Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Kaiser Permanante

 This was too long for a tweet:


@KPNorthwest is in my opinion a very evil company that has no interest in providing care or medical services.  


When I first got Kaiser insurance my employer was paying over $2,000 a month for just my individual insurance. But Kaiser messed up my enrolement in their computer system.  No one could help me,  It was apparently impossible to schedule an appointment for me.


Eventually, after complaining publicly, they found someone who could sehedule an appointment.  My needs weren't important, but their public image was an emergency!


Even then they only offered me an online visit with a gynecoligist or an anestheologist to help with my dislocated thumb.  (perhaps dislocated isn't quite the right word, it came out of joint and I popped it back in.)  How in the world they thought that was appropriate I still can't fathom.


Paid for over Six Years, thousands of dollars a month, only thing I got was a phone call with a doctor who responded to my pain by aksing "How am I supposed to help with that over the phone."


I had Kaiser dental coverage.  The dentist gave me a crown.  The crown was so large and malformed that it felt like was made for someone else.  My teeth don't fit together any more, and the crown has broken several teeth across from it.  I have to wear a mouthpiece to bed every night to stop the continuous destruction.


My wife also has Kaiser.  She got a tumor.  They made he wait four, maybe five, months before they did surgery to remove it.  My wife lost her entire uterus, we will never be able to have children.


When I asked for help with my back pain the doctor threw her arms up in the air and asked me "What do you want me to do about it" -  She then offered me a prescription.  She didn't believe me and thought I was hunting for drugs.  -  Maybe that's the way they kill the patients they don't want anymore.


After walking out of that appointment I gave them one more try.  This time the doctor did an X-ray and found pinched nerves, or some such.  No treatment was discussed, no information about what this might mean to me in the future.  


Offering me deadly addictive drugs didn't get rid of me.   Discovereing I wasn't lying, they lost all interest in helping.


That's when I found out that you will never be told how much they bill themselves for your treatment.  Under the ACA insurers are limited to 20% profit.  Because they control the hospital billing and the insurance cost they raise their prices and insurance costs to make whatever amount of money they want. 


 I now pay ~$1,800 a month, I refuse to get help from them.  Once a year they send me, against my wishes, a home testing kit for rectal cancer.  For all I know they bill themselves $21,600 for that kit so they can keep every penny.


I read the fine print in their Cell Phone App legalese.  If you use a privacy protecting operating system on your cell phone:  You are MATERIALLY liable for any damages to THEIR company software, hardware, data breach, legal, incidental, etc.  I can't use their app.  Their entire business is focused of using the app.  Forget trying to get help from Kaiser is you can't use a cell phone, it's almost impossible.


If you wan't your medical records, or a copy of an X-ray, they won't give them to you.  They will lie to you and tell you that they will send you an encrypted e-mail.  After asking a few times they will send a plain text e-mail with a link to their website where you can view, but not download you medical information. --But not the x-rays, you have to agree to a massive legal document to use an online viewer if you want to see your digital x-ray.


I passed out while driving (My self drivimg car saved me from crashing) I went in to get checked out and they wouldn't listen to me, showed me ZERO respect or care.

That's when I decided to stop using their services.


Lately, I partially tore a tendon and somehow injured my shoulder. I think it was partially dislocated, and it feels like there might be a bone chip.  My pinched nerves have (I think) caused some loss of sensation in a few fingers, and my forearm.


 I'm in pain every day.  --  I don't want to go back to them.


Just last week  I asked for their help to become a bone marrow donor, they refused to help in any way, told me to maybe try calling the red cross.


They won't apologize or acknowlege any of their failings, they won't give me my medical records, they refuse to treat me like a human being.  To Kaiser Permanante you are a slab of beef in a processing plant.


@KPNorthwest  @aboutKP @KPMemberServices @kpwashington

Friday, August 07, 2026

 I submitted a bug report to KDE regarding the Kamoso applicaiton.  I don't know if I've ever submitted a bug report like this before. I think I found what the solution should be, but I'm probably not a good enough programmer to implement it. 

I hope I included the right amount of information and details.  Very exciting!  

Maybe I'll download the code and see if the fix is simple enough for me to figure out.

