I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the Affordable Care Act when it was first passed in 2010. I was lightly interested in the legislative dealings, and I knew it was a necessary step in starting to bring the US closer to every other developed nation in the world, but didn’t have a great sense of what it did. I was glad that it seemed to be a good deal for people that couldn’t afford or whose jobs didn’t offer insurance, but that’s about it.
Last year, when the Supreme Court handed down its ACA decision I was working for the Obama campaign. The campaign is when I really started paying attention. At that point it was more difficult to not pay attention. That’s when I started finding out more about how people with pre-existing conditions will be able to get insurance, and about how insurance companies can’t cancel your plan for frivolous reasons, and so much more. I discovered the larger implications of the how the law tries to slow rising medical costs too, but that’s not really my point here.
I’ve been lucky enough to pretty much always have insurance. Part of that is being fortunate with employers covering part of it. The other part probably stems from my extreme fear that the second I don’t have it, I’ll end up injuring myself in my weekly pickup basketball game. A lot of people I know haven’t been able say the same. For whatever reason—cost, unemployment, thinking they’re invincible, whatever—I have friends and family that I know have been without any kind of health insurance for years.
That scares the shit out of me.
As far as I know, they’ve all been ok up to this point, but what happens to them if they get sick is definitely something I think about often. That makes the ACA a little bit personal for me. It means that people I love no longer have to be on the “hope nothing happens” insurance plan. Me working on that campaign means that they can all go sign up for a insurance starting today.
If you don’t have insurance, someone else is thinking the same thing about you. Go sign up now. I’m not even asking you to go sign up for the health care exchange for your state. If that works for you, great. But if you find another plan you’re eligible for and it’s cheaper, then go sign up for that one instead. I don’t care, as long as you sign up. For almost all of you it will be easier to go to the doctor than it has ever been before. You can even get money from the government to help you afford it.
If you’d like to know a little more, check out healthcare.gov. Lots of information there. Please. Do it. Here’s a video to get you started.
]]>A while ago, someone I follow on the Internet (is there a term for that? internet-friend?), Tiffany Brown tweeted:
marriage is testing my capacity for trust. give him access to my financial accounts? now what now? – @webinista
A joke of course, but it made me think about a conversation I had not too long before that with a couple other friends. Both of them had recently gotten married, and were talking about how it was about time for them to have those hard-core financial conversations with their wives.
That really got me thinking. Money is something that most people don’t really talk about. Families don’t talk about it, friends don’t talk about it, and sometimes even couples don’t talk about it. I’m not referring to salary or anything—I don’t really think that needs to be discussed freely. I’m talking about basic financial literacy though. Creating a budget, having an emergency fund, deciding whether to save for the future or pay down your massive college loans. None of the intricacies of that kind of stuff ever gets talked about, and it really should be.
So, I’m going to start the conversation by just talking about how my wife and I have organized our finances over the years. No specific numbers or anything, just general stuff we’ve done, in the hopes that some of you will share the same and we can all figure out things that would help out. Everybody’s system is still evolving, so maybe we all can pick up some stuff that’ll help. I don’t have comments here, but please blog and tweet about it and let me know @littlelazer. I’ll try to link to your stuff. I apologize in advance for so much of this being kind of couple-centric, but that’s all I really know.
My wife and I have been together for a little over 11 years, and we’ve been living together for the last 10 of those. She has always been better with money than me. I wasn’t bad with money—my credit was good and I wasn’t bouncing any checks—but I basically didn’t know how to save until she got in the picture. She set me straight right away about carrying any balance at all on my credit cards. I’m almost surprised she stayed with me when she found out I was paying interest (seriously, don’t do that if you can avoid it, pay it off in full every month so you can act like you got a free 30 day loan).
When we moved in together she had already lived with her best friend for a couple years and they had a system in place. There was a joint checking account that both of them paid into, and they paid all the joint bills from that account. We started off doing the same thing.
At the time we were watching quite a bit of Suze Orman (we stopped watching a long time ago, so no idea how helpful she is now), so a lot of the stuff she said on her show influenced what we did. We took her advice and added up all of the monthly joint bills and each deposited a proportionate amount into the joint checking, based on our incomes. Any individual bills (personal credit cards, loans, etc.) we just handled independently. We got a joint credit card too for stuff that both of us used, and we just paid that out of the joint account.
Once we started thinking about buying a condo together we started a joint savings account too. At the time, all of our savings accounts were with ING Direct (now Capital One 360), but now we use Ally Bank. Both of us scheduled weekly deposits, also in proportion to the amount that we were making. We even followed Suze’s advice to make a budget. It started out pretty simple in a Google Spreadsheet, but it got progressively more detailed as time went on. Each month had how much each of us made, how much we put into each savings account, and broke down our expenses into categories (transportation, utilities, debt, etc., and the ever-growing “miscellaneous”).
We got pretty meticulous about putting all of our expenditures into there. We still have the spreadsheets, so I could probably tell you almost exactly how much we spent on groceries in May 2006. After a while we ended up burning out though, it was really tedious to open it up at the end of the day and add in 6 amounts in different categories. Gradually it turned into putting receipts in every week, then every month, until eventually I just stopped. We tried using Mint, but it didn’t stick. Even though we used credit cards for most things, a lot of stuff fell through the cracks, and setting up accounts was a pain.
So at this point we already owned a condo (jointly), were burnt out on budgeting and tracking every cent, and didn’t really have any hard savings goals to use as motivation. We were looking for a dead simple way of paying the bills, and ended up settling on a new Google Spreadsheet.
