Figured I might as well show it off

The new back-end for the daily puzzles is proceeding apace. The new back-end database and account manager app seem to be working just fine. Now I'm trying to work it into a game. Since I didn't wanna take down my existing six games (because I, like you, need my confusebox fix), I decided to make a new game and work the new user management stuff into it.

Once that's working, then I'll work on shoehorning the system back into the existing six games.

If you'd like to try it out, check out Poker Patience. That'll be the next daily puzzle. Thus-far, it seems to be doing everything correctly, working with the account manager and such. Also, it'll store your username and password as a Flash cookie, so it'll be completely unobtrusive once you're logged in.

(Sorry about the instructions. I'll write some when I get the chance. Until then, the game rules are an exercise in trial-and-error.)

Note that the game doesn't yet have a "second half". You can create an account, log in, and play the game. Nothing will happen, though, when you finish the game. That's the next half of the system. When you complete the game, it'll quietly log back in and submit your score to the high score table.

Finally after that's working I plan to make the "stat-o-matic" page that'll let you look at a graph of your scores. For example, you could pop into the stat-o-matic and check out your ConFusebox scores for the last 30 days. You'll also be able to see a cute pie-chart of your rankings (you were number one 8% of the time, number two 12% of the time, etc).

Also, the stat-o-matic page will have the trophy case. My last little addition to the system will be that you'll get secret "awards" for special accomplishments with the games. For example, if you manage to clear more than 60% in Voracity, the system will make a "you just won an award" sound. If you go to your trophy case, you'll see that you're now the proud owner of a "Ranks of the Voracity Board-Clearers" award.

The trophy case and stat-o-matic won't require a password, so you can enter other peoples' handles and check out your opponents' stats and trophies.




Now then. Questions for you, my humble readers. . .

I notice that a couple of folks play the games more than once, just using a different name like "Bob second attempt". Should I go ahead and work that scheme into the game? I was thinking of having the game pop up a box saying "hey, you've already played this puzzle today. Do you wanna play it again?" and then the system will automatically append "second attempt", "third attempt" etc to the user's handle on the high score table. That sound like a good scheme?

Should I give the user the ability to add a quote to his daily entry? Sometimes I like to add something like "especially hard game today", etc. to my entries. Right now, I'm not sure that's a great idea. It'd be cute, but it'd add an extra UI step to the "submit your score at the end" process which will soon be completely transparent. Also, it's one more place for kids to show off their powers of profanity (which has thus-far not been a problem but I do intend to keep things G-rated). Any thoughts?

Dang, I can think of about a million uses for this

I thought the GP32 was gonna be the next Cybiko, but I was wrong. It's The Chumby.

Basically it's a little thing. It's running Linux, it's got wifi and a touch-screen, and it'll run widgets written in Flash.

And it's about $150.

And I can think of about a million uses for it. . .

• Digital clock that plays MP3's as an alarm
• Weather-forecaster and weather-radio that beeps during severe weather
• Recipe browser that converts to a kitchen timer once you're done reading the recipe
• Educational game-playing gizmo and/or virtual pet
• eBay "you've been outbid" notifier
• Skype/IM client
• Daily Puzzle player
• Cheap GPS navigator (provided someone gets a cheap GPS puck to work with it)

The form-factor is kinda weird. I would've much preferred something more like a PSP or a GP32 with a fold-out stand. Looks like it's a bit thick because of the extra IO stuff in it.

Anyway, it's cool.

Onomatopoeia J. Blastocyst checkin' in here. . .

I don't know if it's a blind dictionary matchup or a twisted sense of humor, but I find some of the "from" names in spam emails to be funny. Just today I've gotten emails from:

Drone H. Shape
Reshuffling M. Polymaths
Bushy C. Mayoralty
Rumba C. Katrina
Hardtop Tuna

A little googling showed that most of 'em were coming from Pharmacy Express, which is a notorious spammer that changes domain names more often than you change your socks. Nothing fills me with confidence more than buying my medications from a website that'll be abandoned in a matter of hours.

