Hot

Based on the 5-day forecast, we are looking at running the air conditioner for a solid week. I think that is the first time for that, in our 6 years in Minnesota. (I have a high threshold for turning it on, typically 86 degrees.)

Golf Considered Incompatible with Fitness

I am a true believer in, and mild evangelist for, the seemingly limitless benefits of exercise. So many people seem to use the excuse that they don't have enough time. Like most excuses, that probably would not hold up to scrutiny. Then I thought about some of the people I know who aren't so fit, but have a pretty good golf game, and I realized that if they were to trade their golf game for strenuous exercise, they could probably be competing in triathlons if they wanted to!

If you play golf once a week, that is probably a 5 hour time investment, unless you are very good. And if you are very good, and it only take you 3+ hours to play--well, that probably means you play 2-3 times per week, and maybe spend some more time at the driving range. So no matter how you slice it, even a moderate golf hobby takes up an amount of time that could account for a pretty decent starter exercise program.

I don't really have anything against golf, this is just an observation. I know, golf provides a little bit of exercise. But considering the fact that almost everybody seems to want to take a cart now, rather than walk, it really doesn't give you very much.

Carpet Is Over-Rated

Nothing feels as nice under the feet as nice, plush, clean carpet. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn't last very long, unless you have no kids, no pets, few visitors, and replace your carpet every 5 years. I have come around to thinking that it would be better to have little or no wall-to-wall carpet. Much better to have wood, fake wood, or tile flooring, all of which are much lower wear and maintenance. It's only taken me 42 years, but now I try to view every consumer decision in terms of its maintenance implications. And carpet requires maintenance, and it still degrades rather quickly. Plus it hides lots of allergens.

Credit to Gates for Moving On

Bill Gates recently retired from active involvement in Microsoft. Gates founded Microsoft 33 years ago, without any venture capital, and was deeply involved in and identified with the company throughout the years of meteoric growth, and well into sedate middle-aged corporate maturity. I have to give him credit for being able to let go. More significantly, he gets credit for fostering an organization that he can step away from without causing much more than a ripple of nostalgia. This is the defining characteristic of what Good to Great author Jim Collins would call a "fifth level leader".

(As an aside, I have deep doubts that Steve Jobs meets this standard, though at the moment, he seems like a helluva fourth level leader.)

Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In | The ...

This Onion headline says it all.

Exercise Anti-Aging

I think of exercise as the silver bullet of health (first rule of silver bullets: there are none). But so did this guy, right down to bicycling avidly, and he almost suffered Tim Russert's fate.

Isn't "Steering Committee" an Oxymoron

I mean, have you ever seen a vehicle steered my two people at the same time, much less by a committee?!

Telephone Call Volume

I find it very tiring and stressful to engage in a telephone conversation in which it is difficult to hear the other party, for whatever reason (more often than not, because they are habitually speaking too softly). It would be a very, very nice feature if phones could dynamically adjust for loudness--amplifying quite voices, and muting loud ones. That would be some fairly sophisticated signal-processing, but in this day and age, it seems possible.

North Shore

After our second trip to Minnesota's north shore, I now understand why people rave about it. The first time, we focused on the shore part, enjoying our campground that backed up to the Lake Superior. That was very nice, but not quite spectacular, at least no more spectacular than other parts of the Great Lakes.

This time, we headed north, into the many, many state parks, all of which have rivers that flow into Superior. Those offered truly spectacular views and hiking, and so pristine. We get it now.

Worse Than Focus-Stealing

Most irritating thing about it is the way the trackpad works. Hesitating while positioning the cursor is interpreted as a click. This has already resulted in wrong information being transmitted to Netflix

That is quite a useability defect!

eBay Doldrums

Slate has a good article on eBay's doldrums.

I have never been a big fan of eBay, or online auctions in general. I have found that it is waaayy too inconvenient for the buyer. Too much time and energy invested in figuring out what to buy and then waiting to see if your bid wins, which it often doesn't.

Part of the problem is that eBay's auctions do not closely enough mirror bricks and mortar auctions, where both the buyer and seller are under time pressure. In eBay's case, time works against the buyer. If you are trying to buy some item, like a $40 used MP3 player, and you lose a couple of auctions, you have now spent a week (elapsed time) trying to buy an item. It's just not worth it. There is the "Buy It Now" option, but in my experience, the prices people set for those are ridiculous--you could buy the item new, at a store, for the Buy It Now price.

I have an idea for solving this problem, by blending aspects of Buy It Now into the auction process, in order to make the element of time work more like a real auction. The seller would set a "win it now" price, but that price would be hidden from bidders (but once set, not changeable by the seller). The way it would work is that the highest bid exceeding your hidden "win it now" price would be accepted, after one hour of no subsequent bids, as the winning bid.

Terrifffic Anti-Apple Tirade from Dave Winer

Dave says:

I just don't like the smarmy marketing attitude of Apple, he's kind of like the teacher's pet in music class, pretending that he's a connoisseur -- I see flaws and bugs everywhere. Fix the bugs and STFU about how great the product is. Sorry. I want to use Apple's products the same way I use a Canon camera, as a product I respect, but if they ever start screwing around the way Apple does, I'd switch to a Nikon or whatever. Problem is there is no Nikon or whatever in PCs and iPods. All the other products suck. Hugely. Apple's just suck a bit less. Not a huge accomplishment for an industry, imho.

Gas Prices

Given the fact that oil keeps going up, and we are in the summer driving season, I am surprised that gas has stayed around the same "trading range" for the last 4 weeks (here in MN, that would be $3.85 - $3.99 / gallon).

Outlook Message Recall

Probably more than you want to know about recalling a message in Outlook. All in all, it is almost too dangerous and unpredictable and probably the world would be a better place if it were removed as a feature.

Recall Message functionality was designed with a passive rather than aggressive system in mind and is dependent on the Outlook clients' background "sniffer" idle process to remove the recalled message from the recipient's inbox. In order for this message to be recalled automatically, the specified criteria must be met. In addition, Outlook clients must also have the Tools, Options, Preferences, E-Mail Options, Tracking Options, "Process requests and responses on arrival" selected. This feature enables the background "sniffer" to run. When it detects an Outlook idle time (generally anywhere from 60-500 seconds) then it will run and process all unread items in the Inbox to see if any of them require its attention such as Meeting Requests, Read Receipt responses, or Message Recalls.

Bitly implements my anti-linkrot feature

http://switchabit.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/bitly/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bitly_alternative_to_tinyurl.php

We automatically mirror each page, never know when you might need a backup.

This is what I was thinking of several years ago, when suggesting a feature like this for blogging software.

Zippers Are the Weak Link

So often, one finds that the zipper is the weak link in an otherwise expensive garment. I have had to toss perfectly good jackets because the zipper was trashed. I don't think it has to be that way. I have a 10-year old L.L. Bean knapsack in which the zippers (and everything else, for that matter) are holding up splendidly. And that is considering I haven't always treated them with kid gloves--I sometimes get lazy, and pick them up by the zipper tab. I hasten to add, this was a very modestly-priced purchase.

Long Story Short

In the last year or so, I have noticed a trend of shortening the well-established phrase "to make a long story short" as simply "long story short". As in "Long story short, by the time I retrieved my car from the New York City impound lot, it was 3 AM, I was $300 poorer, and felt lucky just to be done with the entire ordeal".

Surprisingly, this usage doesn't grate on me. In fact, I find it oddly charming.

Dave Winer

Dave Winer: I saw the story about the librarian who wasn't allowed to wait for a McCain event because she held a sign with a political message, a subtle one, a thought-provoker...When you put on your plastic lapel pin, you should think about the Government of the People, by the People and for the People ...McCain could give a speech about that librarian, that would be truly impressive. Here's something he can fix right now. Tell the people who watch the people lining up to let people express their political thoughts, esp those who do it legally and peacefully.

CT Scans

This NYT article suggests that CT scans for heart patients are over-used, because the machines cost $1 million each, so one a practice commits to buying one, they have to use it a lot to amortize that high cost.

Without addressing whether CT scans for heart disease are effective, I do have an observation. Similar to airports, this is very expensive equipment, and it should be utilized on a 24x7 schedule. What this would mean is fewer machines purchased, shared between more or larger practices, and some inducement needed to compensate patients for taking the "graveyard shift". Still, it seems do-able. If not fully 24x7, the something close, like maybe 18x7. Having it un-utilized all day Saturday and Sunday certainly seems unjustifiable.