This spreadsheet wasn’t really a budget though. Instead of saying how much we could spend on something each month, all it really did was show how much each of the bills were that month. There’s a column with the name of the bill (mortgage, electricity, etc.), a column with the amount, a column with the day it’s due, and a column saying whether or not its been paid yet. Dead simple. Each month we alternated who had to take the joint checkbook/register and pay all of the bills. That spreadsheet has lasted several years so far, with minimal changes. Once we got married we added in all of our student loan payments, but that’s about it.
Speaking of loans, during this period we started another spreadsheet. This one lists all of our long-term debt. One section is our mortgages, another is student loans, and the third is for credit card debt (almost always at 0% interest—for big purchases one of us would often take out a new credit card at 0% for X months and we’d calculate how much we needed to save each month to pay it off right before the interest kicked in. Useful when you’ve got good credit and a steady job and the discipline to save the money). The debt spreadsheet shows most of the important information for each account: remaining balance, interest rate, current monthly payment, and the final payoff date. I try not to look at those final payoff dates—too depressing in the columns for my student loans. We update the balances every few months. That part is kind of nice, since you can actually see the total debt column slowly but surely dropping. Very slowly.
The next step is what we’re still working on figuring out. We’ve made a few changes this year that require some adjustments. The biggest thing was deciding that it didn’t really make sense anymore to still do so many things separately. The first step was having our paychecks deposited into the joint account. That doesn’t seem like a big thing, but it’s a little weird to me that we didn’t do that before. Chalking that one up to inertia, it’s a pain in the ass to change the auto bill payment information on so many accounts.
Doing that unexpectedly raised some other questions though, most importantly: what’s the point of having individual accounts anymore? And how do we figure out how much to put into those? You still need to have some stuff to yourself, and what if you want to surprise each other? So for now we transfer money into our separate checking and saving accounts as necessary, and don’t really question each other about it. We just buy almost everything using the joint credit card.
We also started using yet another spreadsheet that has the register for the joint account. Definitely easier than using the paper register (does anybody else use those anymore? Am I just that old? Is anybody even still reading at this point?) because we don’t have to hand it off every month, or ever ask the other person to add something to it.
Related to that, we’re continuing to switch as many bills as possible to autopay. The goal there is that when it’s time to pay the bills we don’t need to worry so much about logging into each site and approving the transaction. It’s more about making sure there’s enough money in the account to cover everything and updating the spreadsheet so that we don’t forget anything.
LASTLY, we started budgeting again. No spreadsheet this time. Now we’re using You Need A Budget. I’m pretty sure we don’t use it exactly the way it was intended, but it’s useful despite that. You can set up your budget pretty easily, it’s easy for two people to both use, and you can see what you’re spending money on, where you need to cut back, and you can look at the pretty little graph which shows that you’re eating out way too much. But the killer thing that makes me think I’ll actually want to stick with it is that the accompanying iOS app makes it really easy to enter in expenses. Now I can just do it right away since I always have my phone on me, removing the biggest annoyance from the spreadsheet.
I’m really interested in hearing what other people do. There’s always room for improvement, and even though this is the kind of stuff that people usually shy away from, it’s frequently the most useful. So write it up and let me know.
]]>It bothers me a little bit that people could have that impression, because it’s always struck me as so simplistic to say that black people think everything is racist. To me, one of the defining things about being black isn’t that you always think something happened because you’re black, it’s that you never really know if something happened because you’re black. You see no difference between what you’re doing and what everybody else is doing, so you assume the reason is due to the most obvious difference.
The essence of it is that you end up having to live your life with a small, but constant, level of uncertainty. Maybe you didn’t get invited to a certain party or gathering, or you didn’t get that job you thought you were qualified for. Maybe you felt like the security guard at that store in the mall just happened to be strolling down every. single. aisle. that you were looking at stuff in.
Walking around all the time and feeling like you’re getting treated differently from other people, but never really knowing why, can drive you a little bit crazy. I’m pretty used to being in different environments and around different kinds of people, but there are still lots of times when I have to consciously push those thoughts out of my head. No, it’s not because I’m black that this person was rude to me, maybe they just had a phone call where they got some bad news. No, it’s not because I’m black that I didn’t get invited to something, it’s because I’m basically a hermit and like to stay at home, so I wasn’t around when people were talking about it. No, it’s not because I’m black that I just got pulled over for not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign (well, actually that one was probably because I’m black, but you get the idea). It’s like that, over and over again throughout every day.
I’ve been fortunate enough to go to good schools, so naturally I’ve always have to constantly endure discussions about affirmative action. Those kinds of kinds of discussions can be destructive if they start to chip away at someone’s confidence because, how can you really ever know whether or not you got in ahead of someone else that also deserved it. Some people can’t handle the weight of that doubt. I ignored the discussions because I knew how hard I’d been working, I never really lacked confidence in academic settings, and always felt like my grades could kill any remaining doubts as to whether or not I belonged. Besides, for anyone to be successful, it always entails a certain amount of luck or randomness, whether people want to admit that or not. (Always.) The idea of me not deserving to be somewhere doesn’t usually enter my mind, because I keep telling myself not to let it, and I haven’t yet met anyone that felt the need to try and show me I don’t deserve it.
Maybe I’m the only black person that feels that uncertainty in everyday life, maybe not. If you don’t then I’m probably a little jealous. I think my point is that you can’t control all of the things that happen to you, but you can control how you deal with it. It’s a choice you have to make. I know things are a lot different for the young black kids growing up now than when I was younger, but I feel like this still applies. Hopefully they grow to understand it and be able to deal with it in their own productive way.
