b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Tracking The Loss of Private Data
What Are The Risks of Letting Others Write In Your Space
Why You Need To Be As Smart As Your Doctor
Steve Hannaford Tells Us Why Chrysler is Dead
Denim Site Sketching: Free-form Web Design
Netgear FVS124G and Vonage
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
We, The People will Get $18 Billion Healthcare Bill
In his Business column in today's Wall Street Journal [subscription required] Alan Murray reports:American taxpayers should keep a close eye on the health-care hot potato being tossed aside by DaimlerChrysler AG. Some day, it could end up in their laps.Yes, it's you and me that will get to pay for Daimler's incompetence and ineptitude. Oh, Murray also says Barack Obama is promising to pickup a portion of healthcare costs for all automakers. Another great Democratic strategy - don't actually fix the problem, just get the government to pay for it. I'm shocked! Shocked, I say.
Daimler's plan to give control of its Chrysler subsidiary to Cerberus Capital Management is motivated in no small part by its desire to offload the $18 billion in health benefits Chrysler eventually will owe to United Auto Worker retirees.
That's a big reason why the German company was willing to agree to spend $650 million to make the deal happen.
Tracking The Loss of Private Data
If you're interested in the subject of data breeches, data loss, and mishandling of private information you might want to have a look at etiolated.org.
Site features real-time graphs, statistics, and searchable full-text database of company names, event summaries, and comments. Thanks to my friend Al Macintyre.
Terry Frazier at 8:23 AM
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Tuesday, May 15, 2007
What Are The Risks of Letting Others Write In Your Space
In the last couple of weeks I had someone come on this site and post, via anonymous comments, a series of diatribes that were a serious attack on another individual and company. The information was detailed but utterly unsubstantiated. The tone was extremely angry. The allegations ranged from deception to outright fraud. I also did a little IP address tracing and determined that the person had gone to some lengths to hide their address.Within a matter of hours I contacted people who knew something about the companies and person involved, cogitated on what to do, and decided to remove all posts from that individual. I did so without compunction and didn't think anything else about it. I don't normally remove comments, in fact that was only the second time in the four five years I've had this site. But I guess this kind of thing is going to become more common and we're being forced to deal with it. [More...]
Terry Frazier at 10:55 PM
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Why You Need To Be As Smart As Your Doctor
In August of last year a 43-year-old woman undergoing chemotherapy treatment for nasal cancer died after receiving a massive overdose of the chemotherapy drug flourouacil. According to an Incident Report (pdf) issued by the Institute of Safe Medicine Practices Canada the dose was miscalculated by two different nurses and incorrectly programmed into an electronically-controlled pump. The woman was then sent home, where the pump poured four (4) days worth of drug into her in four (4) hours. [More...]
Terry Frazier at 2:38 PM
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Steve Hannaford Tells Us Why Chrysler is Dead
The US auto industry is in turmoil - rising gas prices, changing buyer
tastes, stiffer environmental laws, and massive labor costs, among
other things - have cost US automakers tens of billions in losses in
recent years. And now the pompous jackasses at Daimler-Benz have killed
Chrysler. It's bad enough that my beloved IBM ThinkPads have been sold
to Lenovo - I can't even imagine buying a Chinese-made Jeep! Chrysler
was in trouble when Daimler bought them in 1998, but the Germans were
supposed to make it better, not spend $40 billion to make it worse.
[More...]
Terry Frazier at 9:00 AM
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Denim Site Sketching: Free-form Web Design
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new site design for a client – InterviewRX.com. We actually have the structure and information architecture pretty well mapped out and are focusing on look and feel, but this type of tool could still come in handy. Even though I am not a designer I’ve taken to creating my own mockups over the years because I find starting from ground zero with a designer to be incredibly frustrating and expensive – it just takes forever for a designer, even a good one, to figure out what you want if you can’t draw at least a basic picture of it yourself. So now I create a fairly complete mockup and then have a designer polish it. That works out much better for me.
But even though I’m getting better at it, I still go through lots of iterations – especially in basic information architecture. Something like Denim could come in handy. I like the mindmap-style sketch interface – seems to me the two are quite similar. I’ll be trying it out later this week. Hat tip to Jim McGee:
Web Design Tool: Denim Site Sketching
When you are making websites, inevitably some form of sketching will be done to rough out it’s design and interactivity.
Whether you’re the web designer or someone trying to communicate your ideas to a web designer, this little piece of software, called Denim, will come in handy.
What Denim does is allow you to create a mock website, with linking pages, just from your rough sketches. Obviously, this will work particularly well with a tablet interface.
Supports Windows, Mac and Unix.
Denim by the University Of Washington
Terry Frazier at 8:21 AM
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Monday, May 14, 2007
Netgear FVS124G and Vonage
A few weeks ago I reported that I had purchased a new firewall, a Netgear FVS124G. I was enthusiastic about it at first but, like most technology, the teething problems showed up rather quickly. Between then and now I've been dealing with technology at a level that I no longer enjoy. But it does appear that, with the help of people at the Vonage Forum, the Netgear Support Forum, and Netgear tech support I have managed to get most things working correctly. [More...]
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