Idea: No Health Insurance = Lower Priced Healthcare

I was bullshitting with some people at a party the other night and we got on the topic of healthcare / health insurance. I was thinking about the economics of the situation and it hit me: if we get rid of health insurance, healthcare prices have to come down. If people can’t afford health care, and the government doesn’t step in and pay for it, doctors will have to charge rates that people can afford.

Of course, getting that implemented is the political-economical issue I have the luxury of not having  to worry about coming up with.

Fuel

Please tell me I’m not the only person in the world that FEELS code. That I’m not the only person that feels like a powerful piece of code becomes something of its own when given life by people using it. That I’m not the only person that feels like code on a page is design whose aesthetic speaks volumes about its quality. Please tell me I’m not the only person in the world that about once a month thinks they should quit their job(s), pay the bills in advance, and pour themselves for three weeks into a project that they are so passionate about their heart physically reaches out for it.

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Seriously? This is Google’s auto-complete that shows the most likely queries based on what you’ve already typed. Essentially the results of your search query, if you were searching for a search query.

The top recommendation for “how do I” is seriously “how do I get my sister to sleep with me”. Nothing needs to be said about the incestuous since you already know. However, the pregnant line is worth mentioning. It looks like large portion of the Internet-browsing population is so young they don’t even understand how to get pregnant (or alternately, they are having trouble conceiving a child, which is much less likely).

Remind me, again: why do I work so hard to make things work online?

Designers are close to the users. They understand needs and behavior. Engineers are close to technology. They understand what’s possible.

Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 (M)

So I got this guy today (I love Amazon’s prime shipping rates; $7 for overnight, Saturday delivery). So far, so good. They actually removed a button from the video I saw on it — now it’s a single button to scan, and it turns off when you close the lid. Awesome.

We went through the filing cabinet and scanned anything important that we would really want to have in case of a fire. I’m dealing with Evernote’s 500MB a month policy, so we didn’t want to just go nuts. Ended up being about 60 documents, many of them (like tax returns) being 20+ pages.

The scanning speed was more than acceptable, and I didn’t once reach for the quality settings, so that’s all good. I didn’t punch the thing or proclaim I was going to send it back with a nasty note attached, also good. I’m quite happy with it, but it wasn’t without problem.

It jams up pretty bad on documents that have been folded “hot dog style”, and especially bad on documents that are lightweight or crinkly. It wouldn’t be much of a problem, but it moves the paper through so fast and these are documents you probably deem important, so the sheer speed at which it demolishes your TPS report is a bit daunting.

The OCR it comes with does a decent job, and makes it so you can highlight and copy text out of the resulting PDF. That’s nice, but it does take some time. Since I don’t really need that most of the time I just let Evernote take care of the OCR for search.

The auto-blank-page detection is iffy enough that I turned it off so it’s simplex scanning when I hit the scan button, or I can right click the manager and hit duplex scan for automatic mode. Not a bad sacrifice.

Auto-rotation leaves a lot to be desired. I’d say 30% of the time it messes up, meaning 30% of the time something was supposed to be rotated, it didn’t get rotated. It also erroneously rotates stuff occasionally, usually because it detected a single line of text going the other way.

The software is clumsy. It’s clearly designed (not graphics, but design, look it up) for Windows with heavy right-click usage and non-standard context menus on top of controls being used in the most awkward ways, but it hasn’t crashed on me and it always does the job. The interfacing with the scanner is really responsive, which is a giant positive point. And as a nice bonus surprise, the installation went without a hitch, no restarting required.

All said and done, this is a pricey piece of hardware. I can’t sit here and say that it was worth $420 to scan in 60 documents, but that’s not to say that it isn’t a good purchase. I think that the value of this guy is really going to be 3 months down the line when I’m freaking out about whether I have a particular receipt or copy of a contract. Since this is a device that’s fun and easy to use I’ll actually use it, and that’ll mean that important document will be waiting for me to find it, saving me a load of stress. Not to mention when tax time comes around next year and I have everything neatly organized and searchable.

If you’ve got the money, it’s an easy “Buy It”. Otherwise, it’s an excellent candidate for a birthday or Christmas list.

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The first roughly half of the graph is running a Dreamhost configured Apache on their PS offering. The second half is Dreamhost configured Lighttpd on the same PS with the same traffic levels.

Lighttpd fucking owns.

Open Letter to Netflix

Please pull your collective heads out of your collective asses and allow playing of videos with Google Chrome. It works fine if I spoof my user agent which I don’t want to have to do anymore. It’s bullshit to disable it on a browser that might be buggy – instead provide a message saying it’s buggy and might not work and I can proceed at my own risk.

Oh, and quit making it harder for me to call/email you…it just means I’m pissed off when I finally get your customer service representatives on the phone and makes them quit more often from getting yelled at all the damn time.