]]>Those people should be ignored. Keep moving forward
]]>So, with my grandmother as my example, there has never really been a question about whether or not I would vote. The only question is who the candidates are. It was important to her, and she made it important for me as well. It was natural and expected that I vote. I’ve acted accordingly.
If you can vote, please go do it. Elections really do have consequences and make an impact on people’s lives. If you can’t vote, for whatever reason, go help someone else vote that otherwise may not be able to do so. If you need more suggestions, check out barackobama.com and see how else you can help out.
Vote.
]]>I had been thinking about this phenomenon a while ago, early last year sometime, when I noticed the disproportionate contempt I had for some websites. I’d go through sites picking at all of the little errors that I noticed, wondering how they slipped through, and thinking about how of course I’d be able to do a much better job. Then I started getting a lot busier and started looking at some of the stuff I was putting out, and wondering what the next person that has to work on the site I just finished going to say about me? Yeah, there may be some things I couldn’t quite smooth out before the deadline to launch the site came up, but I had reasons! My successor has to take into account the time it took for the client to respond, or their irrational color preference I couldn’t budge, or their requirement that I everything be crammed onto the home page with terrible copy and spacing!
Actually, no. Your successor won’t take that into account, the same way you didn’t take it into account when looking at someone else’s work.
What made me think of all of this was this little controversy in the web design community due to a blog post by Andy Rutledge critiquing the design of news websites and using the New York Times, specifically, as an example. I definitely respect Andy as a designer and for the many posts he writes explaining some of the things that designers should be doing. I read that post and thought some of his ideas were pretty good. While they certainly wouldn’t completely work for the Times, maybe some news organizations would be able to implement some aspects and make reading news on the web a better experience. I’m not a fan of his outspoken, and in my opinion somewhat combative and inflammatory style, but I can usually get past that stuff to focus on the helpful parts. After reading the post, I didn’t think about it too much, until I saw this blog post by Khoi Vinh that seemed to refer to Rutledge’s post. Vinh is a former design director for the Times, so he and a lot of his friends and former coworkers built the site.
Vinh praises some of the ideas and the execution of the blog post, but he makes a critical point at the end that I found most important.
I will say this, though: unsolicited redesigns are terrific and fun and useful, and I hope designers never stop doing them. But as they do so, I also hope they remember it helps no one — least of all the author of the redesign — to assume the worst about the original source and the people who work hard to maintain and improve it, even though those efforts may seem imperfect from the outside. If you have good ideas and the talent to execute them and argue for them, the world will still sit up and pay attention even if you take care in your language and show respect to those who don’t see things quite the way you do.
Basically (in not so many words) you can disagree without being disagreeable.
Apparently Rutledge has been receiving a lot of criticism for his redesign, and he wrote another post addressing such criticism, once again written in the same tone. I read some of the articles which he linked to. Most certainly didn’t fully get across what he was trying to do with his analysis, but I didn’t think they were quite as bad as he seems to think (this seems natural, since they weren’t attacking me personally). However, when people (including employees of the Times) took to twitter, blog posts and news articles to attack Rutledge, I don’t know if they were responding to his points so much as they were responding to his tone and some of the content around his points. From the first paragraph of his post, he basically primes people to start coming up with an a response.
Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.
Maybe he was trying to draw attention to the post, or maybe that’s just how he feels, nobody knows but him. Either way, this brings me back to my original point. People don’t seem to consider (or care) that there are actual people on the other side of the screen. As the worker bees trying to grow the Internet every day, you would think that we’d would be much more cognizant of this on a daily basis, but it doesn’t seem that way.
This isn’t about not hurting people’s feelings. That has to happen and can’t be avoided. Any kind of criticism hurts, even the constructive kind. But at least constructive criticism shows you a path to improving, so that’s what you latch on to, and you grow and get better. But if you go to work every day, trying to improve nytimes.com, what kind of lesson can you really take from someone saying “[i]t is hard to believe that the Times, or any other similar publication, actually cares about the news when they treat it with this sort of indignity”?
I think that kind of language immediately obscures the point you were trying to make and potentially forecloses the possibility of a reasonable debate about the issues. It makes it easy to argue and difficult to learn anything when you just think the person you’re arguing against is stupid and wrong. All I’m really trying to say is that I hope in the future we all think a bit more about who did the hard work to create the thing that we’re so casually insulting. I happen to think that’s a better way of operating. I intend to do my part here and on Twitter to make what I say more productive, and closer to something I would actually want to spend time reading. Hopefully others do too.
]]>White celebrities move in a space of white privilege that allows for both forgiveness and forgetfulness on behalf of the ever-present mainstream media machine. This is a space that Black artists are shut out of. As racial identity continues to be negotiated through images and representations, Black celebrities continue to be subjected to the deeply embedded archetypes and stereotypes of Blacks in this country. Read: Chris Brown as the “angry black juvenile delinquent” and Janet Jackson as the “hyper-sexualized, overly promiscuous black female.”
I’m a little torn about this article, which you should go and read first. On one hand, I definitely agree with her larger point—that black celebrities can be subject to very different standards than white celebrities. On the other hand, this seems to be a particularly bad situation to use as an example of such differences.