The first four names remind me of some of Groucho Marx's names from his early movies.

"Hardtop Tuna" sounds like a good name for a band. I recommend you grab that myspace name immediately if it's not already taken.



Oh, and speaking of Spam, somebody needs to come up with an outlook plugin that'll keep stats on the number of times my paypal and/or ebay account is suspended per day.

Paypal accounts are such fragile things. My account is suspended at least five times a day. I need myself a little plugin that'll make a chart of my daily paypal suspensions.

John Versus The Freakin' Flesh Eating Bacteria!

Yeah, I've been outta pocket for a couple of days. If you've been reading this anonymous blog written by a person who uses the same writing-style as my wife, you might've heard something about me having to go to the hospital.

It's true, I was in the hospital for the past three days. Here's the rough progression.

Sunday, middle of the night - My big toe (left foot) starts hurting. I don't think much about it at the time. It's a mite annoying, but I work through it. Figure I might've bruised it or something without realizing it.

Monday, daytime - Toe keeps hurting. Nothing strenuous is going on, so I don't think much of it. I'm already nursing the final stages of a cold and I feel like crap anyway, so I just chalk up the toe pain up to general crappy-feeling.

Monday, evening - Maggie's school is having a parents meeting. I reluctantly put on shoes and attend the meeting. I'm clearly not in the best of health. In addition to walking with a pronounced limp because of the toe, I've got the sweats from the cold. When I get home, I take off my shoe, and the toe's swollen and turning purple. We elevate my foot and put on some ice.

Tuesday, 4:00 AM - Toe is now the size of a golf ball and is turning blue and black. Veins radiating away from my toe are turning bright red and are visible almost to my ankle. The pain is incredible -- feels like my toe's being crushed in a vise.


So we head down to the emergency room. After seeing the toe, I'm admitted immediately. I get lots of questions, most of 'em "why did you wait so friggin' long to come here". When I explain that it took about 24 hours for the situation to go from "dull pain" to "yikes, it looks like your foot's about to drop off", they take things more seriously. I'm taken upstairs, I'm given a syringe of something that makes the world get all fuzzy and melty, and I'm hooked up to a IV bottle of somesuch antibiotic. . .

Which Shelly looked up later on the internet to find that it's the strongest stuff out there and is generally reserved for advanced stages of jungle-rot and/or bites from Sumatran Rat-Monkeys

After swelling calms down a mite, the podiatrist shows up. She looks things over, declares that I had AT LEAST one kind of infection living under my toenail for quite some time that decided to evolve itself into some kind of uber-bacteria before deciding to take over the rest of my body. She declares that the toenail will have to go. Immediately.

Getting your big toenail removed is every bit as pleasant as you can imagine. It starts out with six shots of Novocaine, all around the base of your toe. Which in itself is as much fun as it sounds. Not a lot of fatty tissue in a toe like. . .for example. . .your forearm, so sticking a needle in it is a bunch of pain. Six times.

After that, the toe itself is feeling no pain, so removing the toenail itself isn't much different from removing a nail from a board using a pair of pliers. Almost exactly the same actually. I can't actually feel the nail coming off (and I sure as heck ain't watching) but I can feel my foot getting wrenched back and forth like I'm getting something removed that's not wanting to be removed.

Not painful, but it ranks a ten on the ooky-factor.

Interestingly, after the nail's removed, all is getting right with the world. It's wrapped up in about 20 layers of bandages and all the maleficent vitreous humors (to use modern medical speak) are draining off. I'm up to about four quart-sized IV-bottles of "flesh eating bacteria-B-gone" in my body. Apart from the lack of a toenail, the foot is starting to look more and more like the mirror-image control foot that I have attached to my other leg. It looks like everything's gonna be just ducky.

But no, I've gotta stay in the hospital one more day. Turns out I might have gotten MRSA, which is some kind of new uber-bacteria that doesn't talk to regular antibiotic pills and requires loads more of the IV stuff I've been getting.

