Or ransomware as a service or RaaS, please refer to this Pensacola News Journal article, search for “Black Basta” for the detailed information. I felt this article was well written. Unfortunately, this one is the place I used to work – Ascension Health (company official note on this cyber security event). I also talked about Ascension from time to time, after I left the company in June 2021. Here are some tweets.
Impacts
My 1st worry is its impact on patients, such as this patient in Wisconsin (I tweet below too). The impact to the patients is real and in a way is similar to the recent Change Healthcare hack (WSJ; I have a blog post too).
This is a personal story from a patient in Wisconsin that was impacted by this #cyberEvent – 'I'm frightened': Ascension Health patient feels impacts of widespread ransomware attack https://t.co/A7HgOKwUk1 /7
All this also showed the computerization of the medicine (or healthcare), while has its advantage: electronic medical record in theory at least gave the provider a holistic view of patient health issues. At the same time it shows its fragility (easy to break). Paper based process is always needed, because no computer systems is 100% reliable. This is somewhat like the Disaster Recovery (business continuity process) many decent sized organizations run or try to run, in case something horrendous happens (natural disaster, fire and so on). But in real life, how many hospitals or providers have the paper process nailed down, and have regularly ran the DR exercises. For me personally, I only saw DR exercise in action at Mastercard (and I participated it once as a lead, and it was quite interesting). In fact to me “production” is also interesting 🙂
We know in the US, health care system is very complicated (I wrote a series on this, the 3rd post is here).
Also note Ascension’s insurance (Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan) is not that great to begin with, as I learned 1st hand from my COBRA usage, or attempt to use my COBRA coverage after I left. My new employer’s benefits didn’t kick in immediately and there was two months gap.
Another phone call with the current #HR (benefits central), and they sent out #enrollment info over, and today I called the dental insurance co and it seems fixed. Back to #Cobra, I think it's harder because there is no HR standing behind me… /7
Below is one reason, the event proceeded my leaving. But not the only reason. I guess we may say that’s last straw.
This project was one of the reasons I left that place to pursue other opportunities. I feel the management on my work place is mostly spinning on the wheels: and try to scape goat the vendors for any mistakes. #officePolitics /6
Incidentally I worked at another major catholic hospital chain in the St. Louis area, and while my experience is not as bad, nonetheless I was not happy on one project – at one time we were briefly asked by the management to come in on Saturdays to complete the project “on time”. I knew it was mostly for “a show” not for actual completion of the project. And we had quite a few people quit (jump ship) during that time.
At both places, I have seen or worked on ambitious projects that started because one executive has the budget, and later on had to abandon because of various reasons. I understand software development projects are notoriously for cancellation and budget overrun because its complexity, hard to estimate and changing (or sometimes random) requirements. But I have worked on other industries too, and they usually “fail early, fail faster” (the agile way).
Before I join the company (Ascension.org), I encountered some issues (login or single sign on SSO related) at myAscension.org. I still encountered similar issues (I would say about 33% failure rate) when I was working there. Looking back, this is a red flag of an organization’s IT capability.
If you happen to work in the IT/software development field, think “security security and security” all the time. It won’t prevent all the hacks. But it’s a good starting point. Btw, once when I was working for the Mastercard, I had the fun task to investigate the bad guys logged into a bank’s rewards redemption website and redeemed air tickets and hotels. One thing I still remember is this “client attorney privilege… ” in the email thread; another thing I was emotionally drained was seeing how some people can be that kind of malicious (stealing is bad, stealing on internet is equally bad as physically stealing). I also recalled when I was at college, I was stolen twice, once at a bus, someone picked up my wallet (when I realized, it was a bit late); another time, someone broke the lock on my drawer and took the money that my dad sent me recently. Always have the “security in mind” in daily life and in IT. Learn as much as you can, such as this Security in Mind channel on YT.
Last but not least, I understand we are going towards “electronic medical record” world, but we probably still need to keep some papers around prescription, vaccination records and testing results etc., better yet, back them up in the iCloud or somewhere you believe is safe, just in case the MyChart etc. goes down.