I would actually argue that the black community is a little too fast and forgiving in bringing its celebrities back into the fold. Not for the stupid stuff I don’t care about, like showing a nipple on or having a stress-induced nervous breakdown, but for serious stuff, like statutory rape and violence. I think there is too much rushing to protect someone because the mainstream media is being too hard on them. One obvious example is R. Kelly, who managed to neither apologize nor suffer any long-term legal repercussions beyond the expense and public humiliation of the trial. People never seemed to stop stepping in the name of love.
I think Chris Brown’s situation is quite a bit different though, because he committed an act of violence against another person, and that person was at least as famous as he was (don’t discount how important that second part is). I don’t really follow much celebrity news and gossip, so I don’t know how many other celebrities of any race were involved with violence like this. I know Sheen has had some charges brought and abused the women associated with him on several occasions. Unfortunately Sheen is a bigger star than them, and people took their colorful pasts to mean they were slightly less…reputable. Wrongly, their accounts of the incidents were discounted. There’s also Mel Gibson, but he’s continuing to suffer some consequences. I’m sure there are more, but right now I can’t really think of any comparable situations, other than maybe Ike and Tina Turner. Yeah, Miley Cyrus and Lindsey Lohan and others have done dumb stuff, but they’re only hurting themselves, and people love to see the rich and famous self-destruct.
With Brown, I never really got a sense of any contrition. Like I said, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention, so I could be wrong. I remember him putting out a youtube video, but I also definitely remember seeing pictures of him chilling at a pool with a bunch of women having a good ‘ol time a few weeks later. I’m not saying he needed to be a hermit, but c’mon son, Rihanna’s face hadn’t even finished healing yet. Since he was apparently shunned immediately after the incident, this is basically the first time in two years that people actually want to hear what he has to say—so long as what he has to say is “I’m sorry” (look no further than Michael Vick for an example of that). His big problem (besides having a temper) is that he has now turned what could have been a bad incident into a bad pattern. He could have taken all the questions in stride, sounded contrite, performed, and moved on to the next interview but he didn’t. Why? Because he does have anger issues.
Leigh is right that Brown is a young kid that needs better people around him, but I also think he needs some serious anger management and time before he should be allowed to let slide. Domestic violence is too important of an issue for two years, a misdemeanor charge, and some bs community service to be enough. That’s not the way things work nowadays, though. Now, your road to redemption is paved with dollar bills. The way things work is that he has two choices: 1) change the topic by making himself into a sideshow, so people stop thinking about why he was originally in the news (not an easy thing to do, making violence funny, but possible, as Sheen has shown); or 2) start excelling at his craft and making hit songs (the R. Kelly/Kobe Bryant route). He had already chosen the latter path, which is the only reason he was on GMA to begin with.
Unfortunately, if he really wants people to stop asking him questions, then all he needs to do is start “#winning.”
]]>The phone network still operates as if our phones are tied to specific, permanent devices and geographic locations. Voice is building a new, modern structure on top of this network, a system that works more like e-mail or instant messaging. Your e-mail and IM accounts aren’t tied to certain computers; they’re out in the cloud, and you can chat with your friends whether you’re at home in Brooklyn or at an Internet cafe in Zanzibar.
Phones should work the same way. Why shouldn’t you be able to reach me on a single number whether I’m at home or at work? And why shouldn’t I be able to answer every call on my home phone, where I don’t have to pay for airtime?
There’s no doubt that GVoice is pretty powerful. You can customize it so that family members’ calls always get through, work calls only come through at certain times, and blocked numbers go straight to voicemail. That’s all pretty great, because it’s really flexible, and you can have a different action for each person with your number.
The other side of that coin though is that flexibility causes equal parts complication. You have the power to go into fine-grained detail with what happens when each person calls your number, but that means you have to actually log onto GVoice and spend the time doing all of that customization, which even I am loathe to do. Even if it’s only to put everybody into “Family,” “Friends,” and “Work” groups, that’s a pretty significant investment of time (especially when you have Google Contacts adding every single person you email into your contact list— a big part of why I stopped syncing GContacts with Address Book and just largely ignore it). I organized people into groups once a long time ago; it took forever, and I have no interest in doing so again.
Power users are sure to dig deep into these customizing features in order to save a few minutes here and there out of their busy schedules, but for most people, it’s just overkill. You don’t want work calls coming in on your cell phone? Then you probably just don’t give work people your cell phone number. Obviously some people don’t have that option, but then how much does GVoice really help in that case anyway? You can look and see who’s calling and decide not to answer. GVoice basically helps automate that, but takes away the discretion you usually have (regardless of whether or not you want that discretion). It further breaks down that barrier between home and work that some of us value fairly highly. Do you really want people from work reaching you by phone as easily as they can reach you by email?
Right now I basically use Google voice as my business phone line. When somebody calls it’ll ring all my phones and I pick up wherever I’m at, usually on my cell. What I’d really like though, is closer something that does the opposite and mostly exists already—kind of like call forwarding. Instead of one number to rule them all, I want to have a few different phone numbers—one for work, one for family/friends, and maybe one for all those places you have to give a number but don’t want to give your cell because of telemarketers—that all go to the same phone (cell or otherwise). This would be much rougher than the fine grained control you get from GVoice right now, but I think it’d be easier for me to deal with, because it’s basically what I do now. I don’t have any controls on GVoice, but if people are calling that number then I know it must be for work, because that’s pretty much the only time I give it out. So I can just decide not to answer. No other configuration needed.
This will probably never happen, because it would start to remove phone companies as a middleman. It would basically be a system where you own some phone numbers and then can assign those numbers yourself to one or more devices, rather than going through AT&T; or Verizon and asking them to do so, the way we do now. I can still hope though. In the meantime I may just accumulate a few numbers through Google Voice and figure out a way to implement my system.
