The-Asterisk

While I am getting used to using my new 3G iPad, I am thinking ahead to what might be next... actually, what I want to be next. I was struck by three events that happened this week. HP purchased Palm for a cool $1.2 Billion, Microsoft dropped its Courier (two screen foldable) tablet project and HP has also dropped its plans for a slate device based on Windows 7. Things are definitely happening in the mobile computing space, and happening quickly. As I have tweeted and talked about before and Dave Sobel has actually demonstrated , the iPad can be used as a kind of portable thin client. I don't yet know how well it works, but any kind of application like this is a good thing for business computing. We keep hearing over and over about cloud this and cloud that. We also hear about how Apple is the devil incarnate to application developers who are stymied by Apple's restrictions on what can be developed for the iPad and iPhone. And do not forget Steve Jobs' obsession with keep...

The way I am wired can be a bit annoying at times. I am always trying to figure out solutions to any problem that I see. I just can't help it. Some things are easy, like fixing potholes: JUST DO IT!!! Or fixing really bad roads: Sue the contractors for the repair... like having a ten year warranty on their work. Or getting stuck in a line at McDonald's behind someone that is ordering for 10 people back at the office: Adopt a single line like Burger King. So, while watching the Sunday news shows today my affliction kicked in again when the subject of financial regulation inevitably came up. I have wasted more than a few brain cells on this issue over many years, but nothing like the past 20 months. I have blogged in the past about who I think was the real culprit in initializing our most recent crisis, as well as how the law of unintended consequences is the only law in Washington that will work as promised. And then it hit me. We need a gaming commissioner. Seriously. It has b...

I just saw this video posted on Breitbart. It has a man at a town hall meeting with Congressman LoBiondo (R-NJ) asking the Congressman various 'trick' questions about the Constitution of the United States. At first, you may feel a little sorry for the Rep, since no one wants to be put on the spot or have to memorize law books, but this one is different. The way I see it, fortunes can be won or lost on whether a particular law has the word "and" or the word "or" in a certain position and lawyers will beat a semantic phrase to death to get their point across. Also, political fortunes can we won or lost based on what the meaning of "is" is. So, it is with that backdrop that I think that it is infinitely more important that all of our representatives, who swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, should know what they are upholding and defending. The basic Constitution is really not that long or that difficult to read. Some of t...

I was at the dentist yesterday, sitting in the waiting room, when this lady comes in and goes to the reception window. She explains how she tried to call but must have been calling the wrong number. So she had to come in to reschedule an appointment for her significant other. After the receptionist rescheduled the appointment, she asked "Do you want to go ahead and schedule your cleaning and checkup?" The lady replied, "I am not a patient here and besides, I don't have dental insurance." With that said, she left. I sat there for a moment taking that statement in. Was she saying that since she doesn't have insurance she wouldn't do anything for her dental health unless she had an emergency? Or was she saying that since she would have to pay for it, she didn't consider a cleaning and checkup to be a worthwhile thing to do? Conventional wisdom in the US now is that everyone considers health care to be a basic human right. Well, what good is health care...

Part of the package that passed tonight was desperately needed modification of how health insurance companies operate. As a small business owner, I absolutely HATE the news that comes each August as my annual renewal notice for my company's medical insurance premium arrives. Has it EVER gone down year over year? Nope. I usually hear my insurance agent say "Well, they wanted to increase it by 25%, but I got it down to an 18% increase." A Pyrrhic victory at best. I have been screwed, glued and tattooed by insurance companies over the years and they have lied on several occasions. I have also seen how "groups" are the biggest way that these companies really penalize small employers by creating artificial entities which are rated in a vacuum. With these statements, I hope I have established my bona fides that I am not a shill for the insurance companies. So, what would I do if I was the king? On the insurance front I would make a few fundamental changes. First, I w...

I sit here watching the House of Representatives voting on the Health Care Reform bill. Unless something unexpected happens, this Senate bill (and its companion House bill) will become the law of the land. So many Democrat Congresspersons have sold out for promises and innuendo. Now, the final vote is in: 219-Yea, 212-Nay and they are cheering. The-Asterisk observation: The ‘big’ insurance companies were made the Bogey men and the Dems took up an "us against them" stance. What the applause-givers don’t talk about is the fact that so much of what is wrong with our health ‘system’ now is government imposed rules, regulation and restrictions. Business fulfilling a need is like water in a swollen river, you cannot stop it and when it reaches an obstacle, it either goes over it or around it. That is why our health system is such a labyrinth of insane nonsense. And the Pelosi -Reid-Obama triumvirate think that this 2500 page tome is going to fix it? Are they freaking insane????...