Bumped into it as this morning my 14 year old asked me a question related to this. Her question is about the “parabola shape and formula”, or how they become narrow or wide. For me I think I probably learned this about 40 years ago (at my 6th or 7th grade, 7th grade more likely). So “in Google I trust” and I found this.
This seems somewhat like AI (or ChatGPT) and also I was a bit surprised to find this is owned by the public company Chegg and the market cap of $CHGG is quite small – (assume they are leading edu tech company, this sector is probably very much segmented).
PS: Now I think the graph calculator probably has this function too. I didn’t have the graph calculator 39 years ago in China – saw it at graduate school at Rolla about 27 years ago
I started working in the US since Oct 2000. In a few years, hopefully I can retire from my current software dev job on my own terms (rather than let’s just say being replaced by AI :-). When I 1st started to working in the US, back in year 2000, I had an HP-UX workstation. Something like below.
HP-UX workstation, similar to what I used at the time, source (Reddit)
You probably wonder how was it in terms of the user experience. I would say not that great. Please note around at time late 1990s and early 2000s, Unix workstations were actually quite popular in many places, including the graduate school I went, formerly University of Missouri at Rolla (now Missouri S&T). The Windows NT just came to the scene in the school and work place at the time. It was new and cool, but not at the spot that it dominates.
Note the company gave developers older (slower) or newer (faster) workstations to developers usually by seniority. Because I was new I received an old and slower workstation. And once I decided remote logging into the more powerful build machine, which was the workstation was assigned for compile and build work for another team, btw, I wasn’t aware of the assignment part, and do some work there. A few days later, the build person on the other team knocked on my cubicle and complained about it. That was actually minor compared to another incident. At the time if we want to use Windows, we log into a shared Windows NT workstation via a client on the HP (or something like that), once my “significant other then” decided it was a good idea to check her Hotmail via the mechanism I mentioned above and she ran a virus exe file right there, that broke the shared Windows NT environment for our department. It’s called WinCenter, here is the doc I happened to bump into. It works on UNIX work stations. Note the page 2 of the doc: “WinCenter WS+ provides the following capabilities for HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun workstations” – at the time we have all 4 UNIX flavors for our software – which creates some challenges, because sometimes the bug only show up in a particular platform/OS. Most dev used HP-UX and are familiar with it, and HP-UX does have a reputation for overly lenient on memory management.
The following Monday the operation manager for my department knocked on my cubicle – he was as cordial as he could, but I got the lesson.
Windows
The Windows was already invading the market shares of the good old Unix workstations in year 2000, when I started working for the CAD software company. One of my project leads (tech lead) got his windows desktop 1st. He was the only one has the Windows machine. In a few years (I would say 2 to 3 years), we all switched from mostly HP-UX gcc debugger (and a few Sun Solaris holdouts) to the new and cool Windows desktops with Visual Studio IDE. I even saw the CEO of Microsoft Steve Baller once, when he was in STL to promote Visual Studio. Below I found this Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft Windows 1.0 commercial to be fun. He was just like that.
I recall at one time we supported the Linux distributions as well as the Mac. Because the code was written in C for our CAD software, the main task here is compile and porting to the other platforms including automated integration tests. I did a bit of those tasks (compile, build and run the auto tests) on those platforms. Again the main development was done on Windows via Visual Studio at the time because that’s the most popular platform and it has the best dev tools too.
My 1st work laptop (sort of)and my Shanghai trips
Fast forward a few more years. I need to work remotely from China (our company just established an office in Shanghai). But this is also my personal trip as I need to see my families in China: working from Shanghai office will give me some time to explore, and also that was also the time I met my current wife.
