I completely forgot to mention that the subdomain IAM URLs have been back online for a while. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, on the old IAM, instead of having to give out "iam.BMEzine.com/?Rachel", you could use rachel.BMEzine.com. Now that we've migrated to BME.com, this is what your new IAM URL looks like (switching your username in the place of mine, of course!):

Rachel.BME.COM

The subdomain will automatically redirect to your IAM profile. You can use either username.BMEzine.com or username.BME.com but obviously it makes more sense to use username.BME.com! Don't forget that if you've got links to the old IAM format, (iam.bmezine.com/?rachel), those aren't currently working properly so you'll need to update to the new URLs! We're working on getting those redirecting properly as well but please update them otherwise they'll just redirect to the main page of IAM.

Don't forget to update your security settings as well on your profile & settings page.

You have the option to use your page as publicly or privately as you'd like. IAM is still BME's gated community but now that bandwidth concerns aren't what they used to be, I'm happy to give you access to utilize your page in whatever way you'd like. All of the security options still keep users who aren't logged in from accessing your forums or zooming in on photos, they just determine the access to your journal entries from not being able to view your page at all, to seeing the first page only or allowing users to view your entire journal entry. It's completely up to you!

BME fully respects your privacy, so it's up to you how much information you want to share with both BME and the outside world. This is a major reason why we don't currently have any kind of Facebook tie in. We're still trying to figure out how to best protect your personal information and privacy. I know that most users don't have concerns about posting anything and everything to Facebook but both BME and myself want to protect your privacy. Call me paranoid but I still believe in privacy when it comes to the internet!

We're currently working on ways to make it easier to feed certain aspects of your online activity into BME/IAM but we don't want the information that you want kept on BME going out on the web. If you have ideas of what you'd like to share from other sites to your IAM page, please post in the comment forum for this post. I have a plan on how to integrate other sites (like FB, tumblr, twitter etc) with your IAM page, while being able to keep whatever you want on BME/IAM only, safely behind our locked doors but I'd love to hear input from you!

My day started off at 5:45am this morning. Ari came into my room with breakfast in bed. It consisted of half cooked turkey bacon, Cheetos, sliced bananas and pears covered in chocolate sauce. I almost forgot that she microwaved some white castle burgers as well for me.  It was.. an awesome thought!

She thought today was Monday so she had set her alarm for 5:10am in order to make sure she was awake before I was. She wanted to have plenty of time to make breakfast. When I told her to get in bed and go back to sleep, she was all "WTF?! Seriously! It's only Sunday?!" and we went back to bed for a couple of hours.

We went on a walk to go see our ducks which have taken it upon themselves to move into the neighbors pond. The neighbor loves them and they still come home for meals so I get to see plenty of them but don't have to worry that they're not getting enough splash time, which is a win win for all of us!

I'm dropping the sticker envelopes off at the post office tomorrow. I packed about 2600 stickers and I'm not excited about the shipping costs! I didn't have the right kind of labels to be able to print stamps on letter sized envelopes so I'm going to do it at the post office instead. I also packed up and shipped around 50+ orders from the past two days. It was incredibly awesome to see people ordering stickers from around the world although I felt bad for the couple of people who ordered 1 or 2 stickers and are having them shipped to Hong Kong or other far away places so I threw in a ton of extras.

On another note, I am single. Again! My ex is a great guy, we're just in two very different points in our lives. We had a bit of an age difference and while I didn't know how old he was when I first got to know him (he was a friend of a friend and we'd been hanging out for about 6 months before we started dating) it was a nice year and a couple of months together. I miss him a lot because I love him and we were really good friends before we started dating. That's the risk you take when you date someone who is a friend but he was really hot and into me so that didn't hurt! :) 

You'll notice some new changes coming into effect soon on the site.

Email submissions to BME are going straight to moderation now. Email submissions@BME.com and you'll be able to submit just like you did in the old days.We'll set up an alternate email address to be able to upload to your IAM page.

The message inbox is now converted to a conversation instead of single messages. It was like that when we first launched but for some reason it got converted back to the old style. You will no longer have a separate outbox/sent folder but you can still archive messages in order to save them in a special spot.

Verified Pro applications will now start activating a FREE IAM account once your application has been approved. For some reason it wasn't activating the IAM page, it was just setting it to FREE thinking you'd already had an IAM page. So that's fixed.

There were a ton of other behind the scenes fixes and upgrades but they're not really something I need to list out because there have been too many of them to count.

We've got a ton of stuff we're working on and I'll update you as the come available.

I don't think I mentioned it but I've also added 3 months of free IAM time to accounts, bringing expired accounts active and adding 3 months to already active accounts.

The next things we'll be working on are integration with other sites so you can import/export as desired to make it easier to update all of your various homes around the web.

