@shanselman has been sharing a lot of tweets today on the topic of healthcare and startups. For example:

* https://twitter.com/lobrien/status/247408555651645440 * https://twitter.com/doozerblake/status/247407834130690048 * https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/247403381012975616 * https://twitter.com/timsonofsteve/status/247413105750077440

The shared assertion is – the lack of easily available health insurance is preventing a lot of people from joining or creating startups. Nothing scientific about this data, it is all anecdotal, but I certainly empathize with the view. Health insurance has certainly been a factor in my personal career decisions over the last decade. I know a half dozen people who have wrestled with the issue as they have considered startup opportunities. My sense is that people are willing to take a lot of salary and equity risk, but they can’t put their family’s healthcare at risk, particularly if they are starting young families.

The current US system is certainly biased towards employment with large established employers. I wonder if the upcoming legislated changes will help to create more movement to small businesses and startups. I wonder if we couldn’t do even more to a) make movement to startups easy, and b) provide coverage in the event of startup failure, so that personal risk is minimized.

There is a lot of wailing and teeth gnashing about our patent system and how that is an impediment to entrepreneurs, but I can’t help but wonder if access to healthcare and health insurance is an even greater impediment.

Update: Marcello wrote a “very reasoned piece”:http://www.geekwire.com/2012/healthcare-reform-todays-ruling-great-news-startups/ on this topic in June, worth a look.

* “The Snow Whale”:amazon by John Minichillo. Don’t know why I picked this up, exactly the kind of satirical farce I hate. Gave up on, blah. * “The Master and his Emissary”:amazon by Iain McGilchrist. Get your pith helmet and machete, this is a deep jungle to fight your way thru. Deep exploration of brain function, psychology, philosophy, history, art, culture. The sections on philosophy just about killed me (which given the thesis I find very intriguing and perhaps even a bit concerning.). Fascinating but set aside a long time to read and ponder. I don’t buy the arguments completely but an interesting and well-detailed articulation of a theory of human culture and how it relates to brain function. One area where the argument rings hollow to me is the discussion of modern music. The author attempts to support his core argument with evidence of the emotionless nature of modern classical music, but gives only one sentence to jazz and completely ignores the music that people actually listen to, pop and rock. I don’t think removing this one support point damages his argument, but it does make me wonder about the overall quality of the argument. But still, a very well thought out discussion and worth reading and thinking about. * “The Prophet”:amazon by Michael Koryta. Needed some light fare to recover from the previous slog. A solid mystery set in smalltown northern Ohio with some character complexity. Fun but not remarkable. * “Where’d you go, Bernadette”:amazon by Maria Semple. OK at first this seemed like light farce and I kind of hated it. I stuck with it just for the Seattle setting but thought “Wow, if you are not in the Seattle/Microsoft network, you will get nothing out of this.” And then the book took a left turn when Bernadette opened up and revealed herself, and became a terrific tale of self discovery, of a mother and a daughter, of love, loss, and reunion. Really enjoyed it, it has been optioned for a movie, hope they pull this one together.

Having installed two ipfire boxes now, some simple tips. Overall it is a pretty straightforward install but these may save you a few minutes:

* You can find this in the online doc, but during install, remember: red is your wan connection; green is your local lan; and blue is your local wifi. You need cards for at least red and green or the install will flip out. * Post install, you can only admin from the green subnet, which is totally sensible. And if you install ssh, it is only active by default on the green subnet, again totally reasonable. * Post install, your wifi network will be inert and useless. You have to further install the hostapd extension using the pakfire command line or gui, and then configure the ssid and password, turn on dhcp, and further enable the mac addresses of each wireless device you want to support. Online guides suggest you also need to install wifi card drivers but this doesn’t seem to be needed, the lastest ipfire build seems to include them. Blue useless. * I’d highly recommend installing the ssh extension. also tcpdump. I have a bunch others installed too. * The samba extension doesn’t seem to work well, all my machines have trouble authenticating to the ipfire box. samba seems to offer a kajillion security settings and i can’t find quite the right combo to work.

Bob turned me onto this box, a great little atom box for prototyping appliances.

We have a new firepit at our house fed by a propane tank. It is a very simple design – tank, firepit, burner. Light it and go. It has been many years since we have dealt with propane, and I have forgotten most of hard-won knowledge. I am reminded of my all-time favorite camping joke:

A novice skydiver was taking his first jump. The instructor was reminding him in the plane “When it is time to deploy your chute, pull the ring on the left. If for any reason that doesn’t work, don’t worry, count to ten and pull the ring on the right. And if for some unlikely reason that doesn’t work, reach behind you and pull this tab, the chute is guaranteed to come out.”.