Dell Latitude D420, illustration purpose
I recall in Sept 2006, my boss found me a used (a few years old) Dell Latitude business laptop which was retired device from a manager (and a former dev): and I used it doing coding work in SH office. I recall at the time the memory for the 32 bit Windows machine was 4GB, and I need to use up to 2GB for the program I am developing, and I was very careful about memory usage both inside my code and outside my code (mainly shutdown unnecessary programs). And you may already know, hardware itself isn’t the No. 1 determining factor of productivity – on that laptop, in Sept 2006, I fixed a bug in our software that’s also highlight of my dev career so far. With that fix, our German sales team could go to BMW and demo our software (otherwise we just could not go). That laptop also accompanied me in 2007 when I was in Shanghai for about 6 months (2 trips) when I was spending time with my girlfriend (my current wife). I wrote some blog posts when I was working in Shanghai in year 2007. I listed a few below.
When working from SH, sometimes I also used the Windows Remote Desktop logging into the desktop in my STL office/cubicle. It worked out fine too. I returned the laptop when I left the employer in Nov 2008.
Note around that time, probably from the year 2003 to 2008, Windows also became the dominant OS (platform) for our CAD software , and most UNIX workstations are going away, and at the same time, we support Mac, and two main Linux platforms (RedHat and SuSE Linux). Apple used our software for the designing of iPod (and likely iPhone and Mac, MacBook too). Of course they insist the design software runs on Mac 🙂
ThinkPad
Also in Nov, 2008, I started my new software consulting job at Autodesk, and I received a large screen IBM (or Lenovo? I don’t recall when exactly) ThinkPad for my job. I think it’s probably ThinkPad 500: Wiki and review). This one works fairly well, I used it for all kinds of work, including the AutoDesk Intent (Inventor) customize project, burning software CDs for customers. The reason I need to burn our software CD (mainly AutoDesk inventor, different languages), is because one particular customer asked for them and she is fairly demanding. I recall she threatened that our onsite consulting project may be in jeopardy if we don’t give her the CDs. It’s also interesting, my then more experience colleague commented privately: the customer thinks they own the software, they don’t – they are actually leasing it.
ThankPad 500, Illustration Purpose
Desktop days and my 1st touch of VDI
I worked on two contractor jobs after my Autodesk gig (which was a full time position). For the 1st contractor job (it was basically a contractor job for a large railroad company, and I used a Windows virtual machine – I cannot recall the exact vendor. But my project is fairly small, and it doesn’t need a lot of horse power.
My next contractor position was for a large moving company, and they gave me a desktop. That one is not quite powerful, and I used Eclipse (Java IDE), ant and some other IBM tools or software (DB2 and their J2EE stuff came to mind). I didn’t have laptop for work then. This has both plus and minus. Here is the plus, because we cannot move desktop, when we go home, we can no longer work – which is a good thing if we want a clear separation between work and home life. At the same time, the minus, because coding job is a brain work, not physical, if we have some ideas about the work, we can write it down, but we cannot try it out on the computer right away. Sometimes when the creative juirce is flowing in the brain, it’s better to let it flow 🙂
Other minus: on days when my car is broken down, I need to rent a car to go to the office and work (there is logistics work to rent/return the car, and so on). If I had the laptop, potentially I could work form home when I didn’t have a car. This is also the last time I had desktop for work. From then on, I exclusively had laptops (or VDI) for work, and basically I can work from home if needed (before laptop, it’s possible to work from home using Windows remote desktop from the home PC, but it’s not very efficient). Also before pandemic, in the most companies I worked, work from home is usually not the norm, it could be used as a last resort (e.g., snow days: I recall I did that once when I was a contractor for the railroad).
My two laptops days
In Jan 2012 I started doing iOS for my day job – I mainly Mac for iOS dev, and Windows for .Net web service dev. I also bought a MacBook Pro in year 2013 for my iOS contractor short term gig. Later in Nov 2013, I was back to java dev for Mercy, 1st on Windows, later on Mac. I had two laptops to return when I left Mercy for MasterCard in May/June 2015.
