You may recall that back in January we had to take Courtney in for some CAT scans when it seemed like she might have a kidney stone without any health insurance to help with the cost. You folks stepped up with lots of good advice when the final bill came in at a grand total of $3500. Advice which, oddly enough, the kind folks at the billing company handling the bill also suggested I try and they put the bill on hold for a month while we attempted to get Courtney covered under Medicare. Michigan has two kinds of Medicare for kids whose parents don’t have/can’t afford health insurance. One of them will cover bills up to 60 days prior to signing up and the other one doesn’t. Guess which program Courtney qualified for? Yep, the one that wouldn’t cover the bill.

The second suggestion was that I check to see if the company, Avant Imaging, that did the CAT scan would be willing to offer a discount seeing as I was paying for it out of pocket. The nice lady at the billing company said she would put another month hold on the bill and send in a request on my behalf and that we should eventually see a new bill with any discount applied to it. Well that bill finally arrived and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s still for $3500 and some change. It appears Avant Imaging won’t cut us any slack and we’ve run out of any further options.

The good news is that the donations you folks sent in back when I first talked about this crisis will cover around a third of the bill. Allow me to again take a moment and express my gratitude for your generosity on our behalf. After that initial payment I’ll have to work out some sort of payment plan with the billing company and pay the rest off over time. The other good news is that we just signed up for health insurance through my new job and it should kick in on May 26th. It’s no where near as great as what I had in the past—in fact it probably wouldn’t cover the majority of the cost if Courtney had to have CAT scans today—but it beats the hell out of no insurance at all. The cost for the insurance will knock my pay down to just a little more than what I was earning at the last job, but at least we’re covered. The only really frustrating part about all of this was that we spent a lot of time sitting around waiting for decisions to be made on if we were going to catch a break or not before finally finding out that we’re going to have to pay the full bill anyway.

Here is the sort of peace and love the religion of Islam promotes:

My daughter deserved to die for falling in love’ - The Observer

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

[...] It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.

Sitting on a chair by his front door and surrounded by the gerberas and white daisies he had planted in the family garden, Abel-Qader attempted to justify his actions.

‘I don’t have a daughter now, and I prefer to say that I never had one. That girl humiliated me in front of my family and friends. Speaking with a foreign solider, she lost what is the most precious thing for any woman. ‘People from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.

‘I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,’ he said, his voice swelling with pride. ‘My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.’

Not that Christianity doesn’t have its share of passages in its holy book with similar punishments for perceived crimes, but it sometimes seems as though a majority of Muslims still cling to such barbaric teachings. I suppose they deserve credit for sticking to what their religion teaches, but somehow I’d prefer they’d take the more hypocritical approach of the majority of Christians and just cherry pick the good parts of their religion.

Found via Pharyngula who put things a bit more eloquently than I did.

To say that the scope of Grand Theft Auto IV is ambitious is an understatement. It attempts to simulate a fully fledged living city with an active population and realistic physics and for the most part it does this very well. It’s not perfect, however, so there’s bound to be a few places where the simulation… breaks down… falls flat… just plain goes nuts. For one class of gamer out there hunting those glitches down is half the fun:

Found over at Kotaku.com.

... is that it can make you look like an idiot when you try to protest for a good cause. Here’s a pic of a sign at a recent anti-China Olympics protest:

The answer is: Yes, yes we would allow them to host the Olympics. In 1936 in fact.

Crack a history book every now and then and perhaps you won’t end up looking like a complete idiot.

Sent in by a number of people.

Steve over at the Gaming Steve blog caught up with the folks at Maxis about the shit storm that’s been ongoing since word came out that Spore would be using SecuROM DRM.  From the sounds of it Maxis plans to try and make the SecuROM as unobtrusive as possible:

Hey Spore Fans -

We wanted to let you know that we’ve been hearing your concerns about the online authentication mentioned earlier this week. I didn’t want to head into the weekend without getting back to you with some information about how Spore is planning on using this new system.