Of course, in implementing this kind of factory-like, high-utilization model, we have to be wary of law of unintended consequences. The one I can see coming, a mile away, is that insurers will set their reasonable & customary based on the midnight rate, and pretty soon, everybody will be trying to book the off-peak hours, and the appointments during peak hours will go begging!

Viacom/YouTube Privacy Problem: Another Reason to Use Anonymous Browsing

In all the words I have read about the Viacom suit against YouTube, the possibility of anonymous browsing to remove the problem of preserving one's privacy has been thoroughly overlooked.

A Catchy Name Is Indispensable

I think a significant chunk of the success of a product or marketing campaign is often attributable to catchy naming. I've noticed several very mudane business processes that are made to sound much more exciting and sophisticated via a cool-sounding name:

Sky-hooking: back in the 80s, when insurance claims still arrived as paper, and before off-shoring was in the dictionary, an insurance company sent boxes of claims, air-freight, to Ireland, to take advantage of lower-wage, English speaking labor to process them. The sky part obviously came from the airflight aspect of the process. I really don't know what, if anything, hooking derived from, unless perhaps it was some kind of pre-existing claims-processing lingo.

Blow-back to paper: 5 years ago, the idea of receiving mortgage documents via DVD was somewhat cutting-edge. So cutting-edge, in fact, that we had no processes for internally processing them as images. Our vendor, Xerox, helpfully explained to us that was no problem, there imaging workflow included the option to "blow back to paper". Translation: mass-print the entire contents of the DVD, for further processing 100% unchanged from the past generation of dead-tree-oriented workflow.

Skip-tracing: in the debt-servicing industry, this refers to the process of methodically filling in gaps in address records.

Finally, the Perfect Use for Texting

This has been a very rainy spring here in Minnesota. I have 3 kids in practices, and am coordinator for one of their teams. More than once, it has been touch-and-go as to whether weather would cause a practice to be canceled. When storms threaten, several things happen, all bad:

• Parents call the coaches cell phone all afternoon.
• Some parents don't get cancellation emails in time, and make the trip for nothing
• Other parents assume practice is canceled, when it isn't

While email is very convenient, it is often not timely enough. One, because not everyone carries a BlackBerry; two, because many people use the work email address.

It finally dawned on me that texting was the solution. Everybody carries cell phones, all the time, and texting is very near-real-time.

But I didn't want to solicit and hand-enter 40 or more cell phone numbers (2-3 per athlete). And I wanted all 3 coaches to be able to send the cancellation (or non-cancellation) message.

I looked around the web a little bit, and found a site called www.networktext.com. It's basically a newsgroup for texting. Ad-supported. It has the key features I need:

1. Self-service registering for the members (parents).
2. Ability to designate administrators--the only people who can send messages to the group.
3. Ability to send texts to the group from a computer.

I put out the word to the parents only two days ago, expecting to have low participation. I figured maybe after the next time it was a rainout, that would motivate more people to sign up. But this spring being the wet, unpredictable season it has been, 48 hours later we had our first opportunity to use it. When I logged in, I was surprised to see 23 members registered.

It seemed to work well, one of the parents even replied (by email) thanking me for setting it up, and another replied by text. To be honest, I am surprised this hasn't caught on more. This seems like a very obvious area for Google to move into.

Environmentalism Issue Strategy Memo, Part III

In Parts I and II, we looked at how hard it is to get consumers to focus, in a deep and sustained way, on the stuff that really matters in improving the environment. In Part III, I put forth an idea that seems like it might, just might, in some small way, work.

We need a solution that measures and displays electrical consumption in real-time. The solution I envision would involve wirelessly transmitting power consumption data for appliances to a small screen, conveniently mounted in the kitchen or family room. Ideally, major appliances would each have a built-in transmitter. In the meantime, X10-style plug in modules for major appliances would go a long way.

Clever graphical representation of the data would be the other piece of the puzzle. Showing people how much more $ and carbon they consumed the day they kept their thermostat at 72, versus when they set it at 65, etc.

Postscript 2008-05-14

This city-sized, accidental experiment in Juneau is interesting:

“People are suddenly interested in talking about their water heaters,” said Maria Gladziszewski, who handles special projects for the city manager’s office. “As they say, it’s a teachable moment.”

Postscript 2008-01-25

This experiment demonstrates the potential:

The results of the research project...suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.

MS just does not get user experience

In addition to letting their OEM partners load the machines with crapware/trialware, they are now going to force us to take a lousy OS, Vista, whether we want it or not. I think Apple will slowly eat their lunch. What an irony that MS is reknowned for its senior management being cognizant of the fact that tech supremacy rarely lasts.

You would think MS-Access would be smart enough

to recognize its own auto-assigned PKs, and not try to auto-link them when you add tables with them to the query pane.

Facebook / LinkedIn feature idea

LinkedIn has checkboxes for you to indicate what you are interested in (keeping in touch, career opportunities, etc). I don't find them to be very useful, though. Especially for potential job seekers, I would like a rating of 1-5 to indicate interest level in job opportunities:

• 1 = Very Motivated (i.e., unemployed)
  
• 2 = Motivated (i.e., worried about losing job or hate job)
• 3 = Interested (i.e., looking for a better opportunity, but in no hurry)
• 4 = Would Consider the Right Opportunity (i.e., it would have to be my dream job)
• 5 = Not Interested

I know that when I have been looking to fill positions, I would have found this very, very useful in mining my network.

Dumbest Feature (Not) in MS Office

There is absolutely no incremental versioning. One wrong click and everything is lost. Whereas Google docs automagically gives you many, many versions.

Eat for Exercise Recovery

Not that I am by any stretch a talented athlete, but the way people complain about soreness, I've just never understood it. I get a little sore, but it just doesn't feel that bad. However, I do like to eat, a lot, and I really, really like protein. So that might explain a lot.

Excess marketing email

It is galling how a company, if you ever order even one single thing from them, will assume you want to receive thrice-weekly email offers from them. Of course I never give out my main email address for commercial purposes, but other people do. I have to wonder, if they could just restrain themselves and only send monthly messages, if they might find "less is more"?

I'm also tempted to punish the offenders by clicking the "report as spam" option in Google. I wonder what Google does if I report Home Depot email, for example, as spam?

Reactions to Ads

I have watched very nearly zero television since about the time I could drive, and the only radio I have listened to is NPR. So basically I took a generation off from exposure to TV and radio ads. Now that I have pre-teenage children, though, I am exposed to a modest amount of incidental advertising.

TV ads have gotten much, much better. Many of them are visually compelling, at least on the first or second viewing. Quite a contrast to the repetitive, jingle-based stuff I remember from my childhood. Radio, on the other hand, seems relatively unchanged. It's pretty intolerable, I find--once you have developed the NPR temperament, I don't see how you could tolerate the grating ads, even if the content were compelling.

Regarding IT As A Profession

A pair of terrific columns by Cringely. He hits the high points in some inter-related themes that I have been thinking about:

1. IT as a profession isn't all that fun any more.
2. IT if factionalized and balkanized.
3. Outsourcing and off-shoring have lots of problems, including quite possibly not saving money, just buying a much higher volume of labor at lower prices.

Choice quotes for each:

One of the real miracles of the PC revolution was that it often was led by super-users -- enthusiasts who had a PC at home before they had one at work and who led their co-workers as much through example as skill. Well those days of the 1970s and '80s are long gone and IT is today as entrenched and isolated as it was during the mainframe era of the 1960s.

in most organizations power ultimately manifests itself in head count, so IT organizations grow like crazy, becoming ever less efficient in the process. The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture.

Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.

Behaviorism Health Care

So Express Scripts surveyed thousands of customers to understand better their concerns about generics. It learned some were uncomfortable with how to tell their doctors they wanted to switch, or felt it wasn't their role as patients to bring up the topic. Others found the whole topic too complicated to bother with.

With those concerns in mind, Express Scripts made several changes to how customers were informed about simvastatin, such as shortening the text in its literature and changing its color and including a letter that patients could just hand to their doctor requesting a switch.

The company also framed the message to focus not merely on cost savings, but on how generics can be the better value -- explaining that drugs that cost more but don't do more aren't a better value. People often believe branded or costlier drugs simply are better, says Dr. Nease, whereas Express Scripts' new message stated that the "best buys" are drugs that cost less and do the same thing.

Generic statin use among its customers soared to 53% as of March of this year, Express Scripts is expected to say at a conference Tuesday.

