Get it while it’s hot!

Not Fox News. Not the evangelical movement.

You.

Period.

Call Fox News and the evangelical movement “enablers” (I have not been through any kind of therapy but the term comes up enough for me to pick up the general meaning). But even I have enough sense to tell that the fact that I’ve been bombarded with this woman’s presence for far too long; to me, she’s like Kate from John and Kate + Eight. People who have a need to be in the spotlight, and don’t give a flying fcuk about the costs to anyone around them–and the children are a major part of that.

Palin doesn’t give a flying fuck about the state of the United States. She cares about Sarah Palin. Period. She cares about the sales, and the attraction of others that will create new sales, of anything that requires her presence. She cares about the funding to do what she might like to do later on.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have an issue with that…most of the time. I do have an issue with someone who is obviously not looking out for the common good when he or she does it.

Unfortunately, every time I hear either her or about her, all I can think of is the take-off on the Simpsons, based on the Music Man, of the Monorail. Watch the episode sometime, it’s instructive.

This is from a feed from the AP, and not a choice (usually) that Yahoo! makes. Can you spot the problem?

Let me tell you a story.

In the previous post, I mentioned that I finally took employment with my company (SitePen) partially because of the idea of benefits, the main one of which was health insurance. Now, I make a pretty good salary (and thank you again, SitePen) and so if I’d wanted to go with a private plan, outside of my employer, I probably could (unlike the majority of the people out there). But since part of the way America provides health care is via an employer, I don’t.

I should also mention at this point that I’m pretty healthy (regardless of what I do to myself), and rarely go to a doctor. In fact, I can’t stand the idea most of the time—mostly because every time I do, it results in a lot of headaches, paperwork, and general bullshit. So…back to the story.

About a year and a half ago, I decided that since I hadn’t been to a doctor since 2004 or so, I should probably go and at least get a physical. Our insurance is provided by The Principal, and if you hit that link you’ll see that they provide “a number of different services”, including 401K plans.

First thing to notice: the full name is “The Principal Financial Group“. Remember that. The insurance plan provided to our company (full of JavaScript gurus) is a financial group.

(Disclaimer here: this is not through bad decisions on the part of SitePen. When I first started, we were with Blue Cross/Blue Shield, who (through their “largess”) had a tendency to raise the rates on their group plans somewhere around 33% a year. 33%. Think about that for a minute, and then move on to the rest of the post.)

OK, so…having not seen a doctor in 5 years or so, I decided that now was a pretty good time (last summer, actually). So, being the good industrious person I am, I hit the Principal web site looking for an office which was part of their “network”. I made sure (looking closely at the insurance card provided) that I was looking in the right group, made very careful choices in their search, and found an office within walking distance that I thought I could trust.

So I made an appointment.

Said office was very helpful, very efficient, and had me in within a week. The nurse they set me up with (and wtf was up with that? I’m there for a physical; why am I being set up with a nurse—as nice and as efficient as she was—as opposed to someone with an actual M.D.?) was great. She did everything she needed, made some recommendations, and assured me that I’m not dying of cancer (or something else similar).

While I was there, I casually asked about what was available for helping me stop smoking; she gave some advice and prescribed the most common drug today (I won’t get into that, suffice it to say that the drug’s side effects were much worse than actually smoking, and I’m still dealing with some of those today).

Great. America’s health care in action, and since I’m one of the lucky ones, all is good.

Or so it seemed.

Fast forward to three months later. I get a bill for close to $400 for my visit to the nurse—something like $240 for the physical itself, and the rest for “consult on tobacco cessation services”. My first reaction was “are you kidding me? $240 for a fucking physical???”…second reaction was “wait a minute. Asking about quitting smoking was about a 3 minute conversation. $160 for a 3 minute conversation??? Plus the $140 or so for the drug that entirely fucked me up for a couple of months, which I had to stop for fear of committing suicide? Are you serious?”

What I found out was that the Principal (see link above, not doing it again) had decided that said office was “out of network” and therefore was not liable for any of the fees charged. Even though I’d found said office through a careful search via their own website.

Several calls and complaints to both the office in question and the Principal resulted in a lot of “um, I don’t know you’ll need to call X” and a lot of other bullshit that most of you reading this is probably very familiar with. In the end, I paid the bill and said fuck it—against the wishes of the people around me.

Let me remind you all again: this was all over a fucking 10 minute physical.

How many of you can either relate or top that experience? I bet you it’s a lot of you…and god forbid you have children.

