07:29 – The hospital discharged Barbara’s dad to a rehab/nursing home facility yesterday. The transfer was supposed to happen at 3:30, and for once it sounds like they got something done on time. Barbara left work early to meet the ambulance at the facility. I finally called her cell phone around 5:00 to find out what was going on. Barbara was too busy to talk long, but she said she was signing a whole bunch of papers. I hadn’t thought about it until I talked to her, but then I remembered that the same thing had happened when we transferred my mom from the hospital to a nursing home. And it really pissed me off, because I remembered that the papers they’d really want signed would be financial responsibility papers that would ask someone other than the patient to voluntarily assume responsibility for paying. Of course, they never mention that accepting financial responsibility is entirely optional. They’re just looking for as many “co-signers” as they can get, to make sure that the facility isn’t stuck if the patient’s insurance or the government doesn’t pay. And they take advantage of the confusion to sucker family members into signing these agreements.
Actually, these financial responsibility agreements should be void on their face. A contract requires a meeting of the minds, and it’s obvious that no family member who understood what they were signing would agree to sign. By doing so, they’re voluntarily assuming a potentially large liability that they’re under zero obligation to assume. Most people in that situation just assume that this is routine paperwork that must be signed for their parent to be admitted. It’s completely unethical for health-care facilities to present these papers for signature without fully informing the family members that it’s their right to refuse to sign, and such refusal will have no effect on the patient being admitted or the level of care provided.
In practical terms, this is unlikely to affect us, but it still enrages me that the facility took advantage of Barbara’s concern for her father by requiring her to sign financial responsibility papers that she wasn’t legally obligated to sign without disclosing that she wasn’t obligated to sign them. Bastards.
09:50 – I just finished the physical build on my new system, which is Barbara’s old system. It’s a Core i7 980X hex-core processor, which not all that long ago was a $1,000 CPU. I don’t remember how much memory is in it. There are three sticks, but I couldn’t see the labels, so they may be 4 GB or 8 GB sticks. Doesn’t matter. Even 12 GB is more than enough for what I do. I pulled Barbara’s old hard drive, labeled it, and stuck it in a drawer, just in case. Then I spent an hour or so vacuuming the case (an Antec Dark Fleet DF-85) and installing a new 3 TB hard drive. I’ll probably add more hard drives eventually, but that’ll do for now. I should also connect my eSATA external hard drive frame, which holds one or two standard hard drives. Either that, or I may just use the quick-swap bays in the case.
I started to install Linux Mint 13 Maya LTS from the same disc I used to build Barbara’s new system, but quickly realized that it was the 32-bit version. I’m downloading the 64-bit version now, but only because I want support for memory above 4 GB. I know there are still some apps that don’t work properly on 64-bit Linux, so I’ll just hope that all of the ones I need work properly or have adequate substitutes available.
Once I get the OS installed and make sure everything works properly, I’ll move the system unit, the new 23″ display I bought for it, and the other stuff off the kitchen table and into my office and plan the cut-over. I’m nervous about that because I have so many applications on this old system and I’d really like to get as much of the data and configuration settings migrated so that I don’t have to start from scratch. At least I’m running Firefox on the current system, so everything on it should migrate easily to Firefox on the new system.
I decided to give up Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer in favor of Thunderbird, so I’ll export the data from Kmail, including my contacts, in as many formats as possible before the cut-over. I also need to make a detailed list of all the applications I have installed for stuff like video/image/sound editing and so forth. I’ll leave the old system set up right beside the new one for a while, just in case.
12:57 – Well, this is depressing. I set up my new system with a 128 GB Crucial SSD and a new 3 TB Seagate Barracuda. I booted the 64-bit Linux Mint Maya disc and chose to partition manually, setting up the SSD as the system drive and the hard drive with a small swap partition and a large ext4 partition for data. When I told the installer to continue, it went to work and I watched the progress bar progress to about half way done. At that point, I heard an odd buzzing sound from the system unit. It lasted only a second or so, and I was hoping it was just one of the eight fans installed in the case. Alas, it wasn’t. That buzzing was the sound of the new 3 TB Barracuda dying. The partitioner finally blew up and said it couldn’t write the filesystem to the hard drive. I rebooted the system, and the BIOS told me the DVD and the SSD were now the only ATA devices present. Crap.
This drive is one that Seagate sent me as an eval unit a year or so ago, so there’s no warranty on it. So I headed over to NewEgg to look at hard drives. Not that I’ll ever again buy anything from NewEgg, but their reviewers tend to be a bit more technically-ept than the Amazon reviewers. I decided to look at capacities of 1 to 3 TB. There’s a 4 TB Seagate available, but that’s more than I care to put on one drive, and the cost/TB is much higher than for lower-capacity drives. It seems the sweet spot is 2 TB, so that’s what I looked at. I was surprised that the drive of choice seems to be the Seagate ST2000DM001 rather than a WD model, but so be it. NewEgg had them for $90 with free shipping, but I won’t do business with them ever again, so I went over to Amazon and found they had that drive for $99 with free shipping. Let’s hope it’s not DOA.