If health insurance premiums were as cheap as postage

I was watching The Colbert Report at lunch this afternoon and about 1 minute in to the clip of “The Word” something got on my nerves.  Watch for yourselves . . .

Did President Obama just criticize the US Postal Service?  Is the cost of postage stamps really an example of horrible government service at a really terrible price that is gouging the American public? I didn’t think it was, so I looked up some information and found out that not only does the cost of postage stick pretty darn closely to the Consumer Price Index, but also any increase in cost in postage rates pales in comparison to the increasing cost of health care premiums. See the graph and my rant after the jump . . . Read the rest of this entry »

Someone pry that gun from his cold dead hands

Charlton Heston, crazy old coot, gun nut, finally dies.

The Complete Solution

Last week I went to a training provided by my company about Project Management. One of the best parts about the training was the instructor. He told some very amusing anecdotes about projects he had worked on in the past and where they went right and went wrong.

One of the stories he told was about a project a major technology company (but not my employer) did for the Mexican federal government in the late ’80s or early ’90s. The major technology company was hired to provide a computer system to completely overhaul the federal voting records and make all the records digital. This involved a lot of data entry at the central offices in Mexico City and registration of voters in regional centers. This was an important contract for the major technology company because it represented one of the first developing countries to have digital voting records and a successful completion of the project could mean many future contracts with other governments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Was the 2004 election stolen?

Rolling Stone has a story this month by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. entitled Was the 2004 election stolen?” that I suggest everyone read. It is an important look at whether there was widespread fraud in 2004. The conclusion probably won’t suprise you, but the weight of the evidence is hard to ignore.

Also, I welcome criticism of this story, but you would better refute the evidence, no “name-calling” or off-hand dismisals.

Rumsfield and New Media

Don Rumsfeld earlier today made comments on how the Pentagon and the U.S. government in general needed to use new methods of working with the media to get its message out. This would mean using e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and blogs. Now it is not that I disagree with Rumsfeld about this, but I just feel like it would carry a lot more weight if it, you know, came from someone who actually had e-mail.
Apparently the Secretary of Defense doesn’t use e-mail. Now maybe it is just ’cause I’m a ignorant young’en, but how does a head of a major organization get by without e-mail. And where does he get off lecturing others on how they should use better technology to fight the “war on terror”.
Also, not that Rumsfeld can do anything about this, but how about the Administration do something about the broken patent system so that companies like Research In Motion don’t have to deal with ridiculous patent problem and can keep their systems running.