Don't drink coffee

If your reaction on the first sip is "blech." It's helpful to also to throw away old cups of partially drunk coffee as you might accidentally drink from one.

Healthcare Reform

I've read lots of stuff on this subject and the only conclusion I've really drawn is that the status quo doesn't cut it. In summary my views are,

1. Everyone should be able to get healthcare
2. Choice in insurance is good
3. Insurance should not be tied to your employment

I believe we can and should take care of people when they get sick. It just seems wrong to me that people have to die and suffer because they gambled on not needing insurance or they just can't afford it.

It should be obvious that choice is good.

This last point is important to me because it's one more thing that keeps people where they shouldn't be. It's completely at odds with "at-will" employment. Finally, it really limits the competitiveness of legacy companies like GM and even quasi-governmental CTA.

In a review of presidential perspectives on healthcare, in this Sunday's times, none of the 3 top candidates of either party have proposals to satisfy my 3 top requirements. I'm bummed out that it probably won't get any better than the status quo.

A Bonafide Plan to Improve the World

I deal with a lot of contracts. In my last one I reviewed I spent 25% of the time stating the things I wanted and the other 75% pouring over the clauses to make sure it was consistent and to try to catch the holes. I just know that their are still ambiguity that I didn't intend that if things went south, I could be screwed by.

What if there were a DSL for contracts? With this we could test the contract for logical consistency, highlight the ambiguity, and eventually compile it into different styles of legalese.

And this is where we improve the world. Once people start using this widely, we would need significantly less corporate lawyers. Productivity would boom because people wouldn't waste their time reading the same sentence 20 times to figure out what it really means, and arbitration could be handled by code.

l33t 9009£3

Is this really necessary?

Cleaning Up My Desktop

This is one of my favorites that I had to capture for posterity before I trashed it. I guess whoever coded up that error must have never got it in their testing.

Palm Garnet has a similar thing where you get an error during sync and the error detail is something like AirStateSamMachine.c. What exactly are you supposed to do with that? Maybe enlightened mac / iPhone users don't have to deal with this?

I want to build an app like that

A friend of mine has a kid at the Lab School, and they recently sent home a note with all the kids suggesting the parents talk to them about Twitter and the appropriateness of paying attention in class.

Free food

Schneier has an interesting bit about how people steal free food from a drivethru. So let's assume you had a Mac-attack, is this really the best you can do? Do you think you could apply this to say a drive-thru Starbucks or cleaners (not that Leon's suits would come close to fitting me)? I mean if you have money enough to own a car and put gas into it, why would you need to do this? There's a reason they call it a Value Menu!