I had meant to keep track of all the books I read last year somewhere. Since I have got better at maintaining my blog pages in the past few months I added a page here to update and track them.
The last post on my and my mother’s frustration with her new Windows Mobile phone generated the most feedback of any blog post I have ever posted here. Most of the feedback was well intentioned (I approved every comment that wasn’t obviously spam, including some that were very rude) and I appreciate everyone taking the time to read this and respond.
In terms of clarification – I focused on Windows Mobile as the source of her frustration, since she got a Lumia phone, but I am 90% sure that we would have had the same issues with Android or iOS. The only exception being that it would have been easier for me to guide her through iOS as that’s the platform I know best. Despite what some people thought, I am not an iOS fanboi, or an Android shill, nor am I paid to beat up on WinMo. Personally I use iOS because I also use OSX and its easiest for me to use the same platform across the board (not as easy as promised or it should be, but that’s another post). I think the only thing that is different and more challenging for her with WinMo is the tile concept – where simpler icons might have been less confusing. On the other hand, perhaps different sized tiles correctly configured would have been best.
As far as an update – my Mum returned her Lumia and got the the Doro 612
As far as I can tell, it’s a 6 or more year old commodity feature phone but its screen is easier to read than the antique monochrome Nokia she had before. Personally, I think Doro are coining money by selling obsolete phones at a premium, but one thing they do well is cater to their demographic. My Mum was very happy that the phone came with a printed instruction book which she read cover to cover and filed for future reference. Its not what I would have chosen of her, but Christmas is about giving people what they want, not proving a point. At least texting and calling will be easier for her on this and she can access her emails as she always has, through the library.
Lesson learned.
My 75 year old mother needed a new cell phone – she travels quite a lot within the UK and lives alone and it was time. She’s been using an ancient Nokia for years – it’s at least ten years old at this point and doesn’t keep a charge and is getting harder and harder to use. So when she brought up the idea I was happy to help her – although at a distance. She had seen an ad for the Doro phone – which is aimed at old people.
The trouble is that it seemed astonishingly expensive for what it is and for what she needs – it lists at £230 ($350) for what appears to be a 2-3 year old android phone with a simplified UI. If you purchase it with a monthly plan, it’s still really pricy since my mum uses about £10 of call and SMS credit a YEAR, and the cheapest plans were more than that per month with a 2 year commitment. Even if she were to use 3G or 4G data for checking road conditions and her single email account, I imagine she’d struggle to use £15-20 a year.
So, thinking that we could configure any smartphone to more or less work like this, I decided on my disastrous plan B. I decided to recruit my 14 year old niece who lives near my Mum to help her learn how to use a smart phone and set it up simply in the first place. I sent my sister to carphone warehouse with a budget of £50 to get a PAYG phone. My recommendations were the following:
LG L20
Huawei Ascend Y330
Samsung Galaxy Young
Nokia Lumia 530
The first three are android, the last is Windows phone. My sister chose the last because my nieces have an earlier version of the same phone, so in theory can help her out.
I say in theory, because in practice it turned out to be a complete disaster – after fielding multiple phone calls with tears and stress and upset, I told her too return the smartphone for whatever candy bar feature phone she wants and use the difference for a nice bottle or wine or two.
Why was this process so traumatic?
The whole experience has been trying and frustrating for all involved and I’m disappointed we couldn’t find a phone that worked for my Mum – maybe we can try Android or iOS, but I suspect many of the same issues would arise no matter what the platform. It has really made me rethink UI development from the perspective of the older, unsure user. It also made me realize that the simplicity that Doro have engineered into their UI is worthwhile (still overpriced, though, IMHO).
I’m not going to get into the whole messed-up big picture of all that is wrong in the current state of healthcare – just give a micro example of the dysfunction that is endemic.
I live in New York, and I work for a company based in Minnesota. We (between us) pay for a high-deductible Blue Cross / Blue Shield plan. This causes issues every time I use the insurance because the doctors submit the bills to Empire BCBS (NY) even though my card clearly says I have coverage with BCBS of MN. (Exactly the same thing happens with my dental insurance too).
I need to get a CAT scan, and because I’ll be paying the negotiated cost myself as I haven’t hit my deductible for the year ($3200) I would like to have some idea how much that will be. So I call BCBS and talk to a very nice lady in Minnesota. She guides me to a place on the website that should do exactly this (give an estimate of cost). But first I have to put in what kind of plan I have. Apparently I have an “Aware” plan – which is great to know since it is not shown on my card, the webpage, or anywhere else on the paperwork I have (probably buried in the hundreds of pages of stuff they sent me). I put in my zip code and nothing comes back. The nice lady explains that this is because I live out of state and the tool is only designed to work within MN (despite the fact it accepted the NY zip code).