Saturday, May 23, 2026

New books on the way!

 My Girl Genius Collection remains complete!  I just discovered and filled out my Backerkit Survey for the last campaign.   

I really dislike Kickstarter's website, it is confusing on it's own.  But because it only covers one of the steps of making and a selling a product to a fan base, creators end up having to use multiple other services, which compounds the difficulty for their fans.

As an example, when I search for "Girl Genius" on the Kickstarter site they list the search results in seemingly random order.  I would probably hate every order, except chronological, but random chaos is a bold choice.

I almost missed this last campaign for books 22 and 23.  And the next campaign for books 24 and 25 is coming soon!  I think I did miss the Kickstarter for the last novel, maybe a game or two? - Hard to tell...

I've bought a set of these for all of my siblings kids, and my wife's sisters kids, so to keep my, and all their, sets current I buy 12 books of each release.

A few times I've treated myself to some original art as well. ðŸ˜ƒ

I'm told that some of the kids are too young, and many of them don't read books (!!! ðŸ˜²) - I persist anyway, Graphic novels might be a gateway drug to literacy? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  One can hope.

It's a fantastic series IMHO, although I'm a little sad that this whole thing with mechanicsburg has drug on _forever_.  Mechanicsburg the city, and the castle, was nearly the star of series, eclipsing even Agatha somewhat.  

Now it feels like there are like 10+ characters all trying to be the main character, and I keep hoping that Kaja will make Phil relegate most of them back to being 1 dimensional background characters.  Or maybe go full George RR Martin / Thanos and kill half of them off.  --  No!  Wait I jest, please don't do that... ok maybe a little.

We'll see!

Sunday, March 16, 2025

Me and Grok fixing my mistake on a Dell PowerConnect 5548 managed switch.

 Wow!   Getting help from a super knowledgeable AI that has near instant access to the entire web is amazingly helpful.  Seriously this is the best wish I wouldn't have known I needed to ask a Genie for.  

This is a moment when my state-of-mind just got expanded, I'm blown away!

I'm saving my conversations for future reference, they are that helpful.  I'll link to the text of the conversations in case the details are interesting.  Maybe someday I'll make them into HTML pages, but I don't have time right now...   ...  ...Grok can put my conversation with it into HTML, because of course it can.


While getting some Dell 5548 network switches connected to my network I ran into some stumbling blocks.  I didn't remember my own network configuration.  Specifically what ports on my desk router were connected to what VLAN.  Along the way I discovered that some of my network hardware, while behind my firewall, wasn't setup to use SSL, when I turned SSL on I got a warning that the randomly generated certificates created by the software on my network hardware couldn't be validated and hence couldn't be trusted.  

That rabbit hole led me to learning about wild card certificates, and that SSL was considered outdated.  I'm a bit behind on the state of the art.  At least I'm behind on the details, I've at least heard of TLS.  So, concerned that my network hardware really should be using TLS, but that my browser only told me "http" vs "https"  I asked Grok about it, TLS_vs_SSL.  

Bottom line: to know for sure if something is using SSL or TLS sniff your own packets, and look for the handshake.  Cool!  --  I really enjoy using my shark tap.  I know there are other ways of duplicating traffic on a switch and monitoring it, but conceptually a shark tap is so much easier.  Although all that is a bit annoying right now; I need to focus on this 5548 switch.  So I'm writing the SSL/TLS certificate issue down on my project list for later...

I stated a different conversation and with Grok's help I got the switch to re-enable it's web management interface after I had accidentally turned it off, which was the goal of this troubleshooting session.  I went on for a while with Grok, but I was really tired; cause it was late; also I forgot to ask Grok to give me short answers; it tends to ramble and "think out loud" - It wouldn't surprise me if it was mirroring me!  I'll have to work on that; and I'll have to remember to tell it to give me short answers.

Here is a link to the conversation. I don't think it's worth reading!!


















Saturday, September 03, 2022

Enjoy Life

 I recently noticed that I've been hating life.   Like more so than normal for the past two years or so.   I've never had more than a few acquaintances, but geography, covid and politics mostly ended the relationships that I had.  