I bought the below MacBook Pro (the 1st retina series) in spring 2013, when I started as a contractor for EHI (now it’s Enterprise Mobility). I was an iOS contractor focusing on internal iPad app development: they gave me a Mac Mini in the office. I decided to get my own device so that I can have more flexibility. I used that device for almost 10 years including the briefly used it for my daughter’s virtual learning between March 2020 and May 2020. I sold it via eBay in year 2023 (I bought a MacBook Pro 16 inch Intel on Oct 31, 2020 – this is the main personal laptop I was using for last few years, including sometimes using for it work (more on that latter).
The 1st MacBook Pro I bought in year 2013, I sold this last year on eBay, having used it for almost 10 years
Mastercard was similar to Mercy: I had Windows laptop 1st for production support job; later I received a MacBook Pro for dev (they have a choice for devs to pick either Mac or Windows). It took me quite some time to setup the Java development environment on the MacBook in year 2018. A few months to be exact, but I was happy I finally made it work after spending “much of my spare time”.
In Jan 2019, I returned both laptops to MC due to layoff. Actually I returned my iPhone and MacBook on the spot – I returned the Windows Laptop via Fedex a few days later: because I left it at home that morning, when I drove to office for work (I was not expecting to be laid off that day). I only realized the possibility of layoff about 15 minutes before the meeting with my manager and HR person. My manager updated the meeting room a day before – I realized the meeting room which is near HR – was intentional: again I only realized it about 15 minutes before the layoff meeting.
Pandemic and work from home
In March 2019 I started working for Ascension Health. Again I had Windows laptop 1st, and later I received a MacBook Pro (in year 2020, later half). Due to my job nature at Ascension, I didn’t get to do much coding and in year 2021 I decided to switch jobs and get back to coding – which is what I am doing now, for the most part, to say the least. And guess what, for my current job, for the development work I got back to the VDI again. And to be honest, I was not too thrilled when I switched from the MacBook Pro to the VDI.
My initial Work from Home (WFH) setup during 2020 pandemic: I had a 13 inch MacBook Pro for work
Actually at Ascension I did some implementation using Horizon (VMWare) VDI for the new contractors too (guess the company ran out of money after handing out all the MacBook Pros 🙂 I recall the contractor VDI user, complained the Zoom or Google meet didn’t work well on VDI. I researched it’s a known issue and hard to work around or resolve.
I don't have exact numbers, but #Citrix#VDi experience has not been great so far. Maybe grass is greener on neighbors yard, maybe, but I don't know honestly. When I said #glitchy: I meant when I clicked on the mouse, the program did not respond. Somewhat like the #remotedesktop
A long twitter thread on #WFH setup including #VDI
Why companies chose VDI instead of laptops
Work from home (WFH) as a trend started from pandemic, and now WFH becomes mostly normal for IT and software professionals, at least a few days in a work week. With WFH, the laptop is naturally the 1st choice, but some companies decided to go with VDI. I think VDI has a few benefits:
1) Potentially lower overall cost and flexibility. The VDI is usually subscription or usage based. The employer usually needs to supply a thin client, or a lower cost laptop/desktop, plus external monitor(s). This is usually cheaper than a high-end laptop plus external monitor(s). Overall, the employer manages fewer hardware. The VDI instances are usually running in a datacenter and potentially can be managed by a partner (if not the company itself). I found this usage pattern or scenario works in the academics as well, as recently I asked University of Arkansas Walton Business School, for access to Teradata, and they provided the access via Horizon (VMWare) VDI access (which is similar to what I had or helped while at Ascension).
2) Centrally managed, and potentially better in terms of security and device management, this is evident in the deployment of many thin clients that mainly run Epic Software (EHR, electronic health record, or EMR, electronic medical record) in the hospital I have been to (Mercy, Shriners’ Hospital, BJC and so on).
There are downside of VDI too, as I mentioned some above. I recall in year 2021, when I 1st started to using VDI, at Panera Bread co., I lost connections quite easily partially due to the slow/not very stable WiFi connection at the Bread Co.
Moving from one machine to another
Do we want to move the trash over also? Or we move selectively? The right approach seems to be the latter 🙂 An old joke I recall from a friend: she said, they moved couple times, the boxes in the basement never got opened 🙂 In other words, those stuff are not used in her daily life.
