And introducing, HitCoffee.com.

Very soon, the front page of this site will automatically forward to that one. Soon after that, the this site will cease to exist. However, dot-net will mirror dot-com and dot-co, so you don’t have to update your bookmarks. If you use RSS, though, you will need to update that. RSS feed links are on the sidebar.

Comments on this site are closed.

In other smartphone news, it’ll be interesting to see how the Kindle Phone does. Jose Gonzales calls it a sure thing, but I’m not so sure. The Kindle Fire succeeded in part because it was a tertiary device. It’s different to hand one’s phone over to Amazon. But it could well work out, especially if they subsidize the crap out of it.

Some interesting predictions on the future of air travel. One thing that will likely not come to pass is more airlines getting into the oil refinery business.

Maybe a solution to global warming is laziness. Richard Heinberg thinks we need to redesign our use of energy. Which, if that’s what we need to do… we’re doomed.

Big Coal may be in for some pain ahead, and for once it isn’t because of the Obama Administration.

A new report says that the Family and Medical Leave law is working. We were certainly glad to have it.

According to the Canadian Press, Mining companies that are getting visas for foreign employees are rejecting candidates with 30 years of experience.

I am inclined to criticize employers who expect perfectly qualified employees to roll up on their doorstep, and think that the notion that we have a shortage of skilled workers is built on this mentality. Dominic Giandomenico makes the opposing argument.

I disagree with Michael Calabrese. What is bring proposed here is actually much better than government-sponsored WiFi everywhere.

Maybe this is why Google wants us to use something other than passwords. (Seriously, an interesting article on James Fallows’s wife’s email being hacked.

The residential property in the ten most expensive London boroughs is now worth as much as all the housing in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined…”

Atlantic Wire looks at political types who tried to make it in Hollywood and succeeded or failed. The record for Democrats is mixed, but Republicans generally failed. There are remarks each side can make about that.

Florida has approved birth certificate with three parents. I still don’t fully understand why, given the lack of rights/responsibilities of the third parent.

As far as Arapaho is concerned, though, they don’t owe us anything. They had a record of the $314, but… simply did not feel obligated to pay it. Was that because we were late? They wouldn’t say. But they did not owe us the money, as far as they were concerned.

Last year, we owed Arapaho money. The $314 did not count towards what we owed Arapaho, because that money apparently went into an ether.

It resurfaced last week. Arapaho finally admitted that they had an outstanding debt to us of $314.

What changed their mind about this? They wanted to make sure - even though same documentation said that we may not have actually received it - that we paid taxes on this “income.”

Leave it to the Truman-Himmelreich household to somehow lose money on a tax refund.

I suppose that was an obvious outcome. However, that does not stop me from dwelling on it.

When I told him he appeared drunk, he told me I was right, and said, “At least I’m honest.” How many points would you award for that honesty?

He thinks rehab, AA meetings, and therapy are a waste of time. He drinks excessively, he says, because of environmental circumstances that compel him to do so. When those get around to changing in his favor, if they ever do, he may stop drinking excessively.

It was this guy. That will also probably not be surprising. Maybe it also won’t be surprising that I’ve been through this same general situation with other guy friends, but I’m trying to only dwell on one thing at a time right now. I sure hope it is the last time, but there’s that good old end-of-history illusion. I sure hope this isn’t happening in 20 years with one of my sons. It seems that I have known and even been related to many men of protracted unemployment and terrible attitude. Maybe they even form a majority, but I should recalculate when I’m in a better mood.

I can’t argue with the logic of “I don’t WANT to.” Of course, neither am I going to pay for it. Therefore, I am ignoring his calls now. He apparently considers himself above leaving any message or text that states his purpose, other than “It’s important.” Fuck that. Tell me what it’s about and I’ll decide if it’s important.

He stayed with another friend for three months after he lost his apartment. There were two rules: No drinking, and shower every day. He was really irritated by the shower-every-day rule.

This is what happens when you get older. You either get uptight and boring or you become a loser screw-up. He doesn’t like my choice, and I don’t like his. This is the crappy thing about when there’s a lousy economy — it gives cover and excuses to the shiftless. Yes, I used the word shiftless, and I think the word layabout is useful too. Before you mock me, brother, think about whether the logical extension of your attitude leads you to Fish’s fate.

Russell Saunders explains why Connie Mariano should shut up about Chris Christie.

Dick Tracy watches are truly an idea whose time has come and kudos to Apple if they’re on top of it. There are “smartwatches” that talk to smartphones, and smartphones that go on your wrist, but there’s still work to do to get it right.