Interesting. I wonder if there could ever be a "tipping point" effect, whereby the idea becomes "socialized" that, like recycling, seeking healthcare cost savings is A Good Thing.

A Little Supporting Evidence for My Alternative Employer Health Insurance Tactic

Among employers, the hardest pressed may be small businesses. Their insurance premiums tend to be proportionately higher than ones paid by large employers, because small companies have little bargaining clout with insurers.

Health costs are "burying small business," said Mike Roach, who owns a small clothing store in Portland, Ore.

So, another reason for small business to find different rules to play by.

Apple Profit

For a long, long time, my mental model of "Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs" was that they were playing different games. For Gates, it was all about winning, as measured by profit, and as Cringely has observed, "a graceless win is still a win". Everything else--style, innovation, originality--was completely secondary to winning.

Apple, on the other hand, was all about style, elegance, Steve Jobs' vision. What made Jobs happy was having the coolest products, good profit margins, if not the biggest total profits, and getting to boss people around. It was like Wal-Mart and Nordstrom's--same industry, but totally different approaches.

Now, however, Cringely observes that Apple has become a "lean and mean profit machine". So it seems that, finally, Jobs even matching Gates at his own game--winning in volume.

Google Should Buy LinkedIn

I know Google had some foray into social networking, but they somehow missed the boat. I wasn't paying a lot of attention at the time. But LinkedIn has a solid, professionally-oriented user base.
One strategic beneft would be to get a whole lot more people to have a Google login. I would like to use newsgroups and member-only weblogs for organizing various teams my children are on, but the high number of parents who need a Google login is a barrier.

LinkedIn doesn't have the cachet Facebook had, I bet they could buy it for a reasonable price.

Al Franken Tax Imbroglio

I think it is probably much ado about nothing. If conservatives didn't hate him so much, they would be sympathetic with the compliance burden of having to report any pay tax in 30 different states.

Ugly NFL Neon Sets

Is it just me, or are the modern NFL "sets", with all their unnatural, neon-ish gleam and glisten, simply garish? I'm pretty sure they are computer-generated, and not only do I find them extremely ugly--like the Las Vegas strip in miniature--but also very distracting.

Proton Beam Therapy

But critics say that the technique's advantage over X-rays has not been proved, except in certain rare tumors, and that proton therapy might not be worth the substantial extra cost. They say hospitals are engaged in a wasteful "arms race" for the prestige and profits that come from having a proton center.

I have read for years about this kind of hospital "arms race". When the administrators for each hospital are interviewed, they predictably all say "Yes, there should only be one of these--but OUR hospital is clearly the best place for it". I hope the government-mandated collaboration works out...

Consistency

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

This has long been one of my favorite quotes.

Eczema Treatment--Hydration Then Moisturizers

This NYT article talks about a new theory of what causes at least some cases of eczema. It also talks about the fact that, while that may ultimately lead to new medications, in the short-term, the treatment is still the same--keep the skin hydrated.

Our son had moderately bad eczema on his feet and legs till he was 6. We saw a few doctors, the last of whom was a double-specialist in pediatric dermatology and pharmacology. He recommended a low-tech but surprisingly effective treatment. Rather than just slather on a lotion periodically during the day, he recommended first a soaking bath, to thoroughly hydrate the skin, then only a quick blot-dry, followed by a heavy dose of heavy-duty sealant, like petroleum jelly. Finally, the coup de grace was to encase the poor kid in damp, cotton pajamas for several hours, or the whole night!

We did this for over a year, and Seth was a surprisingly good sport (can you imagine wearing damp pajamas to bed?!). The effects were remarkable. It steadily mitigated, then eliminated his eczema. And since eczema to some extent tends to be self-reinforcing, I think if you can get rid of it for a while, you have a much better chance of getting rid of it permanently. We discontinued the wet pajamas treatment after about 15 months, and there was no relapse.

I have since used a similar approach to my own moderately dry skin, especially my hands. I hydrate, either by a shower or running my hands under water, then apply the moisturizer. What surprises me is that this hydrate-then-seal approach is not more well-known. Probably fits the classic saying--if this treatment could be bottled, it would cost a pretty penny and be heavily promoted.

Windows Battery Remaining Readout

35:17 hours?! What algorithm are they using? More often, it goes from half-to-nothing almost instantly. Windows power management in general leaves a whole lot to be desired, in my experience.

CFL Light Quality

You read a lot of grumbling about the color/quality of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). I think I am pickier than average about that, and I generally have been very happy with the CFLs I have throughout the house (I typically buy 6-packs of 100W-equivalent at Sam's). However, I did buy a GE Daylight 6500K at Wal-Mart that is just terrible--extreme white with maybe a tinge of blue.

Salary Info Gets Out? Really?

An athlete's worth to a college is often negotiated behind the closed door of a coach's office with the scholarship amount kept a guarded secret, like a salary in a workplace. But the figures have a way of eventually getting out, as they do in any office.

The part about salary info getting out seem like false conventional wisdom to me. I have read similar assertions many times over the years, but in my 20+ years experience, both as employee and manager, it is just not very accurate. In general nobody discusses salaries of others in the workplace, and I have known of specific cases where there were substantial outliers, in both directions, and neither the outliers nor their peers seemed aware of the situation.

Ironically, 2 hours after posting, this, I saw this article in the NYT that seems to say differently. I remember, 20 years ago, my cousin Cliff opined that this social taboo worked to the disadvantage of employees, since it preserved a condition of information asymmetry in compensation matters. Which is exactly one of the motivations cited for the move toward frankness among friends in this regard.

Onshore Customer Service

Netflix set up shop here a year ago, shunning other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then in July, Netflix took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions, complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which is open 24 hours a day. The company's toll-free number, previously buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed.

This sounds very good, in the spirit of Joel on Software steps to excellent customer service.

I will say that I have had some good luck with email-based customer service lately, with Northwest Airlines, and BlockBuster. But I hate how hard they make it to actually get hold of a human being.

Blogger Needs A "Now" Time Feature

When you first create a posting, Blogger sets the timestamp for the posting, but it will let you manuallyl override this default time. This feature is important to me, because I tend to email myself very small snippets of ideas for postings, and then come back to them days or weeks later. So generally, I would like the timestamp of my posting to be the time I click "publish".

What I wish is that Blogger enabled this more automatically. At a minimum, with a checkbox by the time-entry box, that says "Now". Better yet, as a configuration setting, to default to "Now", unless over-ridden.

Goodbye, Cursive!

I see one of my predictions is coming true...my children barely learned cursive, and never use it.

Idea for Consumer Reports Project

Collect instances where the dealer says the reported problem "is normal", but subequent evidence conclusively shows there was a problem that should have been diagnosed.

Electronic Appliance Controls - I HATE Them

Our 15-month old dishwasher basically stopped working. It was pretty clearly the touch-sensitive control panel, since it would eratically respond to button presses. I called in a highly-recommended independent repairman. He said it was likely one of two boards--one that costs $80, the other $120. More likely the former. Oh, and they can't be returned (the downside of an independent). That made matters worse, since if it turned out to be the latter, it would require a second service call, since it had to be ordered separately. So between $140 and $320 to repair a 15-month old, $399 dishwasher!

The primary culprit here is expensive, proprietary electronic controls. Adding insult to injury, is the fact that electronic controls don't really add much value. Sure, you have a bunch of different cycles and permutations, a few more than might be feasible with electro-mechanical controls. But all those variations are overkill. Almost all we ever use is normal. Occasionally, rinse or heavy. The same settings you had 20 years ago.

At the very least, appliance equipped with these crummy electronics should have a default basic mode that will work even if the board goes ka-flooey.

The odd postscript to this is that, while putting off the decision, the dishwasher has been working. Not quite perfectly, but basically in the way I just described--normal mode works fine.

(Dishwashers have gotten better at cleaning the dishes, and quieter, but I think they are also flimsier. This Kenmore replaced a Whirlpool that the people we bought our house from had ordered only a few years before.)

Cold Willpower

This NYT article talks about how willpower can be built up, almost like a muscle. I've read that a few other places recently. Maybe that explains why I tend to view the opportunity to tolerate brief bouts of cold as a character-building exercise.

My overt rationale is that it is worth enduring a few moments of discomfort in order not to be encumbered for several hours (in the mall, or restaurant or whatever) with a bulky coat. (I live in Minnesota, so I do keep an emergency coat in the trunk.) But I must admit, the feeling is also bracing, and maybe that comes from the chance to build up some willpower!

