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Verizon Customer Service Fail

One of the “deals” websites I get via RSS had a nice offer on a blue tooth headset from Verizon, so I ordered it.

Got my confirmation email and left for Arizona for a week.

When I got back today, I’m going through my mail and parcels and didn’t see the headset.

So I check the order status on-line.  Status is “cancelled.”  No reason why.  Nothing.

And no notification.  If I hadn't gone on-line to find out where my "will arrive next day" shipment was, I would never have known. 

Think I’ll be switching to Verizon anytime soon?

Neither do I….

My Health Care Quick Fix

I usually watch political debates like the current one on health care reform with amusement and frustration—frustration about how facts get distorted by both sides, especially those “end of the world” TV ads.

I was at my doctor’s office this past week, visiting my physicians assistant (I can’t remember the last time I actually saw my doctor) for my annual visit so I can get my prescriptions extended for another year.  It takes less than 5 minutes.  Since I have an HSA, high deductible health plan, I saw the actual cost of my visit when I paid it--$140.00!

My PA and I briefly discussed health care reform while I was getting my blood pressure checked, she listened to my lungs and heart and wrote the two prescriptions.

All this leads me to a proposal for health care reform the government can implement immediately for basically zero cost (at least by government standards).  It has two parts:

  1. Pass the Association Health Bill that has been floating around Congress for the past 5 years.  That bill would exempt association’s from the ERISA laws that currently require an association health plan to meet each and every state it is offered in and offer a national plan to its members.  That would create the buying group/cooperatives discussed already.
  2. Sponsor, perhaps to the tune of $50 million or so, the development of an open source practice management application system for doctor’s offices with an emphasis on electronic records storage and electronic data transfer.

I am always amazed by the fact there are as many people doing paperwork in any doctor’s office as there are people providing medical care. Read more »

Why do they make it so hard?

I have been helping a friend with a website that is exploding in popularity, was developed in HTML/CSS and has no intention of switching to a CMS, and has a registration/supporters page that has grown too fast to maintain with copy and paste.

I did a quick Excel formula that generated equivalent HTML to what GoLive produced and switched the registration form to a Google form that leaves the results in a Google Apps spreadsheet (eliminating data entry).

I have Excel 2003/2007 on my PC, she has Excel 2008 on her Mac, the thought was to write an Excel macro that would automate the maintenance of that page, so I did.

Whenever I got stuck, I had code examples in the Excel VBA help file and loads of examples via Google.

After a day of playing around with the macro (mostly learning how to dynamically identify how many rows are actually being used in an Excel worksheet), I had a fully functional pair of macros (one to facilitate preprocessing the updates before integrating to the master list, the other to covert the master list to HTML).

Guess what?  Excel 2008 for Mac doesn’t have VBA support!  Shame on you Microsoft!

I would never have expected Microsoft to leave out a major feature in the latest version of Excel.

In searching around for a solution we came up with the idea of using the latest version of Open Office, which had the same macro support across platforms.

While most of Open Office is absolutely compatible with Microsoft Excel, it would appear macros are not. Read more »

Looking Forward to DrupalCamp

This weekend is DrupalCamp Colorado 2009.

I use Drupal for several websites I have built.

Daughter Amanda and I went to a Denver Drupal Users Group meeting 18 months ago.  Since there were several Drupal “newbies” the group kept it basic.  I understood about half of what they talked about.  We decided this group was way too technical for my level of use.

Last summer I went to DrupalCamp Colorado 2008.  It was a great experience.  A highlight was a presentation from Warsaw, done via remote access and Skype, and done by a 14 year old.  There were enough non-technical sessions to make it a very worthwhile experience.

So I’m looking forward to learning new things about Drupal.

Excel 2010 Feature Request

Microsoft’s Excel 2007 added an amazing new command not present in previous versions, Remove Duplicate Data (its just right of center on the Data ribbon).

Removing duplicate data before 2007 involved either Visual Basic programming or a manual comparison after sorting the data.  Both solutions are time consuming (and error prone in the case of manual comparison).

Remove Duplicate Data can search unsorted tables with thousands of rows in less than a second, pulling any duplicates that match in every column, or in a user defined group of columns.

However, Remove Duplicate Data is scary.  You click on the button, decide what columns must match, and almost instantaneously its done.  Your only confirmation is the number of rows deleted.

I know Excel 2010 is about to be released to early testing, so here’s my wish list of improvements to Remove Duplicate Data in order of difficulty to implement: Read more »

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