Health Care

Whatever your believe on the health care debate – you owe it to ourself to watch this:

The text is here. I don’t know if it is as compelling as the video.

I watch it and my blood boils at the damage and destruction to reasonable discourse resulting from the “death panel” comments that Sarah Palin and others made. This is fundamentally why I’ll never vote republican again at the national level as long as people like her, and other obstructionists purely in it for their own gain are anywhere near the GOP. I don’t know that the democrats are all that much better in many areas, but right here in this one, the activities of the republicans are completely shameful.

Pass the damn bill. No it’s not perfect, nothing ever is, but we have to start making steps for health and insurance reform. Pass the damn bill.

Shenanigans

I honestly haven’t the foggiest what’s going on with the w3c HTML working group and HTML5. I don’t read their mailing list (that is, the public one – apparently there’s some private one too).

However, I do follow the blogs and the twitters of a lot of the people who are heavily involved in this process though – so I see all these random, obscurest, glimpses of it. I have no idea who the “good guys” are and the “bad guys” are. I’ll see comments and links from multiple of the participants that seem to trigger one value that I have in software or another.

But as a complete and total outsider, not altogether unknowledgeable of the subject matter, but altogether completely ignorant of the personalities and the the process of it all, all I can say is this:

Dear W3C: You are starting to make Congress look good.

Anyone want to start a prediction market on whether we’ll see Health Care Reform or HTML5 first?

You know what today needed?

More Higgins.

Needs More Higgins is the new Needs More Cowbell.

( thanks to Rich Phelps for my new catch phrase. Everyone needs a catch phrase.. )

Re: iPad

I’m concerned too.

There’s not one line of Mark Pilgrim’s Tinkerer’s sunset that I disagree with. I respect Mark a tremendous amount. But I think my concern is less about the sunset for the tinkerers. Though Mark’s lament really is less about the general sunset and more about the sunset in Cupertino.

Tinkerers will tinker.

I think I’m more concerned we’ll see the intellectual equivalents of the App Store reviewers use increased controls in the operating system to do whatever control freaks do. But I remember then that they already do in most IT environments.

I’m Mark’s age. But my background is, and certainly my abilities are, different.

In third grade I went to Fuller Magnet School in Raleigh – seeing my first computer ever – and having a chance that few lower-middle class kids from the rural suburbs had then – and few chances that they have today. I had electives, I was able to take a computer class. I learned LOGO on Apple II’s – and then BASIC.

“Learn” is a misnomer. I used it. I don’t know if I was taught loops or not, I don’t think so, but I don’t remember, but even if I was, I’m not sure in third grade I could have understood them. So I wrote hundreds of repetitive “Plot” statements – I stayed late after school waiting for my mom to come pick me up – the buses didn’t run from Raleigh to rural Garner where I commuted to the school – to print out “NC State #1″ on the screen. Most of my classmates gave up long before I did in that pre-Ritalin era. But there I was, plugging away, line after line after line.

My first computer I had at home was a Timex Sinclair 1500 I think it had BASIC too, but I don’t think I understood that. Instead I spent hours loading Frogger from cassette tape, waiting for 5+ minutes for it to load, and then eventually crash, at which I’d load it again, lather, rinse, repeat. My friends usually gave up on it, and went down the street to play on the Commodore 64 – that had cartridges and better graphics.

I ended up getting a “Sharp Scientific Calculator” – a luxury that very few kids had in the rural schools I went back to when the commute to downtown wasn’t working out so well. In my pre-algebra and pre-geometry years I didn’t have a clue what any of the functions on it meant. But I learned I could type line after line after line of Print statements in the tiny one-line screen – which I did, using the attached 2.5 in thermal printer to plot out ascii graphics. And when I got the spaces off, I’d go back and retype all the lines again, lather, rinse, repeat.