Senator Mark Warner sent out the following email to me today: A sobering experience There has been a lot of talk recently about the apparent gulf that exists between what we're talking about here in Washington and the economic uncertainty that too many Americans are experiencing in their daily lives. An event I hosted in the Fredericksburg area earlier this week illustrated this economic anxiety in a powerful way. My office sponsored a federal job fair at the Stafford County campus of Mary Washington University, and more than three-dozen federal agencies were represented -- from the Transportation Security Administration, to the Peace Corps, to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The response was overwhelming -- literally overwhelming. As many as 7,000 jobseekers showed-up to speak with these federal agency recruiters, and the unexpected response resulted in long lines and significant traffic congestion. In fact, our event reached capacity before lunchtime -- so members of our st...

Al Gore will never change his mantra on this subject, but I must refute his thesis. Climate Change? Yes, of course. Man-made? Probably not. Can we do ANYTHING about it? No. As this winter that we still have not escaped in the Northern Hemisphere proves, the climate does change. Funny how every person's reference point for the "good ol' days" is how things were when he or his parents were young. Al is a smart man but he does not exhibit his intelligence by holding onto this theory of man-made climate change. The believers will say "Oh, we have to do SOMETHING before it is too late." The problem is, if they do do something and it doesn't change things, then they will say that the non-believers wouldn't let them do enough, or we waited until it was too late. If they do something and the seas do not rise, then they will say that what they did worked and the non-believers were idiots. This is the same modification scenario where Global Cooling became Glob...

At the end of his MSNBC show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" Keith made a 10 minute closing monologue about his father who is hospitalized with a panoply of ailments. You need to take the time to watch the video to fully grasp the meaning of my comments. I truly feel sorry for the Olbermanns. It is a horrible situation to be in, especially if it lingers. A family member of mine just died tonight after a quick but tortuous bout with lung cancer, and after getting hit with dementia. These sorts of thing occur all too often and are an unfortunate part of life. However, this does not justify Keith to use his grief to bend the meaning of death panels to his own description nor does it justify the way he damns to Hell people who have a different opinion. Without researching exact comments by specific individuals who coined the phrase "Death Panels", my take on the term (as an astute observer of current events) is the suggestion that a body of administrative bureaucrats ...

The recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down a portion of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform law which was passed in 2002 was assailed by Pres. Barack Obama in his first State of the Union speech when he said "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections." Let us ignore the comment about a "century of law" as the court overturned seven years of law, although it may seem as if it has been a century since it was passed. And also the part about foreign corporations who have a right to have their US subsidiary interests represented. What I would like to focus on is what role does money really play in elections? Obviously, this post could fill volumes, but really the question is quite simple... What are politicians afraid of? They always claim that money will buy elections, but look at it this way. What good is bu...

This week was the week that Apple finally released their iPad, the long awaited and breathlessly anticipated tablet computer. At the 'unveiling', Steve Jobs announced that the iPad (a name scorned by many, but one I think fits well within Apple's iNomenclature) would be based on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform and that all 140,000 applications previously developed for the platform would work on it as well. I think this was a wise decision, giving the iPad immediate access to a plethora of working applications, instead of having to dumb-down Macintosh applications, or worse yet, have to develop a whole new ecosystem around the iPad. Something that was actually shown twice at the announcement (once when Steve sat down and demonstrated the functionality of the iPad and then again when several new iPad-focused applications were showcased) was the New York Times app. I think this is very revealing because for this device to be more than a novelty, it needs the ubiquitous 'kil...

I woke up at 4:30 this morning with my head totally congested to the point that I couldn't breathe. I stumbled into the bathroom in the dark, careful not to step on one of our two Golden Retrievers and found the decongestant that I had just purchased the day before after having to show my Drivers License and sign a declaration along with my home address that I wasn't going to abuse Pseudoephedrine HCl. (That is a subject for a whole 'nuther blog entry.) As I laid in bed waiting for the drugs to kick in and not being able to sleep, my mind started wandering. I started thinking of all of the things that we have now that were unheard of 50-some years ago when I was a child. I started thinking "You might be getting old if you remember when..." Here is a rather stunning partial list, starting with the first item that got the thought going: Nose drops really were drops in the nose. You had to tilt your head back and your mom would drip two drops down each nostril and it...

Warner Crocker just posted his annual wishlist at GottaBeMobile.com. I am an inveterate wisher, so I made a comment to his post that I liked so much, I decided to just post it here too. Click the link above and see if anyone else added to the discussion. Here it is: Warner, Best wishes with your wishes. My grandfather used to say "Wish in one hand and %$#^ in the other and see which gets filled the quickest." For all of the absolutely horrible, unwanted products released into the wild, why can’t one company just give us what we have all been wishing for for over a decade? I read a statistic that 99% of all products released in Japan in a given year fail. What are these designers thinking? Do they test anything with real people? Do they read blogs? Do they even read their own support forums after they release a turkey? I think not… My perfect tablet would be big enough to simulate a piece of 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper, maybe fold in the middle for carrying and protection and be pretty...