]]>A quote from the book:
Here’s the riddle: Who is more financially independent—someone who can fix a leaky faucet, or someone who must pay another person to fix it? … Isn’t needing money to make it through life actually a form of dependence? If that is so, then asking the question “What would this expenditure look like if I had the time and skills to maintain my possessions myself?” will lead you toward less dependence on money to fill your needs.
That little section bothered me because it’s emblematic of a very light undercurrent going through the book. A large chunk of the first few chapters are about figuring out how much money you are taking in, figuring out how you are spending that money and your time, and deciding if your priorities align with your spending—both money and time (at least that’s what I’ve taken from it so far). My issue is that here and in other places throughout the book they stray away from their message of telling you to figure out your own values, and move too close to just telling you what your values should be.
The reason this stuck out and bothered me is because at this point in the book, I’m already deep into thinking about how I spend my time and money, and whether I’m happy with that balance, and one of the more significant things I’m thinking about is home ownership. We’ve had our place for about 5 years now and we’re looking to move on, so an important decision is whether we want to buy another place or just rent. And I’m starting to come to terms with and embrace the fact that I don’t really care at all about owning a house. I consider time spent fixing things around the house to be completely wasted. So I’d be more than happy to pay somebody to fix something that breaks. That would be a part of financial independence for me
Basically I just hope that other people reading the book are able to make their own decisions about what they value rather than take some of the author’s values as gospel.
]]>I’m not really surprised that Google would make a mistake like this, because it seems like every tech company has a blind spot. That blind spot usually relates to anything that would interfere with the way they make the majority of their money. Microsoft and Apple don’t seem to get “cloud computing,” because they make their money selling desktop computers and electronic devices where everything you need is in your hand. A bunch of other companies don’t seem to understand good design, because they make their money selling cheap knockoffs that only compete on price, so paying to design something would cut into those razor-thin margins. But Google, they don’t seem to understand anything that deals with interacting with other people, especially not privacy. That’s because they make their money using computers running algorithms that index information and sell ads whenever you search for that particular piece of information you need.
The privacy problems with Buzz actually start with a system that it’s dependent on, Google Contacts. Google tried to unify the contact managers on several different products, like Gmail and Google Reader into one central place to manage your contacts. That was a good idea, but the problem was that they made the decision to add people to your address book and show them on your IM program just based on how often you email them. Unfortunately they chose not to make a distinction between people you want to email and people you have to email. So, if you use google chat then people that you email regularly, but aren’t really friends of yours, start IMing you. There are plenty of people I take pictures of when I go to weddings or other events, and I label their faces in Picasa Web Albums so that I can remember their names in the future, but that doesn’t mean I want them listed as a contact. And if you take a look through your contacts, all of a sudden a lot of names start appearing that you don’t recognize because you only emailed them once when replying to a joke your friend cc’d you on. In the case of your contact list you can’t even change that setting, you just have to deal with the pollution of your contact list.
Here’s a general rule for Google: rightly or wrongly, people generally think of the emails in their inbox as private. So you should not put new functionality that is, by default, public in that same inbox. People get confused about how to log into facebook, so how exactly do you think they’re going to be able to tell the difference between an email to their friend and a comment that gets immediately indexed and is available in search results around the world? Answer: they won’t be able to tell the difference, and once they realize that their coworkers and family and 5 billion other people can read that offensive joke they just made they’ll be pretty pissed, and they’ll be pissed at Google.
With Google already starting to have problems in Europe because of privacy concerns, they are going to have to start taking these issues seriously. But that sort of direction has to come from the top of the organization, so it doesn’t help much when your CEO says dumb things like, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” It shows a fundamental lack of concern for these issues, and it might finally be enough to make me start reconsidering some of their services.
Update 2/15/09: Looks like they made a few more changes because of the response they were getting. It’ll likely be enough to get people to relax, but I still think these problems will pop up for them again and again.
]]>These six months have culminated with me finally launching my own company website, Cobwebs Consulting LLC. I decided that the three things I want to work on are web design, technology consulting, and technology project management. Web design is pretty self-explanatory, I’ve always enjoyed well-designed sites and want to bring as many more into existence as I can. I’m not just talking about sites that look pretty though, I’m talking about sites that people actually enjoy (or at least don’t hate) using and that help accomplish some purpose for the owners. Those two things should never be in conflict. My interest in technology consulting arose because it seems like a lot of business really have no idea what they should be doing on the internet. They wonder if they need a facebook page, a twitter page, or an iphone app. They don’t know how to put their inventory online and take orders, or whether to build an intranet, or how make sure that their employees all have access to the information they need to do their jobs efficiently. I’d like to be the person that helps them figure out these issues. Project management seems to me like the next logical step after giving the consulting advice. The organization may have a plan of what they want to do, but they’re good at running the organization, not necessarily in choosing the right vendors and make sure the vendors are doing the job to the proper specifications. I can be the person that watches over the project to make sure it progresses properly.
So as of now, I’m fully open for business and looking for new (paying!) projects. If you have know of anybody that needs a website, please give them my info or send them to my website or my Sortfolio profile.
]]>My retrospective kind of starts in 2008. I decided pretty early on in that year what my plans for ‘08 and ‘09 were going to be. I wanted ‘08 to be the year when I created some kind of foundation for myself, kind of like a starting point. So I saved up for an engagement ring, proposed to my girlfriend and started saving money like a madman so I could have some more flexibility in my choices. I basically transferred any money that was in my checking account the day before payday into savings, every time. I wanted ‘09 to be a year when I started doing the things I wanted to do.