…now, I don’t begrudge most of the medical staff a salary. They worked just as hard (if not harder) for their education than I did, and they have the disagreeable task of making a diagnosis that affects lives in a very succinct way. But like me and a lot of the people I work with, I’d guess that they don’t really know, in the entirety, what is being charged in their name; I’d imagine that their thought process works something like this:

• Why is this person here?
• Ok, we’ll check.
• Oh, there’s additional questions outside of the normal “why is this person here” routine?
• Ok, answered and duly noted.
• Have a nice day! Maybe you should hit our lab and get that cholesterol test too.

Actual fees involved? Likely to be at least aware but without knowing details.

Deep breath.

So why am I ranting? I think you, gentle reader, know the answer to this question but I’ll say it anyways: because a lot of interests in this country want you to think this a good thing. To which I say: really? Strangling our businesses with double-digit rate increases per year, and then fucking over people anyways is a good thing? Really?

To those participating in the current lobbyist strategy of shouting down anyone with half-a-brain, I say to you: shut the fuck up. The current situation is untenable. General Motors, in many ways, went down because of prohibitive health care costs. This is a problem that needs to be addressed now.

(And don’t get me started on whoever is paying people on Medicare to say “keep your government hands off my Medicare”. The irony there is ridiculous in so many ways.)

I’ve long been a convinced admirer of Gruber’s philosophy that Apple is not in direct competition with Microsoft; instead, it is a direct competitor of hardware manufacturers such as Dell and HP. If you take that into account, everything Gruber says in this particular article makes a lot of sense.

But I think there’s more to it—or at least an important point must be made.

The fact of the matter is that it’s not just the hardware. True, Apple’s hardware is definitely of a better quality than the majority of the PCs (Windows-based or otherwise) out there. But the key here is that Apple’s computers are just a lot easier to use, and are a LOT more stable.

I think the bottom line here is that people will pay an extra $300 or so (taking the Dell laptop vs. the bottom Macbook one) if that extra $300 doesn’t cost them in terms of time, annoying anyone they know (whether friend or family) when something breaks under Windows, or having to re-install the entire system just because they made a minor mistake.

For Apple, I think the hardware is key. But I also think their attention to details—particularly when it comes to the OS and the included software—makes a huge difference.

How do I add a node to a document using the DOJO* Toolkit? Please help me!

…or something similar. While I can entirely appreciate the sentiment (i.e. I’m confused, can you give me a hand?), I’m also seeing a continuing trend—which is the idea that the major libraries out there (Dojo, JQuery, MooTools, Prototype, etc.) have been written so that you don’t have to learn the whole concept of the DOM + JavaScript bindings.

That’s not right.

If you are one of those people who are just getting your toes wet in the whole concept of “using the browser as an application platform”, there’s one rule I’d recommend you write down and sleep with for a week on your pillow: the libraries that are out there are not designed to replace, but to augment.

In other words, you’re not going to get very far if you don’t have a basic grasp of things like node.appendChild, document.getElementById, node.getAttribute, etc. If you don’t have a basic understanding of how the Document Object Model (i.e. DOM) works, you’re not going to get very far.

This is not to say that you have to have a truly comprehensive understanding. There are plenty of tasks out there (such as “how do I check that a value of an input field meets certain criteria”) that don’t require a lot of in-depth learning. But the idea that you can slap a dijit ContentPane into a document as if you’re working with a separate window object (i.e. an iframe element) and then wonder why things don’t work as planned—with little to no knowledge of how a browser interprets markup for your manipulation—is like expecting, for the first time, to sit behind the steering wheel of a car and be able to race in a Grand Tourismo, without knowing that the long pedal is the one that makes the car go, and the small pedal is the one that’s going to save your ass because it stops the damn car in the first place.

In other words, you have to have at least a basic understanding of how JavaScript can interact with a document.

If you don’t, I’d suggest you at least try to look around before making a lot of noise on forums, mailing lists, Google Groups or whatever.

Bear in mind that I’m fully aware that many have been given directives with little-to-no-time to try to figure things out. Trust me on this one—just a little bit of research will save you a lot of time (in business terms, resources and budget) in the long run.

* As a side note: it’s not DOJO, it’s “Dojo”. As the person that designed the first two iterations of the logo for the Dojo Toolkit—and being one of the first involved, as well as having a major influence due to my own f(m) toolkit, from way back when—it drives me NUTS when people call it that. It’s like you’re shouting the name back at us.

Please stop =)

A long time ago (close to 10 years at this point), I was part of an experimental band in Minneapolis called Mickey Mao. We had our roots in some of the work I used to do for the Minnesota Contemporary Ensemble (renamed the Intergalatic Contempory Ensemble and basically defunct since 2001 or so), and it was a lot of fun.