If you recall about a year ago, there was a tabloid story of a woman who got a pedicure somewhere. Then her toe started hurting shortly after. She went to the doc and got some antibiotic pills, then she dropped dead of a heart-attack two days later. Turns out that's what she had, and she didn't live all that far away from here, and they wanted to make sure that it wasn't what I had. Since it was capable of eating most of WHOLE FREAKIN' FOOT in two days, they weren't taking chances.

So I get three days in the hospital and about six bottles of high-powered antibiotic in my blood to wipe out the foot-eatin' bacteria. This AM the doc pronounces me healed, and I head back home for a much-needed shower.

Shelly and I now reflect back in amusement that I spent one more day in the hospital for a toe than Shelly spent in the hospital for a baby.


Interestingly, the doc said that it was probably good that I didn't go to a doc on day one and get some pills. As gnasty as the infection was, the pills probably wouldn't have killed it off. Probably would've just delayed the action a bit and caused me to come into the hospital a week later, only with an even worse infection due to the antibiotic pills naturally selecting out the weaker members of the colony and leaving me with an even stronger strain with which to deal.

So put that in your collective pipes and smoke it, you evolution-denying Kansans. You want proof that we're descended from unter-primates? I had all the proof UNDER MY FREAKIN' TOENAIL!

So I'm back among the living and my foot no longer hungers for human flesh. Another day, though, and I would've had to go Evil Dead on the thing.

musical happenings

Music's proceeding apace. I got about five emails from my help-wanted ad in the previous entry. I'm trying to make deals to get at least some music from everyone, mainly because everyone who's contacted me so far has sent me some good demo material.

And Rick's also promised me somethng unique. I guess I'll see what I get.

Interestingly, it looks like I'll have TOO MUCH music once everything's done. Not that too much music's a problem. I can always use some music for later games. That's The Corman Way!



I'm definitely getting over my MIDI-itis. In recent times, when I hear game music that sounds like first-generation SoundBlaster FM-synthesized MIDI, I cringe. It just gave me the vibe I'd get from the old DOS games like Leisure Suit Larry. They were fun, but their music was strictly old-school.

But a couple of the submissions I like the most sound like the most silly plinky old-school stuff, straight off a NES console. I guess that kind of music just fits a game like Bulldozer better than something more grandiose.



One person mentioned music in the daily puzzles. Or, more specifically the LACK of music in the daily puzzles. I've been avoiding putting any more than the most barebones music in the puzzles (mostly just some clicks and dings and a short "you won" flourish) for two reasons:

1. It keeps the download small. The best way to bloat up a Flash applet is with music. Duck Tiles, for example is a 900k download, about 70% of which is music.

2. A lot of people play my games in cubicles (as well you should), so quiet is a good policy.

Any thoughts on music in daily puzzles?

Google Checkout now!

The Buy Games page now supports Google Checkout at a payment solution. Stay tuned. There'll be two major games available within the next two weeks

Attention musical types

I just posted a solicitation for music-monkeys here.

If you're a music person who wants to make a couple of bucks (no, literally a couple of bucks. I'm a cheap bastard) email me.

If you know a music person send him there.

That is all.




Oh, and that was a good suggestion yesterday to make the buttons up there launch the games in a new window. The whole button-thing was an afterthought, as I really designed that panel to appear in the games after you finish 'em.

I'll have to give it a little thinking. Getting 'em to launch in a new window isn't a problem. I'll just need to make it smart enough to know when it's running by itself on a page or when it's been embedded in another Flash app.

Gimme a couple of days, and I'll do that.

Only other problem with the button-panel is that IE7 is gonna complain every time because of that friggin "embedding anything interactive in a web-page violates our patent" lawsuit. I'm getting around it at thecodezone.com via javascript, as there are well-documented workarounds. But gamedev.net blocks javascript in its content, so I don't know if there's anything clever I can do to fix it here.

Google checkout and I'm a winner!