It seems like the general consensus is that 2009 was a fairly shitty year. With the economy like this, that’s no surprise. Things just didn’t turn out the way people intended or would have liked. This is one of the few years I haven’t shared that same sentiment. I lost a few people this year—a couple uncles and an aunt—but for the most part, 2009 ended up being pretty close to what I wanted out of it. It was full of some fairly major transitions, from beginning to end.
First off, my nephew ended up being born on the day before my birthday. Obviously starting fatherhood was a much bigger transition for my brother than for me, but I think it still counts. The next big thing was no longer working at the law firm. It feels a little weird not to be practicing after 3 years of school, 2 years clerking, and another almost 2 years at the firm. Law school and everything that followed took up the majority of this decade for me, but I think I’m happier now than I’ve been at any point since 2002, despite the uncertainty. Somewhat related was taking the next step of filing the paperwork to start my own business. I managed to realize what I actually enjoyed doing, and start figuring out a way to make a living doing it.
Lastly (and most importantly) I got married. This easily could have been something I said a year ago, because I was ready to marry her on the day I proposed. Most of this year was just leading up to October 3rd. All that planning culminated in one, really fast, day. I don’t think there’s any other time that I’ve been able to have that many friends and family all in one place, and it was even better than I had hoped. The pictures don’t do it justice, so I wish it wasn’t as much of a blur in my mind. I’ll still be savoring it for a long time though, and enjoying the married life.
If ‘08 was me getting my foundation in order to prepare for ‘09, and ‘09 was mostly a transitional year, then I’d like 2010 to be the year that I build on the things I started in ‘09. There may be a few transitions, but nothing close to the level of upheaval in ‘09. So far, I’ve identified 3 areas that I want to work on. The first area is design, something I never paid much attention to. I knew some posters/websites/objects were appealing, but I didn’t think about why things were placed a certain way. This past year I started paying attention. I starting following more designers that I can learn a lot from, and also asking more questions to my brother when I need help. In 2010 I design as much as I can.
The second area is music. I’ve wanted to learn how to play the saxophone since high school. During the summer of 2003 I briefly had both the money and the time to rent an alto sax and pay for lessons, but I couldn’t keep it up. Now, thanks to my lovely wife, I have my very own tenor to practice with, and I intend to work at it throughout the year. So regular practice is my goal.
The third area is photography. I don’t necessarily want to take more pictures, but I definitely want to take better pictures, and that will certainly involve taking more pictures. I want to bring my camera with me to more places and be less nervous about taking pictures when I do. I’ve enjoyed photography since my undergrad Intro B&W class, and that interest exploded once my wife (then girlfriend) got me a wonderful present a few years ago. For the past few years I haven’t been in many pictures because I’m always the one taking them. I haven’t taken photography as seriously since that class though. I haven’t thought about the composition, the lighting, and learned how to really use my cameras. Next year I take more more photos and better photos.
Obviously this list doesn’t include a bunch of other things I plan on doing in the next 12 months—getting and staying in better shape, improving as a husband/son/brother/uncle/friend/person, continuing to get my business going, etc. I’m leaving those out because those are pretty much constants. I’ve always been trying to work on those areas, and hopefully I always will.
It’s amazing to see what can happen in a year, and I can’t wait to see where I’m at in another 365 days. I hope 2010 is good to all my friends and family members, as well as yours.
Happy New Year.
]]>Now you have a blog that is written by a journalist pretending to be the CEO of Apple. It’s supposed to just be satire, but still manages to cut through a lot of bullshit and get to what isn’t being noticed or mentioned. Obviously most people don’t really give a shit about Apple, AT&T; or the iPhone, but in his latest post he kind of hits on something more important that any of that.
Essentially the point of the post is that AT&T; has been reducing it’s capital expenditures for the past few years even though it’s been getting a huge influx of wireless data revenue, mostly from iPhone customers that have to pay for a data plan. As a result of not spending that money to build network capacity, we have the problems that AT&T;’s network is plagued with today – bad service in densely populated areas, dropped calls and customer dissatisfaction. The reason, AT&T; has been cutting back on capex is so that it could smooth out it’s earnings, which, as anyone that’s taken an accounting class can remember, need to show steady upward growth for the investors to be happy — not too fast, not too slow, but just right. Since all the executives’ salaries are based on that number, they care about it more than anything.
Contrast AT&T;’s spending with Google’s from a couple of years ago, when their capital expenditures were insane as they built up data centers and all sorts of other things to handle the increasing amount of users they were expecting for all of their different products. I’m not saying every public company doesn’t try to smooth out earnings to some extent, but to do it in the face of increasing customer agitation like AT&T; has is pretty despicable.
Anyway, my point is this: why is this AT&T; information only being talked about in a blog post? Meanwhile you have a bs article in the NYTimes and a segment on CNBC that claim the problem is with the iPhone itself, despite that fact that the very same phone doesn’t seem to have these problems on any other network around the world.
This is why I can’t say I’m all that sad to see newspapers and network TV dying off. It seems like they stopped trying to go out and report actual news years ago. Now I get to hear about Tiger Woods’ sex life most of the time.