So the novice leapt out of the plane, counted to ten, and pulled the ring on the left. Nothing. No need to panic, the skydiver thought, I know what to do, I’ll pull the right ring in ten.

He counted to ten, and then pulled the right ring. Again nothing. Again he thought, no need to panic, I’ll pull the rear tab. And he did, and again nothing.

So there he was, plummeting to the earth, wondering what to do. And he noticed, down and to his left, a man skyrocketing upward from the earth. Well, the skydiver thought, he must know what he is doing. And so he yelled over to the man, “Hey, do you know anything about parachutes?”

And the man yelled back “No, do you know anything about propane stoves?”

In case you haven’t used propane, unlike a lot of gases, it is heavier than air, and it likes to invisibly pool in every nook and cranny, and then ignite all at once. Which is exciting in a “you didn’t really want those eyebrows” kind of way.

A modest bit of research on the web reveals that our simple firepit probably needs a bit more complexity in its “burner design”:http://www.moderustic.com/Propane-Burners.html if we would like to have less exciting evening fires. In my defense, I didn’t design this firepit, but I probably should have asked a few more questions about it as it was being built.

* Halloween is soon, and “MonsterGuts”:http://monsterguts.com/index.php always has great props and prop controllers if you just want to buy something and get it working right away. Their thunder and lighting controllers are great, I’ve used for years. I don’t know if I am doing any Halloween display this year but I do love all the stuff up here. But sometimes you just want to build your own effects from the ground up, so… * “Raspberry Pi”:http://www.raspberrypi.org/. A $25 linx SBC, very cool. But you can’t get one of the damn things, they are as rare as hen’s teeth. So I’ve been reading, but not actually playing with one. So in the meantime * “Arduino”:http://www.arduino.cc/. You can get these by the bushel, and there are a ton of accessories – sensors, actuators, add on boards, you name it. “Adafruit”:http://adafruit.com/ and “Sparkfun”:http://www.sparkfun.com/ both have all kinds of addons and kits. I could spend thousands here. The LED and EL lighting products are kind of amazing. * Atom motherboards. You can’t find a Raspberry Pi and the Arduino is too underpowered? Well there are a ton of Atom motherboards with great prices, case or caseless, etc. I’m building a couple different appliances. * Starting to play with “KVM”:http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page a little too, some of the Atom motherboards support. No strong reason, just to learn. * “IPFire”:http://www.ipfire.org/. One of my boxes is running IPFire so I can monitor and control net traffic at a finegrained level. “pfsense”:http://www.pfsense.org/ is another way to go but I found it be much more finicky to install (probably due to BSD roots). * “Cinemagraphs using the MSFT Cliplet tool”:http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/cliplets/. These are kind of fun. Opens your eyes to the future of photo taking and photo postprocessing. Increasingly I think our cameras will just capture a continuous high res data stream and then smart software will extract the interesting views. * I’ve gone 2 factor authentication nuts, turning it on everywhere I can. It does make stuff a little more painful to use but probably worth it. Facebook does seem a little confused, I can’t get it to remember machines I’ve used, and so it keeps asking me to name new machines so it can remember them. I have 37 login machines on facebook now, :(

I received a Privacy Notification from Chase this week, I have a credit card with them. I usually just throw these things in the trash, I’ve always figured they had nothing good to say.

But as a lark, I decided to read this one on my morning walk. It is impressive for its sheer audaciousness.

* What Chase collects can include, but is not limited to, SSN, income, transaction history, account balances, payment history, credit history. OK none of this particularly offends, I am not suprised, they need much of this to operate their card business, tho “transaction history” could cover a lot of info – just the dates, amounts, merchants, or can they work with merchants to amass even more info on exactly what products I buy? Again, tho, this is not an overly surprising or concerning list.

* Chase can share this information with any company or any person on the planet for Chase’s everyday business purposes (processing transactions, maintaining account, responding to court orders, reporting to credit bureaus), for Chase’s own marketing purposes, for joint marketing with any other financial company, and for the use by affiliates or subsidiaries for their everyday business purposes. And I have no control over this, I cannot as a consumer stop or limit this sharing at all. I am pretty sure that “everyday business purposes” and “joint marketing with any other financial company” can be stretched to cover every possible use on the planet, so basically Chase can do whatever they want with my info with whoever they want.

* I can only limit: Chase sharing my creditworthiness with affiliates/subs (big deal, they can all go get the info themselves from Experian/etc), affiliates or nonaffiliates marketing to me (again big deal, since Chase reserves the right to do joint marketing with any of these).

* If I quit being a Chase customer, Chase reserves the right to keep and share my information forever. Nice.

* And why can’t I limit any other sharing? Because Federal law doesn’t require Chase to give you the power to. So basically Chase is saying, “we have no moral or ethical standards, we will share right up to the limit of the law, we don’t care whether it is in your best interest or not”.