(I'm not very political or radical, I'm always willing to listen and I don't consider a difference of opinion to be relationship ending.  Unfortunately one of the people I used to be friends with is very radicalized and will absolutely fly off the handle every time anyone says anything 'wrong'.  -  It's strange, like, I love GNU/Linux, but if someone refers to 'Linux' with out saying GNU/Linux   I don't get angry, I don't mention it.  We are all just trying to communicate, getting every single part of language exactly correct is never going to happen.... ) 

   [sigh]..   I miss having friends.

Anyway...   Work is frustrating, I find myself with only my wife as company (which isn't fair to her), and my computers really haven't run the way I like them to for _Years_ ... 

{Sorry for being a curmudgeon I don't like systemd, I just don't understand.  Everything ran so well before systemd, and it was so easy to fix anything that broke.  Now so many problems can not be solved in user space, I've lost tremendous control over my computers; and when they do run they aren't flexible.  Gah!}

Ok, where was I..   Oh yeah, hating life.   Work is frustrating, Minimal companionship, My favorite hobby is in disarray...    And I think, maybe, ADHD is setting in, it happened to my dad anyway.  He started getting medicated for it around 58 years old (??) .  So I've got maybe 2 decades left before I either have to take meth, or I should retire. -  The intensity of focus that I used to have isn't guaranteed any more, certainly not like it used to be.  However I still think just as clearly, and I can focus and plan; it's just harder.

Compounding that is that I live in the PNW, we basically don't get sun for ~6-8 months a year, which completely messes most people up, for most of the year.  Compounding that is the problem that I work 3rd shift.  I barely get any sun in the summer!  Finally my relationship with sleep has always been troubled, working through the night every night doesn't make that any easier.  Day shift at my current job is maybe one retiree, or a few new hires away; fingers crossed.

So, yeah, I've been hating life.   That can't continue, it just can't.  So I've been trying to focus on things I enjoy.   Well, specifically, I've been focusing on enjoying living.  I started bringing my bike into the city and going riding once and a while, there are some really amazing bicycle groups in Portland.  I powered up my server and I'm rearranging my network so hopefully I can use the server, and keep it off the internet so hopefully it doesn't get hacked.   I may setup another internet accessible server with some VM's.  

I'd love to find a reasonable motherboard that is compatible with an E7-8891v4.  I fell in love with Broadwell when it came out but could never afford one; now they are super affordable!  Besides loving them, I can re-use my significant amount of ECC DDR3 Ram; this it the last server processor to support that.  Skylake and up are all DDR4.   As I understand it, these super-cheap ones were made for a specific client, they are "off menu".  The used market was flooded with them a while back.  However they might need special motherboards... And finding a motherboard for any of the E7-88xx chips is... iffy? I don't want a Supermicro X10QBI, it's an absurd motherboard! (Although impressive when it's put together well.)- PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.  I'm considering throwing money at a bunch of LGA 2011-1 motherboards until I find one that works.  Someone told me that an X99 motherboard from Aliexpress _might_ work.  But they aren't what I'm looking for anyway.  My old AbuDhabi AMD Opteron 6328 powered HP servers seriously need to go away!  Building a server with lots of ECC memory and lots of PCI-express gets really expensive really fast, so I have to shop for old, old tech.  Comparing the CPU Value score and CPU Mark scores really makes this CPU shine!  Maybe 1/5 to 1/10 the speed of an EPYC system, but 1/500 to 1/1000 the cost.

{EDIT:  Ok, I finally got clear information regarding the motherboard CPU sockets, still looking for more information on chipset support.  
     LGA 2011 - Socket R - Supports Ivy Bridge-E/EP and Sandy Bridge-E/EP processors with the corresponding X79 (E – enthusiast-class) and C600-series (EP – Xeon class) chipsets.
        LGA 2011-1 - Socket R2 - Supports Ivy Bridge-EX (Xeon E7 v2), Haswell-EX (Xeon E7 v3) and Broadwell- EX (Xeon E7 v4) CPUs.
        LGA 2011-3 or Socket R3 - Supports Haswell-E and Haswell-EP CPU, maybe other newer chips too?}

 I bought two new cell phones. One of which I successfully got LineageOS installed on, the other I bricked.  I'm sending the bricked phone off for repair, and then I'll try to root it again.  If you don't have root on a computer you own, you don't control it, or own it; not really anyway.  Also I'm tired of my identity being a product for companies to fight over.  