Google Checkout seems to be happy now. Big thanks to CaffeineAddict for taking advantage of my 99-cent offer and ferreting out a couple of show-stopping bugs in my commerce system.

And, as usual, all of the bugs could've been averted if I hadn't been a dumb person and. . .

1. Rearranged the file locations without testing 'em after doing that.
2. Tested all of the Flash applets to make sure that I didn't re-break something.
3. Tested all of the Flash applets to make sure that someone else's tool didn't break something.

In short my mantra should be "the last step is to test". I shouldn't assume that "the last bug" I find is trivial enough that it doesn't require testing. No matter how trivial it is, I must test as the last step and then deploy. Whenever I'm bitten by a bug, half the time it's because I didn't make a complete test the last step.

---

I must say there's little more fun than getting something in the mail that I didn't expect. I've got the form-filler in google toolbar set up, so if I see a contest or a freebie offer on a web page, I'll often press the "fill out this form" button without a second thought.

And then I usually forget about it. If the freebie shows up, great. If not, I'm not out anything. In the past week I've received two stick-deodorants and two packets of free shampoo. I also got a copy of ActionScript Components from a contest that I forgot I entered.

Anyway, getting free stuff in the mail is fun. I loveloveloveit.

I also love getting free books that I don't have to review. That's the bitter irony of the universe. I actually want to read this book, but I'm not expected to post a review. OTOH, I have a half-dozen books in my closet that I have no desire to read, and THOSE are the ones that have to get reviewed.


On a somewhat-related note, I've been signed up with PaperBackSwap for about three months now, and I love it. I like to read, but one problem with paperback fiction is that the books are worth about nil once you're done reading 'em. They fetch almost nothing on ebay. They fetch even less money at half-price-books. You can donate 'em to the library and get a tax-deduction, but the libraries really don't want 'em either (as evidenced by the mountains of paperbacks on the "buy these books cheap" shelf at my library).

With PaperBackSwap, though, you can swap 'em with other people for books that you DO want. Here's how it works. . .

1. You sign up.
2. You list the paperbacks that you own in the system.
3. If someone wants one of your books, they mark it. The system then contacts you. You then print out a sheet of paper with the person's address on it (they generate a PDF for you), tape it up, put on some stamps, and mail it.
4. When the person gets your book, he logs in and tells PaperBackSwap that he got the book. You get a credit.
5. You can now use that credit to get a book from someone else.

Actually you get a bonus of three credits after you list your first nine books, so you can start trading right away.

Thus far I've unloaded about 20 paperbacks I've already read and gotten back 20 new books. The only hangup thus-far was a person who didn't get credit for his book because he sent it to me media-mail from Puerto Rico, and it took longer than the one-month credit-window to arrive.

Thanks to PaperBackSwap, I just finished William Shatner's Man O War/The Law Of War series (which is much like his Tekwar series, only not as deep), and I have about eight books from the late Octavia Butler waiting to be read, because all science fiction should be written by androgynous black women.

Highly recommended if you have a grocery sack full of books that you wanna unload.

New software

Taking a few minutes' break from my google checkout integration. Should have it working well enough to show off to other people today. If you're interested in helping me test in a production (read: real money) environment, lemme know.

Last time the way I did that was to secretly put up a 90% off coupon code so that I wouldn't drain your wallet.

So if you have a google account and you want my games for 99 cents, lemme know and I'll get you the code when the integration is ready to show off. Needless to say, I'll only need one or two people to help me with that.


Here's my take on a couple of new pieces of software, having tried 'em both.

Windows Vista Beta - not ready for prime-time. I installed it on a non-mission-critical machine, and it was just about six kinds of clunky. A lot of the little bits of eye-candy they added (like the disappearing expand-contract-the-tree triangles in Explorer) only served to make the product more difficult to use. Whenever I wanted to do damn near anything, I had to go through lots of confirmation boxes. I know that I'll get used to it (especially when the book comes out that shows you all the registry hacks necessary to shut off the annoying bits), but I just had a tough time with it.