Music with Photos

As noted, I like seeing my home photos as a slideshow on my HDTV. With slideshows, I have noticed that even canned music which is not thematically related in any way, nor timed to the photo transitions, livens things up. So it seems like a really cool feature for slideshow software would be for the software to read a song and then create the transitions in rythym to the music. I am sure this is out there in some higher-end product, I just don't see why it hasn't migrated to the mainstream.

Differentiation Opportunity: Photos on HDTV

Growing up, my father was a big fan of slides. He took a lot of pretty-good photos, using an 35mm SLR camera, and had them all converted to slides. Once a month or so, we would have family slde night and look at the pictures on the big screen. It was a great way to look at them, and to collectively re-live family memories. MUCH more participative than leafing through a photo album.

I see the big, brilliant HDTVs that have been populating America's living rooms in the last few years as the obvious, and much more accessible, succesor to the home slide show. RSS inventor and inveterate software tinkerer Dave Winer is pushing this concept with FlickrFan (Mac-only, unfortunately). It is just such a great way to see your pictures--think of your HDTV as a really big monitor, and your rolling slideshow of pictures as the photo-screensaver, that plays whenever you aren't using your TV for something else.

I have been doing this, sporadically, with our HDTV. Unfortunately, our HDTV does not have an SD slot, so my easiest means of getting photos to TV is using the SD slot in my son's Wii. That works pretty well, but the built-in slide show functionality on the Wii is pretty limited.

So given the very fevered competition in the HDTV world, I think the top-tier manufacturers (e.g., Sony) could create some differentiation and value-add if they worked really hard at positioning and marketing their displays as platforms for displaying digital photos.

I think key ingredients would be:

1. Ease of use.
2. SD slot built in (more slots would be better, but SD at a minimum).
3. USB port (so you can hook up a card reader, or a USB drive, of a laptop).
4. Good built-in slideshow software.
5. Screensaver mode option--show photos automagically, when the TV is not being used.
   
6. Ease of use.
   

Other more advanced offerings might include;

1. Internet connectivity and downloding from Flickr, etc (basically what Dave Winer is doing.
2. Pre-integrated bundling with a streaming media device. Have to be careful, because without exquisite execution, this could trash ease of use. This is where Apple will probably make inroads.

Light notebooks over-rated?

I think lightness is over-rates in notebook computers, for many home and business users. The reviewers tend to emphasize this factor heavily, I imagine because they are big travelers. And I agree--if you are carrying your notebook a lot, weight would really matter.

But for the typical, non-traveling business user, like myself, toting a 6-7 lb. notebook is not a big deal. For most business users, the notebook stays docked through much of the day. Even if you un-dock frequently to bring it to meetings, as I do, the distance you are traveling is so short that weight doesn't matter too much.

I un-dock at the end of the day, put it in my backpack, and walk the few hundred feet to my car. (The backpack may be a differentiator right there--I could see how a small woman, using a crummy, shoulde-slung laptop bag, might find the weight burdensome.) Drive home, park in the gargage, carry the laptop into my home office. Done. Reverse in morning.

Again, if a significant part of your commute involved walking, then weight would matter more. Including perhaps walking up flights of stairs to get to your domicile (for those few buildings left that don't have elevators). Still, I think that is a minority of laptop-equipped office workers.

Mis-Guided HSA Users Experience Disillusionment

HSAs do offer some long-term potential for helping restrain runaway health-care costs. But as the linked story shows, the empahsis here is long-term. In the short-term, if employees have a chance of HSA or traditional indemnity, they are going to self-select. HSAs will be selected mostly by low-utilizers. Furthermore, in some circumstances, HSAs may be cheaper for very high utilizers as well (because once the deductible is met, typically 100% of costs are covered, no co-pays, including drugs). The middle-to-medium-high users will stick with traditional plans.

So in the short-term, employees and individuals will optimize, by selecting HSAs if they think there is a direct savings to them, so that if anything, upon introduction of HSAs, employers will actually see their costs increase.

The strategic value of HSAs to the system only is realized over time, if they truly work
to cause individuals to be wiser, more efficient consumers of healthcare.

TurboTax Rip-Off Attempt

Talk about unethical. When you got to use TurboTax to e-file, they offer you the option to pay by credit card, or pay by deducting from your refund. That might be a nice convenience, if it didn't nick you for 2x the cost of the filing, just to have that convenience. I think a convenience charge of this magnitude is indefensible, and constitutes an ethical offense. Compounded by the fact that they make that choice the default. I'm sure they trick a fair number of people, and that is an irresistible profit-margin, I suppose.

Shrinking Half-Gallon Cartons

About 5 years ago, Edy's/Dreyer's sneakily started selling 1.75 quart containers of ice cream, for the old half-gallon (2.0 quart) price. Others followed suit. Well tonight, I just noticed that Breyers cartons are down to 1.5 quarts! Probably in part a response to pressure on raw materials, so trying to maintain the same price but provide less product at that familiar price. The container's design seemed intend to diguise the change--flared out from the base. Borderline unethical.

Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet

I have been skeptical of the steady parade of articles discussing how far behind the U.S. lags in internet infrastructure and speeds.

Why Isn't Anonymous Web-Surfing More Popular?

There are various services and programs that will let you web-surf without leaving very obvious tracks. I'm surprised they are so little-used. I think many people don't even know that they exist.

Also, I wonder what the impact would be on the business model of the various companies working very hard to aggregate digital user data, if this were to take hold in a big way?

Who benefits from a real-estate boom?

I hate real-estate booms. I lived through one in the northeast in my early twenties. In 3 years, condo prices declined 30% from their peak. By another 3 years, they were down close to 50% from peak. Beth and I were happy to escape to the inexpensive and dull Indiana real-estate market.

We lived in Indiana for a decade. There, prices increased between 0-3% per year. Housing was very affordable, even in the best suburbs of Indianapolis. We sold our house there for almost no gain, and moved to Minnesota in late 2002, well into the real-estate boom. We bought a slightly nicer house here for way more money, I would say 30-35% more.

I cursed the boom even then, but there wasn't anything to be done for it. With school-age kids, renting wasn't an appealing option. At least we bought a couple of years before the peak, so it could have been worse. But it reminded me of the boom from the late 80s. People were saying all the same things:

• "they aren't making any more land"
• "when is the last time real estate went down in value??"
• "stretch to buy as much as you can afford, it is a great investment"
• "what other kind of investment can you live in while it goes up in value?"

I knew it was a boom, and wouldn't go on for ever. I won't pretend I knew how big the bust would be. I was hoping for the idealized "soft landing"--no outright price crash, maybe just years of stagnation, as incomes catch up to inflated housing prices.

The rest is history, of course.

So as I think about the real-estate boom and subsequent bust, I wonder who has benefited, and who has lost out. I don't think a full boom-bust cycle is a zero-sum game, with a winner for every loser. That might be true of a modest boomlet, when there are a few really strong years, followed by a return to normalcy. But a real bust also involves huge waste of economic opportunity.

So this is my quick analysis of who benefits versus who loses in a real-estate boom.

Farmers and other landowners. They clearly benefit, if they sell during the boom. That's an easy one.

Builders. It would seem like builders boom. They do lots of business, and their unsold inventory keeps increasing in value. Except. The longer the boom goes on, the more a builder is likely to expand. So when the bubble bursts, the builder is likely to have lots and lots of inventory, that sits un-sold for months. So I think builders may be more likely to get hurt, in the end, than to benefit.

Existing homeowners. We need to sub-divide this group. First, let's consider exisiting homeowners who bought before the boom, and continued to own their house through the bust. They never realized their paper gains, so they are clearly not big winners. But it might be worse than that. They might have been suckered into thinking that their house was their retirement plan, so they may have under-saved and/or over-extended. So in a sense, they may well have been hurt by the boom, even if all the fallout was based on decisions under their control.

Then there are existing homeowners who bought before the boom, and sold during the boom. Although it would appear that these people are winners, not necessarily. Most people sell and trade up, in which case they would be worse off. Even retirees often don't really trade down. So it would only be a small subset of homeowners who sell, who come out ahead. Those who sell and rent, or sell and leave for a less-booming real estate market. There will be a small number of people who have lucky timing: were planning to sell and trade up, but saw the market sliding after they sold, but before they bought; or sold because they were getting a 2-year expatriate assignment, for example.