Honestly I think it’s a great opportunity to clean up the house during moving. But at the same time, if someone is trying to keep things for a bit, in case he/she will need it down the road, I understand that too. In fact, I tried to save more than what I would eventually use – which is probably the case for most people. We overestimate what we would use in the future. That’s also one reason I got so much clutter at home. I need to get better at throwing away stuff.
My personal rules on company devices
This includes all the computing devices, from workstation, desktop, laptop, to VM and company phones. I think I did largely okay on this: in terms of personal info hygiene on those devices. Mainly I don’t store my personal information or kids pictures there. The only exception is iPhone (Mastercard), and I did use iCloud to backup my photos there. One horror story I heard from a former colleague at Ascension is the IT people wiped a retiring colleague’s BYOD (bring your own device) phone: all his grand kids pictures are gone. Btw, Ascension IT people nuked my work account in the morning of my last working day there – basically I had to ask my colleague send meeting invitation to my personal gmail if they need me, we were on the G-suite the Google suite for work 🙁
Anyone don’t put your super important, super personal stuff on the company devices.
PS: VDI choices from Citrix and Microsoft. I haven’t used them from personal capacity 🙂
PS 2: probably in year 2006, I was thinking: “I am a slave of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs”. Hopefully I can get an upgrade soon. Maybe a slave of Warren Buffett instead (I am a big fan of him, btw)?
Most recently, I speculated a few more, one with the intension of arbitrage (Reddit$HCP– HashiCorp is weighing up a potential sale – Bloomberg Business); another one I just stepped on it purely by accident ($BSY). I know in many days, I stepped on the wrong thing (or stock), but this time with #BentleySystems, things are looking good 🙂
My year 2020 post on Terraform, note TF is probably Hashicorp cash cow, and also important for cloud infrastructure life cycle management
Note in the years since 2015, essentially since year 2019, I thought about learning the #golang myself and apply for a job (likely dev) at Hashicorp. That didn’t materialize like many initiatives I had over the years. Also note in year 2020/21 while at Ascension health I did use the Terraform quite a bit for the GCP infrastructure automation. My main motivations to join them are two folds: 1) I was interested in Dev Ops and cloud infrastructure; 2) I recall if I join a startup when they have 200 people (or engineers), potentially I would make enough money from stocks so that I can retire early.
For $BSY, I heard about them for a while, but until recently I didn’t have chance to look at their financials (until they came to the public market a dew years ago)
Last but not least, as the old Chinese saying goes, 胜不骄败不馁，what I need to do: is continue this battle on the stocks, and hopefully I will come away with more winners compared to losers (recently losers include $DT, $LEG Leggett & Platt which I talked about here, and $RIVN).
PS (04-27-2024) I sold all my $HCP long position at $33 on Thursday 4/25, and now I think if it drops to $31.50 ($10% discount of IBM $35 offer price), I can make some money there – assume the deal doesn’t collapse, and I think almost risk free arbitrage from $31.50 to about $34. Along those thinking, I placed a limited “good until cancel” buy order of $31.50 🙂
cobble together per Collins Dictionary: If you say that someone has cobbled something together, you mean that they have made or produced it roughly or quickly.
Or Google AI overview – “Cobble together” is an American English phrasal verb that means to produce something quickly or roughly, often without great care or effort. For example, you might say “The group had cobbled together a few decent songs”. The phrase can also be used with disapproval, such as “The last half an hour was unconvincing and looked as if it had been hastily cobbled together just to get to the finishing line”.
I think this applies to my cooking fairly well – I really need to pay attention to more details during cooking, in terms of ingredients, prep, and actual cook, and do better on that aspect.
