Tarkblog

When I was doing my graduate work, I had one professor whom I despised much more than any other. I won’t reveal his name or what class he taught, though it was an engineering related course.

The guy was completely awful. However, the one highlight of the class is that he taught me a technical word that I hadn’t used or heard before and that I, for whatever reason, really like.

That word is nilpotent.

In math terms, a nilpotent matrix is an n x n matrix that if you multiply by itself a number of times ends up turning into all 0s. It turns out the maximum number of times you can multiply by itself to get all 0s is n. It also has some interesting eigenvalue properties (namely that they are all 0s).

Nonetheless, I think nilpotent is a very cool word. It just sounds sophisticated. I can’t think of any use for it other than just sounding sophsticated. Knowing it, and how to use it, makes you a member of an elite club of people who can harness the power of the word. nilpotent.

Just don’t confuse it with potentate.

When I was young and had a bad day my parents used to tell me that it was because my “biorhythms” were off. I never really understood the concept, but it was a neat way of explaining why things weren’t going right.

Yesterday, our biorhythms were off.

We had our second open house in as many weeks. Nobody showed up for the first one, though it was raining all day. We advertised another one, both in the newspaper and via a yard sign (we live in a pretty well trafficed neighborhood and are the first house you see when entering it). We had two people show up, neither of which were interested in home buying. That was discouraging.

Couple in the fact that our relator called on Saturday informing us that the sellers ran into some trouble with their movers and wouldn’t be moved out of the house by Sunday night like they had previously told us. Luckily our contract has a $100 a day clause for each day they are late.

To cheer up the wife and to help clear my head we went for a drive last night. We passed the new house, saw a moving truck, and felt encouraged. I talked her into going out to eat at Ruby Tuesdays, because we both like the salad bar and burgers.

The past few times we’ve gone, we order a burger and two salad bars, then split the burger. This time was no exception.

The salad bar was pretty trachy. They didn’t have mixed greens, which is something I really like. There were noticably a lot of containers just “missing” from the bar. And the station at the end that is normally filled with croutons and stuff was mostly empty (we snagged the last 10 or so croutons). There was a guy who was replenishing stuff, but he was refilling things that weren’t even half empty yet.

The burger came out rare. I mean extremely rare. We like rare food, preferring our steaks medium rare and burgers the same, and had ordered this one medium rare. This thing was well undercooked. Neither of us are complainers, but I wasn’t going to eat uncooked meat. I touched the burger middle with my finger, and it was still cold.

I told the waiter, and he looked at his card and read off the description of “medium-rare” to me. Yeah dude, I understand that most of your customers are morons, but this thing isn’t cooked. I could have scooped out the middle of the burger and made it into its own separate patty for cooking.

So he took it back. Now, this was a bit of an odd situation because in order to find out the burger was rare we had cut the whole thing in half to split. So we really had two 1/2 burgers that we sent back. Further more, it was a tall burger with lots of fixings and mushrooms and cheese and wouldn’t be easy to put back together. The waiter didn’t seem to think they’d be able to do much with it, which was fine with me. Cook me a new one dude, and I’ll be happy.

Except they didn’t. They cooked that one for us and put it back to gether as much as they could. Of course, this time the burger was well overdone, probably because they thought we were a couple of morons who didn’t understand what medium rare really meant. Furthermore, they didn’t really remake it. The cheese had basically all fallen off and they didn’t restock. Same with the mushrooms. THye just kind of threw it back together.

Now, the waiter offered to have the manager talk to us, but we both wanted the burger and it was fine enought to eat, so I waived it off. But, the whole experience was a trach.

It was just a bad day for the biorhythms, I suppose.

Yesterday marked 1 year of Annie (red2) and I being married.

This isn’t all that notable in itself, but I wanted to share our evening because it’s just so fitting to our relationship.

When we got married last year, we did it in a bit of a veil of secrecy. We did the deed on a Thursday, then left on a Saturday for a week long vacation. This vacation turned out to be our honeymoon, but nobody, except us, knew that ahead of time.

On the day we got married, we had a small ceremony at the courthouse. Someone in the clerk’s office did the deed for us, with other people in the office signing as witnesses (though none of them actually saw us get married).

Since we did the deed over lunchtime, we thought it might be nice to get a bite to eat somewhere nice. Luckily, downtown Columbus has a really really shitty mall that has a really really fancy restaurant in it. So we went there for lunch. It was overpriced, but high quality. Service was eh.

Well, we figured it would be all fitting to spend our anniversary eating dinner at this same place. So we made some reservations and drove over last night.

Nothing really has changed with this place - still overpriced and high brow. Not really my fare, but I’ll do it for my anniversary.

I had the flatiron steak, which came with creamed spinach. I also had a side of baked mac and cheese. Annie has some kind of risotto with asparagus and bacon. We ordered a couple glasses of wine and an appetizer of 3 (yes, 3) shrimp wrapped in applewood smoked bacon.

Total bill: $50+

But, keeping true to her form, the wife breaks out a buy one get one free entree coupon for the restaurant. She follows it up with a $20 gift certificate she won the radio a while back.

Total bill: $26 with tip.

Sah-weet. I knew I married her for a reason.

I’ve added dev-python/PyQt4 and dev-ruby/qt4-qtruby to the tree. Both are experimental and may move, break, etc at any given moment. But it’s something to play with if you’re into Qt bindings!

In response to der Maxson Blog on related topic:

On Jan 1, I got new health insurance through work. Here’s a comparison of the previous plan (which is still offered to employees if they’re scared to switch) and the current plan:

Old plan:
100% of the monthly deductable is paid by the company (including spousal and dependent coverage)
Prescriptionss are 10/20/30/40 based on generic/non-generic and formulary/non-form
$10 copays for all dr visits
Free ambulance rides
15% deductable for all other expenses up to some maximum per year ( I think it was up to $3000 out of pocket ).

New plan:
100% of monthly deductable is paid for by the company
They contribute $166.66 to a health care savings account for me each month (untaxed)
I also contribute that amount each month out of my own pay (untaxed as well).
This means I end up getting $4000 into a savings account each year, non-taxed. It only costs me $1500 lost income to do this, because we’re in the 25% tax bracket.
We pay actual insurance costs for anything medical. A trip to the Doctor now costs 44 bucks instead of 10 (normally would be 70, but we get the insurance negotiated rate).
After $4000 in qualified (ie, going to the doctor, surgery, etc) medical expenses for the year, all my medical needs are paid for 100%.
We can also use $$ in the savings account to pay for anything health related - band aids, for example. Before I wasn’t able to get a tax deduction on band aids. Now I am.

The question is: which plan is better.

Let me tell you that without at doubt the second plan is better. Much better. Like REALLY much better. And I think in general it would be better for many Americans, particularly younger ones in relatively good health. With the old plan, I had great coverage, but the benefit of the money of the premium was paid directly to the insurance company. Now, I face somewhat higher prices at the expense of keeping some of the money for myself (for medical expenses, anyway).

Here’s the catch, though: If there was a crisis and we had a medical emergency, I may have to pay the hospital up to $4000. If I didn’t have enough money in my savings account to cover it, I would have to pay the difference out of pocket.

Contrast that to the earlier plan, where the total out of pocket cost would be significantly less.

I hope this HSA thing continues gaining momentum and congress gives even more incentives to use it.