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Paul's Time Sink

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Privacy taken too far

Paul Westbrook | 07 November, 2006 23:24

My company uses Blue Shield as our health insurance provider.  I have been pretty unimpressed with them so far, especially compared to Great West, which we used at TiVo.  The latest annoyance occurred this week.

You can access both processed and pending claims on the Blue Shield web site.  I noticed that only a small subset  of our claims were appearing.  I sent them an email, and this was in their response:

We must be in compliance with privacy laws therefore you are only able to view your claims status on-line.

Each member of your family will need to register separately with a different username, password and their birthday in order to view their claim status.

So they want us to create an account for every one in the family, for privacy purpaces.  The funny thing is that when they send the paper confirmations for each claim, they are all addressed to me, and not to each individual.

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Blogger archiving responsibilities

Paul Westbrook | 07 November, 2006 19:59

Do bloggers have a responsibility to archive the content of posts that are linked to, so when the post becomes unreachable the information is still available? 

I linked to a forum post that described how to fix a problem where your iTunes library file became locked.  I didn't post the actual steps, as I didn't get permission from the author.  Then at some point later, the thread was removed from the forums at ipodlounge.  For a while it was available in Google Cache, but then it disappeared.  Now when people find my post from search engines, they can't find the instructions.

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Zero gravity water experiments

Paul Westbrook | 07 November, 2006 11:29

Boing Boing has a post that links to a video of an interesting experiments run by Don Pettit, on Expedition 6 to the International Space Station.

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