My schools didn’t have any computers, not for the kids at least. I didn’t touch computers again until, as an alternate to the Math program at the NC Governor’s School in 1990 – I got to try out “Assembly Language” and “Pascal” I remember vaguely that I had classmates like Mark, kids that I was awed of that parlayed hard work, opportunity, and brilliance into becoming programming contest winners light years beyond me. And it’s safe to say that I had opportunities to that point – and that tenacity – that put me light years ahead of the kids back home.

The rest, well, with my first “real computer” – is history – 19 years of computing support, system administration, and even software programming – 19 years of using multiple computer platforms and a handful of languages, shooting myself in the foot with every last one of them, and fixing the mess. 19 years of helping others to do the same. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I worry about Apple. I can understand Richard Stallman’s dystopic vision. I fear that too.

Here’s the hope. That OS, that hardware, is paradoxically more accessible to far more people than most things that have come before it. The tinkerers will tinker, but the general population – even the academic population – does not. They won’t even lather, rinse, repeat. 19 years of supporting them has shown me that.

In spite of my freedoms being limited, in spite of the DRM, in spite of the restrictions, in spite of my own hypocrisy – my iPhone is the greatest computer I’ve ever owned – much better than that Timex Sinclair, much better than that Sharp, much better than that Emerson. Even better than that PowerPC 6100AV. I don’t miss the 10,000 lines of Plot X,Y. Maybe I should, but I just want the damn thing to work. And while I can write Objective-C programs – I don’t.

And neither do most. But they use the iPhone and the iPod Touch. They use it like they’ve never used any computer before it. It’s their window into the freedom0-powered web that enables them to connect to each other in ways – similar to the ways they always have in their local communities – but in wider ways in the larger world. It’s letting those that never could connect well within the local community – kids like me that were spending hundreds of hours on thousand of plot lines – to connect too.

I don’t want to settle for mediocrity. I don’t want to give up freedoms to gain them. But these devices – and more – that web – are bringing down command-and-control IT overlords in the process.

The iPad is going to do that. And more. It’s going to change computing. It’s going to screw some and vastly enable others. Just like every platform has before it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don’t welcome my Apple overlords. But I welcome the change, at least for now.

Dear NC Congressional Democratic Candidates

I’m not a one issue voter by any stretch of the imagination. But one issue that I’m most likely to actually speak up about is Network Neutrality. It’s one of a few issues that I could claim some amount of in-depth understanding about – and it’s one of the issues that I look for in any candidate for Congressional office (and it was one of two issues that first attracted me to the candidacy of President Obama – well before the Republicans completely lost any semblance of rational behavior and put Palin on their ticket and firmly nailed that coffin for my vote).

Richard Burr is one of the top recipients of telephone utility PAC money – and added his signature to a letter (PDF) (source: Cecilia Kang’s Washing Post column) on October 13th, 2009 to the FCC from GOP Senators expressing “fear” that the pro-Network Neutrality position that the FCC took in September 21, 2009 speech were “counterproductive and risk harming the great advancements in broadband speed and deployment that we have witnessed in recent years and will limit the freedom of the Internet.”

(p.s. Dear Senators – can you actually, you know, put your names in plain text on these letters? Some of you have absolutely unreadable signatures. To verify for myself that Burr signed the letter – I had to go through list of official statements and find another letter authored directly by Senator Burr and compare signatures.)

So, I think – it’s likely safe to say what position Senator Burr will take. It’s very definitely safe to say that I’m in opposition to Burr’s likely position.

So what about the Democrats? Well honestly, I have no idea.

Both Ken Lewis and Elaine Marshall have followed me in twitter – most likely because they are trying to follow folks in the region that follow President Obama’s twitter account – or some other NC Dem list of twitter accounts. Who knows. I seriously doubt they are going to get anything out of my twitter account that guides them to the thinking of their constituency.

But hey, the more the merrier, at least they aren’t following me because they think I front Owl City.

