Why you should always have health insurance coverage: A friend of mine moved from one job to another and didn’t get around to mailing in a check for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRA_(insurance) COBRA] (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, although what that has to do with health insurance, I don’t know (sounds like a manufactured acronym, or “manufacronym”, as it were)) insurance form. This allows you to simply pay directly (whatever your previous employer had been paying) to keep the same health insurance you had while at work until some other form of insurance kicks in.

He broke his arm snowboarding, and needed surgery to set and pin the bones. The hospital bill was around $25,000, and he has to pay that out of his own pocket. He can pay the bill over a period of time (several years), but that’s still a sizable chunk of money.

Admittedly, there was a period in between jobs (when I left my job-before-last and went off on my own, actually) that I also did not continue under COBRA and was uninsured for a period, though I made it through just fine (before signing up for a Blue Cross PPO plan at about $60 per month), and there’s no decent safety net, otherwise, for what can end up costing far more than you can afford.

What’s odd: He says COBRA was around $300 a month. That’s strange, considering the cost of my simple Blue Cross plan. (Correct me if I’m mis-remembering the exact figure, but I do know the difference was very large.) Why is it so much? Isn’t this a government program to encourage and facilitate people moving between jobs keeping medical insurance at all times?

“Mp3 file”:http://mh-z.com/txp/file_download/1. Noodling around, as they say.

Did you know that when I was little I used to like eating raw spaghetti? No, my parents didn’t starve me.

I also liked raw potatoes. Something about the texture was appealing. My mother would be slicing up potatoes to cook with chicken, and I would grab a few. She’d tell me they were poisonous if I ate too many.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had either raw potatoes or spaghetti. I wonder if I’d still like them? Perhaps tastes really do change with age.

My latest credit card bill was $1,234.56.

Okay no really, it was $1,234.52. Close, though. It’s like almost getting a straight flush. Or “the one that got away”. Close but no cigar. Where did that expression come from? Were cigars given out as prizes sometime in our murky past? It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife. Blegh. I hate that song.

I’ve joined “DeviantArt”:http://www.deviantart.com/ with the intention of creating and showcasing some new pieces and the hope of selling a couple on the side. I’m not exactly sure how the system works, yet. Is it like “Zazzle”:http://www.zazzle.com/, where they handle printing and distributing the artwork you create, and where you’ll simply upload a super-high-resolution version to them? Or is it like Ebay, where users handle production and shipping, and Deviant simply sets up the connection between creators and potential buyers? If the former, I’m always concerned about the quality of the service’s version. Will the colors come out as intended? Can I upload a high-enough-resolution file? If on the other hand I “get” to do the printing, then although I personally am confident about the quality outcome of my own prints from my nice little Epson inkjet (which takes 10 minutes to print a page at its highest quality setting and chews through ink cartridges faster than Kobayashi eats hot dogs (doubtful whether he chews)), this could be a liability for Deviant and sets up a system where they depend on user reputation and quality of prints would be highly variable from one artist to another. So… I doubt it works that way. Back when I did try Zazzle, I had used the service to order a poster-size print of one of my own images, which I was very dissatisfied with. The colors were horribly muddy (whereas output from my printer was nice and bright); the image was blocky and the dithering very visible (as if printed at 300 dpi). I’m sure mass printing technology (with far less than 10 minutes to dedicate per image) has improved considerably over the last few years, though, and I’m sure that the quality standard which customers expect from an online art service has increased. I could, I’m sure, resolve the topic of this speculation with about two minutes-worth of reading, but that wouldn’t be any fun. More importantly, I have to dedicate much more time to art, again, and I’m looking forward to that.

Ah, nice to know I have (a) visitor(s). :)

Passable. I had a horrible primary-color scheme here based on the colors in this “Windows XP theme”:http://interfacelift.com/themes-win/details.php?id=144 for a while, but that was transitory. I’m not entirely satisfied with this new look, but it’s simple, and for the moment, it works.

!/gfx/rules.jpg!

Drawn freehand with a ball-point pen. Yep, believe it or not. It’s a technique, whereby I create a line slowly, adding to the length one piece at a time, and going back and forth over the end of the exitsing line to straighten it out. The color you see here is a poor match to the actual drawing, but the best my scanner was capable of.

There are two categories of ball-point pens: those which can be used to create variable shading (those common Bic “round stick” pens, or most of the common Papermate pens I’ve encountered) and those which create solid blocks of ink, or fills, easily. This image demonstrates the latter category.

I was walking down the street. Sneezed. Sounded like someone honked a horn at that exact moment. Horn kept honking; apparently it was a car alarm. So my sneeze was powerful enough to set off a car alarm from at least ten feet away. Impressive.