First-time or out-of-town buyers who bought during the boom. They are losers--they paid more than they would have in a calm, orderly market.

Would-be homeowners. People who would like to become first-time homeowners, but either can't afford to in the hot market, or are just afraid of buying in a hot market. They are losers, though maybe not as bad as the above group, because although they would prefer owning to renting in reasonable market conditions, the frenetic market keeps them out.

Parents of young adult children. Even if you are thrilled to see the value of your own house go up, is it really so great if your adult children can't afford to but their first house?

Plastic Bag Bans Over-Rated

A classic environmentalist distraction.

Bailouts

This guy makes a lot of sense. WAY more sense than those in business clamoring for government intervention and bailout. I have seen a large number of articles, where executives in the mortgage and related industries are urging some form of government intervention. Appalling.

Like their counterparts in Japan in the 1990s, American authorities may be deluding themselves into believing they can forestall the endgame of post-bubble adjustments. Government aid is being aimed, mistakenly, at maintaining unsustainably high rates of personal consumption. Yet that's precisely what got the United States into this mess in the first place — pushing down the savings rate, fostering a huge trade deficit and stretching consumers to take on an untenable amount of debt.

Booms

As mortgage lenders imploded and stock prices swooned last summer, a light bulb went off for Tim Houlne, chief executive of a Texas call-agent provider: "Bubbles always burst."

Mr. Houlne's realization attests to how, far from Wall Street, executives in other industries and their advisers are finding management lessons in the subprime-loan meltdown.

Among the key insights: Don't chase a boom without planning for the bust. Make sure subordinates feel safe delivering bad news. Ensure that incentive systems don't encourage excessive risk. And don't gloss over complicated details.

They ought to teach this stuff in schools. Seriously. I think the only possible cure for booms would be widespread consciousness-raising. Nobody wants to hear that during the boom.

Mark Inconsistent Formatting: A Very Annoying New MS-Word Feature

I have used MS Word for Windows for years, almost decades. Just recently, I started very consistently encountering entire documents with wavy blue lines under all the text. Similar to the very-familiar wavy red ones that highlight spelling problems (a brilliant feature), and the wavy green ones that denote possible grammar problems (an okay feature). When I would right-click, the top menu choice was "return formatting to match original" (or something like that).

After a few weeks of being very annoyed by that (I read lots of Word docs online at work) I finally rooted around the Options tabbed mega-dialog, and found where to turn it off. Put that innovation right up there with "Open in Reading Layout".

Now--More Mis-Spellings of Juneau

I live on Juneau drive. It is already enough of a problem getting people to spell it right. Many simply have no idea how to spell "Juneau, like in Alaska". Many others may have once known, but default to Juno because of the old free email pioneer. Now Juno the movie will just exacerbate that problem.

Things Parents Should Deny Their Kids Even If They Can Afford Them

This article talks about how bad it is to have a TV in the bedroom. Also on my personal list: cell phones. That one eventually becomes hard to resist, but at least, for goodness' sake, don't go out of your way to hurry and get your kid a phone, just because it hardly adds anything to your monthly bill. The cell phone is very disruptive, in that you no longer know who is calling your kids. I know, email and IM is similar, but at least a lot of that takes place in the house (and you can always install spyware).

That's one of the challenges living in an affluent community--for so many parents, the only calculation is "is it affordable?"

How Is Ortho Insurance Like Rebates and Gift Cards?

My daughter got orthodontia last year. We had ortho insurance, which hardly covers the cost, but it does help defray it some. The bill for the ortho is very front-loaded, however, whereas the ortho insurance only pays out 1/3 of its total each year. But as far as I can tell, there is nothing to get the insurer to automatically pay the next year's installment (assuming you are still covered). I had to work pretty hard to get it re-submitted and paid. Which makes me wonder--how many $ or legitimate ortho claims never get paid, because the insured doesn't remember (or even know) that they have to re-submit in years 2 and 3?

Photo Forgery Detection

I've thought this would be a cool field to specialize in.

Wii Fitness--why can't MS and Sony retrofit Wii sensors?

It still seems to me like the Wii-style motion-sensors could be retro-fitted into XBox and PS/3.

Oh Thank Goodness

I don't pay a lot of attention to college sports. But I turned on ESPN while stretching, and Butler was playing Cleveland State. The announcers kept talking about how it was an important matchup in the Verizon League. I had never heard of the Verizon League, but my first reaction was "this is just taking naming rights way too far". So I looked it up on the web. Fortunately, it is the Horizon League. Whew.

A Matter of Trust: Bigger Volume = Savings

I consider it a breach of trust when the unit price for a larger size of a product is higher than for a smaller size. As a consumer, I want to be able to take the mental shortcut of assuming that there will be some savings by buying in volume. So if I need the larger volume anyway, I shouldn't have to bother comparing the price to the smaller size(s). Sales or promotions are an exception, but in those cases, at least I have the signage to alert me to the fact that I might want to take the time to compare.

It doesn't happen too often that this rule if violated, but it does happen. Today at Wal-Mart the 8.5-oz size of Jet Dry was less than half the cost of the 16 oz size, no promotions involved. I personally view that as unethical behavior on the part of the retailer, and it does make me think less favorably of them (for what that is worth!).

Government Intervention

It's not that you can never envision any theoretical case where intervention might be helpful. It's just that there are so many real-world problems attached to interventionism, that is never going to be a good bet:

1. Likelihood of getting it right--timing and scope.
2. Temptation for pork-barreling pile-on.
3. Permanency effect--government programs seem to live on forever.
4. Moral hazard.
5. Distracting government from core missions (choose between doing a few things well, or many things poorly).

Wishing Comcast Ill

But for all the harm these price cuts may inflict on the wireless industry, experts say they may exact an even bigger toll on cable companies such as Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner's (TWX) cable division, which for years have been luring phone-company customers with service packages that bundle calling, high-speed Internet access, and hundreds of TV channels. "We have to look at it beyond wireless" says Roger Entner, senior vice-president at consultancy IAG Research. "We don't want to look at mouse traps when we are hunting for elephants. [With these plans], you can beat the cable guy."

I would be thrilled if wireless kicked cable in the shins, hard. Reasons I deeply resent Comcast:

• It was hardly 1 week after they bought AT&T Broadband that they raised my broadband rates
• When they acquire companies, they aren't kind enough to keep the old email domain--they make you switch over to comcast.com (I've opted out of that, with my own domain and Gmail)
• Even though I had a cable package that already included ESPN, when I upgraded to HD, that did not get me ESPN HD; since that was my only reason for paying for HD (since I got all the other HD channels I cared about over-the-air), I instantly down-graded.
• Generally not carrying nearly enough HD
• Poor service and especially billing screw-ups

Postscript: I guess I am in good company hating Comcast.

Legislative auditor criticizes jobs program

The state's [Minnesota's] primary program to stimulate rural job growth has given tax breaks to firms and communities that don't need them and may have hurt competing businesses that aren't subsidized, the legislative auditor reported Friday.

Well, duh. I don't understand why this would surprise anyone. It is really too much too hope for politicians who understand, and are willing to stand up and say, that government tinkering isn't going to make people want to live and work in desolate, under-developed areas?

I read this long article about Buffalo, which pointed out the numerous, vain attempts that had been made to resucitate downtown Buffalo over the years. Detroit is the big target now. During the presidential campaign, I have heard most of the candidates talk about how their economic program will help revive Detroit. What nonsense. Detroit is in a horrible downward spiral, not likely to be arrested, much less reversed, any time soon. Anybody who has a good opportunity to bail out of Detroit probably should. It is a disservice to give people false encouragement to stay and hold out for a turn-around.

(I'm not saying any of this out of some anti-Detroit bias, I just believe the writing is on the wall, has been for a decade or more.)

Some form of crampons for vulnerable people on ice

You know those wheelie sneakers that elementary-age kids have? I would like to invent the crampons version of that. We all know how dangerous snow and ice can be for the elderly. If they (or anyone else, for that matter) had shoes with little studs, it would vastly increase traction. The ideal would be if the studs could be somehow retractable, so they didn't damage floors.

I don't actually have any reasonable ideas for implementing retractable shoe studs, mind you, I am just thinking how useful they could be.

Immune to Ads

This article says "MySpace Users Build Up Ad Immunity". I'm surprised there is not more discussion of ad immunity in general. I would like to see a study that looks at all the ad-based business models, and aggregates their assumed attention from users. I would not be surprised if the aggretate assumption comes out to the average web user spending 3 hours a day reading and responding to ads!

