Category Archives: Business

Newspapers, RIP

Posted on by

Seth Godin has a thoughtful article up about the imminent demise of the daily paper.  He makes the point that there’s not much in a newspaper that isn’t done elsewhere, and better.

What’s left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I worry about the quality of a democracy when the the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.

The VA’s Latest Computer Problem

Posted on by

Computerworld has an amazingly detailed description of the VA’s August IT breakdown.

On the morning of Aug. 31, the Friday before Labor Day weekend, the Region 1 data center was packed with people. According to Director Eric Raffin, members of the technical team were at the site with staffers from Hewlett-Packard Co.conducting a review of the center’s HP AlphaServer system running on Virtual Memory System and testing its performance.

About the same time, staffers in medical centers around Northern California starting their workday quickly discovered that they couldn’t log onto their patient systems, according to congressional testimony by Dr. Bryan D. Volpp, the associate chief of staff and clinical informatics at the VA’s Northern California Healthcare System. Starting at about 7:30 a.m., the primary patient applications, Vista and CPRS, had suddenly become unavailable.

What follows is a step-by-step analysis of how not to solve a systems problem.

Just what the U-T needed

Posted on by

My local paper’s website has started allowing users to comment anonymously on stories.  Yeah, that’s just the clever, edgy thing to improve their flagging circulation.  As evidence I give you today’s story on the grocery workers’ contract talks.  The story itself is fine, but scroll down to the comments. 

Hey, U-T!  get a clue: I don’t read the paper to get silly, bigoted comments from mouth-breathers who think the way to add emphasis to their words is to add a whole bunch of exclamation points!!1!11!!!!!  Yeah, nothing says “rational discourse” like run-on sentences in all caps saying that what we need is more and bigger Wal-Marts.  I’d accuse them of being poorly thought out, but thinking is obviously a skill they haven’t learned.

Dual Displays

Posted on by

I have dual video displays on my computers, both home and at work.  For people who constantly switch between two or more applications, it increases productivity by 9 to 50%.  Those aren’t my numbers; they come directly from Microsoft:

Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn’t going to happen. They’ll never go back to a mono display. Researchers in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group (VIBE), found that increasing a computer user’s display space made it easier for them to complete their tasks.

[…]

The research study required users to complete several different tasks, switch from one task to another, and remember data. None of the study participants had used multiple monitors before.

The first study revealed that the users’ productivity increased by 9 percent. Further studies showed even greater increases – at times up to 50 percent for tasks such as cutting and pasting. Mary Czerwinski, the VIBE research manager, is excited about her group’s discoveries, asking, “If you’re able to squeeze 10 percent more productivity out, do you know how much money that will save?”

My own observation is that for programming tasks, where the user has an IDE open in one window and the browser open in the other, 50% is a conservative estimate.

Financial Planning

Posted on by

Recently I had to make some decisions about what to do with a significant amount of cash from an inheritance. I ended up putting it into an annuity. Generally, annuities are a bad idea. (“Bad” because the fees and fund expenses can eat up any tax advantages. Not true in my case, but I digress.)

Anyway, in talking with some folks about where to put this money, I was amazed at the number of otherwise very smart people who don’t have a clue about financial planning.

Once upon a time, I was like them. I didn’t have a clue either, and my financial strategy was “ignore it.” I was enlightened by none other than Scott Adams, in his book Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel. There’s a simple nine point plan, and like much of Adams’ work, amusingly simple. The points are:

1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.

Goodnight, Salon

Posted on by

Things are looking pretty grim for Salon.com these days.

If you’ve never read a 10-Q, what it basically says is that they’ve got $880k in cash and ready assets, four times that much in immediate debt, and they spent a million bucks of their cash in the last six months, trying to stay alive. Yet they’ve lost more than that in expenses and asset devaluation. (That means they’re spending more than they’re making. The “good” news is that they “only” lost a million bucks last quarter. As PR Newswire dryly puts it, that’s a 46% improvement over the previous quarter.)

Assuming they’re still hemorrhaging cash at that rate, I think they’re pretty close to not being able to make payroll this week or next.

Goodbye, Webvan

Posted on by

Webvan, the only online grocery delivery service operating here in San Diego, has announced it will shut down and file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This is bad news. I used one of their predecessor companies, homegrocer.com, quite a bit. Maybe a year or so back, homegrocer.com got gobbled up by Webvan. I didn’t use Webvan as much, because they were more expensive and more difficult to deal with, and they screwed up a delivery on me. That’s the kiss of death in any delivery-based business.

It turns out they couldn’t compete with the regular supermarkets. We have three huge supermarket chains in southern California, who are more that capable of putting anybody out of business. Looks like they’ve done it again. Goodbye, Webvan, you were an idea ahead of your time.