The Vista window-frames are pretty, but I'm not sold just because of that. I can get about 75% of the Vista UI niceness via Crystal XP, the Trillian Vista Skin (as it's the only app where I can't say "make yourself look like everything else on the screen"), and Desktop Sidebar. I could get all the Vista niceness and more (specifically windows that wriggle and twist and such) with Object Desktop, but I really don't need that much shininess and animation. First thing I did when I set up my Mac Mini was make the danged icon-dock stop annoyingly zooming itself whenever I was near it :)


New Office Beta - a very nice surprise. There's nothing earth-shattering, but the new toolbar-stuff is much better organized than it used to be. I was surprised at how fast I got used to the new ways of doing things. They managed to make things work a little better without making me feel like I couldn't get anything done (see above for an example of the opposite). The only question-mark I have over my head is why they chose to go with the new tab-bar on some apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and not on others (Outlook, Project, Access). Although Outlook does have the new tab-bar on the "compose email" window, which really beats the pants off the old Outlook "compose email" window.

Only annoyance was that I had to fart around with the Outlook settings before I could get my old email database to work.

Speaking of Office Beta, I'd heard that FrontPage was getting killed. . .sorta. It was getting re-deployed and would become part of other products or something like that. Actually it just got rebranded as "SharePoint Designer", whatever that means. It's pretty-much the same app except that it's borrowed stuff from Dreamweaver, specifically DW's little tabbed panels and DW's heavy enforcement of styles. It still has two chief advantages over DW, specifically that it's much snappier and it has in-line spell-checking (i.e. it puts a little red squiggle under words it can't find, which I like). I'm sure that folks will still look down their noses at it as an attempt to continue to shoehorn FrontPage into the market, but it is pretty good. I'd consider using it for my web-stuff, but I don't wanna re-learn their way of doing the complicated DW stuff, like templates.

Also, PHP is a second-class citizen with FrontPage for obvious reasons. DW didn't care. The only real difference it made was that DW had a built-in PHP reference, and I don't imagine anything MS is gonna be getting that anytime soon.


On a final note, Watching that whole Steve Jobs "Vista 2.0" thing this year was rather sad. Apart from the little live-backup thing, there's really nothing in the new OSX that's even mildly interesting. To watch him go on and on about how they're superior to Windows because they bundle in. . .brace yourself. . .an email client with HTML-based document templates and. . .brace yourself harder. . .support for virtual screens that you can switch between just felt forced and lame.

What's next?

"We're now Vista 3.0 because we're including a sound-recording app and a game where you have to find hidden mines. . .that really explode in a cool and shiny way!"

Apart from the file backup thingy, there really wasn't anything that couldn't have been dropped into a service-pack update. Ain't worth $129.

---

Speaking of Apple, I won an iPod Shuffle at my local Tom Thumb grocery last weekend for their "Grand Reopening". To be honest, though, it's got the same capacity and isn't as nice as my little Samsung MP3 player (which has a color screen with cute icons), so it's probably gonna get ebayed.

Google checkout

Wrestling with Google Checkout order processing. It's more powerful than PayPal and gives you a few more capabilities that I'll never use, like the ability to validate shipping costs, tax tables, and coupon codes from within Google's shopping cart page.

Also, their security is ponderous. Paypal's was pretty simple. You'd get a notification from Paypal that somebody's buying something. In that notification, they'd send you a bigass random string as a token. You'd then send that token back to Paypal as your way of saying "did you really send this order to me?". If it send you back "VERIFIED", then the order was indeed sent from Paypal and not from someone trying to fake out your processing code.

Google Checkout wants everything in XML and encrypted. I could probably write the encryptor in ActionScript, but I took the easy way out and sent my cart-contents to some PHP code that'd send it along to Google, as Google already had the stuff written out in PHP as a sample app. I used the PHP CURL stuff so that I could transparently massage my shopping cart into something google-friendly and then send it to 'em.


