Five days ago, I published an open letter to Tufts Health Plan about the many ways in which they have made it unpleasant to deal with them since I first became a member seven months ago. I sent a link to this letter to a supervisor in their Appeals and Grievances Department, asking her to… Read More »
The City of Boston publishes its schedule of curb-side yard waste pickups, but does not provide any mechanism for receiving a reminder before your block’s pickup so you don’t forget to put out your yard waste. I’m here to fix that! If you would like to receive a reminder email the day before and day… Read More »
[See the update here.] Dear Tufts Health Plan, I am fortunate to have had the privilege of working for more than three decades in white-collar jobs which provided decent employer-sponsored health insurance. I’ve therefore been a member of many different health insurance companies, and I’m not sure any of them has given me so much… Read More »
Cross-posted from: Do you think as the economy spiraled into the toilet in 1929, people were telling investors with money in the stock market, “Just ride it out. You’ll be fine. The fundamentals of the economy are strong. Trying to time the market is a fool’s bet.” That’s what people said when I started saying… Read More »
Cross-posted from: Listen up! If you are even a little bit financially secure right now, it’s time to #PayItForward and help people who are facing homelessness, starvation, and serious illness because of #COVID19. Here’s a great way to do that. 1) Figure out how much money you can give other people weekly until we’re past… Read More »
I just sent the following email to the parents’ email list for the K-8 school that all five of my kids have attended (my youngest, in sixth grade, is the only one left there). I’m sharing it here because it fully captures my current thinking on COVID-19 and on where the economy is heading and… Read More »
Tufts Health PlanAttn: Member Appeals To whom it may concern: I am writing about the letter I received today from Cigna Health Management for myself, participant ID [elided] and reference code [elided]. To be frank, this letter is the worst, most impenetrable, absurd blob of insurance-company doublespeak I have encountered in many years. I am… Read More »
Recently our toaster broke, and although we have a “spare” toaster (long story), my wife and the kids all hate it and insisted that we replace the broken toaster, which they apparently absolutely adored, with a new one of exactly the same model. The old toaster had an unfortunate habit of its feet falling off… Read More »
In my current job, we are evaluating Datadog as the repository for the metrics and logs being generated by our SaaS application, which is hosted in AWS. We have taken a security-first approach in our design for the AWS accounts and infrastructure surrounding our app, which means among other things that we are not allowing… Read More »
I recently had to replace my old Synology DS415+ NAS with a new Synology DS918+ NAS, at a cost of more than $600, because my DS415+ failed. When I researched the failure that permanently bricked my DS415+, I learned the following: The failure was caused by a known defect in a component of my NAS.… Read More »