One of the first emails I received this morning was the first I’ve received on the Affordable Health Care Act. It included this line: “Unfortunately, we do not have details on the exchange coverage or the rates to share with you at this time.”
And this starts in October.
Though, right off the top, there are $65 in fees, and “we do not yet know what the rate increase will be.”
Thanks, Congress.
So I wrote our hard working and now long suffering HR director and asked a few specific questions. You can imagine the stress that gentleman is under.
In the evening I received this tweet:
Was so scared to drive within 20 ft of a biker today in fear that it was @kennysmith because MY GRADE IS IN HIS HANDS. #heholdsgrudges
— Steffany D'Angelo (@Steffanypaige23) August 29, 2013
I tell my students “One of the perks of being in the front of the class is having your pet issues. Here’s mine. Be careful of cyclists. Move over three feet,” and so on. Be careful when you pass them, I say, because you never know when it will be me and I get to grade you.
This joke always does pretty well. And she laughed at it, too.
Someone asked me on Facebook one day how to pass a cyclist. I got it down to five hints:
First: Wait. Just a second. Let a little road get out in front of him or her. She has the same rights the car does, etc.
Second: Know that waiting for 15 seconds until oncoming traffic doesn’t exist isn’t going to make you late.
Third: Just ease over to your left and pass, when clear. Some cities have a three-foot law. Think of that: that’s an arm length, but do err on the side of wider berths when you can. (Not everyone is a champion bike handler.)
Fourth: You don’t have to honk your horn. Unless you are driving an electric, I can hear you.
Fifth: Go on and have a nice day.
A former student sent along this story:
Police say a man suspected in a Chase Bank robbery was found in a nearby building after they believe he fell 21 floors down a garbage chute.
This is the dumbest story of the day: Radio station officials apologize for stir created by promotional:
The programming director at Shoals Radio Group said he is puzzled how a promotional for a local radio station managed to excite many students and parents into believing bombs would be exploding today at area schools.
Rumors of school safety being in jeopardy have steadily increased since promotionals began Monday to bring attention to a format change at Star 94.9. The rumors prompted some parents to keep their children at home today instead of having them attend class as usual. Police and school officials also increased patrols in some schools in an effort to ease fears.
[…]
The promotional, which will continue until Friday when the format change is officially announced, is built around the thought that aliens have taken over the radio station and are trying to figure out what type music appeals to humans.
You can hear the promos here. How people got worked up about them remains a mystery. “Aliens with perfect diction!”
Every now and then Spencer Hall feels the need to prove he’s a better writer than the rest of us. Give the guy a good story and watch him work. Read this (too long) excerpt and you’ll need to know the rest:
Kurt Vonnegut said that his chief objection to life in general was that it was “too easy, when alive, to make horrible mistakes.” This is what offensive line coaches live with: the notion that for every five simple circles drawn on a board, there are a nearly infinite number of possible threats looming out in the theoretical white space. Offensive plays give skill players arrows. Those arrows point down the field toward an endzone, a stopping point, a celebration. Those five simple circles stay on the board in the same place, and are on duty forever.
They are rough men in the business of protection.
Herb Hand is an offensive line coach at Vanderbilt University, where he might not even be were it not for a long line of random events. Hand got a job at Glenville State under Rich Rodriguez in 1994, a team whose base offense–the spread option that redefined modern football–depended on a play that in itself was the result of an accident, the zone read. A quarterback simply pulled the handoff from the running back, read the defensive end, and turned a mistake into deliberate and deadly strategy. Other coaches might have dismissed it entirely. Rodriguez did not, and now it is run at every level of the game from Pop Warner to the NFL.
Hand would work under Rodriguez at Clemson, and then followed him to West Virginia when Rodriguez was hired to replace Don Nehlen. Hand would recruit, coach tight ends, and recruit, and do all of that in exactly that order, because recruiting is an important activity that sometimes is interrupted by bouts of college football. One of the places Hand recruited was the talent-glutted state of Florida, including Orlando, where on April 27th, 2006 something would hit him in the back of the head with an axe.
The axe blow to the back of the head was a different kind of pain than normal.
And then you finish that story and you think: Great, that’s how we start football season. With teary eyes.
Which is fine, I guess, because we have football. You know, I’ve waited almost my entire life to enjoy picture-in-picture. The technology was rolled out in 1983. I’ve had two televisions that had the tech, but never had the necessary cable setup. Now, on this second television to feature PIP we finally have the opportunity to use it — and during football season! — and I can only manage to watch the same game twice.
But Gatorade ads look great when you see them in double vision!
So picture in picture is, so far, disappointing. And the New Directv setup lasted seven quarters of football, watching and switching between channels, before quitting. So there was a call to tech support. They flipped the magic switch and unkinked the hose on their end. A reset and a reboot later and it works again. Hope we’re not doing that all fall.
Even if we are they’re already proving more competent than Charter ever was.
Three things from the Multimedia Links site:
From the ‘Picking on Millennials’ beat