Here’s where it gets laughable. She explains that she can’t tell me what is covered or what it will cost because they don’t have the info. I respond saying they must have the info because they pay the claims. That’s a different department she responds. She realizes this is a crazy situation but BCBS haven’t given her the tools to do anything about this. I explain I just want a ballpark figure – is it $300 or is it $2000? The last time I had CAT scan was 20 years ago and it cost over $10,000 – but that was then. She would really like to hep but she can’t.
Just for the hell of it I type in my old MN zip code and I get costs varying from $350 to $1400 depending on which facility I use. I can use that thousand dollar differential much better than some random health facility so I would still like to get to the bottom of this – as much for the principal at this point.
So I call BCBS of NY (Empire BCBS). It’s a little difficult to find a phone number because the web site just says call the number on your card. When I find a number and call it’s also hard to get through the menu without an account number but I keep selecting random things and pressing zero to get a person. The person who answers is also nice (kudos to BCBS nationwide for that) but she can’t help me either. Can she give me a range of what they reimburse? No. Again she is hamstrung by procedure, but she suggests I call the facility.
I call the facility and speak to the billing department and the lady there is even more helpful. She understands the confusion and is not at all surprised by the lack of communication between the various BCBS entities. What she can tell me, though, is the actual amount that they bill to BCBS ($1090, for the record) so I know that the actual amount I will pay will be lower than that. I’ll update this when I find out what the actual cost to me is.
I’m not at all surprised by the confusion and lack of communication between different insurance entities – and imagine the wasted cost of all these useless middlemen! I am very surprised that a CAT scan in Chelsea, NYC is a fraction of the cost of the same procedure in Minnesota (depending on facility).
I had breakfast this morning with an old college friend. He was in town to run the NY marathon for charity and I reached out to him on twitter and made the time to catch up. He was my best friend at University, but after I came to study in North America we lost touch and I literally had not spoken to him in over 25 years.
It was a great breakfast and a chance to catch up and reconnect. I met his wife of 25 years for the first time, heard all about their kids, and his career and life over the intervening time. It was great fun, and I wonder why we lost touch, because we have so much in common. What it made me realize is that a large part of this commitment to healthy life I am undertaking is the mental health aspect and maintaining and fulfilling friendships for the sake of sanity, stress relief, and enjoyment.
There are many studies that show the health benefits of good friends. If you make those friends the kind of people who run marathons for charity, or who will go skiing or surfing with you, then that’s even better.
I’m winding down my status on any of the airlines because I get pretty much the same benefits on United having their credit card as I do having silver status and its nice to not have to travel as much.
But I still have close to 100,000 miles banked and I do collect the miles and use them wisely. As part of that equation I thought I would try and work out what each UA frequent flyer mile is worth to me. That way, if I see a car rental for $200 with 1500 miles and another for $175 I can work out whether it’s worth paying the extra for the points.
A starting point is the (apparently quite high) cost of purchasing miles for United – 1000 miles costs $37.62 which works out to 3.76 cents a mile – plus a bunch of extra fees. That’s only practical when you are few miles short of an award. Using my United credit card for work expenses has zero marginal cost as long as I don’t carry a balance. But if I pay interest that “freebie” starts to become very expensive.
If I look at it from the other direction, I mostly use miles to travel to Europe. When I travelled a lot I used miles for business class because that’s where you get the best value per mile, but let’s assume I’m taking economy / saver tickets because that’s what I do when I can. A trip to the UK using miles is currently 60,000 miles RT for a flight that averages $1000-1200 which gives a redemption value of ~1.6 to 2 cents per mile. You get better value in Business because it “costs” 115,000 miles RT but would cost $5,500-8,000; yielding a redemption value of almost 7 cents per mile.
Using these metrics I came to the conclusion that one United Mileage Plus mile is worth somewhere between 2 and 4 cents to me when I’m earning. Meaning that I can pay a $20-40 premium to earn 1000 miles and feel OK with that. Of course, my preference is always going to be to earn as many miles as I can without paying anything extra.
So I haven’t really been reporting and I have fallen off the wagon a little bit over the last couple of weeks – and then regained focus this week. I do feel like I’ve been paying more attention both to diet and exercise in the previous month compared to the rest of the year. I had not been sleeping well with the change in seasons last week, but getting back to the gym has taken care of that mostly. We still alternate between cold and damp days and overly warm for the time of year and that’s never a good thing.
I did plan a trip to Newfoundland over Thanksgiving – a boost for my mental health – and I am very much looking to getting out in the wilds, even if it is cold and wet.