But sometimes I got to do what I got to do: I mean work sometimes. For example, last Tuesday evening I had to do that. This is something we should be able to improve when I reflect on it. The issue was: the database scripts for deployment were not version controlled all the way, and there were some manual steps involved. And the DBA ran an earlier version of the DB scripts. My problem on the spot is: I need to figure out the changes since the particular script DBA just ran. And came up the scripts so that the end results would be like we ran the latest scripts 🙁
Cobble together is suitable for that situation. And I was able to quickly realized what’s needed, and came up with the “Update” scripts in a few minutes. And have the DBA ran that. Followed by validation by the teammates.
In a more modern database world though, ideally DDLs and DMLs would be automated, or in other words, the versioning of Database will be managed by a framework, such as FlyAway, or LiquiBase. I recall in my previous job at Ascension, we used the latter. This (automated) way is usually better than the “cobbled together” (manual) way. It doesn’t mean the frameworks don’t have any issues.
I think I was pretty ignorant about the Roth IRA or Roth 401k until recently years. Some friends talked about Backdoor Roth IRA a few years ago. Around the same time (Sept 2021), I noticed my employer 401 k plan has a Roth option. Before that I already worked in the USA for about 21 years: I did contribute to 401k plan earlier on and also have some traditional IRA plans (savings). In addition to those, I have HSA and 529 plan for my daughters too (both are not significant) compared to 401k and IRAs.
Weschler, extrapolating from numbers that I sent him, said that if you’d put the $70,535 that he had in his IRA at year-end 1989 into Vanguard’s S&P index fund, you’d have had more than $1.6 million as of June 30.
(The exact number, Vanguard confirmed, was $1,636,238.)
“That $1.6 million,” he says, “drives some very simple advice: start early, maximize the (employer) match, invest 100 percent in equities, and ignore all the other noise.”
Not a recommendation to transfer or rollover. 3% match requires Robinhood Gold (subscription fee applies). Keep Gold for 1 year and the IRA for 5 years. Other terms apply.
Also, I just saw the blow from their email:
For the 2023 tax year, you’d earn $195 on a maximum $6,500 contribution by April 15, 2024. For the 2024 tax year, you can still earn $210 on a maximum $7,000 contribution through April 15, 2025. Subscription fee and terms apply.
I am thinking: for most people, do what you need to do in terms of what to save, where to save, what to invest, don’t try to get the 3% match at any cost. I heard the RobinHood Gold has a cost (it’s not a high cost, but it seems to me they are trying to promoting something that may not be suitable for me).
PS: I think HSA again is a potential sleeper that can do quite a few things for us down the road (thinking investing in S&P 500 index fund instead of just put it in a CD or money market like fund).
PS 2: Over the years, I have seen two people who are likely in their 70s worked at Panera Bread (St. Louis Bread Co. here in STL), one lady worked at the Bread Co. at Chesterfield (Olive and WoodsMill), another gentleman at the New Ballas Road (near Olive, he may still works there). And I just came across this story – So last October, at the age of 80, Murray ended her retirement and got a job giving out samples at Costco. Honestly, this is something I am trying to avoid for myself and my wife. Working for fun and working for food/medicine are two quite different things.
I agree. At #Panera (aka bread co here in STL), sometimes I saw quite senior people work there. I think a while ago couple times at the Woodsmill and Olive (an old lady, reminds me of my grandma), and now at New Ballas (near Olive), an old gentleman (he seems like my dad's age) https://t.co/LAjbqQwMDt
I just saw a lady who is probably in her 60s, picked up at bread do and she is wearing red #doordash t-shirt. She is using an accessible parking 🅿️ spot too. Over the years I also saw a few people who likely in their 70s work at bread 🥖 co. #seniorEmployment#seniorsAtWork
Sometimes I cross posting, and sometimes I posted on social media but I forgot where I exactly posted (I spent probably one hour trying to looking for this on Twitter/X), but I just found it at FB. I posted below on FB on 03-09-2016.