I think this is the soft underbelly of most of the free commercial content on the internet. It almost makes me want to short Google stock.

It also makes me worry a little, as a Google user, since I like and increasingly rely on their apps. I would probably be willing to pay Google $150/year for a family subscription to all their products (assuming the continue their rate of product innovation). I wonder if that would be worth more to Google than I am in their ad-based model?

Outlook Feature: Send Email not Invitation

Sometimes when I am organizing a meeting invitation in Outlook, I want to send the text in the meeting notice, but not the invite itself, to certain people. Unfortunately, there is no feature in Outlook for that.

The funny thing is, there is a feature that seems like that is what it would do: the "Do Not Send Meeting to This Attendee" option you can check by each name. For a while, in fact, I just assumed that is how it worked. But all that does is essentially logically delete your meeting attendee. I really don't see the advantage to that over just physically deleting them.

Mimicry Enhances Social Bonding

Researchers have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.

I think I've seen this happen with corporate jargon, where one person starts using (or, often as not, mis-using) a word or expression, and it spreads, becoming very common for a period of weeks or maybe a few months, before running its course.

It's always a modest achievement to find a significant copy editing mistake in the NYT

See if you can find the "their-there" mistake in the sentence below, from the NYT:

However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities.

Yep, it should say "leach", not "leech".

Maybe the copy editor was in a hurry...one would think this other sentence from the same article might have been improved on: "some in attendance appeared to trance out".

MS Office Communicator Has My Implementation of DO NOT DISTURB

Although I can't seem to locate it, I am sure I wrote on my prior blog, about my idea for a DO NOT DISTURB mode on cell phones. Well I just discovered that Office Communicator (IM client) has the implementation I had in mind. If you try to send a message to someone who has set themselves to DO NOT DISTURB, you get a warning, pointing out they are in DO NOT DISTURB mode, and asking if you really want to proceed to disturb them. Very nice.

Michigan and Florida: I Wouldn't Try to Change the Rules

Because Michigan and Florida moved their primary dates up, contrary to party rules, the national Democratic party sanctioned them by not counting their delegates. Now apparently the Clinton campaign wants to reverse or at least re-visit the decision to not count them. This seems like very low and dirty intra-party politics to me, and what do I know, but given the negative publicity the Clinton campaign has gotten recently, it seems to me like this could well backfire. I mean, the rules are the rules, right? It seems incredibly opportunistic and cutthroat to object only after the result is proven to be in your favor. Somewhat similar to what happened with the Clintonian objections to caucus sites located on the strip in Las Vegas arose only after the culinary workers' union endorsed Obama.

Even if it works and helps get her the nomination, it seems like it could both lead to more intra-party hard feelings, as well as providing fodder for negative ads from the Republicans in the general election.

USB Kills PCMCIA?

It just occured to me that my new laptop doesn't have a PCMCIA slot. The previous laptops I have had, for years, have equipped with two slots. I assume that USB has pretty much eliminated the market and need for PCMCIA.

Cory Doctorow and Glenn Reynolds both think the de-coupling of insurance from employment would be a good thing for innovation.

Pair Programming Reduces Errors by 80-98%?

Pair Programming is one of the best-known tenets of the eXtreme Programming methodology. It is probably also one of the most controversial. I think it probably has many benefits, but one of the subtler ones revolves not around positive productivity, per se, but rather, mistake avoidance.

Let me tell a non-programming story to illustrate. A few years ago, my wife Beth and a neighbor friend of hers conspired to have us husbands build decks on to hour houses. Neither Dave nor I had ever built anything like a deck before. We were both about the same level of mediocrity as far as home-maintenance DIYers--advanced-beginner to intermediate in terms of skills and competency. But decks sounded good, so we signed on.

It was great to have someone to work with, for many reasons. But the reason I am interested in is short-cuts. Occasionally short-cuts can be good, but probably more often they aren't. Particularly in the hands of novices. Here's what happened, every time I would think of a short-cut (and vice-versa).

Normally, if working alone, I might think of a short-cut, consider it briefly, and then proceed. Often proceeding to regret it, within minutes or hours. However, when working with a partner, the unavoidable first step is to explain the shortcut. And what transpired, much more often than not, was that, about half-way through explaining my short-cut, I would "hear" the bad ideas actually coming out of my mouth, and I would drop the idea abruptly and rather sheepishly.

I think that same principle applies to pair programming. In software, it is the mistakes that kill you. If programmer B were only half as fast as programmer A, but never made a mistake, he would be by far the more productive programmer. So anything that reduces mistakes, really pays off.

To really see how this could work on a pair basis, you need to look at the math, which is simple, but deceptive. Suppose the typical programmer makes mistakes 10% of the time (whatever that means, exactly). If you add a second "pair of eyeballs" to the mix, and assume that their mistakes are non-correlated to those of the first programmer, then you have reduced the mistake rate from 10% to 1%! (10% * 10% = 1%; this is one of many examples of the "power of redundancy")

Firefox Add-In Idea: Auto-Add Current URL(s) to Google Reader

During the course of my days, I stumble across a lot of articles that I'd like to read, later. Partly because I don't have time at the moment, and also because, more and more, I like to print stuff and read it off-line. Sometimes that is because I need exercise reading material, other times simply because it is much more pleasant to read, comfortable in a comfortable room of my house, rather than hunched at the computer.

Anyway, the feature I want is a button to click, on the FireFox toolbar, that adds the current URL to my Google Reader. I can't believe I am the first person to think of this, but I searched and didn't find anything.

Primaries--Glad They Are Not Settled

As discussed, I am no fan of front-loading the presidential primary schedule. So I am very glad to see that the first 4-5 primaries have really decided very little, and it all seems to come down to super-Tuesday. (I'm not glad that it ALL has to come down to super-Tuesday, but that's better than having it all settled by Iowa and New Hampshire.)

Need a way to retrofit zoned heating into forced hot-air homes

Let's face it, we had our energy wake-up call 35 years ago, and we have continued to live pretty much exactly as before, instead of making changes, some of which might have been more disruptive (less driving and driving alone), some of which seem like they would have been fairly easy.

In the latter category I would put: building houses to be more energy-efficient. I am a notorious home-thermostat nazi, but even I get tired of being chilly in my own house. But I just can't justify heating 3000 square feet, when only one or two people are at home (I work from home 2 days/week, so that one person is often me). The design question is--why do I have to choose between the extreme of 3000 chilly square feet or 3000 warm square feet? We all know that we tend to use 1-2 rooms of the house most of the time, typically the kitchen and the TV room. Why can't I close those off, and have zoned heat that let's me keep them at 72, while the rest of the house cools down to 60?

As I noted, if we had any brains at all, we would have been building houses to support this option, lo these last 35 years. In the absence of that, we need a way to retrofit the typical, suburban forced-hot-air system to support some heating zones. But there would still be the problem of doors--retro-fitting them into my floorplan could be physically done, but it seems like it wouldn't look so good.

(Yes, I know, we also shouldn't have been building 3000 square-foot houses, either. I agree. I would like to trade mine for a townhouse.)

Prepare for a Gruesome Retirement

Scary, scary article on the retirement prospects of those working today. Although my ideological ideal runs toward libertarian and laissez-faire, I think this problem is severe enough that I would, at least in theory, support government-mandated personal retirement savings.

Re: Caveat Emptor

One more thing from the Joel article on the "sins" created by the motivation of a sales commission, regarding a customer "returning" an extended warranty (just the warranty, not the product it covered):

The manager acknowledged that CompUSA's returns policy covered an extended warranty (which, as everyone knows, is almost all profit for a retailer). Still, the salesperson objected.

At first, I thought that the customer had been duped into buying a warranty she didn't want and was trying to return it, so it was unclear why the clerk was giving her such a hard time. But then I realized that the argument was over the fact that the salesperson had given the customer a discount on the merchandise, paid out of his own pocket. In exchange, the customer had agreed to buy the extended warranty, which would have resulted in a nice bonus for the clerk. Now she was returning the high-margin warranty while happily pocketing the discount. The customer had double-crossed the sales clerk!

That is hilarious. I hate extended warranties, which are notorious for being the most profitable item in the store. I remember once I was at Best Buy, purchasing a refrigerator (famously long-lived appliances, the last thing you would want an extended warranty on), and I had to interreupt the sales girl's spiel 3 times, to insist I wasn't interested in hearing it. She got into a mild argument with me about how could I make up my mind without hearing her out?

