Sensible Approach to Healthcare Given Republican Filibuster – Small, Easy To Understand Legislation

So, now that Scott Brown has won in Massachusetts, the Republicans can filibuster anything and everything in the Senate. Obviously, this includes the current healthcare bill.

So what to do?

Let the Republicans filibuster? Sure. That’s an idea. Let them filibuster healthcare and Senate Democrats won’t put anything else on the agenda until they end their filibuster or the 2010 elections. If the latter, then the voters can decide whether they were happy with obstructionism or not. Obviously, this sort of “ballsy” move won’t happen.

But as Democrats with an *18* vote majority in the Senate and a commanding majority in the house, you need to start governing. Now!!

Most everyone believes the healthcare system needs reform. Well, here is what should be done:

Create small, separate bills w/ the following legislation:

1. No pre-existing conditional denial; no revoking insurance when a condition arises.
2. Guaranteed, subsidized catastrophic coverage to those out of work (i.e. taxpayer funded).
3. Cap on premiums/deductibles to avoid gouging high risk persons.
4. Ability to buy insurance from anywhere and port it to anywhere.
5. Guaranteed, subsidized twice yearly checkups and vaccinations for all Americans (i.e. taxpayer funded).

They would be simple and easy for anyone to understand. I would dare anyone, Republican or Democrat to vote against these. Because if they did, they would have to explain to their constituents why they voted against the person with diabetes who couldn’t get healthcare for insulin or the working Mom who was laid off and developed cancer and now cannot get insurance because she cannot afford it.

(The easiest thing to do would be to pass HR-676 from John Conyers which gurantees healthcare access to all. It is less than a 30 page bill. It is simple and to the point. But, obviously, for reasons that I cannot comprehend, that won’t be passed anytime soon)

Announcing the Launch of Programming Classroom

So, I finally did it. My company Twin Roots has launched an actual product. Well, not a product exactly; more like a service. Along with my outside partner in crime, Rex Jaeschke, we planned a website where we are providing a service geared towards programmers.

Programming Classroom is the result of this effort.

Rex is well known throughout the programming community, especially in the standards world. He is also highly regarded for his live programming seminars where he teaches classes in C, C++, C# and more.

We thought it would be a great service to offer the seminars that Rex uses in his live classroom teachings to the general public in electronic format. These are the exact same materials from documentation to example source code. It is just that it is at a much lower cost than a classroom setting because it is self-paced learning. You will find seminars on C#, C++, Java, Visual Basic, and C. You will also find some freebies like sample chapters and tips.

So check out ProgrammingClassroom.com and let us know what you think. Needless to say, I am very excited while very nervous at the same time.

A Letter To My Congressman Regarding The Healthcare Debate

I just couldn’t take it anymore. All the fear mongering, misinformation, and ill-informed commentary. I had to write my U.S. Congressional representative, a Republican, about my feelings regarding the U.S. healthcare debate. Here is my letter:

Hello,

I am curious. At any of your town hall meetings in August, did you once, while you were denouncing a public plan for health care, say that you will sponsor a bill to totally rescind Medicare, Social Security and Public Education? As you know, all these are government run. I imagine that you did not. You would lose a lot of your electorate if you did that. And therein lies the hypocrisy.

I don’t mind honest debate. I don’t mind disagreement. What I do mind is misinformation, misdirection, hypocrisy and outright lies when talking about an issue.

And when you encourage, or at the very least don’t denounce, ill-informed views that public healthcare will create "death panels", a pure Hitler-like take over by our government, the loss of patient/doctor privilege, etc., then there is an integrity issue. And without integrity in a debate, all is lost.

The healthcare debate has become more about fear-mongering and keeping political power. And that is sad.

I deserve better. The American people deserve better.

Sincerely,

Joel Marcey, citizen of your district.

I will post a response, if I get one.

10 Songs That Have Made An Impact On My Life

I have thousands of songs in my music collection. And I have heard thousands above and beyond those in that collection.

For some reason, I got to thinking about which songs actually have made an impact on me on a personal level. They are not necessarily my favorite songs nor do I necessarily listen to them much anymore. But they are songs that actually had a noticeable impact on my life or emotions.

Here are 10 songs (well, technically 11 since one set has two songs associated with it), in no particular order of favoritism, that have made some sort of impact on me:

Just the Way You Are – Billy Joel: First song at my wedding. Nuff said, really.