This is my typical YouTube experience. I swear I thought I was for net neutrality, but it appears it doesn’t matter — YouTube will remove itself from the game by serving up video at the approximate rate that a *dead* turtle crawls.

Job Interview Tests

The example code tests some of the quirkier attributes of JavaScript engine behavior. I’ve seen similar quizzes in the past, sometimes by people saying that they use it as a test during job interviews. I think doing so is both disrespectful to the candidate as well as generally useless. You don’t encounter this type of quirk every day, so making that the minimum to get a job is about as useful as asking flight attendant candidate to explain jet propulsion.

-via http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2010/01/26/answering-baranovskiys-javascript-quiz/

The plain truth is that if you don’t know the quirks of the languages you work in you’re bound to make more mistakes and be a weaker engineer. Those of us that care know this stuff, and it isn’t a burden, because we want to be the best we can be. I wish more employers would dish out harder questions during tests to weed out shitty candidates.

The flight attendent analogy is bunk. A pilot knowing the technical intricacies of the plane he’s flying is a much better analogy, and I think we can all agree that a pilot that knows his plane is quite preferable to one that doesn’t.

What my resumé lacks in bullshit titles my talents make up for tenfold.

This is really all I have to say to the people that talk about Apple’s market share. They make 70% the revenue that Microsoft does with 1/3 the employees and they still have room to grow (that 90% of that market they don’t have that you say is a bad thing). Where can Microsoft go in the personal computing market?

From a business-in-the-future perspective, Apple is whooping Microsoft’s ass.

Dear Threadless.com

Dear Threadless.com,

You got me with your support of the art community and $9 & $10 sale days. At first I was stoked – I was getting some great printed tees for a great price. When they arrived in the mail, I was every bit excited and wore them with pride. Once or twice, anyways.

See, that’s the problem. Though they fit great when I got them, they’ve since shrunk from adult smalls or mediums to child smalls. Now wearing them is likely to induce foul looks from the homophobic that do manage to creep into liberal Austin from the surrounding countryside. And that’s unfortunate because I really like the fact that the shirts aren’t too thin and aren’t cut to fit like a dress.

So please, start pre-shrinking your shirts. And please don’t give me that line about buying it a size large – that means the print is going to get all fudged up when the shirt shrinks but it doesn’t (talking about prints with large solid sections here).

Until then, I’ll have to find somewhere else to get my T-Shirts.

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For those of you convinced that it’s okay to use Internet Explorer still, this is what you’re missing.

In other words, don’t come sniveling to me when my website doesn’t work on your browser. You’re the asshole making my job harder while simultaneously making your experience less secure, slower, and less powerful.

Hell, even the German government is warning against the use of Internet Explorer.

Archive Mail in Apple Mail.app

I’ve been trying for the last few days to make managing my several email inboxes less time consuming and more productive. I don’t like forgetting to respond to an important email, I already have unsubscribed from newsletters and such I don’t want to hear from, and I’ve tried flagging important emails to come back to later.

I also have several mailboxes and rules to direct things like user payments (for my website) into them and mark them read so I have a receipt and don’t need to touch them manually, and I’ve turned off most Facebook email notifications, but it is not enough.

The Fix:

First, I created 3 mailboxes:

1. Crap Box: Newsletters, notifications, bank alerts, etc. Things that I still want to get emailed about but don’t need to have stick around and are not urgent (ie. I can read them at the end of the night or when I have time).
2. The Vault: Receipts, invoices, documents, passwords, etc. If I would keep a filed copy of it if it were printed, it goes in here. This gets it out of my inbox and in an easier to filter place.
3. Archive: If it doesn’t go anywhere else and it no longer needs action, it goes in the archive. This means I don’t have to see it anymore in my inbox so I can focus on what is still there.

To make it easier to “Archive” my mail like in Gmail I added a quick keyboard shortcut. I see a lot of people do this with AppleScript, but that’s just overkill. Instead, you can add it with System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Application Shortcuts → Add. Just type the name of the mailbox (assuming it’s unique) and give it a shortcut key combo. This works because you can use the menu to move an email to a mailbox (Message → Move To…).

Now everything in my inbox will be things I have to take action on, which makes it hard to forget about something (though I still need to go through 3,000+ emails in there and either delete, vault, or archive them).

GoDaddy is Entering Used Car Sales Market

I jest, but not because they aren’t suited for it. They refuse to make anything easy to do, hide behind layers of obscurity and pseudo-complexity, cram offer after deal after sale in my face the whole time I’m “shopping”, and guarantee to get me the best price out of anybody. It seems the only thing they have yet to stoop to is handing me the CarFax report for a domain that belongs to a similar car but not the one I’m buying.

I’ve been using them for years, but I’m really feeling like it’s time to switch. If after 5 years your site looks significantly worse and is more difficult to use than Myspace in a foreign language, well, you fucking fail, no matter how cheap your products are.