I blogged about Nicholeen’s experience with BBC a few weeks ago… I just found out her book is out and shipping.  It’s a whopper of a book, too… 383 pages!

You can get it here: A House United: Changing Children’s Hearts and Behaviors by Teaching Self-Government.

One of my wife’s good friends (who has a fantastic parenting story and system) had her family featured on the British World’s Strictest Parents show.  I  watched the 6 parts on YouTube and was touched  a number of times… it’s amazing how much kids (I can say that since I’m so old) live without real direction from parents (or, how much kids get away from good morals).

I’ll leave it at that – here are the six parts:

You can learn more about Nicholeen Peck at her Teaching Self Government blog – also, there are lots of “afterthoughts” there.

I’ve heard my wife talking about this movie for a while since she knows the people behind it.  It was really cool to see that some of it was filmed at another friends house (not the rich house, the … er, more modest house).

Okay, a note about this more modest house – we covet it.  The yard is phenominal – not sure how much they show but we went there three or four times last summer and we dream about a yard like theirs.

Here’s the trailer:

The link to the movie is Stand Strong Movie . com.  Apparently it will be “screened at film festivals nationwide beginning in December.”

There are two picture (avatar or image) problems that I constantly see online:

1. Picture is too dark.

This is usually an avatar on a social networking profile like LinkedIn or Twitter.  Mine was too dark, to the point of being accused of being GOTH (lol).  I loved my picture, actually, but I got too many complaints about it and finally changed it to something lighter.

I didn’t think too much about it but lately I have seen a number of pictures on LinkedIn or Twitter – these are SMALL pictures – they are so small that if you have a lot of dark shadows and background it won’t look good.

One reason I see too much shadow is because the image is cropped from a networking event – not an on-purpose picture.

2. Picture is too BIG.

This is a problem I see on many small business owners websites – it is either their professional picture they had taken, or a corporate picture, or something like that.

It’s easy to figure out if it is too big – the way I find out is when I go to an About Us page and the page takes forever to load.  Actually, the page loads while the picture slooooowly creeps up.  Any slowly creeping photo is TOO big.

If you right click the image you can see the properties, which will tell you the size.  Anything under 100K is good.  Anything over that can be optimized (in just a few seconds).  Anything over 500k or 1MB is HORRIFIC.

Change your picture size to something small (this is the file size, not the dimension of the image) and you’ll have that About Us page loading lickity-split!

(I know, kind of a weird post but it’s been on my mind :p)

Check out this quote I saw on CNN this morning (story: Crush of cancer, medical bills snares family):

“Health insurance premiums track directly with the underlying cost of medical care,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, which represents 1,300 health insurance carriers in the United States. “As the cost of providing care increases, premiums increase accordingly.”

My first thought was THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE LIE.  Okay, now that I”ve settled down, it is not a lie.  It is the truth.  A warped truth.  Let me share my thoughts.

Everyone knows that the spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans is going to, indeed HAS TO, talk about things in a light that is positive for America’s Health Insurance Plans.

Understand that that is some kind of organization (association?)  that represents insurance carriers.  Lots of them.

Don’t read it wrong – this is not an organization for for AMERCIANS, it is an organization for the insurance carriers.  These are the same carriers who are essentially screwing hundreds of thousands of Americans, like the family in the CNN article I got it from.

Got that?  Okay, had to get that straightened out, lest we think America’s Health Insurance Plans are the good guys.

Having said that, let’s go back to the quote.  He says “health insurance premiums track directly with the … cost of medical care.”

That was what I thought the lie was.  Based on my summer, with a birth and a surgery, I could not believe the overhead and price inflation caused by insurance companies.   You can read about it on my JibberJobber blog, but understand that the hospital bills for the birth of my kid were about 60% discounted because we were self-pay, and we paid up front.

In other words, because we bypassed the health insurance system we were able to avoid 60% of the cost.  Unbelievable.