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So I was at Sam’s club, tasting the free salmon sample. The lady passing out the Salmon said something funny “Being a Mizzou journalist graduate, I know how to propaganda”. Something like that. It sounds like she lost Journalist job. An old couple who complimented the salmon and the lady’s cooking (there is really not too much cooking because the main task was to warm it up, I think), said their daughter who is in graphic design, lost job since last July. I know it’s probably very difficult for journalists these days amid the new media etc (traditional media lost all the Ads revenue). My previous 2 jobs were in two industries that were both seriously affected by the government polices, luckily my skill can be transferred to other industry. I believe the two people can look at other relatively stable industry as well, as their skills can also transfer: good communication, writing and graphical design skills are always in demand. This is my chicken soup of the day.
(Update 12-08-2024) 我今天录了一个油管视频：I created a YT video today and it’s in Mandarin Chinese. I can create an English version later, if there is interest.
My street credentials (qualification) for writing this: besides as the consumer of US healthcare system (employer sponsored plans most of the time) since fall 2000. I also worked for 2 large healthcare systems (hospital chains) in the USA, Mercy Health and Ascension Health. Here is my LinkedIn profile.
I received 5 bills total, one paper bill didn’t come because I turned on paperless billing inside MyChart
We had two visits at Shriner’s hospital near the BJC at central west end: the initial encounter (encounter as in medical billing) and the followup encounter (to make sure her ankle is good). She was not seriously injured per Shriner Hospital but I am still glad that we had professional to check her out to make sure.
There were 5 bills or 5 payments from my side. Two bills for the X ray which although it says the doctor’s name in the insurance company website’s benefit explanation section. For those two bills I paid on the Shriner’s hospital MyChart website. Talking about MyChart, personally I liked it very much as it’s electronic. And recently I switched my primary doctor to Mercy partially due to this. I can see the appointments, messages and test results, as well as billing info in one spot. I didn’t realize or recall until very recently, all the insurance and billing information are in the MyUHC website. More on this in the next section.
More paper bills and that’s the confusing part
Later on there are two bills for the nurse practitioner who looked at S. And one bill for therapist’s work who came for the 2nd visit. Because I don’t see the bills inside MyChart, and initially I didn’t go to MyUHC website (the benefit explanation website) I only see one paper bill came after another, and I didn’t know what’s going on.
Eventually I paid off all 3 bills online by following the website address on the letter (the paper bill), because I prefer to get refund check instead of get the collection letter.
I still didn’t fully understand is why those bills don’t show up in the MyChart website. Last but not least, after I paid all the bills, I found out I can pay all those bills from the MyUHC website too. There is some integration between UnitedHealth (insurance side) and its subsidiary Optum (HSA account, payment side). Now I recall I used that functionality a few years ago when I had the United Health insurance from my previous employer Mastercard.
Out of pocket cost
The total out of pocket for Shriner’s hospital is about $450 for us: which seems okay for me at least. The UnitedHealth plan do have some decent discount from the initial charge.
Dealing with my 14 y old: the new retainer got lost in a week. See: I was smart that I bought the “retainer insurance” 🙂 If the opportunity arises, I would buy the “iPhone insurance” too (remember why I bought iPhone 15 : long story short, she accidentally broke her iPhone XR (which was passed on from me), and I decided to buy iPhone 15 so that I can give my iPhone 12 to her.
And before that, she lost her wallet at the J (due to theft).
So we have 2 accidents and one theft (in which she is victim, but still as my wife says, you don’t want to be careless so that the thief would notice you 🙂
Why, why, why is her so sloppy in terms of keep track of her things?
I can think of one reason, which is coming back right to us – we babied her too much, reminded her consistently (sometimes a bit excessive), which made her rely on our reminders to some extent. This is definitely not healthy. Here is one article on the topic – How to get your kid to do stuff without having to constantly remind them
Another reason is probably because there is no real consequences for her on those kinds of things. Imagine if I “broke something like iPhone”, there is no iPhone then, let’s just say that I lost a radio, or a cassette player (a Walkman). It won’t be trivial let me guarantee that. Even if my parents didn’t say anything: I would feel bad. In college now I recall I did have a few accidents: including once someone broke my drawer and stole my money there – remember the loss from theft story I talked above. Even today I still suspected someone in my dorm room or someone has the connection stole my money (they probably knew I received money shortly before that). Once in a bus in Wu’chang, I realized my wallet got stolen by a pocket picker.