After reading all this, I have a pretty good sense of how Chase views me as a customer – just something to be exploited or used as they see fit without regard to my concerns. I’m not shocked, it is not like I ever expected to have a warm and fuzzy relationship with my credit card company. But I did kind of feel like they were making enough money on their explicit fees – merchant fees, annual fees, late fees, interest charges – and that they didn’t need to sell me to any and all comers to juice their returns.

I will probably start to think harder about my bank choices now. I’m curious about online alternatives like “Simple”:https://www.simple.com/. I’d like to find an institution that promises to protect my money, privacy, and identity first and foremost, that requires opt-in for any other use, that shares only the absolute minimum to credit agencies (I certainly accept that any bank will share information about my non-performance with the world, it is my responsibility to meet my obligations).

This is a powerful article on “GM’s continuing woes”:http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2012/08/15/general-motors-is-headed-for-bankruptcy-again/. The contrast between VW’s design-centric culture and GM’s culture is stark and telling.

Early in my career I was a (very junior) business strategy consultant and visited GM several times. Even in the 80s the company had a culture problem – design by committee, too many brand and marketing driven decisions and not enough product driven decisions. And it showed in the cars. Seems like those cultural problems have never been fully fixed – or they have returned in spades in the new financially-managed GM.

The only GM product I have ever owned was a Chevy truck and I was happy with that, and I’d look at GM truck products again if I was in the market for that kind of vehicle. For any other class of vehicle, I can’t imagine looking at a GM product, which is sad.

* “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”:amazon by Michael Chabon. I’ve always wondered what would have happened had Israel lost their 1948 war of independence, and all the Jewish refugees had moved to exile in Sitka, Alaska. OK no I never wondered that. But Chabon does a great job of creating that world as a setting for a detective novel. Another good one from him. * “The Islanders”:amazon by Christopher Priest. This author is popular in Britain but has never found much of a following here. I don’t think this book will push him over the edge. A strange travelogue/history/mystery about a world of islands, and the people that try to connect with one another during their lives. I was never quite sure what the author was really trying to do. I wonder if Brits as island dwellers resonant with this material in a way that Americans never will. * “Thirteen Reasons Why”:amazon by Jay Asher. I like to dip into YA fiction now and then, some great stories and series have risen from these beginnings. This book, however, is utter crap, despite some glowing recommendations. Serious matters but trite treatment, awful characters, terrible dialog, just garbage. Don’t pollute your mind or your kid’s mind with this. * “Forgotten”:amazon by Cat Patrick. This, on the other hand, is a nicely written tale of a young woman with a strange mental/neurological problem, digging into the events of her life that have left her this way. Compelling characters, fun read. * “Paper Towns”:amazon by John Green. And another excellent YA choice. On the eve of high school graduation, a student disappears leaving behind mysterious clues, and her friend tries to puzzle out the mystery. Not a simple mystery tho, but a deeply introspective and sometimes literary examination of himself, his missing friend, and their true natures.

I whine here about various products at times, products that fail to meet expectations.

But I am sitting here at a Starbucks, using free WIFI, on a lightweight laptop with 6-7 hours of battery life, downloading 200M of software onto a 32G USB key the size of a chiclet, while listening to an infinite selection of music on Spotify, and posting various documents up to a bunch of cloud services, and monitoring a live stream of news from the Olympics. All done at a fraction of the cost you would have expected even 5 years ago. It is honestly pretty freaking amazing what the industry has created over the course of the last several decades.

I’ll try to remember this feeling next time I am whining about button placement or some other nit.

Just for yucks I am using a linux box in my house as gateway for all the devices in my house, I just want to be able to see what is going on at the network level and do a little more finegrained control.

I considered using “dd-wrt”:http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index but it is not keeping up with router releases – it is not available for any of the routers on the shelf at best buy locally, for instance. and these router boxes are kind of a mess anyway, super limited on ram and storage, which constrains what I can do. i can easily build a cheap linux box with ethernet in, wifi out. the only advantage the router boxes have are the 4+ onboard wired ethernet ports. but wired ethernet seems to be going the way of the dodo in the home.

There are a ton of code bases to choose from. Here are some that seemed notable

* “untangle”:http://www.untangle.com/. commercial product but also some open source light version which they try to hide on their site. which makes me think the open source thing is 99% of the commercial thing. nice UI. They obviously don’t really want to support people like me tho, probably will steer away from this. * “clearOS”:http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html. similar but looks even more open-sourcy, they say the right things about supporting open source community. * “ipfire”:http://www.ipfire.org/. very open sourcy and modern (git repositories for instance). git repositories seem active * “zeroshell”:http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/. old school open source (not git based for instance), looks a little rough around the edges, but very complete. * “devil linux”:http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php. boots off cd/usb so easy to try but doesn’t seem to have the network depth of the previous choices

i’ll probably start with an ipfire trial. unless someone has a better idea.