YouTube censors all ideas that are not conducive to commerce, and then attempts to ransom my sanity by offering to remove ad's for, uh what 12$ / month.   -   It's an extra special dystopia!  I want out!   So I'm trying to de-google my phones.   Thank god for the people that made CyanogenMod and the people who are making it's progeny, LineageOS.

So enjoying living...   Part of enjoying living is not being scared to be flawed.   I'm not perfect, I have some odd interests, privacy, opensource, cyberpunk, science fiction, walking my dog's, an obsession with really good electrical work.  :-)

So yeah, I'm trying to enjoy living.  

One thing I'm getting excited about again is that the large ball screws that I need, for the CNC machine I'm going to build, are purchasable again!   I tried to buy them during the pandemic, and the order got canceled.  I got a nice note from the supplier about how shipping was just nearly impossible (stupid, lazy, bribe-taking, canal drivers [captains?]....  I don't blame the EverGiven, or the Affinity V, only the special canal crews, not sure if that's fair, but that's where I'm at.) .  So... the CNC project can continue.  Unfortunately I missed an opportunity to get some really cheap I-beams locally, oh well, I'll just have to keep looking...   I still need to save up for a 3-phase converter.  I tend to focus on the biggest challenge for any project.  If I can't solve that, then the project needs to be modified, or I should shelve it for a while.  So I guess I'm going to futz around with my servers, brick some phones, and save up for a Phase Perfect PTE215RQT.

I'm having trouble finding information about supporting a long ball screw.  I suppose you could have multiple ball nuts and drive them simultaneously, but I swear there was a product you could get that would follow the screw passively to help support the ball screw itself...  I'm still working out the design.   I bought some small ball screws that were labeled 1200mm on-line, but when they arrived they were labeled 900mm.  The screw is _overall_ 1200mm, but the available travel is only 900mm.  So that was a fairly cheap lesson!  I think I can still use them for a 3D printing project, it's just going to be a bit smaller, but that's fine....   I wonder if you can get a ball screw with ball nuts that move at different speeds.  Like if the machine was driven by a normal ball nut, but there could be other ball nuts that travel at fraction of the speed.  You could use the fractional nuts to  help support the ball screw.  Fun to think about, but I think it's probably a terrible idea.   See fun!   Enjoying Life.   Ha! Victory!

I think I will buy a E7-8891v4 and my best guess at a compatible motherboard..  If it doesn't work I'll just get a CPU that does work in that motherboard and I'll only be out a few bucks...

Thursday, December 16, 2021

SD Card File Transfers Done Carefully

SEE WARNING BELOW, DON'T DO WHAT I SUGGEST IN THIS POST!

 With USB2 SD card readers there really isn't any need to slow them down, they are already not fast.  But if you are like me and you like fast file transfers you probably looked for and found a USB3 SD card reader.  

Unfortunately some combos of SD cards and SD card readers bog down real bad when large transfers are done at high speed. On Linux, this is the solution I use:

tar -cf - {source_files} | pv -q -L {transfer_rate_limit} | tar -C {destination_files} -xvf -

The {transfer_rate_limit} is specified in bytes/sec; a suffix (k, m, g, or t) can be added to the end for specifying KiB, MiB, GiB, or TiB's per second. 

I got this from Matt on stack exchange.

Another use for this: If the transfer is being done between two modern computers, you can speed up the transfer by adding encryption at the source and decryption at the destination, the 'z' is for gzip which is fairly fast:

tar -czf - {source_files} | pv -q -L {transfer_rate_limit} | tar -C {destination_files} -xzvf -

lz4 compresses smaller and much faster, as show by CatchChallenger, but make sure it's installed and supported by your version of tar: 

tar -I lz4 -cf - {source_files} | pv -q -L {transfer_rate_limit} | tar -C {destination_directory} -I lz4 -xvf -

It's a long command with lots of fiddly bits; this is exactly how UNIX was initially designed.  It was supposed to be a system where you can string fairly simple programs together to accomplish complex tasks.  Check out Brian Kernighan talking about it on YouTube.