This alone helped me understand why medical costs are so high.  Not because of the fancy/expensive GE equipment, not because of the Dr.’s Porsche collection, but because the health insurance system is sooooo screwed up.

Let’s go back to the statement: “health insurance premiums track directly…” Okay, now I realize this is not a lie.  This is 100% accurate.

Why?

Let’s change the sentence and add one concept:

“health insurance premiums track directly, with a factor, …”

In other words, they have to put their profit in there.  Unfortunately, we the people have to pay for the inefficiencies.  Ask anyone who is involved in medical billing, or office admin, in healthcare and you can get an earful of such inefficiencies.

So perhaps the cost of health care is this:

medical costs (Dr, hospital, supplies, etc.) * (Insurance company Profit + percentage of gross inefficiencies introduced by insurance model)

Thanks for the great quote Mr. Spokesperson.  I wish, instead of defending your constituents lame position, you could help work on fixing the inefficiencies before the gov’t does it for you.

I’d really like for insurance companies to clean themselves up.  We’re good with you making a profit… no problem there.  But Oh My Flipping Gosh (OMFG), do you have to add so much cost to my medical procedures?  Seriously – 60% of the cost of my wife’s hospital stay?

That. Seems. Criminal.

I wager that health insurance companies won’t be able to fix it (except the rogue ones, the small, nimble ones, hopefully).

I hope that Obama can move enough things forward so this gets fixed (and not replaced with another nightmare of a problem).

Otherwise, my future major medical expenses will be taken care of outside of the United States.  Not because I want to, but because “the system” prevents me, and millions of others, from getting appropriate health care.

Daily I check out what’s going on in the world on CNN.com… today I see these things:

Check out the last one… do you know what number that is?  I like to know how much people owe, so I worked backwords… you can see from the image below that this person owes $23 gazillion bucks… I wonder what the payment is for THAT!

What have we come to?  This really makes me sick.  I just got this (unapproved) comment on my JibberJobber blog:

There were some yellow flags that made me think this *might* be a spam comment:

1. The blog post is pretty old… most of the time if I get a comment on a post older than 2 weeks it is spam, and
2. The comment itself is without substance.

Nonetheless, I thought maybe it was legit… but then something really caught my eye… look at the commenter’s URL:

Ripoff Report? Seriously?  Someone wants a link to the ripoff report?  Now my curiosity is piqued.

So I click on the link, and indeed the name of the commenter will be hyperlinked to a report on Ripoff Report.  The event has to do with a doctor (vet) who apparently did something wrong…

It gets better.

The person who took their dog in to this vet is probably not the same person who left this comment.  Check this out – when I click the Whois link (this one, again, from the image above):

… I find out the person who left this comment is in Amsterdam.

From this, I’m guessing that the person who is mad at his/her vet hired a person or firm to spread libelous comments on the internet, with the intention of doing regular ol’ SEO. Not cool.

In fact, quite disgusting.

Note to the vet: Dr. what’syourname (I’m not going to say here, as he/she doesn’t deserve any bad link bait or negative SEO (yes, it’s in the top image, but search engines aren’t smart enough to figure that out)), there are tactics to get rid of this that are quite easy…. drop me a note and I’m happy to introduce you to my colleagues who specialize in this type of stuff (or go to ReachCC.com to find them yourself).

Note to person who is responsible for this filth: thanks a lot.  I was just getting my faith in humanity restored, and then I have to see this crap.

Sometimes I think I’m nuts. Even though I’m more sane than others.  But seriously, what am I thinking, doing my own business? Where’s the safety net in that??

Sometimes I think I’m dense. Even though I got a hecka lot of education, and feel like I’m rather witty.  This “dense” thing comes mostly when I compare myself to others.

Sometimes I’m lonely. Even though I have a terrific wife and family support, and thousands upon thousands of people who read my stuff in my blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.  But when I’m sitting in my office, all by myself, with hours to go in the day, wondering which thing I should do next, I wish I had a team working with me.