A few things we wanted you to know:

• We authenticate your game online when you install and launch it the first time.
• We’ll re-authenticate when a player uses online features, downloads new content or a patch for their game.
• The new system means you don’t have to play with the disc in your computer. And if you are like me, always losing discs, this will be a huge benefit.
• You’ll still be able to install and play on multiple computers.
• You can play offline. 

We do hope that players will play online - sharing creatures, buildings and vehicles with other players is something that is unique to Spore and one of the coolest features of the game. Every day, when I play the Creature Stage, I get to see wacky and awesome new creatures from my Buddies on the team coming over the hill at me and I can’t wait to see what happens when our creative, passionate community starts sharing their creations.

I’d love to write more - but I need to get back to work. We’ve got a game to finish.

-caryl

I’m still not happy about it, but if they limit the authentications to when the player is getting downloadable content/patches and it doesn’t stop legitimate applications (read: Process Explorer) from running then I may be able to live with it. Mass Effect is still out of the question though.

Microsoft’s Zune media players continue to lag behind Apple’s popular iPods so they’re looking to gain an advantage wherever they can. One possible boost is a recent deal with NBC to license shows for use on the Zune after NBC yanked them from Apple’s iTunes offerings after a dispute over pricing and DRM. Microsoft seems eager to do whatever it takes to make NBC happy including developing software that would check for and block any illegitimate NBC shows found on your Zune. Here’s a snippet from the New York Times Blog:

Late Tuesday afternoon I reached J. B. Perrette, the president of digital distribution for NBC Universal, to ask why NBC found Microsoft’s video store more appealing than Apple’s.

He explained that NBC, like most studios, would like the broadest distribution possible for its programming. But it has two disputes with Apple.

First, Apple insists that all TV shows have an identical wholesale price so that it can sell all of them at $1.99. NBC wants to sell its programs for whatever price it chooses.

Second, Apple refused to cooperate with NBC on building filters into its iPod player to remove pirated movies and videos.

Microsoft, by contrast, will accept NBC’s pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright “cop” to be installed on its devices.

Oddly enough there appears to be some debate at Microsoft about whether or not this Copyright Cop software will actually ever see the light of day on the Zune:

In the Zune Insider Blog, Cesar Menendez, a member of Microsoft’s Zune team, refers to this post, and the blog discussion it prompted. He writes:

We have no plans or commitments to implement any new type of content filtering in the Zune devices as part of our content distribution deal with NBC.

It’s worth noting that Mr. Perrette told me that Microsoft committed to explore filtering; he didn’t say it committed to implementing those filters.

Here is what Mr. Sohn, the Microsoft spokesman, told me yesterday when I asked him about what Mr. Perrette said: “I don’t think they are wrong, but we are not going to characterize those discussions.” Later he added, “We have agreed to work with NBC across a range of topics, and protection of copyrighted material is certainly one of them.”

Either way it’s certainly a good reason to think twice about whether or not you want to purchase a Zune especially given the fate that befell users of the defunct MSN Music service. 

This one is a classic. I had to share:

Apparently the folks at Electronic Arts want me to become a software pirate. You may recall that I refused to purchase the PC release of Bioshock because the SecuROM DRM it contained would actually disable some perfectly legitimate troubleshooting software on my PC out of fear that I might use it to crack the game. It also limited you to 10 installs before you had to “reactivate” the game over the Internet and, as someone who restages his PC often, that was too much of an intrusion.

Now word comes down that the critically acclaimed RPG Mass Effect will also make use of SecuROM with a limit of 3 installs and a requirement that it phone home every 10 days to reactivate itself. Apparently the same will also be true of Spore:

BioWare technical producer Derek French lit up the Mass Effect forums this past week announcing that both their game and (on page 2) fellow Electronic Arts title Spore come with SecuROM, a DRM system that requires activation the first time you play the game and then a re-check every ten days, with the first check on the fifth day.