Remember the robber that accepted an offer of pizza for his family instead of robbing the place? Too nice a story to be true, I guess. He was lying.

Bitcasa touts infinite online storage. They have my attention.

Paging Ryan Noonan: A man who took his wife’s name was accused of fraud. It does seem to me that there ought to be documentation for both men and women to change their names, but if you’re going to give one a pass, so should you with the other.

If you like Chuck Klosterman or professional basketball, or if you’ve heard of Royce White, I recommend this article.

Fans of the movie Spaceballs will appreciate this.

The Obama Administration may be holding up the pipeline, but they have approved substantial offshore drilling leases.

UMass got a lot of early mentions for a possible invite to the Big East. Then we stopped hearing anything about it. Maybe this is why.

LibreOffice 4.0 is out! I’m still waiting to see what OpenOffice does with the code they got from IBM before I go all-in with Libre (except Access, which I just can’t quit).

If you just stole an iPhone from someone else, it’s not a particularly good idea to call the cops when someone steals it from you.

According to the Daily Mail, the NHS in the UK is going after your data.

Automation may not take away jobs, but they will suppress wages. This is one of the things that makes me skeptical of trade restrictions to boost domestic employment and wages. There are very often going to be other options.

Now, fortunately for me, I tend to be very patient with the crying baby (more on this at a later date, perhaps). It doesn’t bother me as much as it seems like it should. But I still don’t like the baby crying, especially if it’s indicative of there being something wrong.

Clancy got a hold of a book about napping and we wondered if maybe that was the reason she was so constantly cranky. The book said that little ones tend to have 90-minute awake cycles, so you try to put her down every ninety minutes for a nap. It seems to have actually helped. But it hasn’t been easy. She is becoming really, really reluctant to nap. Almost like it was before we started this.

The routine is that I take her upstairs and hold her and sing to her. She spends the first part crying. But I sing all the same. It’s certainly easier on the arm than singing while walking her around. And, around the 90-minute mark, she used to rather suddenly get very tired. And she was in a better mood when awake. I was getting some time to do some packing. So it was really working out.

For some reason, though, she is fighting the naps harder now than before. It’s now taking 30-45 minutes a go, sometimes. Which really, really disrupts my day. In some ways more than the crying baby, because the crying baby was kind of a constant.

Anyhow, my brain has increasingly geared towards the 90-minute wake cycle. Even when she’s asleep for the night, I stop after 90 minutes and think “Isn’t there something I need to be doing?”

Some businesses are looking to fix our sleeping habits. I’m a big fan of employee nap rooms. That my wife’s hospital didn’t have one for on-call docs was always baffling to me.

If this is Google, I once worked for the anti-google. Google tries to find ways to make its employees happy. My former employer tried to find employees who would be happy in its oppressive atmosphere.

I pass on a lot of links about alternative housing. Here’s one on alternative hoteling!

Graphic novels rule, books drool. People retain more information from graphic novels than typical books.

Slate explainer tackles the question of whether states can exile people. Actually, I know someone who was exiled from Arizona.

You can always count of Dave Schuler for sober analysis. On the bright side, he has a post on how we can cut health care costs without lowering payments or reducing services.

This is pretty cool. A phone for your smartphone. I really hope that the future of smartphones includes modularization. They need to get everything talking to everything else. In addition to smartphones-as-car-keys, I want an Android fridge.

Apparently, back in the 80’s in fear of a Sam’s Club’s arrival, Oklahoma passed a law requiring a six-percent profit margin.

Why comment trolls suck.

I’m about as pro-resource-exploitation as you can get whenever the economics warrant it, but I will admit that this makes me uneasy.

Google is hoping that we will trust our personal information to a USB drive. Speaking of passwords, when I read this post at Dustbury I was thinking “Hey, that guy had the exact same problem I had!” Then I realized that “this guy” was me.

The neat story of how a guy filmed a movie as Disney World on the sly.

Farhad Manjoo is singing the same old tired song about the death of the PC. Bring able to do 80% of PC functionality is enough to use the tablet on the go, but heaven help is if, as a culture, we simply forgo the other 20%. Meanwhile, Rob Enderle hits the mark.

It has a garage, but it’s of little utility for its intended purposes because it’s not very accessible by car. It’s connected to something that’s more like an alley than a street. I also doesn’t have an automatic door and cannot be unlocked from the outside. It actually makes me wonder why - when they were building it - they didn’t just incorporate it into the house. It would have added significantly to the square footage. I’m not sure what extra expense there would have been, but I’d imagine it wouldn’t take long to recoup in higher rent.