]]>In the post, Chuck explains some of the ways that he uses the project management software Basecamp created by Chicago-based company 37 Signals in his legal practice. Basceamp is a type of project management software which tries to help teams of people (potentially in different locations) to communicate, coordinate their efforts, and share information, including files. There are other types of project management software, but I will focus mostly on the benefits of Basecamp here and give a more thorough explanation some other time. Chuck explains his reasoning as follows:
My group of attorneys decided to use Basecamp in order to coordinate our practice area and to allow each of us to have access to critical documents, notes and time matters concerning the cases that we manage together.
…
The critical information in your office needs to be available online so you do not have to haul files all over kingdom come, like we use to do. Instead of a complicated and expensive VPN, we tried Basecamp instead.
Project management software can be used by small law firms and solo practices as well as by teams teams of attorneys working together in larger firms. Ant example of a situation it would be useful is with a group of attorneys working on a single case. As the case develops, you are send emails back and forth, research relevant precedents, draft motions, etc., and you need to keep track of court dates, deadlines, contact information for people involved with the case, and tasks that need to be completed. All that information is spread out in several different locations: your calendar, your email program, todo lists scattered around your desk, different folders on your computer, etc.
Project management software would allow you to keep all the necessary information associated with that case in one place. You can upload files for everyone to see (helpful if you’re collaborating on a motion and sending drafts back and forth), keep a calendar with important milestones, send messages to everybody associated with the project, and delegate tasks to specific team members. If you need to see the latest draft of a response, check a deadline, find a pdf of a case you cited in a previous motion, or see what the next item on your todo list is, you check the folder for that matter and it is all right there. You don’t have to wade through the emails concerning other cases, mailing lists you joined, forwarded jokes from your parents, and other miscellaneous items you receive daily, and you don’t need to remember where on your computer you saved that important file. Everything in one place, and no confusion about what’s been done and who’s supposed to do what comes next.
37Signals software is a favorite at Cobwebs Consulting. We use Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise daily. I also personally used Backpack when I was practicing to keep track of a case I was assigned. I had a page with all of the court documents filings from the beginning of the case, as well as an explanation about what happened at each hearing. Since the most recent items are automatically added at the top of the page, everything was already in chronological order without me having to do anything. Any time the partner had a question about what happened on a certain date or wanted to see a particular motion, response, or order, I’d just consult the Backpack page and be able to tell him right away. No need to search anywhere else. It ended up being a huge timesaver. I highly recommend it to all of you associates struggling to stay organized. More on Backpack and 37Signals software to come.
As with anything, there are pros and con to using services that are hosted on computers you don’t own. Interested in finding out whether project management software is right for your company, or already thinking of implementing project management software to help organize your business? Contact Cobwebs Consulting LLC at info@cobwebsconsulting.com. We can help.
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Must have general knowledge of managing Twitter, Facebook and the internet
Effective written and verbal skills
Action-oriented and drive for results
Must be able to work independently with little management
Knowledge of current events in general practice groups in the legal world
Must have a college degree and an interest in current events.
The person’s primary responsibility will be to “actively promote our growing law firm using a variety of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and our existing web-site.”
This is an interesting development for law firms. It is certainly a good thing for them to take notice of “social media” and experiment with using it, but I have reservations about doing it this way. My first question is, what is the primary purpose of hiring this person? Is the goal to attract associates by showing how progressive the firm is? To attract clients by demonstrating the firm’s expertise in certain areas? To keep their clients informed of developments in that area? An overall strategy is necessary to focus the efforts of lucky person that lands this job.
I’d also like to know how much the Social Media Director will interact with attorneys. Will that person will be on an island by herself, researching and posting whatever she comes across? Will she have a good idea of what projects people are working on and need to specifically talk about those? She will probably find out about some big case the firm wins, but that is basically just another press release that nobody pays attention to. What about an important legal tidbit that an associate came across while researching a memo or drafting a motion? Will the associate talk to the social media person about posting that information? The ad says the person will “communicate through social web-sites about all specific practice groups and their developments,” but the person will only know about developments through weekly or monthly practice group meetings, which cannot encompass everything that is going on.
So here is my opinion on a better way. Law firms already have employees that know enough about the Internet and social networking sites. RIght now they just call most of them associates. Almost all of them have facebook profiles, and some are probably on Twitter too. Many partners at least have a profile on LinkedIn. The attorneys also happen to be the ones finding information that can add some value to the firm’s presence on the web. Why not just empower them to post something to twitter, or a blog, saying “Hey, I just found an interesting little case that would be of interest to a few clients in a certain area. Check out this case, here’s what it says.” Posting to the website could even be a condition of employment as an attorney at the firm, maybe included in an attorney’s non-billable hours.
Something like that would have appealed to me when I was an associate—do research, and if you want, write a short blog post about something interesting you find. If you need to encourage people a little more, requiring one post per month, or year, per attorney would be more than enough. If you’re worried about giving associates that much responsibility, require that a partner approve it beforehand. Attorneys are already getting daily or weekly updates about significant cases in their practice area, so it won’t require too much extra effort to write up a paragraph about a significant case they find.
A method like this could have multiple benefits. It helps the firm because fresher and more relevant content on the website improves search rankings and prevents the website from seeming stale. This could help the firm attract new clients by showcasing its expertise in certain areas. The attorneys may also benefit personally by getting another outlet to hone their writing and (if their name is attached to the posts) building up their personal brand as an expert in that subject matter. It’s an easy way to get young associates into the habit of publishing and promoting themselves. Being able to show a potential client several pieces you’ve written about their industry and issues that affect them establishes your credibility.
I doubt this is something that will happen in firms for a long time, but I can hope. In the meantime, if anybody is looking for Director of Social Media, I’m definitely available.