French explained that there is no external program installed and the check will be run through MassEffect.exe (or Spore.exe, presumably), the data transfered will be the CD key and a “unique machine identifier of some type” and that he has been told, “there will be clear labeling on the package.”

This is very disappointing news as it guarantees that I won’t even consider purchasing Mass Effect now and it makes my purchase of Spore debatable as well. If I do end up being weak willed enough to buy Spore I can guarantee you that I will be hunting down the crack for it. There’s been a fair amount of talk among developers that piracy is killing the market for games on the PC, but these draconian DRM schemes aren’t helping the situation at all as it pretty much ensures that legitimate customers will either end up turning to pirated copies to get away from the restrictive DRM or just refuse to purchase the game. Given the fact that Spore will contacting servers on a regular basis to download user created content there’s even less of a need for SecuROM as opposed to just using the game’s CD Key.

What’s going to end up killing the PC game market in the long run is treating your customers like criminals, but it appears that’s a trend that isn’t going away anytime soon.

The folks at Eurogamer are reporting that a patch for the PS3 version of Grand Theft Auto IV should be hitting the net today:

Speaking to Eurogamer, a Sony source explained that the patch would help by “reducing the loads on the servers at GameSpy and hopefully the completely random hangs that some users have seen”.

I’ve not had the chance to play the game for the past couple of days anyway so this is perfect timing for me. With any luck the patch will be available by the time I get home and I can check to see if it clears up the issue. No word yet on a patch for the Xbox 360 version.

On a related note: GTA IV is, as expected, earning Rockstar a shit load of money taking in some $500 million in its first week on store shelves.

Update: According to the guys at PS3 Fanboy the patch is out and working as advertised.  It clocks in at 18MB and bumps the version number to 1.01.

The new service pack brings a handful of new security related features, a whole host of bug fixes, and a purported speed boost as well. As always it’s probably a good idea to install it if you’re running Windows XP on your machine. Microsoft has also re-released Windows Vista SP1 which was pulled after some compatibility issues. Both are available through Windows Update.

For a month every year Muslims are supposed to fast (i.e. not eat any food) during daylight hours - this is known as Ramadan. Most cope with this fine (and if you’re ill you can eat food). But one guy from my home town, despite feeling rather tired, decided to drive. And fell asleep. Alas, he hit a lamp-post and later died in hospital.

Bradford Coroners Court was told Maurice Gent, 59, was fasting for the Muslim festival of Ramadan and was “feeling tired” at the time of the collision.

The court heard how Mr Gent, of Waterside, Bingley, was taken to Airedale General Hospital where he told Accident & Emergency staff he thought he had fallen asleep at the wheel.

Mr Gent, a civil servant, had complained of stomach pains in the ambulance. He was stable on arrival at hospital, but his condition started to deteriorate and he died of multiple organ failure on October 5, 2007 - six days after the collision.

Ramadan is actually getting earlier each year and this means that daylight hours will be getting longer, so it’ll be interesting to see if more accidents happen as a result of people fasting who really shouldn’t.

I guess the standards for what constitutes a newscast are slipping these days:

The Federal Communications Commission has ruled as such in the cases of Fox’s “TMZ” and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “The 700 Club,” declaring Friday that each show meets the test for “a bona fide newscast” and therefore would not trigger political equal-time requirements.

Those requirements hold that “if a licensee allows a legally qualified candidate for public office to use a broadcast station, it must afford equal opportunities to other such candidates for that office,” according to FCC regs.

Congress defined “bona fide newscast” as one that holds “genuine news value” and is not intended to boost or aid any particular political candidate.

I’ve seen episodes of both shows and it seems pretty clear to me that the last thing they might be are “bone fide” newscasts. In TMZ‘s defense I suppose it’s only fair to grant the the status seeing as Entertainment Tonight also qualifies and I don’t really see that as much of a newscast either, but to say that the 700 Club doesn’t boost or aid any particular political candidate is laughable.