Sometimes I feel poor. Especially recently as we paid for a new baby, a broken van and car, my doctor’s visit to get my calf looked at, working on getting our basement finished, and payroll… but then I think about the families I met in Mexico who know what poor, and poverty, and hunger, are, in a way that i’ll never have to know.

Usually I’m hungry. Not for food, but for success.  Actually, not even crazy-wild success, just the kind of success that pays the bills for a family with a modest lifestyle.  That’s what i told my publisher, and why I swore I’d make money from book sales.

Most of the times I’m scared. Scared of failing.  Or scared to take steps backwards.  I often wonder if I’m the right guy for the job, and then I just get back to work, day after day, to get the job done the best I can, and hope that indeed, I could be the right guy for this job.

I’m an entrepreneur.

I feel privileged, and hope that I don’t mess this up.

I feel like this is bigger than me… much bigger than me.

I feel like thousands of people need me to keep on plugging along, as my stuff (whether it’s JibberJobber or my books or DVD or blogs whatever) are making a difference to them.

I feel like my future is in MY hands. Not the CEO of Enron, or some board of directors, or some cranky boss… but my own hands.  Please let me not screw this up.

I’m an entrepreneur. While it isn’t easy, it’s rewarding.  I couldn’t imagine it any other way.

I have liked Chip Hartman from the minute I met him… I love his creativity and sense of humor.  And he’s a genuinely cool guy, to boot!  Here’s an image he made for my new boy (this is not a pic of my son) – click the image to go to Chip’s site:

Thanks Chip – very clever!

Yesterday my wife gave birth to our fifth child.  Mom and baby are healthy, and we feel very blessed.  

I didn’t intend to share much about what was going on, as we’ve chosen to keep our personal life fairly personal… so all I did was write a blog post about going to the hospital (just a few sentences).  

When we got to the hospital, however, I found out we had a really nice internet connection. So I jumped on my email.  And I got on twitter.  And I had the crazy idea of sharing more than I intended about the birth.  Of course, I wanted to tie it into me, and my business, which is our life, and how we’re going to pay for this kid :p  here’s what I tweeted:

I wondered if I crossed a personal/private line, but the reactions I got were terrific!  It was fun, and I started to get some phenominal responses… you can see the thread at either of these (see jasonalba or #babytime (which has less)).  Really fun stuff, as you follow my tweets and some of the responses I got from others.

I was amazed, also, at how many Facebook responses I got.  On Facebook, I am Friends with a lot of people who know my wife… and I’m sure they were happy to get the news and updates.

I just spent an hour going through the reactions, and for the sake of recording history, I grabbed a few screen snippets of a few of my favorite parts of the conversations…. enjoy!

Here’s all of my tweets from the hospital… notice I tried to not flood the twittersphere with too much info.

An otherwise brilliant person, Mr. Druid (a good friend) was the only person who didn’t quite get the contest and submitted a guess on weight instead of time… !

Accused of not being supportive? Nah, not me :p

We kind of had a funky-cool communication thing going on… still, I wondered how many people (mostly women) would have echoed Gayle’s sentiments? (Gayle is a JibberJobber partner)

LOL – I thought my wife might not be too keen on this, but it worked out for us (maybe if I tweeted more she’d have been livid… )

After much frustration with all of the chair-things for me, I broke down and CUSSED!  Robert’s reply was classic

This was hillarious – advice from the wife of a guy who I used to work with.  I read this and then headed out for food :p

My coauthor, aka Mr. Sensitive, offering to help kill some time at the hospital.  I kindly declined his offer :p  ROFL

Al summed it up, and helped me realize there were people who were actually reading all of the updates!

This was a cool affirmation from Mari, queen of Facebook.

I was hopeful that @cnn would have picked up on this – alas, apparently they hadn’t

Hillarious.  If you have a fifth because of this, you have to name him Jason.  Or her Jason.  

Here’s the winner – he beat out the next closest by 3 minutes!

What started out as “should I??” became a really fun way to get to know my contacts and friends better!