Low carb vegetarianism continues to elude me mostly, although I have cut the vestiges of pure fructose in the form of cranberry juice ice pops I used to eat most nights. I also dropped Tim Ferriss’s metabolic supplement suggestions since I had seen absolutely zero impact in 6 months and I don’t need to waste the money. I may well do the same with the flax seed oil when it runs out.
No easy answers at all – I’m doing 90% right, but obviously something is fucked up in my metabolism because it can’t be normal for a 230 pound physically active male to consume 1500 calories a day and not see any weight loss. Oh well, I should be happy I’m healthy and active and stronger than the vast majority of my peers
After my latest experience of being lied to and misled by a business (Chase credit cards this time) I reflected on the peculiar pathology that seems to be all around us. A certain subset of businesses (usually the larger ones, but not always) have chosen not to compete for customers and revenue through developing better products and service, but instead have made the choice to grow revenue through deception and cheating.
Everyone reading this will be able to think of numerous recent examples – the landlord who dishonestly kept the security deposit, the cable or phone company who “mistakenly” charged you extra for months (it’s funny how these “mistakes are *never* in the consumers’ favor), the car or software salesperson who lied about what their product could do or disparaged the competition unfairly, the bank that chose to extract the payments before applying the deposits and then charged you multiple times, etc. etc.
I’m an honest and straightforward person. Although (because?) I have no religion, I have a very strong sense of morality and ethics and thus it’s hard for me to get into the mindset of the liars and cheats around us. But time goes on and you become cynical and jaded – this offer is too good to be true, those claims can’t be valid – and generally you are right.
The ubiquity of this dishonesty in business suggests it’s a deliberate policy. Lack of enforcement in most societies has educated white-collar criminals that their risk is low compared to regular criminals on whom far more resources are focused. I would consider the upper and middle management at Bank of America, Comcast, or Hertz to be as much white-collar criminals (although to a lesser extent) as the crooks who fixed the LIBOR rate or bankrupted Lehman.
It’s also odd, because in some aspects society is in a golden age of discovery and business growth. Etsy and Kickstarter facilitate small craft and product development businesses; Tesla has successfully started the electric car revolution; Apple, Google, Microsoft, Blackberry, Citrix, and Cisco (and many others) have successfully unchained many workers from the cubicle and daily commute; Amazon and AliBaba allow people to live outside big cities and still have access to an enormous array of goods and supplies; ZipCar allows people to live in big cities and not own a car that sits unused most of the time; etc.
At the other extreme, the legacy businesses – banks, airlines, cable companies, property management companies, car companies (for example) – have by and large chosen not to innovate or create and instead to gouge their customers to improve their bottom lines. Maybe in this current business climate there’s no viable way to keep United afloat other than fucking over their frequent and infrequent travelers through endless fees, charges, and erosion of service and benefits? Maybe the whole banking system operates on such small margins that BoA (and all of the rest) have to charge 12-23% interest on credit cards, while paying 0.03% on savings? Perhaps the only way GM and Ford dealers can compete with Tesla is by preventing Tesla from selling cars in that state?
I wish I knew what to do about this. It’s just depressing, really, and I call it a crisis of capitalism because this certainly doesn’t feel like the operation of a rational market. I don’t think it’s THE crisis of capitalism, and I suspect that as more and more people recognize what’s going on they will pressure their elected politicians to do something and eventually there may be a little more semblance of oversight and enforcement. Of course that is tougher to do when politicians in the US and UK are primarily funded by the beneficiaries of this broken system – but I don’t think I can give up on both democracy and capitalism in the same week.
On the trip I was reading about a competitive swimmer in his forties who was eating right and training 4+ hours a day and still gaining weight. I’m not training that hard, but I’ve been eating <1500 cals a day for over a year and working out 30-90 minutes 6 days a week and I haven’t lost an ounce. Clearly my metabolism is not working like most people’s (can I be the only person who trained for and ran the NYC marathon and actually gained weight in the process?)
Going to experiment with low carb vegetarian to see if that can make a difference.
It’s definitely going to be a challenge since I can only eat so many eggs and haven’t bought milk or butter in years. It looks like eggs, tempeh, tofu, and beans are going to be in my future A LOT
Back at home after a trip to Maine. Too much beer drunk and less than optimal diet, but good for the soul and mental health, and that’s an important trade-off. Lots of walking this weekend – 7+ miles in the the city yesterday and probably close to that on Saturday.
According to RunKeeper, I hit my 50km walking challenge in less than three weeks – and that doesn’t include cycling or elliptical in the gym.
Carrying on.