I do find it interesting that I’m nearly as appalled with TMZ as I am with the 700 Club in terms of the content. It’s hard to say which one was more vapid and potentially harmful to brain cells. I don’t recommend large doses of either over long periods of time.

The chi of Portland: High weirdness in Nirvana | Kansas.com

PORTLAND, Ore. - Acupuncture is not just for people. It’s also for cities - if the city is Portland.

Adam Kuby has stuck a 23-foot needle into the ground down by the Willamette River and hopes to plant more, choosing locations where he figures the city’s “chi,” or vital energy, needs some help.

Unusual? You bet. Unusual for Portland? Not really.

Because the city apparently has a lot of weirdos in it. The rest of the article goes on to describe some of the quirky events and people to be found in Portland, but honestly most of it doesn’t sound too strange. The guy trying to do acupuncture should win a nutcase prize of some sort.

Among the latest additions to the panoply of Portland’s oddities are Adam Kuby’s giant needles. An artist who arrived from New York four years ago, Kuby says the acupuncture project is an attempt to get people to see the city in a holistic way.

“It is a visual way of expressing what a lot of people already know,” said Kuby. The city is “one organism, one body, one very complex, independent system.”

Other than this nutball, the city’s weirdness actually is very appealing to me as I’ve long been attracted to people and places that aren’t afraid to be seen as different. I don’t know that I’d attempt what the article describes as “Zoo Bombing” at my age, but I might go watch people participating in it. If nothing else it might be a fun place to visit.

Well that didn’t take long. One really strong weekend barely over with and Marvel Studios is already announcing a sequel to Iron Man according to the folks at /Film:

Hot off the $100 million opening of Iron Man (nice job Steve!), the ever powerful Marvel Studios opened its war chest up today, revealing the company’s in-house feature roll out through 2011. Here’s what it looks like…

2010

April 30th: Iron Man 2

June 4th: Thor (directed by Matthew Vaughn)

2011

May 6th: The First Avenger: Captain America

July (day N/A): The Avengers

So, two Avengers films in 2011, eh? Unprecedented. DC’s Justice League is bummed. In addition to the line-up above, Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man is still in the planning stages at the studio, and obviously June brings us The Incredible Hulk, followed by Punisher: War Zone in December.

Let’s hope the rest of them are half as good as Iron Man turned out to be.

Here’s one more reason not to be excited about the fourth installment in the Terminator movie series. They’re aiming to make it a kid friendly PG-13:

As production starts today on “Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins,” the next installment in the action franchise, producers at the Halcyon Co. say they aim to deliver a PG-13 movie to Warner Bros. for release on May 22, 2009.

The “Terminator” series is one of the highest-grossing R-rated franchises of all time, with the first three films having grossed more than $1.03 billion worldwide. But Halcyon producers thought it was time to broaden the upcoming fourth film’s audience base, and they believe the PG-13 won’t compromise the series’ gritty vision.

“The ratings have changed,” said Halcyon co-founder and co-CEO Victor Kubicek, a broker-turned-writer-producer. “The PG-13 has increased in intensity.”

It appears the success of Live Free or Die Hard last summer was enough to convince the folks who bought the rights to the Terminator series that moving from R to PG-13 would be a good idea. I’m already leery of a fourth Terminator film due to abysmal third installment and the rather wobbly (so far) TV series and it doesn’t help that they hired the guy who wrote the third movie to also write the fourth one. Toning it down for a younger audience may just be a deal breaker for me.

I’m also getting a bit tired of the mad rush to make everything PG-13. This is particularly true of the horror genre where it seems it’s either a decidedly non-scary PG-13 or an over-the-top torture-porn rated R. The original Terminator was as much a horror movie as a sci-fi movie and the sequel did a good job of fitting into the same mold. Part of the reason the third movie failed for me was that it wasn’t particularly scary. Considering how non-scary most of the PG-13 horror flicks of late have been it’s hard to see how the drop in rating on the next Terminator will improve things at all.