Black – Pearl Jam: My favorite song off the album that made me a Pearl Jam lifer. And they still remain my favorite band ever. Just listen to the lyrics of Black sometime. Love lost.

Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana: As cliche as this song has turned out to be, this song literally brought me to a whole new level of musical appreciation. That’s really the bottom line. Defined my generation.

Cheeseburger in Paradise – Jimmy Buffett: First concert I ever saw with my then college girlfriend (and now my spouse). Walnut Creek Amphitheatre in Raleigh.

Cornflake Girl – Tori Amos: First concert I ever saw in a concert hall with the piano as the primary instrument. Tori Amos rocks the piano and it made me a Tori Amos fan forever.

Caribbean Queen – Billy Ocean: My first EVER concert. I was about 10 years old at the county fair in Ft. Lauderdale. It was at that point I new I loved music.

To The Bone – Sex Police / Fun & Games – The Connells: These two bands really help define my college experience. The Sex Police specifically helped to define one of the greatest times I have ever had in my life.

Brass Monkey – Beastie Boys: Might have been the first *cassette tape* I owned. Remember the tail of the airplane on the cover? My middle school years were heavily influenced by this song and album from many different perspectives.

Joining You – Alanis Morissette: Just listen to the lyrics and you will understand why I put it here. I really find the story in the lyrics kinda chilling (the story might actually be true if I remember correctly). And I love the riffs. I have never grown tired of this song. Alanis is one of the most underrated musicians of my time.

Ice, Ice Baby – Vanilla Ice: The first *CD* I ever owned. Got it as a joint gift with my first portable CD player. Also the song that made me realized that I might just sometimes be ridiculed for the choice of music that I may like (as I am with Kelly Clarkson now).

My Communications Infrastructure is led by Google Voice (with teammates the iPhone and Ooma)

In the last month I have completely revamped my communications infrastructure, hopefully for the better.

Here are the before and after pictures.

Before

After

Yep. I am using Google Voice as a hub for phone communications. My Google Voice number will be a primary number for people to contact me. Depending on the person calling, Google Voice will forward to my iPhone, my home phone, my spouse’s mobile phone or any combination of the three. (With Google Voice, you can actually get so granular that you can forward to different numbers based on the person calling, have a different greeting for any person, and a different voicemail message for any person or group of people). And I can add or remove phones from the forwarding mechanism at my leisure because my Google Voice number will shield anyone who calls from the black box that is now my web of communication facilities.

Sure people will still call my iPhone directly. And I expect some people to do that as it is my primary line for business discussions, etc. But for a majority of people, calling the Google Voice number will be all that is needed.

And, as what I am seeing as a huge money saver, I have left Vonage (where I was paying $20-25/mo) and came to Ooma. I paid $199+tax at Costco for free U.S. calls for life. Ooma has premium services that you can pay for, but at this point, since I have Google Voice, I don’t see the need just yet. (Note: I had no real negative issues with Vonage. The service was actually very good for the time I had it. But, you can’t blame someone for trying to save some money).

What if Ooma goes out of business? Well, that’s the beauty of Google Voice. I can remove Ooma and add something else to the infrastructure and no one would be the wiser. People know the Google Voice number and don’t really care how (and with what device) I answer the phone on the other side. I am actually considering adding a Skype phone number to my account to see if I can forward numbers to the Skype number for the times I am away from my home and online.

Here are my assumptions about using Google Voice as a communications hub:

1. Google is not going out of business anytime soon. Thus, my Google Voice number can be my number for life.
2. Google Voice will continue to be free (or ad supported), or some reasonable charge if it comes to that.
3. Google Voice will keep my privacy just as well as the government does with respect to my phone calls

We’ll see how this all plays out; but right now I feel excited with my new setup.

Google Voice is in beta right now, but you can sign up for an invitation and these invitations are going out daily.

Save 35% on an Apple iPhone Using Microsoft Bing??

[Note: This deal could stop working at anytime. But it was working as of June 10, 2009 2:50 PM]

Well, I would say this is quasi ironic.

Check out the results of the top of this link: http://www.bing.com/search?q=att

Notice how it has a “Bing Cashback” logo at the very top result which is the AT&T Official Wireless Site.

So apparently, if you use Microsoft Bing to buy a phone at AT&T, including the Apple iPhone 3GS, you will get 35% off your purchase!