But I really wish that the campaigns would actually get a clue about Twitter and social media. When one of your constituents asks you a question in Twitter – say, I don’t know, Network Neutrality (p.s. Ken, your twitter “handle” was so much nicer, approachable and “human” when it was KennethWLewis).

Here’s the first clue: answer them back. It will take your campaign a few seconds. And I realize that your staff is pretty busy and probably already overwhelmed – but this is a substantive question – it’s a way to stake a position – or just engender goodwill. You don’t know me from Adam, maybe I’m a likely contributor, maybe I’m a likely volunteer. What I am – if I’m using the medium to ask you – is someone comfortable in it and most likely to echo and amplify your answers with others.

I’m not naive enough to believe you’ve actually developed a position on the matter. Your campaigns are likely just still developing your market and party tested sound bites on health care, immigration, national security, the economy. But you don’t need it. Here’s all you need: “@jasonadamyoung – thanks for the question – we’ve been focused on starting up our campaign so far – tell us what you think about it” You know what – you can use that, free of charge. Use a service like CoTweet to help spread the paste load among several of your staff.

Be human, answer questions, respond to folks. Don’t treat things like “Twitter” as a checkbox on your list to what a campaign needs – it’s not any different than having a ham biscuit on saturday morning in the country store in the myriad communities that make North Carolina great – have your ham biscuit with me and 1,000 other of your constituents in Twitter.

Either use or lose it folks – that’s your free “new media” advice of the day.

I write long emails and I cannot lie

True story. I wanted to be a writer when I was in high school. Actually, that’s not true, I wanted to be a chemical engineer. But I was going to make a side career out of writing. I was all about the art of it. Ok, mostly I was all about the appearance of the art of it. I was in plays in high school too, not because I was a good actor, actually I was really pretty bad, but I could memorize lines like you wouldn’t believe. I hung out with all the actor people, and I remember going with a group of folks to see The Doors and coming out of Mission Valley Cinemas on the way to whatever restaurant was there (Rock-Ola I think), yelling at the top of my lungs, inspired by all things weird and Jim Morrison, “I AM GOING TO WRITE A [CENSORED] BOOK”

Mostly that just served to have my friends kind of speed up and look around to make see who was watching and for Amanda to tell me to shut up.

And one of the most exciting moments in my life, you know, one of those moments where you go running through the hall in arm-pumping exultative (yes, I know it’s not a word) YES YES YES frenzy when I managed to land a column in NCSU’s student newspaper, writing things that were almost, but not quite funny

Thankfully I had discovered computers, and I really disliked my college lit courses, and well, the rest is history. I did marry an english major and copy editor though. (and for the record I just asked her “exultative is not a word is it?” “No dear.” “Well, I’m going to make it one” “Ok dear, you do that”)

In case you are wondering if this has a point, well yes. And the point is this. I am not a writer. Clearly this is obvious.

But I have things to say. Clearly this is debatable. But let’s humor me for a moment.

And because I’m not a writer and I have things to say, I write incredibly long, rambly, parenthetically filled emails.

You know, one of the proudest moment in my life – well maybe the most amusing moments – was when I wrote this awesome email about the tyranny of dealing with Powerpoint. A faculty member in the communications department that puts together documentary films said of my email “it was like a jazz riff with words”

This should immediately harken you back to Jerry Macguire

“This… is Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Stockholm. 1963… two masters of freedom, playing in a time before their art was corrupted by a zillion cocktail lounge performers who destroyed the legacy of the only American art form — jazz. “

Where was I? Oh yes, I’m sick and freaking tired of the long, rambly, parenthetically inclined email writers catching such a bad rap. Now, I realize it’s the hip thing to do these days to pick on the long email writers. It’s incredibly easy to do too. “Oh whine, I get soooo much email, it’s just information overload, I don’t know how I’ll ever get through it all. These long email writers are just so selfish. They don’t respect my time. OMG, Jay has written another one”

Horsewaddled bollywocks (no, I don’t know what that means either, but it sounded good). You know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of you asking me the same damn question for the fourth time – when I clearly addressed it in Paragraph 7, in the fourth clause of the second sentence on May 11, 2008. And again in Paragraph 4 on December 17. And yet again on the second page of that system update email on July 17.

