Achoo!

Arrrrgh. I have gotten round 2 of the dreaded winter cold. Fortunately, I'm feeling much better today. I stayed home yesterday and today to both recuperate and also to spare my coworkers from my sniffling and throat clearing. I also discovered that the nasal spray I had been using expired 3 years ago. Which explains why it wasn't working. So I got a new bottle today. It works now and I feel much better. Hooray!

Work is going swimmingly, though it is keeping me ridiculously busy. We released Linden Homes to the public on Wednesday morning and the response has been phenomenal! I have to admit, it does feel good to have worked on something that, when it finally gets out there, is enthusiastically embraced by the users. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this project, and I'll elaborate on them later post, but let's just say that for the past few days we have been super busy shoring up our app in light of the rather rapid pace of adoption and fixing some (mostly minor) bugs that managed to slip through our development and QA process. And, in addition to all that, we've been hard at work trying to hammer out a complementary application which will make things even more awesome.

SXSW is coming up so in early March I'll be heading to Austin for a week of tech schmoozing and tech learning and all that good jazz. So, partly to ramp on django (which we are migrating to at work) and also just to have something to talk about at SXSW, I've resumed some of my dormant projects that have been collecting dust on my hard drive. Perhaps I'll have something to show off in a few weeks.

And, finally, I'm thinking of writing up a zombie survival guide for San Francisco. Perhaps even make a Zombie Survival Project. There does exist, apparently, a semi-half-assed Zombie Survival Wiki which seems to be attempting kind of what I have in mind, but it's dependent on user contributions and is riddled with ads. In short, I think it's run by some schmo trying to make a quick buck off zombie enthusiasm. Man... I could be another schmo!

Taxes. Yes, it is that time of year again and I'm praying to god I get a decent tax refund this year. I got me some debts, yo! But anyway, while doing my taxes - or, more precisely, while getting all my paperwork together to ship off to my accountant - I discovered that you can deduct the cost of prescriptions and doctor's appointments. And, because I'm me, I keep track of all of those expenses. And, for 2009, I spent roughly $1500 on doctor's visits, tests, and prescriptions. That ain't chump change.

And while I do enjoy a nice tax break, which, really, will probably only amount to like twelve bucks or something, it did get me thinking about health care again.

So, I have very predictable health costs and I am otherwise quite healthy. In fact, according to the battery of tests my doctors keep subjecting me to every six months, I am the very picture of health. I am also quite aware that our economy pretty much blows right now. Unemployment and costs keep going up. Wages are most definitely not going up. And, I have to admit, if I were to become unemployed right now I would be put into a very, very unpleasant situation. I would have to continue paying my bills, and living in San Francisco isn't cheap, while looking for a new job, which I would be competing with an ever growing pool of job seekers. And, you know, that sucks already. But, on top of that I would be burdened with having to afford my prescriptions, which are somewhat important to, you know, keeping me alive.

I would gladly pay into a national health care system that would guarantee me at least basic health care in the event that I became unemployed. I would argue, too, that having a nationalize plan that, even if it didn't cover everything, at least covered some basic things (like flu shots, setting a broken bone, insulin... ), so that I don't have worry about dying every time I try to change jobs.

So that is my rant about that.

And now for something to file in the irony pile: some folks over Free Republic are wondering what to do when they lose their health insurance and need to get prescriptions, but can't afford the prices in the US. Of course! Order your prescriptions from Canada! What is ridiculous, of course, is the folks at Free Republic are dogmatically conservative and are just the types of people to loudly campaign against "Obamacare." Personally, I don't entirely understand why conservatives are so opposed to government health care. It's like there's some cognitive disconnect. No one is suggesting we get rid of either private insurance or company sponsored insurance. It is, in fact, the option in Government Option. Jesus Christ people.

Anyway, the comments over at reddit are rather amusing, if not a little snarky at times. Try sorting by "best" or "top" to get somewhat higher quality posts.