Microsoft and Apple are “partners” here. Like I said, quasi-ironic.

There is a noted stipulation that this is for new subscribers; that could be true, but I can’t verify it.

Check out these links for more info on this:

FatWallet Forums
MacRumors Forums

And as always, your mileage may vary (YMMV)

Please Help Me Choose a Worthy Computer Desk Chair

I am in the market for a good computer desk chair. I mean one like Chris Pirillo has in his office — the Grahl Synchron 8, which apparently is not sold publicly anymore. I could do without that crazy price, though.

I am looking for full body support to help keep my back as pain free as possible. My sciatic nerve is really irritating me. I am willing to spend a pretty fair amount for a chair that will keep me comfortable and pain free.

Some others I am considering are:

The Kneelsit

The Mirra

The Aeron

Any recommendations?

Thanks!

Installing LAMP and Wordpress on Slicehost (or elsewhere) Redux

[Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any mishaps that may occur by following these steps or advice because you follow them out of your own free will.] — I figure I better put that up-front, again.

My original post on installing a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server with Wordpress seems to have helped at least a few people.

I have since come up with a few more random, but I think helpful, tidbits since writing that post. I will list them here.

Basic Commands

‘ls -alR’ for a recursive look at all owners and groups, etc.

Transferring your Blog to Wordpress.org

If you are importing your blog from somewhere else and the upload doesn’t seem to be working (e.g., when you click the “Import” button you see no screen changes and/or you the browser is just “spinning”):

• create uploads directory in wp-content
• you may have to set wp-content to chmod 777 permissions for import
  - first try 755 on uploads. If it doesn’t work, then
  - then try 777 on uploads. If it doesn’t work, then
  - then try 777 on wp-content
• revert everything back to 755, or what you had it before

If you are moving from wordpress.com to wordpress.org and you need your blogroll, you need to export this separately (it is not included as part of the normal export from wordpress.com). You go to http://your-wordpressDOTcom-domain.com/wp-links-opml.php and save the XML you see and then import via the blogroll/import capability (or you can just enter the link to the opml I mentioned before right in the blogroll import). Note the export only seems to work in Firefox and IE. Safari gave me a blank page.

SSL

If you want SSL for Apache – sudo a2enmod SSL (see article)

If you want SSL for your Wordpress administration areas, enable SSL for wp-admin (See documentation)

For SSL resolution — if you are only using SSL on one site and you have other sites, see this forum post.

Final Setup Steps for Wordpress

Make sure www-data has write access to the following — Do a ‘chmod -R g+w’ on wp-content/themes,wp-content/uploads

For final permissions:

• find public -type d | xargs chmod 0755
• find public -type f | xargs chmod 0644 (files)
• find public -type d | xargs chown username:www-data
• find public -type f | xargs chown username:www-data

Why Backblaze Is My Choice For Online Backup Provider

I chose Backblaze as my online backup service provider for one year (possibly, longer).

It was actually a tough choice. I was weighing many options. Do I just go with the well-known leaders (by customer base), such as Mozy or Carbonite? Do I go with a provider that offers me a finite quantity of backup space per subscription, but allows me to backup unlimited computers, such as SpiderOak?

Obviously, the answers to these questions were “No”; so here is why I went with Backblaze:

