My heavens, every time I hear this I cringe.
“I wrote a blog…”
No, you didn’t, you newbie! You wrote a BLOG POST.
You don’t write an envelope, do you? NO. You write a letter.
“Hold on, I’m writing an envelope to grandma!”
Get it?
Blog vs. blog post.
If you blog, learn the difference.
(now, someone find me a ladder so I can get off the soapbox :p)
This is what I wrote when my JibberJobber developer asked me a question about a certain part of JibberJobber.
He asked me something that had to do with the Jobs section of JibberJobber. In my mind I starting thinking of my response:
“I don’t do much with jobs.”
(I use JJ more as a business CRM, since I’m not in a job search).
While I was typing that I started to think:
“I have to eat my own dog food. In fact, any business owner, designer, product manager, salesperson or product advocate has to eat their own dog food… if they don’t eat their own dog food then….!”
I went on a mental rant… and instead of typing what I wanted, I combined both ideas and produced this sentence:
“I don’t do much with dogs”
To which my developer had to ask “I’m sorry, what do you mean by that? What do dogs have to do with anything?”
LOL – sometimes, I swear I need a new brain…
Check this out – JibberJobber.com mentioned by a federal entity:
Let it not be the last time it’s mentioned officially 🙂
As a disclaimer, I learned why they mention stuff… this is a survey they are doing, and when any one tool gets 25 or more votes, they mention that tool…. so we got a mention not because we are cool, or because they know who we are, but because we had 25 people register and vote – very nice and very cool… !
I am using Google Docs to write something and did the spell check… of course JibberJobber was flagged… surprisingly here are the options:
Hm. Not even close! When I have some time (yeah right) I’ll go check those out to see what they mean :p
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!
