ProfessorTomoe

Oops. I was really out of it when the hospital called on Friday during the sleeptalking event. Turns out the hospital didn't get prior authorization for my prescription. I just got off of the phone with Blue Cross. It was never filed. AAAUUUGGGHHH Now I've got to wait for the damned hospital to start the whole process from scratch.

Quick! Minions! Return to base and report!

OS/2

It never ends. This time, Adobe is the culprit. I was working with it just fine over the weekend with Adobe Audition CC. I hop on today, and none of my Waves plugins are working. I check to see if they're working in Cakewalk SONAR, and yep - they're working. Waves isn't the culprit. Audition is. I fire up Audition again and check for updates. It tries, but tells me I need some file and offers to get it for me. I accept. The process fails, almost exactly the same way. It does this about five times. I finally get this vicious cycle to end and write down the URL it's trying to go to. I get there, retrieve the file, and run it as the process was trying to do. Anyone who has run a Linux distribution that does not have rolling updates will understand what happened next. I was upgraded from Adobe Audition CC.2017 to Adobe Audition CC.2018, and all of my VST plugins were GONE. I've just spent the past 15 minutes trying to find the one piece of paper where I've got the paths to all of my VST files written down. Dried mud indeed. I am not gruntled at all at this moment.

Blog update: https://dleejackson.lbjackson.com/2018/01/good-musical-progress/

Had a big problem Friday with my pain medication. I got a call from the pharmacy, who said I needed "prior authorization" for my full prescription to be filled (this is the "prescription matters" I mentioned above"). Not a good thing, since my pill supply was going to run out Sunday morning. I called the hospital pain treatment department and left a message, asking them to speed matters up. The issue went on so long that Mrs. Prof told me to just go ahead and pay for the damned prescription out of our own pocket—over $230. The pharmacy processed it, and I did receive my pain medication on Saturday. Here enters the sleeptalking episode that I wrote about. It was with a call from the hospital, who usually never calls back. Well, they did this time, to tell me that I'd received prior authorization. I apparently told them that I'd paid for the prescription already. Urrgh. From what I understand, I'm going to need to file a claim to get my money back from the insurance company. They'll send a letter with the authorization on it and instructions for filing. I'm still not a happy camper over the matter.

My son was happy with the song! He had a couple of "fix it in the mix" suggestions, which I've already done. I also had a former co-worker from my Apogee/3D Realms days give it a thumbs up. I moved on to the mixing/production stage yesterday and this morning. I wound up with two versions: one with just some fixes (see prior) and another with treatment from a "mastering plug-in" fashioned by a pro in the industry. Good lord, that second one slams the dynamics of the file so hard that it makes the waveform look like a brick. Weird thing is that it doesn't sound half bad. I desperately need feedback from my son's ears on this.

8:25 am CST 20180106. Uh-oh. I've got a problem. My memory is going. Mrs. Prof says she was taking a nap yesterday when the phone rang. She saw that it was the pain management center and heard me answer the phone. I apparently had a conversation with them about some prescription matters that we had a problem with yesterday. She thought I was awake and went back to her own nap. Only problem is I was in a nap and apparently sleeptalking. I remember absolutely nothing about the phone call - not even the call itself. This is troubling, to say the least. From now on, when I'm in a nap, I'm going to have to let everything go to voicemail. It's too dangerous otherwise.

Just curious: why don't you have a snow blower? It'd seem like that'd save a lot of manual labor.

FINALLY! A piece of music that I started working on at home in the late 90s is finished! I think. I've got the composition part of it finished, I hope. Mrs. Prof argued with me over the ending. It took a lot of rewrites and convincing to get one that she was happy with. Lots and lots of work on the ending. My son is going to give it a listen tonight when he gets home from grocery shopping, if he holds true to his word. Next up comes the production and mastering stages if the song passes muster. I'm hoping to put this on an album with several other songs and release it sometime around April.

It's a crappy situation, to be sure, but the auto mod business is male-dominated and male-oriented. The only reasons we're going to this place is that it's close to Mrs. Prof's office and it's highly rated.

Here's an example of pure male chauvinism in action. Mrs. Prof wants a rear-view camera for her 2014 Subaru Outback. We find one online and then find a general installer in her work neighborhood. I give her the info. She calls on the day she goes into the office and gets a "Johnny." He does a lot of "um" and "uh huh" during the conversation, generally sounding dismissive. Anyway, he comes back with a price lower than what we have plus installation quote, but wants $50 up front before he'll order it. She comes home and explains the situation to me. I'm skeptical. I give "Johnny" a call the next day. Using my best confident baritone voice, I talk to him about the same deal. Turns out he didn't give her a quote for the same camera. I tell him I need the brand name and model number of what he's offering. He says he'll call back in 30 minutes, which he does (a similar promise to Mrs. Prof resulted in a 3 hour wait with no callback). I get the info and tell him I'll call back in 30 minutes or so. I actually call back sooner than that with the results of my research: his camera is designed for Mrs. Prof's car, it might work a little bit better than the other one, and his dealership is an authorized installer. I tell him I'm willing to go through with the deal and ask what's next. He says it'll be about 4 days before the camera arrives, at which point he'll call me and we can set up a time for installation. End of call. Note the biggest difference: he didn't ask me for any money up front. The woman's not trustworthy, but the guy is.