• Good communication – Backblaze communicated with me via Twitter and answered my pre-sales questions via email. SpiderOak was also very good in its email communication with me. Carbonite, iDrive, Mozy, Safecopy also communicated with me satisfactorily as well.
• Let me into the Mac beta trial — While very late into the party (they publicly released for the Mac a week later), Backblaze gave me an invitation to try their Mac service before it went public.
• Ease of Use / Function Offering Ratio Balance — It was very easy to set up the client on my MacBook Pro and get to backing up. An icon sits in my menu bar and allows me quick access to see what and how much is being backed up. But just because it is easy to use, doesn’t mean they skimped on the functionality. I can throttle my backup bandwidth; choose file types and folders to exclude; set my own encryption key; and set basic scheduling options.
• Price — My choice came down to BackBlaze and SpiderOak. At retail, SpiderOak would have cost me $100/yr. Backblaze $50/yr. Like many people, I am doing my best to try to conserve some money, make appropriate purchase decisions. And while I really believe SpiderOak is a player in this space, a lot of my decision, maybe sadly, was based upon cost. Backblaze is a legitimate player and the cost was right — especially after the 10% Chris Pirillo discount, which sealed the deal for me. (To be fair, you can find 10% discounts for SpiderOak and there are even some 20% discounts out there if you are resourceful)
• Allows me to backup external drives — As I write this, I am backing up content on an external firewire drive connected to my MacBook Pro. This drive is partitioned 3 ways, holding my Time Machine backups, SuperDuper backups and data that I just didn’t want taking up space on my primary 120GB MacBook Pro drive (e.g., videos). Backblaze does not allow you to backup your Time Machine data (seems reasonable), but I am backing up about 42 GB of data. I am 7GB into that process, which, probably expectedly, is taking just a tad longer than the primary hard drive.
• Backup speed — The throttling mechanism is very useful and seems to work. With various degrees of throttling used in the 8 days, average 12 hours/day time it took me to backup 42.5 GB of data on my MacBook Pro, I average about 0.45 GB (450 MB) per hour. That seems pretty good to me.
• Restore — I tested restore just a little bit. Seemed straightforward and easy. You log into the website. Enter your private encryption key if you decided to use it. Choose what directories/files you want. Then click Restore. An email comes to you really quickly saying a zip file with all the files you chose is ready to be downloaded. If you need a bunch of your stuff urgently, and can’t wait for download, you can also order, at extra cost, an overnight shipped DVD or USB drive of your data (see below why this could be an issue, though).

All that said, I do not believe Backblaze is perfect. Here are some items I think need improvement:

• Multiple Computer Support — Backblaze would be near perfect if it allowed multiple computer support on one subscription a la SpiderOak and others. While 95% of my time is spent on my MacBook Pro (because I can run both OS X and Windows), I do have another HP laptop. It would be nice if I could just add that computer to current subscription. But, while I can add the HP to my current Backblaze account, I would have to pay another $50/yr. So instead, if I want to backup items from that machine, I use an intermediary like DropBox or SpiderOak (which both offers 2GB of space free) and then access those items from my MacBook Pro to be backed up on BackBlaze.
• Unencrypted Data on Their Media Restore — Sort of a good cop, bad cop here. It is actually very cool that Backblaze offers the option to get your data on hard media, overnight. But the problem is that your data comes to you *unencrypted*. Me, I would be a little bit apprehensive of FedEx having a drive that has all my data readily accessible. I believe BackBlaze is working on a solution to alleviate this issue, but nothing has been announced publicly. That said, most providers don’t offer this capability anyway, so it is a nice-to-have feature. And most people restore their data through download anyway.

So in summary, I believe Backblaze, while imperfect and a relatively new service (especially on the Mac support front) provides a great service. It offers great functionality at a very good price. And I have seen no major issues with the service thus far. And, they seem willing to communicate with you if needed. I have signed up for a year commitment. SpiderOak was a very close second, and, in the end, primarily came down to financials as to why I chose Backblaze over them. I think they are pretty even on all other aspects as for what I require in an online backup provider.

Now I just hope that I am a paid user and they have lured me in, they still won’t mind the occasional Tweet every now and then

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Company Spam and Scam

At 8:44 PM last night, I get this email in my Apple Mail inbox from someone named “lisa rey” with the subject “Idea for [joelmarcey.com]“. Hey somebody has an idea for my blog!! Great!

Ding! Obviously spam or a scam, without even opening the message. How do I know? Well, first the sender’s name has no capitalization. What kind of professional uses a name without capitalizing the first letter of their first and last name? Secondly, the subject screams out programmatic email with the brackets being used as a key to insert website names.

So, what other giveaways are there? I decided to open the message:

So here is what I see

1. Message was dated 6:46 PM and I got it 2 hours later. Not sure that means much.
2. Email address has about 10 digits after the name ellie. So, there is obviously a program generating email addresses. I mean, come on, at least have lisarey123456789@gmail.com
3. The greeting addresses me as “Website Owner”. Another indication of automation and spamming is not addressing you by your real name.
4. An address, but no company name or link to company website. They even say “Our company is on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term ‘SEO Company’”. REALLY? But you won’t tell me what the name of your company is, huh? (btw, here is the search result for “SEO Company” on Google.
5. They say “Simply reply with opt out if not interested to hear from us”. Not very good English, if you ask me.
6. I also did a search on Google and found other people seeing these types of emails.

So I wonder what would happen if I replied?? Not sure I am going to try to find out