I haven't figured out what the best speed to transfer at is, I assume it depends on your card and card reader.  The program "time" will measure how long the command takes to run:


anon@grayghost:~$ time tar -I lz4 -cf - ToDo.txt | pv -q -L 4096 | tar -C /home/anon/Sy/ -I lz4 -xvf -
ToDo.txt

real 0m0.015s
user 0m0.009s
sys 0m0.016s
anon@grayghost:~$ time tar -I lz4 -cf - ToDo.txt | pv -q -L 1024 | tar -C /home/anon/Sy/ -I lz4 -xvf -
ToDo.txt

real 0m0.287s
user 0m0.016s
sys 0m0.019s
anon@grayghost:~$

 Neat!

Update; works great with making ISO images with dd:

dd bs=1M if=[image_name] | pv -q -L 10M | dd of=/[your_director_here]
(I haven't tested that dd command YMMV)

I just ran into a problem.  The contents of my SD card was corrupted.  Transferring data slowly off of the card actually heated it up to 164°F, while just letting it run was only 99°F.  I don't yet know if the heat and transfer speed was source of the problem.  Until I can figure it out avoid, or at least be a bit cautious, using this technique!



Wednesday, December 15, 2021

GRUB2

I've always loved GRUB.  It's not easy to use, but man it works well, usually the setup is automatic, but maybe a little scary if you have to do something manually.  But then it's setup and it works for years.  

If/when GRUB fails it doesn't wreck your data, and can usually be recovered with a boot disk and a few commands.

Seriously love GRUB, and GRUB2 is dramatically better!

Yesterday I got tired of putting 2-4GiB ISO images on to 32GiB SD cards.  My friends were starting to wonder if I needed an intervention:

 So I started looking at tools to put multiple ISO's on to one large bootable SD card, and simply choose which one you wanted to boot at boot time.  I found the excellent website of LinuxBabe.com who suggested MultiBootUSB  and MultiSystem - but both of those appear to be abandoned projects from some time ago.

Someone on Discord suggested PLOP. Truly hilarious name.  But that also looked really sketch.  Then I found another LinuxBabe article;  apparently GRUB2 can boot directly to ISO's!!

So I made these partitions on a USB stick: 

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name      Flags
 1      1049kB  2097kB  1049kB               bios
 2      2097kB  68.2MB  66.1MB  fat32        efi_boot  boot, esp
 3      68.2MB  128GB   128GB   ext2         iso_cube

The first partition is a BIOS protective partition and has no file system, some old computers or misbehaving software will overwright the beginning little bit of a disk.  1 MiB is excessive, but it also helps ensure partitions are 4k block aligned, and I don't care about 1 Mib.

Mounted new filesystems:

mkdir /mnt/efi_boot
mkdir /mnt/iso_cube
mount /dev/{usbstick}2 /mnt/efi_boot
mount /dev/{usbstick}3 /mnt/iso_cube
mkdir /dev/efi_boot/boot
 

Installed GRUB2 onto the USB stick (this was on an Ubuntu system, YMMV):

grub-install --efi-directory=/mnt/efi_boot --boot-directory=/mnt/efi_boot/boot --removable

Booted to the USB stick, and then proceeded to boot directly to an ISO file.  The 'ls' commands are me looking for files, GRUB names disks in a way that is easiest for GRUB - we just have to deal with it:

ls
ls (hd0,gpt2)/
ls (hd1,gpt3)/
set isofile="/ubuntu-20.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso"
loopback loop (hd1,gpt3)$isofile
ls (loop)
ls (loop)/
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=$isofile quiet noeject noprompt splash
lnitrd (loop)/casper/initrd
boot

Victory!

So LinuxBabe showed how to add ISO entries to the GRUB menu so you don't have to memorize and type a bunch of commands every time.  After I add a bunch more ISO's and test them out I expect I'll probably do that.  For now I just made a file on the usb stick with the commands I typed.  The grub command line has 'cat' so I can read my instructions, I don't boot from USB very often, so I might just leave it.  Having to use the GRUB command line every once and a while will go a long way to helping me learn it.