Ball peen hammer time again. Augh. The tech who came out to collect data was apparently sent to convince me that my problem was not bad enough to fix. He kept doing tracert commands to what he claimed I'd called "problem sites" (more later) and said that the speed between hops was sufficient for their standards. In other words, if I didn't get a hop of 100 ms or more, sorry bub, you're SOL. Time to consider (urp) Spectrum, I said. Again. To him and his manager. He went back to doing tracert commands. Finally, he found one that was bad enough to report. His manager told him to tell me he was elevating my problem to "level 3." I don't even know if level 3 exists, or if it's just a level used to get problem customers to STFU. In any case, immediately after tech puppet left, I got a hop of 400 ms. I called the manager and told him to include that in his "level 3 referral e-mail." God, I hate Frontier. It was halfway decent when it was Verizon. Not anymore.

Excuse me? I'm trying to wake up my brain, not put it into a coma. Oh, what's the use. /* mixes rum and Sambuca, lights it, and takes a flaming shot */

We thought we were following the warnings! We had it in a hamper. Baker knocked it over to get to the ribbon. We didn't notice the nibbling until after we'd righted the hamper. Said hamper is in a closet now, with stuff on top of the ribbon if Baker should somehow find his way into the closet.

Mrs. Prof had to make a mad dash to put up the Christmas wrapping supplies this year. We kept finding little piles of barf with red or yellow ribbon in it. Loudmouth was the initial suspect since the ribbon was stored in his feeding room, but that theory got blown out of the water when I witnessed Baker barfing up some red ribbon. To be honest, all the ribbon had been digested to make it look like candy wrappers, so at first we didn't suspect Christmas ribbon. What I witnessed had identifiable ribbon bits in it, and when I checked the ribbon itself I saw tooth marks. That makes two Christmas things we have to keep out of Baker's reach: tinsel and ribbon. He's trying to get into the spirit, I'll grant him that. More like he's trying to get the spirit into him.

Wouldn't that be biowoofare?

Of course not! Those are valuable objects nowadays. International monuments and treasures, those. Besides, they'd be damned hard to get up through the remaining structure of the ship ...

It does if you set a big enough sandworm after it. Spice must flow. Sorry, my brain's in Jamaica today and doesn't want to wake up and do its damned job.

No, it's actually a PIN number. I had to sort through this big box of PINs, you see. Terribly painful if you're not careful. Hard to read the number printed on the PINhead, too, what with all the angels dancing on top of it.

I came ***very*** close to pulling out the ball peen hammer yesterday. The Frontier rep came out and at least fixed the phone (I still had to call tech support for help in setting up a PIN number for my voice mail). However, after doing "everything he knew how to do," he and his manager were about to dismiss the problem as an issue on my end, even with proof in the form of a slow download on my screen. I told him that he was very close to losing a customer. He apologized and tried six ways to Sunday to explain how it wasn't Frontier's problem. Then he said the magic word: traceroute. He started doing a few hops on my system. He even got his manager on the phone for me. Then I pulled out a diagnostic tool called PingPlotter. It's a graphical interface to traceroute. It showed exactly where the problems were occurring. There were some problems within Frontier's system, but the biggest problem was a huge delay between Frontier and someone else's NOC (Network Operations Center) with whom Frontier had a contract. Bingo. To paraphrase the tech, I convinced his manager that there was indeed a problem. I now have the manager's phone number and an appointment for another tech to come out and gather data via a hardwired connection today. I may see a very faint light at the end of this incredibly long tunnel that I've been stuck in for the past few weeks.

6:03 a.m. CST 20180103. Here I am, flooding the thread I started again. Moan and complain. Didn't get too much sleep last night. Got plenty during the day yesterday, but that's only part of the problem. My right ankle—the one that still has all of the stainless steel hardware in it, holding the bones together—it's been hurting like hell, thanks to the cold temperatures (I guess). However, the rest of my right outer side of my right leg is pulling a 7.0 on the one-to-ten scale as well. It's not like I've been getting outside in the cold and aggravating it. It just hurts. I'm not going to be able to get a ton of sleep during the day today. For why, switch to the Computer Problems thread.

Raven could use some of Susan's "ranged weapons" right about now (i.e., flying dollies). Also, why on earth is Susan using "stun" hammers in this kind of situation? Is she trying to capture one of the vampires, or is she just too squeamish to kill a vampire still?

Had to call my pain doctor's collection agency again today. They apparently hadn't all got the news about me updating Blue Cross that I didn't have duplicate insurance (only Medicare Part A), which I did a couple of weeks ago. The agent is going to re-submit the claim—hopefully it'll go through this time. Urrgh. Appointment with the pain doctor (or more likely his nurse practitioner) early Thursday for a med check. No changes anticipated.

Here's Loudmouth, enjoying the first day (that we know of) of a new year as an inside cat: Mrs' Prof took a good picture here, IMHO. If anyone would like a larger resolution for desktops or just for the hell of it, let me know. I shall gladly oblige, although we might have to go outside of the confines of the forum due to size limitations. No worries—I'll get it to you somehow, if you want it.