That said, it works out perfectly for us. Moving from a larger house to a smaller house means we have extra stuff that needs to be stored. So even if it were a room, we’d probably still be using it for storage. This way, at least, there is a huge door that makes it easier to move stuff in and out.

It’s the little things you notice when you buy a “new” house that was put together by non-developers. There’s no toilet paper roll. There is no mailbox, though they have agreed to put one on there.

I noticed the lack of a toilet paper roll, and remembered that I had not yet taken any toilet paper over there… at an inopportune time.

We’d hoped to hire the realtor’s unemployed brother to help us move stuff. It’s… pretty hard for me to pack with a baby attached to me. I mostly just wanted some help putting stuff into boxes and moving heavy furniture. They wanted $1,600, I was not willing to may much more than $1,000. So after having got used to the idea that I wouldn’t have to move everything, I started having to get used to the idea of moving everything.

We’re going to miss having a yard with a fence. Where we are moving to means that I am not going to be able to let my dog out on her own. Too many streets with too much traffic and too many rabbits that might tempt Lisby into traffic.

Dr. Phi gives us a glimpse into government IT.

I link to this article of a fire in Chicago because you have to see the picture. It’s far out.

The USPS sent Laura Northrup’s package 1,688 miles out of its way. I had a package from the east coast sent to me in the mountain west that, for some reason, went through Hawaii.

XXfactor takes exception to GQ separating out Indian and Asian women from its “Hottest Women List.” It seems to me that you can just as easily chalk this up to “Yay diversity!” rather than get irate. The follow-up on modeling specification is a good point, though.

Apparently, the magic number for an economy is $8,500. Once average purchasing power reaches that number, political extremism and populist promises start losing their appeal.

The few remaining ninjas out there are financially struggling.

How Newegg fought back against a patent troll and saved the online shopping cart.

McDonald’s, meetMcWorld!

It really is annoying that all-in-ones won’t let you scan images if you are out of ink. Apparently there is a bypass for my Canon, though. Cool.

I’ve never understood tail-bobbing. Tails are awesome!

How much does Yelp help businesses that get positive reviews? It turns out to be significant.

Researchers are looking at the Facebook pages of people that commit suicide to see if they can identify warning signs.

The first thing to point out is that under the hoped-for models, we’ll probably need more doctors. The payment reforms being proposed are going to push us much farther down the road towards corporatized large practices capable of bearing substantial capital and regulatory burdens, and pooling risk over a large group of patients. Doctors will become employees, rather than small business owners.

But if it’s hard to maximize their income, doctors are going to want to maximize lifestyle instead, working a lot fewer hours in exchange for their lower pay. This may be better for patient care (I don’t really like the idea of my surgeon working twelve hours a day, six days a week). But unless you really believe that doctors are creating most of the demand for their own services, this implies that more doctors will be needed.

The second thing to point out is that it will be difficult to get people to give up 10 years of their life and $250,000 in exchange for a salary that will top out at, say, $150,000. Yes, some people want to be doctors because they just love doctoring. But ten years is a long time, and $250,000 is a lot of money. If you’re good enough at school to get into med school, it probably doesn’t make financial sense to go.

She paints a pretty dour picture. It’s not completely unwarranted. There are at least some things we can do that might help immensely. The biggest thing is to collapse medical school into undergraduate as much as possible so that doctors aren’t having to wait ten years. It might be hard to accurately predict good future doctors straight out of high school, but I don’t think you have to wait until they have an undergraduate degree in something else (Clancy majored in bio-chem and psychology)

Importing doctors from abroad is an attractive possibility. They’d be willing to work for less. Or would they? It seems to me that we can attract a lot of doctors from overseas with the offer of money, but it would become notably harder if we try to do it at regular middle class wages. Especially if we expect them to go through residency. Of course, we can consider bypassing residency, but we would only want to do that for doctors from similarly situation nations, who are the least likely to want to come here for diminished wages.

We hear a lot about how other countries pay for their citizens’ medical care, but hear very little about how they make their doctors. Given the shortage, as well as the desire to reduce physician wages, it’s something we need to start giving a lot of thought to.

I have my ideas, though I think it’s ultimately - if we do anything - going to involve redefining “doctor.”

In separate statements released Friday night, Dodds and Applewhite called the incident a one-time occurrence. [UT Athletic Director Deloss] Dodds said it happened during activities related to the 2009 Fiesta Bowl, when [UT Offensive Coordinator] Applewhite was UT’s assistant head coach and running backs coach.

Dodds said he learned of the incident later that month, and that Applewhite admitted his “inappropriate conduct.” Applewhite “fully accepted his discipline, including counseling,” Dodds said.

