The New Musings of a Quiet Geek

For reasons that are not really important for complete strangers that stumble upon this blog to know, I discovered that even though my health insurance's billing department has been here in Maine for years, and I've paid for 2 appointments with my PCP and 2 eye appointments (the last of which discovered my recent shunt malfunction incidentally) and a neurosurgeon office with no problems, it's now become a problem I have a Connecticut-based policy.  The problem here is if I need to see a specialist, I can't find out if one is covered by my insurance because the website search engine doesn't accept my Maine zip code. So I requested paperwork to transfer over to a Maine policy.  It seemed like forever for it to come so I called them back to see what's up.  Aside from being a huge corporation (Is it any wonder why I'm anti-Big Business?), I'm pretty sure their phone system was having problems.  Anyway, long story shorter, I get a hold of the right operator a

On Monday, the holiday, the internet crapped out.  Calling my internet service provider to see if there was some kind of outage, it turned out to be my equipment that malfunctioned.  The woman at Tech Support seemed to think that given that I had an older model it had died of old age and to replace the cables etc. as well.  On Wednesday, the new modem arrived and I was back in business thought it was hideously sluggish.  Under normal circumstances with a DSL modem, when this happens you reboot it. Doing so killed it again.  Thursday, I realized I had switched out the Ethernet cable   (Firefox wants to capitalize it. Who am I to argue?) but I had left the original phone cord in place so I switched it out.  Nothing happened. Talked to my father on the phone and made lunch and then it worked.  Better than it had since last weekend. I spent an entire post on Mission: Impossible last time and that had low readership but I want to discuss another spy show I just started watching. I've

Finding movies (or sitcoms for that matter but that's better left for another post) on Netflix that look interesting but haven't already seen has been Mission: Impossible lately. Case in point, I re-watched Mission: Impossible III last night. The most recent installment, Ghost Protocol is even more Mission: Imnpossible -y and therefore even better but III is a nice first step. One of the little things I liked about Ghost Protocol was use of the Alias codename "Outrigger." In my third viewing of III , I finally noticed the use of the codename "Phoenix." Also, having watched Maggie Q, who played the "femme fatale" here, in her current role of Nikita , I found myself comparing the two roles. My cousin and I have contended for years the franchise can work again on TV. It was established in the '80's that there was more than one team simultaneously so the movies would not be affected. Also, it wouldn't have any of the issues othe

I'm back! I guess. We'll see how long it is before I don't want to do this any more and take another long hiatus... I could have just scrapped this blog and started afresh but then I would have had to change the signature thing in my e-mail and who's that ambitious? Though, my life is somewhat different now as my cousin now lives in Alaska which he had a blog about but I can't remember the address so you'll just have to take my word for it... I have a new roommate now who's a student at the seminary I work at... Oh, and the seminary finally hired me after 5+ years as Assistant Librarian. They're effectively going out of business as a seminary in June and becoming a continuing ed/support system for "ministry in the 21st century." It's really hard to describe. "You'd have to be there" is is an overused, and possibly too inaccurate, a phrase but but we'll go with that... Anyway, this new identity won't include a lib