Last night the check engine light on my 2001 Acura Integra came on. I googled a couple of things here and there and I found some people suggested using a paperclip to read the code.

My car is relatively old so I didn’t want to bother with a DIY project.

I dropped it off at the shop this morning without thinking much about it. I figure reading the code off the car would probably cost about an oil change — $30-$40, and whatever is wrong with it, they will recommend a service to me and I can decide then how much I want spend. I was so out of it, I didn’t even realize they quoted me a very hefty price tag.

The results came back — It was because the damn gas cap was not tighten, so the sensor threw a fit. My post-mortem research showed that this is actually a very common reason the light came on.

Now here is the kicker, the bill is $90!

FUDGE!

I shouldn’t have been so nonchalant about it. I go through a lot of work to save a couple of bucks here and there, but I totally failed to do my research here. Had I googled just a bit harder, I would have probably fixed the problem.

The worst part is, this exact thing actually happened to my Prius less than 2 months ago. But the Prius has free maintenance so I didn’t feel the pain of being dumb.

Now I know.

I’ve been trying to help my mom with her medicare and this shit is damn confusing.
You’d think since it’s made for seniors, they’d make it as simple as possible. But it’s not.
The worst part is, most people who are supposed to be knowledgeable to help seniors with this stuff cannot answers the questions I have.
Or they simply cannot answer it clearly because it is impossible to be clear about it.
From my current limited understanding, they have four different types of Medicare A, B, C, and D.
It’s nice that they gave it a simple alphabetic naming convention, but in this case it’s actually NOT helpful since it is completely non-descriptive and confusing.

First off, I find it ridiculous some people are just NOW complaining about the government spying on them.

This shit is so old news, Jesus was alive when it happened. PBS has been running documentaries on it for years now and everyone knows there is an entire ATT building in San Francisco dedicated to spying on your phone calls.

I feel like one of those people who knew about the indie band before they became popular and now thinks everyone is a poser for listening to their music.

But anyways, my main thought is this:

Gun people really irritates me. As I said before, I don’t care about them and their guns. They can sleep with a gun up their ass if they want. But their rhetoric about using guns to protect themselves against the “tyranny of government” is so fucking stupid I can’t help but label them as stupid.

I guarantee you a government drone will kill you and your entire stupid militia in less than 5 seconds.

The reason it irritates me so much is because the spirit of the 2nd amendment is actually more applicable to defending our electronic freedom.

Maybe back in the days when the US started, guns were important to defending your rights. But nowadays, the freedom to communicate online free of government spying is the true weapon of liberty. Just look at how all the revolutions in the middle east started. It all came from people using the internet to organize and spread their message.

It pisses me off that the Republican party, the architect of government spying, through things like the Patriot Act, are the same asshole screaming about gun rights.

Now they are all pretending to be mad about PRISM just because Obama is president.

I bet you the next controversy is going to be when people realize that the TSA has actually been storing all those nudie pictures of them in a giant warehouse.

The other day while playing around with my AWS RDS account, I realized that I left an RDS-large instance running for about 6 months. It had nothing in it, but it was turned on. It was costing me about $500 a month, but I had no idea because I pay my amazon account automatically, and I rarely ever log in to check in on the bill.

This is of course a huge mistake on my part, and my heart sunk when I realized what a mess I made.

I did the only thing I could think of and emailed Amazon asking them to spare me. I made a huge mistake and needed their mercy.

To my surprise, they credited me the entire balance without hassle, within 2 days.

Awesome. Amazon is awesome.

And yes I learned my lesson. I now check my billing account regularly and set alarms to notify when I exceed my threshold.

A long time ago I interviewed for a programming job, they gave me a programming task to complete.

Here was my implementation: http://rover.heroku.com/

They didn’t offer me the job.

My feelings were hurt.

Watching a documentary on this very interesting place. Don’t want to forget it.

Beautiful tropical island you say? Let’s blow it up with a nuclear bomb…