I hope all you mothers out there have a great day with your kids. I know I'm about to crawl back into bed with mine and watch a movie before passing out. After she finishes dinner and I finish braiding her hair, of course!

I just noticed that some people don’t have their names in their account. I didn’t think to specify adding that because for some reason I assumed that people would put their name in since I’m sending them stuff in the mail.

Please add your first and last name so that your mail gets delivered! I think the postal workers will get confused when they try to deliver mail addressed to various user names, especially the “weirder” ones!

I have some amazing news. It's been more than 12 years since I have had health insurance. When I moved to Canada, I never got any kind of immigration status (due to reasons that i won't get into) but i was fortunate enough to be able to afford to pay for Canadian Healthcare. It's affordable and accessible in Canada even without insurance, despite the many complaints that I've heard about their socialized healthcare.

A while back I'm sure that you all remember hearing all the fuss about "Obamacare" and how people thought it was going to be terrible. As someone with a serious medical condition and absolutely no way to get healthcare due to my pre-existing conditions, I was all for it. The only issue was that even though it had been passed, it was going to take years for it to actually become available.

The point of my post? Thanks to Obama, I am now no longer one of the uninsured. I have health coverage and it's affordable!!!!!! Everyone was claiming that the US healthcare system would change. Everything would go down the shitter and we'd be out in the cold waiting in line to see a scourge of unqualified doctors. What's changed? People like me have health insurance now! I'm still able to go to all of the doctors that currently manage my health. The only difference is that I have the option to get precriptions via a mail order pharmacy automatically every 90 days.

The last healthcare plan that I was offered cost almost a thousand dollars a month. The coverage was limited and would not cover anything related to any pre-existing conditions for 18 months. At that point, I had to reach an out of pocket deductible of $7k until it would kick in and nothing related to a pre-existing condition would apply towards the out of pocket expenses. So I'd have to get hit by the aforementioned bus before my MS related issues could be covered/treated.

There was also no prescription coverage. My prescriptions cost over $10k a month, which needless to say, I don't take my medication. I basically have been going from month to month deciding what aspects of my illness were bothering me the most and treating those. My injections alone cost $4800/month so I have never actually continued to take them aside from the one 90 day prescription that I did fill. I had read research that said you could take it 3 times a week instead of 5 times a week so I did that and made it so that the prescription lasted a lot longer than it should have. I basically do that with all of my medications as well. I take half of what I'm supposed to most of the time. I figure it's better to take half than nothing.

Now that has changed dramatically! I've got a premium of $188 dollars which is for the extended option plan. The deductible is $500 bucks and anything that I spend money on for medical purposes counts towards that deductible. I've got full prescription benefits and the co-pays are amazing.All of my current doctors are "in-network" and it works just like the insurance you'd get from your employer. It's simple to use and it's worth it. The cost of a normal doctors appointment for me would be $150-$500 depending on the doctor that I have to go and see. That's more than my premium is! My co-pay for my appointments is now either covered making the co-pay $0 or it's $20. I can't tell you how happy this makes me and how it's potentially going to change my life.

Since I always have to mention the shitty side to things, I really wish I could have been posting this same thing before I had to go and get over $100k in medical debt from a huge medical complication that I had last year, but never posted about.

It was very simple to apply. For this specific plan, you need to have a pre-existing condition. This can be any kind of condition. You either need a rejection letter from an insurance company or a letter from your doctor indicating what your medical condition is and you fill out the application. It can all be done online. I applied in February and there was a bit of a mix up in my original application so I was denied because I accidentally missed a check box on one of the questions. I corrected the application and as of April 1, 2012, I have health coverage!

http://www.pciplan.com/

I'm serious! If you need health insurance, please take the time to look into the government provided plans. They're definitely worth it. $188/month might seem like a lot but if you've got a serious or costly medical condition, the insurance is definitely worth it. You never know when you may have some kind of serious medical event and suddenly you've got a day in the hospital that costs $50k!

I wish I could find the link to this woman who was trying to sue the obama administration because she claimed it was unconstitutional to "force" people to have health insurance, which is what some anti-"obamacare" pundits are claiming. She recently filed bankruptcy due to her medical bills.

And just like that this particular FREE GIVE AWAY is over!

Thank you to everyone who took the time to update their settings and post in the forum (and the one on modblog) so that I could give you free stuff.

It's going to take me a little bit of time to copy all of the addresses but hopefully the stickers will go to the post office on Monday. From there it should take 7-10 days (hopefully less) for people in the US to get their stickers. For those of you who are outside of the US, it can take anywhere from 2-3 weeks for International First Class mail but I've heard of it taking even longer than that. I'm hoping it doesn't!

I really like giving stuff away. if I could figure out a way for BME to pay it's bills and I could make the entire site free, I would. Who knows, maybe some day?