My unfortunate experience with Allstate homeowners insurance

In the last week of December 2010, I noticed water damage in my home and contacted Allstate. The water appeared to be coming from an upstairs toilet and had caused damage to the hardwood floor in the lower level of the home, apparently running down an inside wall. Additional damage was also found to the downstairs walls as well as the flooring in the upstairs bathroom. The damage to the floor and walls was recent, as noted by observation of rapid delamination of the hardwood flooring occurring due to moisture. A plumber was called and he removed the upstairs toilet which revealed soaked flooring under and around the toilet. It was also observed at that time that a repair toilet flange had been previously installed over the original damaged flange and that the leak was coming from a failure of the wax ring in this new flange, not the original flange. There was also some pre-existing damage to the wood sub-flooring around the original flange, but it was confined to a small area near the base of the flange. After the toilet had been removed, the damp areas began to dry out over a period of several days. Allstate later sent an adjuster out who immediately determined that all the damage was old damage that had occurred sometime in the distant past. Aside from the sub-floor damage found immediately under the original damaged flange, this simply was not true. The amount of water coming from the leak was significant, proving that the leak had recently re-developed; if that were not true, significantly more water damage would have occurred due to the amount of water being leaked. He only saw the original damaged flange because the plumber had removed the newer repair flange, leaving only the original flange visible, which he naturally assumed was the cause of the leak. I later informed him that a repair flange was observed when the plumber pulled the toilet, and that the plumber removed it and took it with him. He spoke with the plumber and confirmed this. I received a letter from Allstate stating that the damage would not be covered because it was leakage that occurred "over a period of weeks, months, or years." Only a small area of older sub-floor damage was observed around the original flange, and no previous damage was ever observed downstairs. Everything outside this small area was recent damage that occurred over a period of days, not weeks, months, or years.

"You're in good hands will Allstate." Yeah, right. I WISH THAT WERE TRUE! Instead, their contractual loophole allows them to deny any water damage claim originating from a leak that is more than 14 days old. So you better be checking under your sinks, showers, dishwasher, clothes washer, and any other water source every TWO WEEKS to make sure there are no leaks! Or do like me and start looking for a better homeowners insurance policy through someone other than Allstate (edit: Amica doesn't appear to have this limitation in their policy).

On a related note, Allstate also screwed me once before (fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.) My home was burglarized and they did not cover any of my fiance's losses because I hadn't told them she was living with me. Another contractual loophole.


You might also want to read this.

PS: My state's insurance commissioner did nothing to help.

StreamStar users group created

If you have questions or just want to keep up on news, join the users group.

StreamStar v1.1 (beta) released!

I just released v1.1 of StreamStar for Android. This is a pretty significant rewrite of the previous version and includes several new features:

• There is now a service that runs in the background which helps keep the app from being killed during low memory or low use (inactivity) situations. It also ensures that the app can automatically pause music playback during incoming or outgoing phone calls.
• A new feature to search for artists and albums using your voice. See here for more info on how to enable that.
• Ability to now stream OGG music files (thanks, Google!) This was a big deal to me since I originally archived a lot of my music using this format.
• Many bug fixes (and probably some newly introduced ones.) Please report crashes when possible!

StreamStar beta app released for Android

Finally got my MP3 music player "StreamStar" packaged up on Android Market and it's now available for installation on Android based devices. Its purpose is to allow progressive streaming of your home music collection (MP3 files) using a web server set up for directory browsing. I've successfully done this myself using a DNS-321 NAS device running lighttpd and also successfully tested using IIS. Since it's not wise to expose your entire music collection to the online world, you'll probably want to tunnel the HTTP connection over SSH and use an obscure port for added security. Being my first Android app and coming from the VB.Net world (i.e. Java noob), there are bound to be some bugs so expect to see a force close (FC) or two. But it does work nicely once you get things set up correctly on the server side.

Since this is the first public beta release, the app will self-terminate when executed on or after 9/1/2010 (I should have newer versions available by then.)

Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth?