I guess that’s one hard part of parenting. But I think I would still trade “being my daughters’ Uber driver” any day (see the paragraph below), over true retirement which means I probably need to find something productive to do if I am still healthy.
昨天基本上就是半退的状态-我告诉我老大我大概为她的事跑了两个半小时-为她的retainer开车到new and cool St. Peter’s orthodontist 🦷 office 两次（2 round trips, drop off mold 1st, then pick up when the new retainer is ready); 放学到学校接她(got “dad, can you pick me up” text when I was taking a walk to Warson park). Yes sure 🙂
PS: I talked about “soldier on” mentality to my 14 year old and she thinks it’s too much. She basically her generation doesn’t care. My sense is she felt that is “out of date” concept. After all, until fairly recently she never ate anything from White Castle (they have very cheap food). I guess many of her friends are privileged like her too. I heard some people spending tons of money on Bar and bat mitzvah: one of my Jewish friend told me some rich people spent wedding like money on the adulthood ceremony. She was invited to one last year and it seems pretty good too. This is quite different from my middle school days. Too bad she still has to work on similar math homework I do in my days 🙂
关于Soldier On, 我的理解很大程度上是“坚持”：我记得高中一年级，有一次运动会，跑四百米，我知道我有可能拿道第三名，最后一百米使出吃奶的力气，紧紧跟住第三名，后来我是第四。我的一个同学后来跟我说：其实他（第三名）也是害怕你一直跟着他。我觉得现在美国的很多问题其实也是因为缺少坚持，努力和毅力。
And if/when I tried to tell her or remind her to be more careful (maybe once to 3 times at the most), she would say: dad, basically you are telling me things I already know. So, here am I, the middle age guy who tends to repeat himself 啰嗦或是爱唠叨的老头。
I think she may be more talented or intelligent than me, but without that grit I am not 100% sure that she will be successful. A related phenomena is I saw very few Americans want/like to do physical labor nowadays: by that I mean things such as construction work, mining etc. For example, we saw all the contruction workers in the Baltimore Bridge accident are immigrants – An international tragedy: A father of 3 and a budding entrepreneur are among 6 victims of the Baltimore bridge collapse. The irony part is those workers were trying to fix the potholes in the highway (on the bridge) that many commuters and 18 wheelers use daily – assume mostly are the wear and tear.
Or maybe this is so called generation gap 代沟？After all, once she said: I don’t think there is any ethical billionaire. I guess her definition of “ethical” has higher standards than most. Then she added: Taylor Swift included too. That’s my girl: at least she is thinking and has her own opinion.
*美国的Double Tree Hotel 也不包早餐。Hotel chains that provide free breakfast (usually buffet style) include: Hampton Inn (by Hilton), Hilton Garden Inn, Hyatt Place/ Hyatt House and Residence Inn (Marriott). This is not a complete list. I know in addition to Double Tree, Marriott’s Courtyard doesn’t have free breakfast either.
This is a continuation of my personal reflection on investing in stocks. I recall most recently I talked about patienceover frequent short term trading here. Patience is import during power (electricity) outage too: which btw, in St. Louis due to the unpredictable weather, it happens once a while (such as this one in year 2006. And in summer 2021. Both the Jan 2007 and the July 2021 outages lasted multiple days. Also keep thing in perspective, I recall in July 2006 an electrician died when working to restore the electricity.
Today (this morning to be exact) I just noticed 2 stocks in my portfolio. And one is much bigger than the other in terms of portfolio size: 20 to 1. The big one barely went up 1%, the small one went up 10%. If you are curious, the large holding is $KO Cocacola, and the smaller one is $VERX Vertex software inc (tax software).
This reminded me of something Charlie Munger said quite a few times.
Charlie Munger: “And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don’t. It’s just that simple.” (reddit self.investing)