If she were more experienced, though, I think she would learn that there is no point arguing, you will never change the mind of someone who is onto the game, and willing to interrupt you mid-sentence to let you know that. You are wasting your time, in addition to pissing him off. The sales pros learn this. The problem for retail is they have rank amateurs. Given the high turnover, almost nobody becomes more experienced.

Caveat Emptor

Great Joel article on the "sins of commission"--the anti-customer (and sometimes anti-employer) behavior that can be created by too-clever financial incentives.

I also really like Joel's solution:

...we were worried that the same thing would happen if we paid salespeople on commission. I had a recurring nightmare of salespeople gone crazy, going to ridiculous lengths to make sales and ruining Fog Creek's hard-earned reputation as a friendly, win-win kind of company.

But we soon realized that commissions weren't the only management tool at our disposal. We simply established as a rule the idea that gaming the incentive plan was wrong and unacceptable. Employees generally follow the rules you give them -- and if they don't, you can discipline them or, in extreme cases, dismiss them. The problem with most incentive systems is not that they are too complicated -- it's that they don't explicitly forbid the kind of shenanigans that will inevitably make them unsuccessful.

I think this is a great, common-sense solution. Probably doesn't scale as well in big companies, but it is a great starting point.

Sign of how boring MS-Office has become

My company is using Office 2003. Over 4 years old. Nobody, including me, complains, or really even notices.

Does New Hampshire Zag When Iowa Zigs?

Both of the winners of Iowa didn't do nearly as well in New Hampshire. In Huckabee's case that was a foregone conclusion, I know. But still I wonder if there isn't a little bit of willfulness in the NH primary voter...if NH results fall in line with those from Iowa, doesn't that make NH just a little less special? And it seems like NH residents, or at least primary voters, actually, the whole darned state, is quite enamored with their special place in the presidential race.

McDonald's Takes On Starbucks

Similar to my idea for McDonald's to elbow its way into chicken wings.

Future of Health Insurance Benefits?

Why the Present State May Be Unstable

I feel like I can see fault lines that could lead to the collapse of the current American system of employer-provided, group-plan health insurance. The way it works right now, employers typically extend coverage to all qualified employees, as a group. By getting hired and meeting the qualifications ( e.g., full-time), you are automatically eligible for group coverage, without regard to your personal health fundamentals--your desirability as an insurance risk. Because you are part of a group, your risk is blended into that of the group, and the annual claims experience of your group is used to re-adjust the rates each year.

This is unlike other forms of insurance. In other forms of insurance, your risk profile is considered as part of the underwriting decision as whether you are given insurance, and at what rate. Viewed from a social-good, shared risk perspective, this arrangement--whereby a less-healthy person, if they are well enough to get a job with benefits, effectively gets the more-healthy people to share the cost burden--may well be viewed as a good thing. However, when viewed from a pure, economic self-interest perspective, I wonder if it is about to become unstable?
The key thing to know is that medically under-written insurance (e.g., policies purchased by individuals) is typically considerably cheaper than non-medically underwritten, group insurance (the policies purchased by employers). The reason for this is simple--in medically under-written insurance, the high-risk 20% or so of applicants will either be denied, or "up-rated" (charged a higher rate, to account for higher-risk). Assuming some form of an "80-20 rule" applies, by excluding the 20% most undesirable applicants, a huge chunk of the total risk has been removed. Hence, lower rates for the remaining 80% of healthy applicants.
Group vs Individual Plans

For a long time, since World War II, a job "with benefits" was the litmus test for whether a job was a good, career position. Even lower-paid white-collar employees had health benefits as part of their jobs, as did most better-paid union jobs. Few people were in the market for individual health insurance, so it was not marketed heavily, and tended to be expensive, even though it was medically under-written, since the under-writers tended to assume that someone motivated enough to buy their own health insurance might have some expensive condition lurking in their health history.
More recently, however, for various reasons, there has been a growing market for individual health insurance. Now that market has truly come of age, and is being served both in terms of marketing, and pricing. So the large majority of employees who have company-provided benefits would nevertheless be better off if they could receive a credit for the full cost of their health benefits, and instead purchase their own health insurance on the open market.

The way things stand now, however, employers are not about to make such an offer, because doing so would de-stabilize the system. The rational employee would go out and try to get a medically under-written policy. If they succeeded, and the premium were less than the credit being offered, they would take the credit. But for the 20% of less healthy employees, this deal would be a non-starter, so of course they would stick with the group plan. This process of self-selection would then result in the claims experience for the now-small, much less healthy cohort of remaining employees rising, astronomically. So I don't think that the revolution is likely to start with existing large employers.

The Disruptive Force

I think the revolution will begin with start-up companies.

If I were a small knowledge-based company, such as a software or consulting firm, I would be very tempted to try a different approach to health insurance. An approach that could give me both a cost and recruiting advantage. Instead of having a traditional, non-underwritten group plan, I think I would try to partner with an insurer(s) to provide my employees with individual policies. It would take some selling and education to get employees and candidates to understand the value proposition, but, as an employer, if you feel like your core demographic is likely to be pretty healthy, why not press that advantage?
I would pay my employees somewhat more in salary, to make up for the fact that they had to buy their own benefits. But since those benefits would be medically under-written, the overall cost to the employee should be relatively lower. One key aspect of the partnership would be to figure out a way to provide expedited approvals—say within 1 week, for standard cases. No underwriting short-cuts, mind you, just making sure the process is very efficient, and little time is lost to waiting in work queues. To make this work, it would be important to match the time for approval to the same kind of timescale that might be expected for acceptance of an offer of employment.
Another aspect to the partnership would be education. Employees are notoriously conservative and gun-shy about their health insurance. So there would have to be some education involved in making sure they see how this is a mutually beneficial arrangement. I think that having an arms-length partner, in the form of an insurance company, would be helpful in performing that employee education. There really are some significant advantages for the employee:

1. 
   Net-net, the employees are sharing in the economies of this system, in the form of higher salaries that more than offset the cost to them to buy their health benefits.
   
   
2. 
   Guaranteed-renewable individual insurance is theirs, and nobody can take it away from them, as long as they pay their premiums. So if their spouse gets cancer, and they get laid off, or want to start their own business, they never need lose a minute of sleep over health insurance concerns complicating those other life decisions.
   
   
   
3. 
   The individual business risk pool is much larger than for any one company, so they don't have to worry that their premiums will go up unexpectedly due to one or two very sick co-workers.
   
   

#2 is big. Once a person gets their minds around this, it turns individual insurance into a very desirable thing. In fact, it would be a modest additional source of employment advantage--if other employers don't offer the same deal, the employee who wanted to change employers would have to either give up their individual policy, or suffer the intolerable penalty of essentially paying twice for the same insurance.

The most obvious downside for the employer would be losing out on candidates who do not qualify for medically under-written insurance. But since that number is typically only about 20% of applicants, it isn't a huge penalty to incur. Moreover, considering that those 20% are presumably much more likely to miss work for health-related problems, then viewed from a very mercenary point of view, it doesn't seem like too high a price.
So it seems to me that this revolution would start, like many social revolutions, rather quietly. A few small startups would be pursuing this strategy. But over time, some of those startups would grow larger. Eventually, their established, traditional competitors would inevitably become aware of the cost advantage enjoyed, and would be pressured to react. Once started, I think the trend would become hard to stop. For a quick comparison of a different, but snow-balling compensation trend, think about the disappearance of traditional, guaranteed-benefit pensions.

Tax Considerations

A partial impediment to this is tax implications. Employer-sponsored health insurance is purchased with pre-tax dollars. Privately purchased health insurance does not inherently provide for a comparable tax break, unless the purchaser is not self-employed and incorporated. President Bush did propose that extending that very tax benefit to all purchasers of private health insurance, but it didn't get put into law. It is still on the agenda of some conservatives, though. In the meantime, there are partial measures which would probably work pretty well for the situation I am describing, namely medical FSAs and HRAs.

Afterword
The above is analysis, not a policy editorial. I don't know if it this development would be a "good" thing or not. I just think it may happen.


Postscripts

Cory Doctorow and Glenn Reynolds--not normally on the same side--both think the de-coupling of insurance from employment would be a good thing for innovation.
I heard some kind of panel interview piece on NPR where the conservative guy was also advocating de-coupling.
Update

It seems possible that the drumbeat for reform will change conditions on the ground, rending this prediction obsolete.