A great read about the future (or lack) of science and engineering in the USA:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12021

Using VLC to stream MP3 audio to a SHOUTcast server

My wife is a singer on SecondLife (her avatar name is iCandy Overland). In order to stream music semi-professionally, she's got a Shure wireless microphone and an MP3 player hooked into a Behringer mixer. The mixer is plugged into the line-in on her Windows PC. An audio encoder is used (in this case, VLC) to encode and stream the music as MP3 to a SHOUTcast server which is then played at venues within SecondLife.

I set all this up a long time ago and it worked great, until I decided to upgrade VLC to the latest version (1.0.5). Once I did that, I could no longer get the stream to connect to the SHOUTcast server to save my life. I eventually had to restore a backup of her PC into a virtual machine and copy over the VLC preferences located under %APPDATA%. I'm now writing this blog entry to save others (and myself) from making the same mistakes again.

First off, when it wasn't working, this is the error I was seeing in VLC:

access_output_shout warning: failed to connect using 'icy' (shoutcast) protocol

access_output_shout warning: failed to connect using 'http' (icecast 2.x) protocol

access_output_shout warning: unable to establish connection, retrying...

I later found out that my first mistake was adding "http://" to the beginning of the server URL when configuring the Icecast destination in the VLC Stream Output GUI. My second mistake was not checking the "Stream MP3" checkbox in the VLC Preferences for Shoutcast. Once I corrected both of those mistakes, the stream worked again.

So here are the basic steps. This is for VLC 1.0.5:

1) In VLC, click "Tools" and then "Preferences".
2) Under "Show settings" select "All".
3) Select "Stream output" -> "Access output" -> "Shoutcast".
4) Enter whatever stream info you want here but make sure to check "Stream MP3":

VLC Shoutcast Preferences

5) Save the settings. 
6) In VLC, select "Media" and then "Stream...".
7) Pick whatever you're going to stream (in my case Line In, located under the Capture Device tab) then click "Stream":

Capture Device

8) Source should be "dshow://" so click "Next".
9) Select "IceCast" for new destination and then click "Add".
10) Enter the server address WITHOUT preceding it with "http://" (e.g. "lema-awards.ipr365.com").
11) Enter your server port.
12) Not sure if it's necessary, but I always enter something for "Mount Point".
13) Again, not sure if the login name is necessary, but I enter both a login and password for "Login:pass". 
14) Check "Activate Transcoding" and select "Audio - MP3" for "Profile".

Stream Destination

15) Click "Stream".


If all goes well you should now be successfully streaming to the SHOUTcast server. Note that if you want something less than a 128Kbps stream you'll need to adjust your MP3 encoder settings in VLC as it appears that's the default.

7/24/2012 Update:
I decided to upgrade VLC to the latest current version (2.0.2) but ran into another issue: the stream was constantly skipping and stuttering like a badly scratched record. After much experimentation, I eventually stumbled across the "Stream output muxer caching (ms)" setting and changed it from 1500ms to 0ms (found under "Stream output" in step #3 above). This appears to have solved the skipping problem.

I also figured out how to create a desktop shortcut to start the stream immediately:
"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" dshow:// --sout="#transcode{vcodec= none,acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:std{access=shout,mux=ogg,dst=icandy:password@lema-awards.ipr365.com:1234/icandy}" --sout-keep

The Apple II disk transfers have started

Man... I sure hope this effort is appreciated by someone! It's taking many hours to transfer hundreds of 5.25" floppy disks over to my Windows laptop. Doesn't help that I didn't organize some of the disks very well, especially my backups. But I've already found lots of games and utilities that don't currently exist on the Asimov FTP site. Or at least I couldn't find them there (some files aren't named very well.) I'll be uploading those as time permits. I figure if nothing else I'm preserving computer history as I may very well be the only person left who has some of these titles! I mean, who else kept a copy of Telechess? I even have original copies of Ultima III, Flight Sim II, and a few others. Not to mention lots of software I wrote myself, including a virus I coded in assembly (it was never released into the wild.)

Was also able to image over my Sider ][ HD but I can't get my BBS software to run successfully in AppleWin because it doesn't emulate a Thunderclock time card (yet). And I don't really feel like hacking the ACOS code I wrote 20 years ago.

-DC-