam and Jeff are 50-55.

The outs of insurance

I received a statement from Blue Cross/Blue Shield, saying my wife wasn’t covered for a hospital visit she had back in June, and I would be responsible for the $2000 in charges. She did indeed have an appointment there in June, but not on that day. The form said she didn’t have insurance on the day services were provided, which of course she would have, if she had been at the hospital that particular day.

So what was the problem? The hospital had sent BC/BS a bill for charges belonging to another woman who happens to have my wife’s name. BC/BS claimed innocence, that it was the hospital’s mistake, but they also screwed up. The statement had the wrong middle initial for my name, which was what made me suspicious in the first place.

It was possible, if unlikely, that the woman with my wife’s name is married to a man with my name, but I was told by BC/BS that their computer system had replaced my middle initial with my wife’s. Having spent more than 30 years in the healthcare computing business I felt confident in saying to the representative, “unless somebody entered that by mistake manually, that’s a bug in your software, and you need to kick this upstairs.”

Speaking of healthcare, this is worth watching…

Watch Making Sen$e: Competing Claims About Healthcare Reform on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

The President HATES This!

Way back in April, 2007 I used this picture in a post I called “Legal Loan Sharking.”

Sub-Prime Lender

After the credit crisis hit in September, 2008, I hoped these sleazy mortgage ads would disappear from the Internet but, no, they’re still there. Yahoo is a big offender. Here’s a current example.

“The President Waives Refi Requirement??” Hey, if you believe that, I can sell you a pair of X-Ray specs that will let you see through a girl’s clothes. What sort of slimy boiler room operations are behind these online ads, anyway? Here’s another one.

What does the Better Business Bureau say about Power4Home? Nothing good. Whenever anybody tells you they know some mysterious secret or trick that will make your car get better mileage, or a diet that will melt pounds off like magic, or whatever, it’s a come-on, if not an outright scam. Period. As Captain Braddock used to say at the end of each episode of Racket Squad, “Remember, there are people who can slap you on the back with one hand, and pick your pocket with the other… and it could happen to you!”

http://youtu.be/zEvtOo_O_Cw

Yes It Is Something

I am annoyed that Logitech has discontinued its superb Squeezebox Touch music player. I’d be even more annoyed if I didn’t own one. Playing on the Touch right now is, for me, the ultimate expression of audio technology as it presently exists — The complete Beatles on an Apple USB flash drive. The customer reviews on Amazon are all over the place, and I am very pleased to say you can ignore all of them that aren’t five stars. (No, I didn’t have a problem with the stem, as others have reported. The drive is secured magnetically, and maybe that’s given some people trouble.)

This thing is worth every penny, and maybe I’m just giddy because I applied all of my Amex Rewards Points to the purchase and got it for only $18, as a birthday present to myself, but the sound quality is what it is, and it’s absolutely outstanding. I’ve never been carried away with the sound of most — and I mean 75% or more — Compact Discs. I have never thought that digital audio was the problem, but that 16 bits aren’t enough. The dynamic range of CD is great, but so is the contrast ratio between solid white and solid black. The fine shades of gray — the nuances — often seem to be missing. Cymbals, for example, lack the shimmer they should have. Acoustic guitars don’t quite convey the feeling of the strings vibrating. Etc.

Despite my advancing age, my ears still seem to be good up to 12 kHz, maybe even 14 kHz, and listening to the Beatles this way is really something. With CD’s, when music gets loud, with a lot of instruments and vocals, I think everything sort of collapses into a flat-sounding mess, and I lose interest. The Beatles collection, copied from the original 24-bit digital masters, and compressed in the lossless FLAC format, doesn’t do that. Every little thing can be discerned distinctly and easily.

For sure, this is a specialty item for the very few with a lot of interest and the right setup, but at last there’s something better for listening to the Fab Four than the Mobile Fidelity LP’s from 30 years ago (I have a few titles, but not the box set). Enough talk. I’m going back to listening!