Health Care Reform

An article definitely worth reading on the subject of health insurance and the need for reform, about someone in the health insurance business who now believes in reforming the industry from which he resigned.

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Blogger Update

Blogger is celebrating its anniversary by rolling out new features, using responses to polls they conducted. They've just instituted options for the labels widget. You can do a cloud or set the widget to show only selected labels. I switched to a cloud here; it takes up less room than the list form.

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It Might be News but is it True?

Jay DeDapper's essay Facts, No Thanks is must reading for anyone who cares about the current events. He really nails the growing problem of people who define facts as whatever agrees with what they believe. DeDapper was a reporter on NBC New York's local newscast until he got laid off with a number of other experienced reporters. I liked his reporting and missed it, but fortunately, he started a blog, Get Real with Jay DeDapper. Definitely a blog worth following.

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Personas

How the internet sees you: Personas from MIT. This is popping up all over the internet, on blogs and Facebook and LiveJournal, etc, but it's of limited use, especially if you have a common name. My legal name is not common, but I could see other people slipping into the search. Someone with my name plus a second last name (a hyphenate!) was especially prevalent in my results. It also says it's designed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600, but with my widescreen monitor, I had to bump it up higher than my usual 1024 x 768 in order to fit the search box in. Anyway, it's amusing in its own way and somewhat attractive. They call it an art piece, not a tool, for what that's worth.

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It Doesn't Take Much to Be Accessible

I finally finished my box of these and stopped into a drugstore to pick up another pack, because I get papercuts all the time, not to mention other boo-boos, and was so pleased to see Johnson & Johnson now has their Band-Aid boxes with braille labeling. So, even though the store brand (colored deceptively similar to J&J's boxes) was a bit cheaper, I rewarded J&J for this simple yet vital effort to help braille-reading blind and visually impaired customers to find their product on the shelves.

One issue is that people might not always know there are braille labels to look for. The more companies that do this, the more people will come to expect it and for people who need and can read braille, finding what they want on their own can and will become the norm. That is true independence.
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Re-Tweeting

Twitter plans to make Re-Tweeing (RT) an official part of Twitter. I like how they absorb the conventions their users come up with. For now, if you want to Re-Tweet a Tweet from someone you follow, you type RT, then the @ plus the Tweeter's username, then copy and paste in the Tweet. Cumbersome, indeed. As soon as they work through the process with the developers who use their API (it's a code thing, for other apps that work with Twitter), they'll launch it officially. That will make things so much easier and simpler for those of us who use the service. tweet tweet

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Health Care Reform

Too many people are too quick to believe rumors about health care reform proposed by President Obama. Reform is needed to prevent the kind of things the rumor mongers claim Obama is supporting.

And while I'm posting, what's the fuss about Hillary Clinton's little fit of pique? I've seen the video. News items make it sound like she'd thrown a tantrum, tossing things and shrieking like a banshee or something. To me, it sounded like she was a tad irritated. I wonder if so much fuss would've been made if:
1. she were a man
2. people weren't looking for reasons to cast doubt on the Obama administration.

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