Firefox Add-In Idea: Auto-Detect "Skip this Ad"

When I encounter an advertisement screen (sometimes euphimistically titled "welcome screen"), I can not click "skip this ad", or the equivalent, fast enough. I find it hard to believe that anyone else does differently. Anyway, seems like the germ of inspiration for a Firefox or IE add-in. It would contain a database of ad-presenting sites (traditional media, such as NYT, Forbes, etc), and detect the presence of "skip this ad" or "skip this welcome screen", and if so, would auto-click that link as soon as humanly machine-ly possible.

We Need Better Teleconferencing Software!

Introduction

I work for a very large, very distributed company. For the first time in my career, I find that most of my meeting time is spent in teleconferences, rather than in-person meetings. Although I miss the face-to-face contact, I do think it is clear that teleconferencing will only become more prevalent, driven by various developments: distributed workforces, off-shoring and out-sourcing, and telecommuting.

Considering how critical teleconferencing is to getting work done for the contemporary knowledge-worker, I am rather shocked by the deep mediocrity of the technology. My employer uses AT&T Teleconference Services, which I have used for years at other companies, and it really hasn't improved AT ALL over time. Same old problems: everybody has to introduce themselves, and then hear a repetition of all the other people on the call; if someone puts you on hold, the rest of the conference gets serenaded with their PBX's muzak (I know there is an advanced feature that prevents this--nobody ever uses it); security problems if you have back-to-back calls on the same number, when the early joiners for the next meeting unintentionally "barge" into the meeting that hasn't yet ended. The fact that these old, well-known problems continue to be tolerated--never mind the failure to introduce cool new features--shows me a product category ripe for innovation.

What is needed--beyond a teleconferencing provider who cares enough about their product to continually improve it--is convergence between teleconferencing and web conferencing. In the admittedly limited sample of big companies I have experience with, web conferencing really has not taken off as one would expect. We probably have 10 teleconferences for every 1 web conference. Granted, there may be some discussions that simply do not benefit from any visuals, but as often than not, I find that there is inevitably a point in the teleconference where it would be very convenient to display something.(Maybe I shouldn't complain though--I have a long commute, and when possible, try to combine it with conference calls) In fact, we frequently wind up quickly emailing documents for the participants to review.

There are probably a few reasons for the under-use of web conferencing, but I think one big one is the tedium of scheduling them. I have used both LiveMeeting and Webex, and they both require meetings to be set up in advance, and the meeting URLs have to be distributed to all the participants. Ironically, ease of initiation is the one area where teleconferencing really shines, since there is no setup whatsoever required--just dial in to a well-known, persistent number and access code (unfortunately, there are some security problems associated with that, which we will get to shortly).

If teleconferencing and web conferencing could be tightly integrated, I think all the existing problems of both could be solved, and valuable new features added. An inventory of the improvements I envision is listed below:

Web conferencing is initiated automatically with the teleconference, and vice-versa

Just as employees receive their own, individual access code to the master teleconference number, so would they receive a standing URL for web conferencing.

As a bonus, teleconference/web conference addresses would be discoverable, for authorized individuals (see Security section for more discussion).

See who is currently connected, along with who was invited

Instead of taking an oral roll call, you can see who is connected. I bet introductions and roll-call takes a 5% productivity toll on teleconferencing time. So as mundane as this problem is, solving it would have a big payoff. Bonus feature--you automatically get a log of who was on the call, and even when they were on.

"Ping" invitees who have not signed on (via IM or phone call or email)

Another big time-waster is the need to "ping" the people who were invited but still haven't joined in 5 minutes after the start of call. Integration wouldn't completely make this go away, but it could make it easier--instead of manually adding their names to an IM or email, you could just click-select and invoke the "are you joining us" message. Bonus--an option for pinging could be a phone call with a pre-recorded message.

Display who is currently speaking

This feature would be very nice, though admittedly it would take some real technology, not just more integration. Still, it's value would not be insignificant--it can be very,very challenging in a large conference call to track the identity of the speaker.

Better security

Another thing that surprises me about all the corporations I have been at that use teleconferencing is the obliviousness to the gaping security hole. Since access codes NEVER change, anyone who gets one can join any call at any time. And given the lack of functionality, it can be very difficult to count and track all the beeps (not to mention, with quick-start calls, if the lurker is the first person in, they will be even harder to detect).

I would envision a layered security approach. There would be an option to provide a one-time URL for a given meeting. There would also be integration with network-based identity-management capability.

Bonus feature: for those occasions where the teleconference host won't be able to attend, instead of having to hand out one's standard host access code to a delegate, the ability to generate a one-time access code.

Conference Initiated But On Hold

I have worked in many different companies, and they all suffer, in varying degrees, from the problem of arriving late to meetings. To address this problem, the software needs to allow the conference to be initiatied but placed on hold (this enhances personal productivity, since participants won't feel obliged to engage in small talk while inevitably waiting 5 minutes beyond the appointed meeting time to have a quorum of participants available). The way this differs from current technology is that the leader, and even the participants, will have visibility to who has called in. That way, the leader can determine when a quorum has been reached, and at that point can take everybody off hold and into conference.

As a bonus, participants have the option to "break hold", if they want to talk as a subset. The key point is that everybody knows who is on the call, even if they haven't broken in to introduce themselves, as would be necessary with the current technology.

Auto disconnect web conferencing when done

A security problem I have noticed with web conferencing is that it is easy to forget to disconnect. Integrated software could have pop-up reminders, initiated when the participant terminates the call, if they are still logged in as a presenter on the web conference.

Icing On the Cake

Of course, a modern, integrated conferencing system would not have stupid anti-features, such as:

• Inadvertently and embarassingly subjecting the rest of the teleconference to music when you put them on hold to take another incoming call.
• Hanging up when you mean to take yourself off mute (inadvertent hang-up being an anti-feature of almost all current telephones)

Farther Into the Future

• Development of an applet for mobile phones that provides most or all of the above features.
• The development of full "telepresence".

CONCLUSION

The current state of teleconferencing reminds me of the state of web search or webmail before Google jumped in: minimally adequate, but long neglected, ripe for innovation and integration. In the short-term, it seems like some of the features I envision would require a highly integrated corporate PBX. In the long term, I hope they could be achieved via off-the-shelf handsets, or at a minimum, via standard cell phones.

Has Google Conquered Spam?

I switched to Gmail a couple of years ago, and have been consistently amazed at how good their spam-filtering is. I get very, very, very few false negatives, and as far as I can tell, nearly zero false positives. I've gotten so complacent, I have pretty much stopped thinking about spam. And it seems like I hear a lot less complaining about it.

Ports in Front!

PC Mag: "Even in this age of enlightened computing, there are still too many connectors on the back of a desktop PC. The Sunbeam 20 in 1 Superior Panel lets you transfer to the front of your machine just about all of those ports, some of which you didn't even know were an option. It's an all-in-one audio/video I/O panel, a memory card reader, and a fan controller—at an exceptional price." Why the heck don't they make this standard! I so detest having to lean over and fiddle to find the port I am looking for.

True-to-Life Movies

It could be my imagination, but it seems like there have been a high number of good movies based very closely on true-life stories. Many of them are sports movies, others are historical. I have truth-squadded many of them afterwards, and have been shocked how historically accurate they have been. In fact, in many cases, had they not been factually-based, I would have criticized elements for being too implausible.

Anyway, it would be nice if there were a website "Truth-squadding the movies".

Movies that I am thinking of:

• Charlie Wilson's war (I haven't fully researched this one yet)
• The Greatest Game Every Played
• Glory Road
• Amazing Grace
• The Natural (haven't researched in detail)
• and a bunch of others I can't recall at the moment.

Innumeracy Watch: Dumb to Focus on Sports Contract Totals

I think it is so dumb when a newspaper article will talk about so-and-so-jock's $48 million dollar contract. Hello, people, we need a little context. Is that $48 million for one year? For 6 years? It does make a difference.

It looks like LinkedIn now forces your emails to go through them

I'm really not impressed--the features they are adding are the wrong features! You used to be able to email your contacts from their site. I have been thinking of LinkedIn as a replacement for keeping casual contacts email addresses in Outlook, but now I'm not so sure. What's the next step--only being able to send emails to your own contacts if you have an "enhanced" membership?

Not hard to see why a lot of people think Facebook is going to eat LinkedIn's lunch.