tqft.net

Anthem Blue Cross denies substantial part of home birth costs

Scott Morrison — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 02:32:46 +0000

Our son was born at home, with the help of the excellent midwives of Awakenings Birth Services. Happily the mother and child were very healthy, and everything worked out great. Except, of course, our health insurance. Our health insurance was through Anthem Blue Cross. They have just recently formally rejected our grievance against their decision to deny most of the claimed costs. They appear to be largely unaware of what was actually billed to them — our midwives sent them a bill for $5000 for the prenatal care and birth, but on the occasions I’ve spoken to a representative on the phone, they seem to be unaware of the number of times a midwife visited, or what they did on any of the visits. As such, it seems clear that their decision is based on ignorance, and is likely an example of “routine rejection”.

I’m now beginning to send them documentation of the various visits made before the birth, in the hope that they’ll see that they’ve made a mistake. I’ll also tell them that we’re more than happy to go to the small claims court over this!

PGAC denies my claim, after being rear-ended

Scott Morrison — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:31:34 +0000

I was rear-ended by John Sheehan, on Shattuck Ave at Delaware at 6:50pm on February 23rd. Permanent General (pgac), his insurance company, denied my claim (PA486199, if someone wants to fix the problem.)

HealthNet and incorrect physician information.

Scott Morrison — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:49:49 +0000

I’ve just spent almost 2 hours on the phone trying to discover who my physician is. For reference, I have insurance through HealthNet, and I’ve found them extremely unhelpful throughout the entire process.

The number listed for my doctor is a different doctor’s office; they’ve never heard of him. Calling the Alta Bates Medical Group, they’ve heard of him, but have a wrong number for him and no other information. HealthNet, the insurance company, so they can’t change the information without receiving a correction from the Alta Bates Medical Group. They say that HealthNet should call them.

switching from svn to hg

Scott Morrison — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:22:57 +0000

Follow these instructions to pull your svn history down to a local hg repository:

easy_install hgsvn hgimportsvn http://tqft.net/svn/example example cd example hgpullsvn

Now set up mercurial somewhere you have hosting. This follows these nice instructions.

wget http://mercurial.selenic.com/release/mercurial-1.3.1.tar.gz tar xvzf mercurial-1.3.1.tar.gz cd mercurial-1.3.1 make all && make install-home

Add the following lines to ~/.bash_profile and to .bashrc:

export PYTHONPATH=~/lib/python export PATH=~/bin:$PATH

… then follow a bunch more instructions, per link above …

TikZ CVS builds, as zip files

Scott Morrison — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:56:33 +0000

http://www.texample.net/tikz/builds/

Install in ~/Library/texmf/tex/generic

The TI-83 signing keys, from wikileaks.

Scott Morrison — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:01:18 +0000

From http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Suppressed_Texas_Instruments_cryptographic_signing_keys,_28_Aug_2009:
——————————————————————————————-

This are the OS signing keys for different Texas Instruments calculators. The key for the TI-83 calculator was first published by someone at the unitedti.org forum in this message: http://www.unitedti.org/index.php?showtopic=8888. He or she needed several months to crack it. The other keys were found after a few weeks by the unitedti.org community through a distributed computing project. The keys make it possible to sign your own operating system for the Texas Instruments calculators.

Texas Instruments now contacted several people with a DMCA notice to take down the keys from their websites. Some of the websites which got a DMCA notice are: unitedti.org, brandonw.net and reddit.com. One of these DCMA notices can be found here: http://brandonw.net/calcstuff/DMCA_notice.txt

Here are the three keys:

TI-83 (Plus):

n=82EF4009ED7CAC2A5EE12B5F8E8AD9A0
AB9CC9F4F3E44B7E8BF2D57A2F2BEACE
83424E1CFF0D2A5A7E2E53CB926D61F3
47DFAA4B35B205B5881CEB40B328E58F
p=B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD
q=B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB
d=4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7
EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927
6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1
e=11

TI-84 (Plus):

prp77 factor: 67070508990537181066342707695603050521324524613874331879259881495826493920589
prp78 factor: 186923771200711284770368041572205320486346816476524340240220962467860568859381

n=EF5FEF0B0AB6E22731C17539658B2E91E53A59BF8E00FCC81D05758F26C1791CD35AF6101B1E35
43AC3E78FD8BB8F37FC8FE85601C502EABC9132CEAD4711CB1
p=94489014C63CC9E1E1ADB192DBBDD1F78F90A630DA9C86EFC4CBCA44E5B4D54D
q=19D431AF2794229620B884E3750D622D1C74F2E4569DC15486FC8D5A3BCDFE2F5
d=2A3E1B2010F318D9BD7C7E19300980B055A0E2A9554B77E7142E23CDF7C7CA13C233A3D462FDFC
968B1F9CEAF2AC2CF305147992AD9E834192ACEBB517DB9941
e=11

TI-89:

prp76 factor: 2231124525637629443181963045297394875470510167130210300957267082210173784611
prp79 factor: 3226885534240147415018248397410101286362761128614350056368675111071170873486957

(these are factors of 71995834568684773636720438651160472297127884480206535156843307841378050889714332
73011970552138960583799368215373582308591928985045059261105298431035818727)

Log in to math.berkeley.edu even if you’re over quota, and the grace period is over

Scott Morrison — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:32:09 +0000

ssh user@login.math.berkeley.edu bash --norc --noprofile -i

Printing to the math.berkeley.edu printers from OS X

Scott Morrison — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:20:47 +0000

sudo sh -c "echo ServerName printserver.math.berkeley.edu >> /etc/cups/client.conf"

HP printer and scanner drivers on OS X

Scott Morrison — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:19:37 +0000

The drivers that come with HP printers are a crock of shit. Don’t use them. If you’ve installed them, track down the uninstall program and run it. Instead, just install the drivers from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL907. If you need to scan, don’t attempt to use HP software, use the built-in Image Capture app.

Mathematica’s OpenSQLConnection causes the kernel to hang.

Scott Morrison — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:10:59 +0000

Running MMA6 or MMA7 on OSX 10.5, I have the following reproducible
problem that causes Mathematica to completely hang (ie, to close
either the frontend or kernel, I need to use Activity Monitor or the
terminal).

Needs["DatabaseLink`"]; Needs["JLink`"];

x := OpenSQLConnection[JDBC["mysql", url],
 "Username" -> username, "Password" -> password,
 "UseConnectionPool" -> True]

Do[Print[k, " ", x], {k, 1, 20}]

(You’ll need an SQL server to connect to, and set url, username and
password appropriately.) At least on my machine, it manages the first
8 connections, and then totally hangs.

Of course, I don’t really need to open this many connections; it was a
mistake in my code, but one that took a day to track down. Still, it’s
a bug!