Back in about 1990, I sold almost all my vinyl when I went fulltime to CDs. I did keep a few treasures – some Beatles, Floyd, Yes (“Roger Dean covers!”:http://www.rogerdean.com/paintings/), Led Zeppelin. But I sold the rest and moved on. Every once in a while I pull a vinyl record off the shelf to show the members of the younger generation so they can marvel at my backwardness.

I have moved on from CDs as well, quite a while ago. In fact I am probably in my 2nd generation of post-physical CD use – 1st gen was ripping all my CDs and just using digital copies everywhere. Now I just use Spotify and its ilk and don’t buy much music at all. But I still have 5-6 banker’s boxes of CDs in the garage, and they are taking up valuable space (that I could use to store more valuable stuff, like small kitchen appliances – rice cookers, bread makers, etc).

Sell? Does anyone want to buy old CDs? Are there aficionados that value CDs because they sound “warmer” than digital versions? Just throw away? Will I ever want the full CD resolution of any of this music ever? If I just throw away, but still listen to the ripped versions I have, am I in trouble if the RIAA goons show up some day? Maybe I can just take a picture of them all in a pile and the RIAA would accept that as proof of ownership (not likely). Do I have to sort thru and figure out which are available on Spotify and so can be thrown away without creating a legal liability for me, and keep the CDs that aren’t readily available online? What a pain.

OK I have been diligent in using this phone, I really want MSFT to have a competitive offering in the phone space, it would be good for me as a customer and good for the region.

But I am starting to get frustrated, and looking forward very much to my next phone.

* Back button versus Home button. If you enter an app from the Home screen, it is a fresh new copy, always. If you enter from the back button, you come back where you were. So suppose you are drafting an email, go to the browser to grab a url to stuff in the email. If you get back to email via the homescreen, your in-process message is gone. F^&k. You have to go back using the back button. Stupid. Annoying. Bites me every freaking day, several times. Apps should remember where they were. * The bottom row buttons become unresponsive once a day – the home, back, search buttons. No amount of pressing helps. Reboot. This is extra special if you were composing something, jumped to the browser to get a url, and then can’t get back. Grrr. * Prominence of the Bing button. Way too easy to hit unintentionally, I constantly bring up the Bing page which I never want. It is not that I hate Bing, it is just that I can easily search from the browser address bar and I don’t need a big freaking button that is too easy to hit on the device. * Spontaneous TellMe invocation. No idea why but at least once a day, the voice reco dialog pops up. Often when I set the phone down at night and plug it in – about 10 seconds after setting it down, TellMe pops up. No idea why. Voice reco blows (on all phones) and I never need this feature. * Tabbed browsing. Something is wrong with it, it is way less intuitive than with the iphone, I don’t understand when tabs are created or reused. I end up never using tabs.

Very soon, this phone is headed for retirement. What will I get next? Well I will wait to see the purported September iPhone refresh and make a decision then. The Nokia hardware is solid and I like it, but I don’t feel great about the overall experience, and I’m still pissed that this device has been orphaned by MSFT. I could go Android as well, the Android user in the family is very happy.

* “The Disappearing Spoon”:amazon by Sam Kean. Breezy walk through all the elements and their quirks, along with the back stories of their discovery and the quirky, sometimes petty scientists involved. * “Whiter Shades of Pale”:amazon by Christian Lander. If you like Portlandia, you’ll probably chuckle at this. * “Kill Decision”:amazon by Daniel Suarez. Guy writes a solid thriller with great short term technology extrapolation. I assume he will write a followup to this, there is certainly a very dystopian tale to write. * “Blackout”:amazon by Mira Grant. The first book in this post-zombie-apocalypse series was awesome, complicated characters and no storybook endings. But in this, the third book, I feel like the author chickened out and went for the happy ending and single dimensional villains. Still fun but could have been more… * “Forty Stories”:amazon by Donald Barthelme. There is an de Kooning on the cover of this book, and that serves as a hint to the type of stories you will find in here. I’m not sure there is a writing genre called Abstract Expressionism but these stories sure seem to fit the bill – patchworks of elements that seem to form coherent wholes but I’m never quite sure of the intent.

Beautiful design, mythically rare.

Months into my ownership, on Microsoft’s home turf, and a young attractive barista in Seattle says to me “Hey, didn’t you use to come in the Bellevue Square Starbucks?”

Preening and smiling, I respond “Yes.”

And she says “I thought I recognized you. That is, I recognized your phone.”