Bill Katz

Now that I've left Stanford and ventured into self-funded entrepreneurial waters, I have the joy of paying the full cost for medical insurance. And thanks to a breakdown of what I'm paying for, I discovered it's not just "medical" insurance on the bill. There's a mental health component that usually isn't broken out. My medical insurance bundles this component into the overall plan and outsources the service.

Almost $40/month goes to United Behavioral Health, a service my wife and I will not use and an expense we'd like to chop. I complained to our COBRA representative about this bundled insurance and was told I can't remove it without stopping medical coverage.

Steve Jobs said people should queue up at an AT&T store for an iPhone, and he was mostly right. Well past midnight on Thursday, Jenn and I did a tour of the three stores around Palo Alto that will sell the iPhone: the Apple retail stores in Palo Alto and the Stanford Shopping Center, and the AT&T store at Page Mill Rd & El Camino Real. Guess which store is best for a procrastinating iPhone owner wannabe?

The Apple Palo Alto store had a sizable queue, which isn't surprising after notable technoblogger Scoble began broadcasting from his #1/#2 queue position on Thursday morning. Here is some camera video of the scene:

I broke my wrist playing football a few weeks ago. There was little pain and initial swelling, so I compounded my stupidity by staying in the game until it ended (30 more minutes of potential misalignment) and going to Stanford Barcamp for the rest of the day. Later that night, an acute care doc diagnosed the injury, and by weird chance, he had planned to go to Stanford Barcamp the next day. He posted my x-ray with my permission.

T-minus 4 weeks, maybe, until the cast comes off.

I've been at Stanford for a few weeks now. Some happenings and initial impressions:

• After accumulating a decade worth of junk, cross-country moves are... taxing. I will never move again. That's it. They'll have to drag me from our new place. We're still not unpacked and fully situated although I can breathe a little easier now.
• I'm enjoying my new position. On my second week, the cardiovascular lab I'm working with went to Tahoe for a retreat, spouses included.
• It rained all but two days for my first three weeks. We used to joke that people from Washington brought that kind of weather to Stanford. Apparently, it's people from Washington DC as well as Washington state.
• Linx, the dining area in the Clark Center (where I work), served Pho last week. With real, flat rice noodles. Not bad for a university cafeteria.
• My new MacBookPro with TextMate rocks, even if it gets hot. I'd like to find something like TortoiseSVN for the mac.
• Having a $40 T3 connection into your townhome rocks. The server rack we crammed into my den is going to enjoy the big pipe.
• I'm a Ruby on Rails virus. Within a week of arriving at Stanford, I convinced a project manager (for the Simbiome biosimulation directory) to switch from his prototype Perl scripts to Ruby on Rails.
• Palo Alto is expensive. Not a little expensive. We're talking Tokyo-high housing prices. Food and restaurants are more in line with Wash DC prices, but the tax is higher. All of University Ave, though, is a free wi-fi hotspot. I'm typing this in front of a cafe using my MacBookPro and wireless.
• The campus has grown substantially since my undergrad/coterm days. Besides the building that houses my office, I would guess 80% of the med/engineering corner of campus is new.
• Riding your bike into work within 5 minutes is pretty nice, even if it's in the rain.
• My talk proposal "Metaprogramming Writertopia" was accepted for the First International Rails Conference. Looking forward to Chicago in the summer. I'll make sure to get the two relevant plug-ins cleaned-up and released before then.