And that idea that you think is so fabulous? I addressed that too, in my note on March 4, 2007. That was in the second paragraph even. And I gave you a half dozen reasons in one long run-on sentence of why it was complete crap then, and you can bet your sweet bippy it’s still complete crap now.

And I bet you are now thinking to yourself. “Hmmmm…. Jay is sending me up isn’t he?” No, I’m basking in metaphorical, long parenthetical self-immolating glory and I like it

Look, I’ve read Edward Tufte, I know the danger of information density. I also know the danger of a set of summary bullet points. See, Life is not a powerpoint slide. It’s a rich cornucopia of story and metaphor and side commentary

Here’s the deal. It’s my fervent desire that you have all the information you need to understand and make decisions. I want you to know how the things work. I want you to understand what I understand. And to know what I don’t know. To know my bias. To know your bias. To have the full flavor and story in all it’s technicolor glory. You need the wheat and the chaff. Is that selfish? Of course it is. But it’s not because I want to be some know-it-all blowhard. By telling you everything I know and most importantly, everything I don’t know, you got what you need. Of course, you might not need it now. But you’ll need it sometime.

Of course, it may not be what you want.

But you can’t always get what you want. I wanted to be a writer, you know?

So when I write those long, parenthetical, ridiculously rambly emails? Cut me some slack.

I want you to have information and have it to full Like a jazz riff, but with words.

Hey Adobe, Somebody give the Photoshop.com folks a hand

I’m a big fan of John Nack’s blog and I’m rather fond of Adobe, most days. They merited a shout out on the blog earlier in the year. And I really, really, really dig Lightroom

So I wanted to check out the root of blogs.adobe.com tonight – and much to my surprise I see this:

That’s weird. That looks like, um, Microsoft Word garbage.

Uggg. That is Microsoft Word garbage.

Photoshop.com and the iPhone app look cool – somebody at Adobe – can you give them a little hand with the web?

More bars, at least in the house

My wife and I had been cell-phone only for quite some time both before we were married and after. Then we moved to a more rural part of the triangle, and switched to AT&T wireless and found ourselves in quite the cell-hole. Especially in summer when the leaves on the trees came in.

After weighing the options at the time (Vonage, Time Warner Digital Phone, or Embarq Plain-Old-Telephone Service) – we ended up going with Embarq for a variety of reasons, just hoping for the day that AT&T might have another tower or two out here. It’s not that we disliked Embarq (though I could list several annoyances I had with them) – it’s just that it wasn’t worth $60 a month to have local+long distance service for a phone we didn’t use all that much, but needed it when we needed it.

That day never came. But the day has finally come that you can put a tower inside the house.

Raleigh is thankfully one of the first test markets for the roll out of the AT&T MicroCell device – which I didn’t know until yesterday, I thought it was only in Charlotte. But after checking AT&T’s site again, my zipcode was an availability hit, and within 15 minutes I was out the door to my local AT&T store to buy the device.

The AT&T MicroCell is a AT&T and Cisco branded device that piggybacks on your home broadband and advertises a 3G signal to authorized devices. You buy the device $162 (incl. NC’s 7.75% sales tax) and you either use your existing plan minutes against it, or pay $20/month for unlimited minutes with the device (unless you have AT&T broadband, where the “unlimited minutes” using the device are cheaper per month). If you do sign up for monthly charges, there are subsidies for buying the device.