Biggest problem now is how Google sends me back the verification that the charge happened. It's similar to Paypal in that there's a little piece of back-end code you write. And, unlike Paypal, Google sends you the stuff as XML rather than a CGI post, as that makes things needlessly complicated.

The hassle is how Google sends you stuff. Basically everything gets sent separately. I'll get stuff like this. . .

"Hey codezone. User zippy@zippy.com wants to buy item PP1 for $9.95. I'm calling it transaction number 1344."

This is pretty-much all I need to verify and send you a game. But I can't send it to you yet. All that means is that someone INITIATED a transaction. Not that the transaction went through.

A few seconds later, google will call me again to say. . .

"Hey codezone. Transaction number 1344 is now set to chargeable."

That means that I'll be getting my money, so this is the important notification. Unfortunately, this notification doesn't tell me what the user bought. It only tells me the order number and that the status has changed. That means that I have to save the first transaction above somewhere and just wait until its status changes.

IIRC, Paypal does the same thing, but paypal sends along all of the item numbers and prices again. That way I can ignore the first packet entirely because, frankly, I couldn't much care if someone starts to buy something and then doesn't finish.

So basically I'm gonna need to store partially completed transactions.

Bask in the glory that is me

Don't bother playing Pop Pies today. I broke 13,000 points, leaving only three balloons on the whole board.

It's unbeatable. I'll be number one tomorrow and you won't. Resign yourselves to it.

Oooh, that's a tough one

Thanks to Pouya who, in the course of playing my standalone games (available here for only ten bucks, which is the best gaming value on the planet) discovered what may possibly be the crowning achievement in Shi Sen bastard-hood, board 489220.



As you can see, I appear to have taken a good start in the game, having eliminated four tiles already. Unfortunately, those four tiles are the ONLY FOUR TILES THAT YOU CAN REMOVE on the whole freakin' board. The rest of the board is so perfectly terribly venomously scrambled that 140 is the best possible score you can make.


He actually sent this to me as a possible bug report, under the auspices that all boards should be beat-able and this one's clearly not. Being a proper solitaire game, though, Shi Sen's shuffle is just that -- a shuffle.

And this was a question I wrestled with when designing. Should all boards in solitaire games be defeat-able? Eventually I concluded that no, not necessarily. Just as it's nigh-impossible that you'll ever come across a Voracity board that can be eaten 100% or a Pop Pies configuration that'll allow you to remove every single pie (although I've gotten down to about six pies), you're at the mercy of randomness.

It's similar to Windows Solitaire (or Klondike for you non-computer types). If you lose a game, it's not necessarily because you played poorly. Quite often you just get a shuffle that prevents you from winning no matter how well you play.

Interestingly it's rumored that this isn't a problem with Windows Freecell, as all 65536 possible games are beat-able. This, however, is more likely due to the nature of the game itself than the way that they're setting up the board. This could be compared to ChessCards. I'm not doing anything magical when I'm setting up the cards in ChessCards, but there are enough movement options available that there's just not a way to get stuck.

Actually, that'd be an interesting experiment. Is there a way to set up a board in ChessCards where a card is 100% immovable, giving rise to the possibility of an un-solveable board? Just offhand, I'd say no. It'd be an interesting 8-queens problem to see if it could be done, though.

Back to the topic at hand, though. Shi Sen boards can be unsolveable. To quote the pretty-much only network show I watch anymore, you are karma's bitch.

I'm still here

Sorry about the delay. Maggie's summer-school let out last Friday, so we now have two weeks of full-time-at-home-kiddo. Shelly's had some "drop everything" projects going on, so I've been Mister Mom for the past few days.

Thus far things have gone fine. She joined up with two summer reading clubs at the local libraries and read 15 books (just kids' early readers, so don't get too impressed), so we're up to our eyeballs in free kids' meal coupons. The libraries also have kids story-time on Tuesday and Thursday, so we're gonna be spending mornings there.

We also have passes to Six Flags, so we'll undoubtedly be spending some time enjoying the 100+ degree heat and riding the kiddie rides.