Where I am from, you don't send out Christmas cards with plain ol' stamps. You have to have Christmas stamps (or at least holiday stamps or something festive.) So, I bought some surplus Christmas stamps from my office and brought them home to put on our Christmas cards. But, wouldn't you know, we had 46 cards, and I only had 40 stamps, so we had to get more stamps. The reason that we didn't have any stamps in the first place is that the post office that my wife went to earlier did not have any stamp machines and the lines were too long to wait in. All of the stamp machines had all been pulled. This was the post office for our ZIP code, and it is not a particularly big post office, but I thought that was still kind of strange. In fact, this particular shopping center where the post office is located had one of the first stamp machine kiosks way back in the early 1960's, when you had to feed it a bunch of coins and then pull that big lever out and hope that the glass...

Yesterday, during the steady rain that we endured while everyone else on the East Coast was getting buried with snow, I was sitting at my keyboard catching up on 'stuff'. The TV was on and I clicked away from Fox News just after the post-mortems on the Senate Health Care Reform cloture vote. Two channels down from FNC on DirecTV is Current, Al Gore's channel. There was a piece playing about Hillbilly Heroin , or OxyContin and the drug trade between Florida and middle America to supply this wildly addicting drug. This situation with 'OC' is very sad. Most of the people caught up with the addiction (and the illegal trade to feed it), by their own admission, did not want to get involved. But, like many things in life, crap occurs . In fact, the sherrif of the Kentucky county where the report was shot, said that everyone in his county was touched by OC in some way. No one was immune from the influence. Today, I watched Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday. As the question...

I am having a difficult time reconciling something... For the past several months, I have been following Tom Peters' blog at tompeters.com . I even post a few comments from time to time (if you can imagine that.) A recurring theme lately has been about health care in the US. Tom has a number of readers and posters from the UK. Many like the system that they have and they have posted anecdotes to support their feelings. Another recurring theme is that something needs to be done about health coverage in the US, that we are the only developed country in the world without some sort of full coverage and that we as a country are slackers for not doing so. The word socialism keeps cropping up. Tom made the following comment following a recent posting " The "horror of socialism" is a uniquely (?) American thing. We do allow a socialist military--though with our second ammendment, many of us are mini-militias. (I personally think that any Congressman who votes against some fo...

I just received a nice logo watch as a gift. I opened up the tiny, little booklet that came with it to see how to set it (nothing is easy anymore...) The little booklet turned out to be the 10 Year Warranty certificate. Here is what it says in a 2 pt font: "All timepieces carry a 10 year limited warranty against any original defect in materials and workmanship. (Warranty excludes: batteries, wear to crystal, strap, bracelet, crown or damages resulting from accident or abnormal use or from repairs made by others.)" Later on it continues: "Should your watch require servicing covered by the warranty, send to the following address... a check for $12.50 to cover handling, postage and insurance charges." Now, what are the odds that anyone would use this warranty? Or be able to find the postage stamp-sized 'brochure' in 2019 which will instruct them how to make it all happen? If your warranty is unusable, why even have one? I sure hope they don't require a pro...

I was moving around my collection of 'stuff'' during the recent nor'easter after I discovered that a leak in one of the rooms in my house had saturated the carpet with water. I discovered this little box in perfect condition. It is a set of two cassette tapes containing an abridged Audiobook of Tom Peters' Liberation Management - Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties . It was read by the author, ca 1992. (I remember the nineties. They seemed to blow by in a nanosecond...) Even then, I had discovered that the quickest way for me to get through a book was to have someone read it to me. I have bought other books by Tom, and most recently, I have listened to his Audible reading of Re-imagine! Coming up from Tom in 2010 is his new book, The Little Big Things (163 Ways to Pursue Excellence.) He writes interesting books, talking more about enterprise than small business, but great food for thought, never-the-less.

And I mean lots! In spite of the recession, wars and political malfeasance, the US (IMHO) is still a great country to live in and even the 'haters' who threaten to leave this country if X, Y or Z happens, never do. We have to put up fences and guard (except for the airport, I use that term loosely) our borders to keep people out. So how can we be so FUBAR ? There are so many examples of dis-ingeniousness, that I had to pick just two for this special Thanksgiving edition of The-Asterisk . Food and Climate Change (nee, Global Warming.) Food Insecurity . This is a term that is just getting its legs. No, it doesn't mean that tomatoes are dreading the frost or that carrots fear being yanked from the warm earth. It is a term to describe hunger, or the threat of hunger. If an individual is labeled food insecure , it is defined as being hungry or anticipating hunger within the past year. FRAC.org has well-written page that further defines this term. Don't get me wrong, I am sur...