“Several years ago, I made a regretful decision resulting in behavior that was totally inappropriate,” Applewhite said in his statement. “It was a one-time occurrence and was a personal matter. Shortly after it occurred, I discussed the situation with DeLoss Dodds. I was upfront and took full responsibility for my actions. This is and was resolved four years ago with the university.

The university may have had reason to make this belated disclosure:

Last month, Bev Kearney, the women’s track coach at the University of Texas, resigned over an affair with “an adult student-athlete” in 2002. Was the African-American, gay, woman forced out over a consensual affair while the white male football coach (who was also a star football player at the school) received preferential treatment? In Applewhite’s case, the affair was not with an athlete, but there may have still been a supervisory role. It will be interesting to see how Texas spins this.

It seems to me the central question is whether or not there was a supervisory role (and if there was, what was the nature of it). That, to my mind, is a critical difference between the two incidents. I could be convinced that Applewhite should have been fired for his transgression (UT is reviewing the policy). The case that Kearney shouldn’t have been fired is much more difficult to make. Even at the professional level, where there is a much more ambiguous power relationship between coach and player and the players are older, that is a fireable offense under any reasonable handbook. Such things are almost certain to cause instability within the team the coach was hired to lead.

In the Applewhite case, I can really see it going either way. It seems inappropriate for anybody who is even technically a sorta-member of faculty to be sleeping with students. It also sets a bad standard for the student athletes and their conduct (how they handle the attention and adulation they receive, if of course we care about such things). It can be hard enough to get coaches to crack down on inappropriate (or illegal) personal conduct without coaches having inappropriate relations with students ten years their junior. On the other hand, it’s consensual and there is very little to indicate that their was sufficient power differential to cause concern for coercion.

One suspects that the Applewhite case is one of those things that is going to depend heavily on factors unrelated to the allegation. Which means that someone more prominent like Applewhite stays, while a lesser-known figure would be quietly dispatched.

While so many conversations about health care costs focus on overbilling and fraud, often left unsaid are the fact that non-fraudulent doctors frequently underbill. There are things they could get paid for if they approached their records a little differently. It’s one of the things we have to worry about if we start trying to bend the cost curve by cutting physician fees. The more we do that, the harder they will look. Or, maybe, it actually doesn’t matter because of EMR. EMR is, among other things, allowing hospitals to more easily find the billing they could send out but don’t. As it stands, my wife’s employer checks doctor notes once every now and again and gives doctors tips on the things that they forgot or didn’t know to bill. With EMR, the review process would become a lot more streamlined

Interestingly, I think that McArdle may have been more right than wrong in her initial view of EMR (cost-savings aside). There is a huge learning curve, and people who have been doing notes one way for the longest time are going to be slower during the adaptation process (which may last the duration of their career…). But for doctors who learn to use EMR initially, I think it’s more likely than not a time-saver. My wife came through under both systems and it didn’t take long for EMR to be the faster way to go. She initially hated it, but now really wishes her current employer would adopt it. But she hadn’t spent years and years doing it the other way.

Not often, but I sometimes get conspiratorially-minded. The case of the NCAA screwing up the investigation of Miami (FL) to my usually dormant conspiratorial instincts. This has the potential to save the NCAA from making a very difficult decision. Enough so that I wonder - at least a little - if it wasn’t sabotaged. I’m sure Miami-Ohio is breathing a little easier, though.

Tom Tancredo lost a bet and will have to smoke pot. Awesome. Good on him for keeping up his side of the bargain.

I link to this article of a fire in Chicago because you have to see the picture. It’s far out.

Canada has denied Randy Quaid’s request for permanent status. It looks like we’re stuck with him.

Via the New York Post and AP, an interesting story of how a clerk at Papa John’s managed to talk a thief out of taking money and into taking a pizza instead.

Having read this list of 10 lessons from creationist-inspired school books, I decided that I needed a drink.

I’ve been addicted to the Android game Temple Run lately. I can play it with one hand, which is very helpful when holding a baby. Here’s the story of how it came to be. Also from BusinessInsider, a look at where Google keeps your data.

Discussed recently on NaPP, a look at the rebound effect of energy efficiency. The “rebound effect” being that people who have more energy efficient things end up using it more and undercut the energy savings. They exist, but are not large enough to offset the energy savings.

A case for and against the Rooney Rule (actually the “pro-” says TRR isn’t enough). The Rooney Rule is the NFL’s insistence that minority candidates be interviewed.

Here is more on the giant squid, and its hunter.

Aquaman gets no respect.

After we made one, what exactly would we do with a neanderthal?