---

On another note, I'm really bummed for our economy, as it's really hitting home around here. We have loads of adorable stucco-sided strip malls around here that are sitting empty because they're designed for small businesses that just can't keep themselves open even if they're making a profit. One of my favorites was the Southlake Roly Poly, which was basically a Subway sandwiches, only rolled up like burritos. We went there quite often and knew the owners personally, as they were members of the local Chamber of Commerce. That was our regular dinner-place when Maggie went to swim lessons, as we could grab a couple of sandwiches and Maggie could pop into the bathroom and change out of her school-clothes.

Well, it's gone now. As are the hamburger place next to it and the Mexican food place on the other side of the parking lot. All small and family-owned. And gone.

There are two places where the economy's really hitting our business personally, and the administration appears to have done everything possible to make the situation even worse. That's gas prices and health insurance.

It used to be that making deliveries on Civilgrrl's dime wasn't a problem, as reimbursement comes in at about 0.37 a mile. That was enough to cover the cost of gas, along with the amortized cost of the vehicle itself as well as wear-n-tear. 37 cents a mile would cover all of that and leave you a few cents to spare. With gas at three bucks a gallon, though, I'm pretty-much making deliveries at a net loss, and that means that we have to make up the costs elsewhere, like charging clients for deliveries. And that makes clients unhappy, which affects our bottom line, especially if a client feels he can do better elsewhere.

And I'm driving a PT Cruiser. I can't imagine how tough things would be if we had an actual delivery truck.


Our health insurance costs have more than doubled since opening CivilGrrl, to over $10,000 a year now. And that's not even for good insurance! Our deductible is over $2000 and there's no dental, and Maggie's yearly checkups are only covered every other year. At this point, we're now looking at downgrading our insurance to a plan with a deductible around $5500 --basically it'll cover us if someone gets something really bad, but pretty-much nothing else is covered.

The Bush administration's plan regarding healthcare has been the following. . .

1. Put a cap on malpractice penalties. This was done under the auspices of being able to lower the cost of malpractice insurance to doctors, who will then pass that savings on to you, thus lowering the cost of your insurance. . .which didn't actually happen.

2. Make it illegal for insurance companies to make volume-deals with drug companies. The idea here would be that insurance companies could make deals with drug-makers for lower priced drugs that then could pass on to consumers, ala "Our co-pay for most drugs is $25, but it's only $5 for Prozac because we made a deal with ProzacCo". But that's illegal now.

3. Make available Health Savings Accounts, which make it more attractive for people to buy REALLY CRAPPY INSURANCE like the stuff I'm looking at buying. Basically it allows me to take a tax deduction if I put that ridiculously high deductible into a savings account.

Ultimately the only one of these three that didn't make things WORSE for the consumer was number three. The first two laws only benefited insurance companies and drug companies. Item number three will save me about $1500 off my taxes IF I actually was so sick that I spent all $5500 of my deductible in one year. Although given that the price has doubled, even if I did spend all $5500 of my own money and got the deductible, I'm still far worse off than in recent years.

I actually looked at the following option. . .

1. Dump health insurance entirely.

2. Put $5500 a year into a HSA and use that money to pay completely out of pocket if one of us needs to go to the doctor.

3. If one of us got so badly sick that we would require very expensive care (cancer, heart attack, etc), we declare ourselves insolvent and go on medicaid.


And I know I ain't the only person out there who's looking at doing that. I'll bet that's one of the fastest-growing kinds of "insurance" you'll find.

And the saddest part about that is that WE'RE THE FRIGGIN' AMERICAN DREAM! We're the monogamous mom & dad & kid who run a profitable small business. We're everything that every president has ever declared to be what makes America great. I can't even imagine what folks who aren't able to keep their businesses in the black (like the owners of the aforementioned restaurants) are doing.

Last year we had to fire our housekeeper because we couldn't afford to have her clean our house once a week. Her house-cleaning business is now gone. Far as I know, she's now either moved back in with her parents or she's working at Wal Mart for minimum wage and no health coverage.