]]>It was one of those things I always knew in the back of my head, but never really thought about, how with almost everything you use or see somebody has specifically given thought to how it should look, so that it will be as visually appealing as possible, easy to use, and help you get whatever you need accomplished (whether or not they accomplished those goals is another matter, at least assume they tried). Now that’s a big part of what I think about when I walk around.
Example: I went to dinner with about 10 or so people a few days ago. I was sitting near one end of the table, and behind a person at the other end, maybe 8 or 9 feet away from me was an old poster for some street fair in the 1980s. The last hour of dinner I just couldn’t tear my eyes away from this poster. Every time I stopped talking to someone my eyes would inevitably go back to it (of course I foolishly didn’t think to take a picture of it). The thing I noticed was that from the distance I was, I could still see the drawing (of a Toronto trolley car) on it perfectly well, and could also read the name of the event and the dates on which it took place. There was other writing on it, what looked like names, but that info was obviously less important because it wasn’t visible from where I was sitting. I kept thinking how someone had purposefully thought about what information was most important and made sure to design the poster so that people glancing at it from a distance would be able to discover that information. Yeah, it’s a small, basic thing, but it’s the kind of thing that I’ve started to take note of and think about when I’m trying to design a site. Baby steps.
]]>Now I generally regard myself as pretty healthy. I’m not in the best shape, and I no longer regard myself as near invulnerable, but generally healthy. I’m not against taking a whole bunch of medications, if they’re necessary, but I’m not a fan of just taking a bunch of stuff if it isn’t actively keeping me alive. I go in for the testing and find out that I’m allergic to dust mites, mold, and dogs. I tell the doctor how I had asthma as a kid and that I have some dry eye stuff I’m dealing with now. I thought it would be a quick convo with her — I say I’m kind of allergic to dogs, she says here, take this medicine and do these things to minimize it, boom, we’re done.
I was incorrect.
It’s all still kind of a blur, but somehow the doctor ended up writing 2 or 3 prescriptions and giving me three different samples of products that she had written the prescriptions for. Apparently she expects me to use some nasal spray once per day, take Claritin, and use an inhaler 15 minutes before I go play ball. And this is in addition to getting dust-mite repellant sheets and covers and a HEPA filter when we get a dog. There’s no way I’m going to take most of that stuff, even if I was ok with spending that much money, there’s no way I would have the patience for it. The Claritin, filter and dust-mite stuff, sure. The prescription medications? Not a chance.
It just seems a little wrong that a healthy person can go in for a specific purpose and end up with a cornucopia of medications like that. Why is all of that necessary? I felt like she was just throwing a bunch of stuff to me that I would have to take for the rest of my life. Not interested. Not at all.
]]>First, I don’t trust this plan by Sec Treasury Paulson. It just doesn’t smell right to me. He’s claiming that the reason why Merrill, Lehman, AIG and all these banks failed is because they have all this worthless derivatives paper that is based on mortgages that people have stopped paying. So the solution he proposes is for the taxpayers to buy up this “worthless” paper at a price that is supposedly fair to both parties so that the companies can have enough capital to lend out and go about conducting business as usual. Now like I said, I’m no expert, but if all these smart financial people can’t put a good price on it to enable the companies to work the situation out themselves, then why should the government be doing it? As I see it, they’ll either end up overpaying or underpaying.
Now if they overpay, that means the U.S. government (the taxpayers) end up losing money on this deal, and I’m not a fan of that, obviously. But if they underpay, then the companies won’t have enough capital to sustain themselves anyway and they’ll still fail. If by some chance the government is able to set a price that everybody thinks is fair, then why should the government have to commit any money at all? If people know what a fair price is, then they’ll be able to make their own deals without our involvement. So why do they need $700 billion again?
Second, as I understand it, all this paper that these companies are holding and can’t get rid of is essentially the right to receive money from payments that people make on their mortgages. The problems started because people got mortgages that they couldn’t really afford, so now they can’t make the payments and the banks end up foreclosing on houses that nobody wants to buy (I’m going to put aside whether the blame for these mortgages lies on the people that agreed to them or the people that were pushing the mortgages, both sides should share plenty of blame).
So if the paper is worthless because people can’t/aren’t paying their mortgages, wouldn’t helping people restructure their mortgages in a way that is bearable for them solve all the problems? Less people losing their houses, more mortgages being paid on time, and so then shouldn’t the value of the derivatives rise as well? I understand some money would eventually be lost, since the home prices would fall, but I see no reason why people that bought the houses (and end up getting their mortgages restructured) shouldn’t take a little bit of a loss because they can’t sell them for a profit, and the companies that sold these mortgages shouldn’t take a loss by having the value of the instruments drop and be worth less in the long run. Unless that kind of adjustment happens things will just remain artificially high and invite another crisis somewhere down the line.
I don’t know if this analysis is overly simplistic, but it makes some sense to me. I don’t see why such a big deal should be made about saving these specific companies. Let them declare bankruptcy and let other companies pick over their carcasses. I mean, this country is supposed to be about capitalism and creative destruction right? So let it happen. I’m just getting flashbacks of the Patriot Act when somebody from this administration comes in front of Congress and says the proposed bill must be passed immediately otherwise there will be dire consequences. I think things will be fine until January 21. I just don’t trust Democrats to have the backbone to stand up to be steamrolled, especially during election season.
]]>So what do I do with such a nice little moment of peace and quiet and absolute silence? I go write a blog post. Go figure.
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