According to HME Business, a trade magazine relevant to my field, the number of O2 suppliers was down 50% (fifty percent!) from last year. I thought it was 20%. Apparently the 20% is just HME providers in general.
There’s also a brilliant editorial note from the same magazine. When it becomes available on the site, I’ll have to copypasta it verbatim.
Some days I wonder if it’s worth working hard, if at all, when the government has us in the crosshairs.
One of the more weird things to happen today. Woman calls, starts giving me an ID number, to which I respond that we’re not an insurance company, is she one of our patients? No. I explained that we’re a DME, and is there anything I could help her with? No. “Have a nice day.” So I hung up.
She calls back, demanding to speak to my supervisor. Tells me I was ‘rude’, obnoxious, whatever. Starts hurling obscenities when I explain there’s no one higher than me. Then she hangs up.
Anyway, I call her back and leave a voicemail. And then using google voice, I text her, apologizing for my inability to help her and that I take these criticisms seriously and if she could call back and repeat what she said slowly, I could try helping her.
That started a bizarre exchange of texts. Ultimately, she forgave me… for what? I don’t know. There were words in those text messages, but they didn’t make any sense in the way they were connected.
And so,… that was the first call of the day.
The anticipation is so much higher the second time, since there’s a Nora in the mix. Her life is going to change forever. I don’t know if she really understands what a little brother means. Maybe she does.
I know I never give her enough credit. She always surprises me. But this isn’t a singular event.
And of course, there’s that little detail that there’ll be another little life in our possession.
Wow.
Since the last birth center appointment, I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything. So excited, and so nervous…
With the impending arrival of the baby, I just want to go at full speed, but Lisa wants to chill out and do nothing. Problem is, I can’t shut it off. Even now, I’m planning my evening and such, but fully cognizant that I should just rest and sleep.
On the flip side: two kids?! When are we going to get time to manage anything with two kids? At least not until after the baby sleeps through the night, right?
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This is post #800. It took 5.5 years to get to 700, but only six months to go from 700 to 800. I guess I’ve been going at a torrid pace for just about everything, much to Lisa’s chagrin and consternation.
I understand Medicare needs to reign in their costs. They could’ve done it by cutting the payment, not shutting off the flow after 3 years. I don’t understand why they opted to do this.
Basically, a patient who was with one company that went out of business is trying to find another company to take her on. Given her equipment and her situation, I have to say no. That makes me feel awful, but I guess this is part of Medicare’s brave new world.
Nora and I played in what was left of the snow. I had a chance to break out the camera with the AF-S VR lens and practice some manual focusing. I’m thrilled with the results.
Nora afforded a slight smile after dancing in the snow. F/6.3, 1/160, ISO-200
Edited with the GIMP + Phatch. Click here for the original.
Nora was trying to see her breath. F/5.6, 1/125, ISO-400
And per Lisa’s request…
Not Denby’s finest moment.
The VR AF-S lens is very sharp. Still not a fan of the focus ring, but I absolutely love the half-stops and it has some excellent detail. The first picture came out on the cyan side. My screen isn’t color calibrated, so I may have added too much magenta to compensate. My hands were absolutely frozen after taking 25 shots. I can’t wait for nicer weather.
Michael sent me a text few days ago asking if I had taken over 1,000 photos on the new camera. After a moment’s contemplation, I sadly admitted that I hadn’t. Christmas went wonderfully well (450+), but since then it’s been bitterly cold, with nothing to photograph.
So this morning I decided to break out the AF-D lens and practice manually focusing images. Both Nora and Lisa were adamant that I NOT take pictures of them, so I took pictures of the cats (again).
This camera smells good!
“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to?
The new lens has manual focus (obviously) but I’m very uncomfortable using it. The focus ring recedes into the lens making it pretty difficult to use at certain lengths. I probably should just used to it – the VR function is a significant upgrade over the AF-D lenses.
When the baby is born and/or it gets warmer, I promise much more interesting compositions.
Forget the netbook, forget the Droid, forget all that. The one and only gizmo I want is an eReader.
For the last year, I’ve been using this free program called CutePDF to save interesting stuff I find on the web. It’s very simple: whenever you choose to print a document, you simply point it to CutePDF, and it saves it as a PDF. This works for anything that can be printed.
I haven’t been reading them, though. There’s an e-stack of articles and documents I want to read, but I’ll be damned if I sit in front of the PC to read a 45 page tome on World War II, for instance.
Everybody and their mother is producing e-Readers (Barnes and Noble being the latest one) but all are in the $150+ price range. If the Inquirer offered to subsidize something like that if I took up a newspaper subscription, I would be all over it… provided that they upload the latest paper in a timely fashion, unlike their delivery service which had the paper nowhere near my house after the time I left for work.
I read at a decent clip. PDA screens are a bit to small to read books properly. I tried reading Siddhartha on such a screen… it didn’t last for more than three minutes.
I’ve been pretty quiet about my linux escapades because it usually means I set myself up for failure and go back to Windows, but lately it’s all I use at home. I haven’t found myself wanting anything or missing anything and surprisingly it is now working better than xp on my aged laptop.
Specifically, on my laptop, the fans are insanely loud. To control this, I use Speedswitch XP which allows me to throttle my CPU. It works for a few months, then for whatever reason Windows will stop respecting my cpu throttle settings. Then, after a few more months, it’ll defer to the higher stepping for even the most mild of tasks. I originally thought it was spyware, but over the last few years I spend less and less time on the internet and more on other tasks, like music sorting. It seems the more often I do CPU intensive tasks, XP quickly decides to override my settings. I don’t mind running my laptop at 600mhz for web surfing or typing up documents or even tagging music. I don’t need that horsepower all the time.
So, oddly, one of the biggest reasons why I’m using linux on a day to day basis is because cpu throttling is set at kernel level, so whatever the system is doing, it’s doing it at my whim – even at boot time (throttling only happens once I’m logged in under Linux). This issue seems to be dogging my laptop only. Lisa’s laptop is silent, and even my sister’s laptop, which is also a Centrino, is largely silent. But mine is the prettiest.
Second reason is virtual desktops. I do NOT use any of those fancy graphic plugins. I like being able to move windows around to multiple desktops, increase and decrease desktops on the fly, and have it all bound to keyboard shortcuts.
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I originally was dissuaded from macs because of the double toolbar – one up top and one at the bottom. Since I started using gnome (and loving it), I’ve relented on that aspect. Now I just want a decent implementation of virtual desktops, and I’ll be completely sold.
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I don’t think my laptop is going to last much longer. The DVD drive is failing, the keyboard is having some issues, and the glue between the bezel and the lcd wore out, so now particles of dirt are in the LCD, so there are spots on the screen that I can do nothing about. My hope (fingers crossed) is that Lisa buys a new laptop for her practice so I can ‘inherit’ hers. If not, I’ll give a Mac a long look. Or maybe this, though it’d be a used model 5 years from now when it comes down to a price I can afford.
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April is going to be fantastic. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comes out, which should be the best implementation of Ubuntu yet (and it’ll be accompanied by a thorough user manual) and Glee comes back on (on my birthday no less). And of course, we should have a 12 week old by then (!).
Lisa took this picture of me to show me just how ‘ridiculous’ I look.
I think it’s one of the best pictures of me ever taken. You can agree with me in the comments.