It honestly (perhaps surprisingly?) was incredibly simple to setup. You plug it into an open ethernet port on your existing home router using (or stick it between your Cable/DSL modem and your computer if you don’t use a router or between your modem and access point if you just use a single port Wireless Access Point/Router) wait up to an hour and half to update and initialize itself (that seems like an incredibly long initialization time to me, but hey, I’m impatient with new technology) – and you’ll eventually get an SMS message that it’s ready to go:

Note the network signature, and the (5!) bars:

So, $162 later, and I can now use my cell phones again in the house – and also importantly have reliable SMS for notifications (and I’m guessing more reliable visual voicemail on the iPhone) Call quality seems perfectly acceptable. There’s E911 location and from the address on file with AT&T (and there’s GPS on it, which I guess transmits to more modern E911 systems, I’m not up on their technology). It piggybacks on my super-reliable Time Warner broadband – which Vonage would do, as well as Time Warner’s Phone Service (well, Time Warner might reserve some bandwidth for the phone service, I’m not sure). But there’s no additional monthly charges on top of what I’m already paying AT&T for cell service – where we have lots and lots of minutes to spare. (And my $30/year outbound Skype service is what I use for conference calls already)

The drawbacks? No service when the power goes and the UPS runs out. And getting rid of the phone line means I can’t send the occasional fax anymore if I need to (without signing up for one of the email-to-fax gateways). But that’s perfectly okay – my feelings on fax machines are best reserved for Office space scenes

AT&T’s MicroCell – very highly recommended (so far). I haven’t been this excited about giving a telecomm money in, well, forever.

How to avoid almost everything

This is the second version of this post, I pulled the first off the net earlier this week because I really wasn’t satisfied with it. I wrote the first out of frustration, and that never works well for me

It started with my own hyperbolic metaphor:

Guess what people? According to Maciej Ceglowski and according to John Gruber, you should never own a car if you don’t want to be in an accident.

Because I was frustrated about this hyperbole from Maciej:

If you listen to the WordPress people, the answer to this is ‘be extremely zealous about updating your software’, which is the same as saying, devote half your life to learning and understanding WordPress administration.

I think I’m frustrated with the hyperbole because I hear this kind of thing all the time, and for a peer technologist to pervade the myth that being responsible with software is going to cause a significant investment in time or that the only way to protect yourself is not run the software in the first place? That’s frustrating. But we technologists, we like the hyperbole.

There are two core points I think: keeping your software upgraded (well at least most software upgraded, and that includes basically everything short of things like SAP and Peoplesoft) does not require you to spend “half your life” You do maintenance on your cars, you do maintenance on your house, you just do these things. If you don’t, and sometimes we don’t, then things change over time, the externalities cause things to break. You just hope that the software is updated, or hopefully it’s licensed in a way that you can find somebody that can update it for you if you can’t.

It takes some upfront responsibility and education to understand what you are doing, and it takes some ongoing responsibility to stay on top of things. That’s just what responsible people do. You run software update for your OS. You keep your apps updated when folks fix flaws and bugs. You update your web software when it needs it.

There are some that won’t make that investment. I think it would be foolish to say they “can’t” As my grandfather used to say “can’t never could do anything”. Anybody can do it, just like I can change my own oil. But I don’t, because it’s not worth that investment for me. For others, maybe it’s not worth the investment to run your own software. In that case, it’s fine, let somebody do it.

But you can do it. You just have to want to. And don’t listen to the suggestion of anyone that tells you not to do it if you do want it. Because it’s not that hard.

Software has values

In light of things I’ve said before and hope to be presenting more on later this year – I want to highlight a tweet from Mark Pilgrim yesterday

“Oh, the publisher made them do it.” Bzzt. Code doesn’t just appear. Amazon DESIGNED the Kindle’s remote wipe. Someone coded it & tested it.

This is in reference to Amazon removing paid-for copies of 1984 from Kindles

Whatever the eventual debate about that will turn out to be. This is where software embodies a set of values, and the software developers code those values.

Was it a cool problem to solve to figure out how to issue a command to delete content off customer kindles? I bet. Heck, I’d be totally interested in the protocol and software design of that.

But the truth of the matter for my colleagues – and the companies in which you work – just because you can, does not mean you do.