Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

 It's no secret - I work every day asking insurance companies to make a decision on whether or not a patient can receive a particular medication. It's much more complicated than that, but the bottom line is simple.  A doctor meets with a patient, reviews their medical condition and history, and then uses their judgement to select from a growing field of medicine a particular medication that will treat the patient and improve their health.  Quite often it's not a cure, as most of the time these are conditions that don't have cures.  It's usually a treatment to help the patient feel and do better.   The insurance company will tell you they aren't making care decisions, they're simply using their best medical judgement to determine whether the prescribed treatment is going to have a positive response.  Certainly, the medications are expensive, but they aren't fooling me.  The reviewer, who is also a trained medical professional, looks at the medical ...

 Well, I guess my background of fine-tuning my own HTML leaves me disappointed with this editor.  But anyway... Today marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Prince.  A rather famously anti-drug person, he sadly died from an unexpected (I'd guess) drug overdose.  Now his initial explosion into the music world here was well below my radar, as I really wasn't all that tuned into the local music world.  I was pretty focused on popular music with a rather intense interest in what we used to call hard rock. When Prince took the skills he had developed locally and blew up the entire music world, I disagreed at the time, but as time went on, I had to agree with my wife.  While Prince was ground breaking and a gigantic talent, he likely had as much of an influence on popular music as the Beatles had.  Yeah, I know, they had very little in common on the surface, but if you step back a bit, you will realize exactly the same thing.    In the ea...

  The episode in which your regular Cranky Correspondent muses rather crankily on the current state of AI and where it could really make a difference... I know, I know, but the thing is We Are Not Yet getting Artificial Intelligence. There are many ways to define "Artificial Intelligence".  The classic one is when you hold a conversation with something which you believe is human, and can't tell the difference.  I'll give you a little more complex one.  True Artificial Intelligence will be able to respond to a situation it has not encountered or prepared for and selects an appropriate response.   What we have today are expert systems.  The way you know that is because they are trained.  They are exposed to situations others have experienced and the things that others have done to respond to them.  They then develop their response based on previous responses.  So yes, I have also just described much of what some people consider traini...

This weekend I got to do something I haven't been able to do much of over the last few years...  Spend time with some old friends.   Going back thirty-plus years ago, I was a much younger man (half my age, in fact), and a soon to be young father.   I was told by one of my sisters that there was going to be a meeting at my parent's house of a newly forming Star Trek Fan Group.  Yeah.  So in part because I was still feeling the Protector and concerned about what was going on, I told my wife we'd be visiting my folks.  Mind you, this was about 75 minutes north of where we lived, which was Burnsville.  We didn't have kids yet so we were pretty free and loose with our schedule, but it was still a commitment of limited resources, being both gas and time.  We got to my folks house and met this young couple.  She was pregnant, much more so than my wife, but they didn't strike me as any sort of shady folks.  He was a bit different than ...

I used to see people brag about their weight loss and say "nothing tastes as good as... " followed by some weight loss goal.  I still like food, but I'm down aalmost 40 pounds so far.  It's not a lot, at least not where I'm going, but I do like the numbers when I get on the scale.  It's going to be a long slow journey, I guess.  Then again, it did take years to get here, and I can look back and see all of the mistakes. My first out-of-college job was a continuation of the job I had held there - Wendy's.  I started out as a grill closer.  I busted my butt to learn the job, kept learning more positions and roles.  When the opportunity came along to run the closing shifts every night, I took it.  I learned how to do the dreaded "Saturday Night Books".  Every week we did a full food inventory.  Every other week was a full check on all of the consumables, down to the ounce.  And once a month were the Saturdays that the managers did - the...

As with every winter here in the tundra, we get those "oh, hey, you think winter's done?" storms.  They usually fall on weekends during March, and so for some reason Minnesota state high school tournaments tend to get, well clobbered.  This weekend was the Girl's State High School tournament, and while we had athletes and their families from every corner of the state coming to Minneapolis, where, of course, this blizzard took it's square aim on the metro area and south - because most storms tended to go north or otherwise just miss us this year.   So Saturday morning we had sun and the yard was almost completely cleared of snow.  The few remaining spots were in the shade on north sides of trees and down slopes that do not get a lot of direct sunlight this time of year.  Across the street is an elementary school, and the snow piles on the edge the lot had fallen from sixteen feet to about three feet tall.  By about nine Saturday night, when we took the ...