Daynotes On A Budget, V6.0

 I am terrible when major equipment in my life has to move onward. That is to say, I do tend to become very attached to some major purchases of sorts. Tomorrow my Expedition is likely to wander off into someone else's sunset.  Too early, in my opinion, even though the thing is 20 years old.  And has been ours for about five years now. I suppose it rolls back to the difficulties we've had in keeping wheels going in this nuthouse.  But it's not been all that terrible, overall.  Just ... a struggle. The latest departure is our 2001 Ford Expedition, a big old vehicle that was purchased when we needed to be able to get back and forth to Iowa to visit my mother-in-law, before she passed away, and, well, move from place to place.  It replaced a Dodge Caravan Minivan that had served the same purpose for a few years.   That vehicle did pretty well until one Christmas, I think long about 2004 or 2005.  I had to head down to Iowa and pick up Grandma and...

 I suppose it might not be a bad point to drop a short history lesson before I go full-on into rant mode.  Back when I started this diversion into ... well, whatever the hell it's become, I was a new father, living on a tight-but-slowly-expanding budget, and so the original name of this thing was Daynotes On A Budget.  The Daynotes term was what Dr. Jerry Pournelle called his daily site, and others, such as Bob Thompson, Tom Syroid, Matt Beland, Brian Bilbrey, Dave Farquhar, and others, helped to popularize.  Chris Thompson, the fine fellow who found my links to his site, also contributed greatly to my daily enjoyment of those fellows.  As did Dan Seto, Dan Bowman, John Doucette, Bo Leuf, Sjon Svenson, and Bob Walder.   In my own feeble attempt at admiration and writing regularly, I named it after them, and included my hoped-for efforts to keep things down a bit on the low side of budget impact.  And John Ricketson was another fellow who contribut...

 My day job involves asking insurance companies if they're willing to pay my employer for providing care for what we might best call mutual acquaintances. My hospital stay last year was a bit of a reminder of how that portion of our population lives.  Through my own sheer stubborn stupidity, I had a region of infection on my foot.  I'd gone into the Urgent Care one day to ask for help.  The Urgent Care folks promised to get me some help and get back to me.  Then I heard nothing.  And my foot got worse. So after being admitted, I found out that it wasn't going to be a quick in-and-out sort of visit.  I spent nearly a week watching bad daytime TV - and bad TV in general.  I learned that the nurses are really the people who run the hospital and care for patients.  There's a new innovation in medical care these days called a "Hospitalist".  I've got a regular doctor I go to for my health care.  When I was admitted to the hospital, they ...

 So about twenty years ago - yeah, I went there - the primary content of this space, in it's earlier versions, was primarily technical content. I enjoyed working in technology for many years.  I left it because, frankly, it was just too difficult to keep searching for a new job every 2-3 years.  I'm the person who wants to find an employer they can retire from.  But I digress - which is what I also do here. So I have multiple email accounts.  Some are more public than others.  The one I use here is my Hotmail account.  This means that it's the primary target for spammers, scammers, and just generally dumb people.  Today's sheer stupidity award goes to the numbnuts who will undoubtedly be doing very low-level jobs for their entire life - presuming, of course, they manage to stay out of incarceration.  Yes, kids, that's a big word which describes why numbskull might go from his basement to a nice room with bars on the front of it.  Nice in...