The basic idea behind it to combine bass (me) and drums with a “modified” sax and computer, and see where it went. By “modified”, I mean my friend Bob Schrepel drilled a hole in his mouthpiece, mounted a small microphone and ran it through a Boss guitar pedal rig; the computer aspect of it was my friend Jason Swain, who would rip samples (found primarily by scouring old record stores for some of the worst things ever printed to vinyl and by recording audio from the UHF channels, AM and shortwave radio) and then mix them live using Sound Forge 3 (ah, those were the days!) in place of lead vocals.

Considering we started this in 1997 or so, I’m kind of feeling like we were some sort of visionaries—today it’s pretty common to be using a computer live for performance, but back then it was pretty rare and not very well done.

We only did two gigs (a show at the Walker Art Center under the moniker of the Minnesota Contemporary Ensemble, where we did a complete deconstruction of When Elephants Fly from Dumbo and earned some pretty strong anger from the staff at the Walker, and a full-on show at the Weisman Art Museum with the now-defunct Own), but we had a shit-ton of fun doing it.

Right now I’m considering the idea of starting up another side-side music project (as opposed to my band Morning Society), where I can go play my fretless and do things that would never pass muster in front of a live audience…so I went back and ripped the original live demo Mickey Mao did. After some noise reduction and a very, very quick mastering, I present to you the originals from Mickey Mao:

1. dial R for Redrum
2. he’s the man
3. this land is your land
4. jesus god

(Yes, the lowercase is intentional.)

Bear in mind that these are all live recordings (in our makeshift studio), and have been remastered off a cassette tape that has had a lot of playings; you’ll definitely hear it in this land is your land (tape cuts out a little near the beginning).

I kind of wish we were still doing what we’re doing but as with any project, people tend to evolve and we basically stopped playing by 2001. Still, I think it’s pretty cool stuff and figured it needs a listen. =)

Seriously. Sick to my stomach.

I just watched the majority of the VP debate on CNN HD. I can’t begin to express how pissed I am about it; the myriad of assumptions by both parties and by the media is just….astounding. ASTOUNDING.

Where to begin?

OK. CNN. The ENTIRE debate, on HD (don’t know about the non-HD channel) had a huge amount of chart junk on the left and right sides of the screen, with “faux” pie charts representing obviously partisan commentators from CNN rating the performance of each candidate in a way that was absolutely confusing and frankly spurious.

I really wish I had a screenshot, maybe someone will come up with one.

That info had NOTHING (and I mean NOTHING) to do with debate and had everything to do with a CNN “value-add”. It did NOTHING for the country and was more than likely (based on all the work I’ve done in this particular field in the past 6 years) more than deceptive. It distracted from the actual content (basic HCI principles).

On top of this, they ran some sort of “undecided Ohio voter” thing, as an updating line chart, in REAL TIME. My question: where did they get that data, when did they get that data, and why did they do that during an actual debate?

I can tell you, having been a developer on a number of data visualization projects, particularly in real time, that THAT DATA WAS MORE THAN LIKELY FAKE. This is coming from the original developer of the first Charting engine that did not require a specific tech other than a browser, which was developed to monitor data in real time a massive data server.

NO REAL TIME DATA IS THAT REAL TIME.

Period. Trust me on this one. Various NDAs prevent me from giving you proof but I think most of my work stands on it’s own.

Look…Palin scares the shit out of me. She is the embodiment of “Not In My Backyard”, and that is NOT where we need to be as a nation. But the “analysis” at this point is so bad, and bought by so many, that frankly I think we’re screwed as a nation.

What I want…and I DEMAND…is something that lets me, an intelligent person, judge things on my own without the infomercial shit in order to watch a specific channel. I get that you want viewers but this is OUR COUNTRY you’re taking about.

OUR COUNTRY.

Think about that. Then think that maybe, just maybe, sometimes (ok most of the time) you are selfish pricks that don’t give a rats’ ass about the country that allows you to do what you do, and instead are willing to slap up things in front of most people that are mostly irrelevant but have pretty colors.

Jon Stewart was right, when he showed up on Crossfire. Just stop. Please just stop. You hurt the country and at this point all I can think of, when I think of you, is the greed epitomized in the movie “Wall Street”.

Basically I got SVG Fonts working with dojox.gfx so that you can have your own custom typography on your web pages without having to resort to a plug-in or a proprietary tech.

(Gives himself a pat on the back. )