don’t panic

I love technology.  There’s just something completely sexy about being tied into multiple real-time data streams, and having up to the minute news and information from all over the globe.  If there’s a major earthquake anywhere in the world, I’ll know about it in seconds.  I can get nearly live satellite images from space in six different spectrums, and sea-surface readings by the hour for hurricane zones.  Hell, I can pull the data straight off the buoys, sometimes with video!

So why is it that with this massive interconnection to billions of dollars worth of hardware around the planet, I can’t get anywhere near an accurate measurement of how hot it is outside my door without literally going out there and reading a thermometer?

The iPod Touch is a wonderful little gadget.  But like anything in the computer world, the usefulness is only as good as the data going in.  The Touch comes with a built-in app simply called Weather.  It’s straight-forward, really easy to set up, and completely useless.  Why?  Because it can’t give you accurate data in the one area in which it was designed to perform.  Let me elaborate…

Right now, the Weather app says it is 86° F in our neck of the woods.  When you click on the little “i” in the bottom corner to set up you cities, there are logos for both Yahoo and The Weather Channel.  Tapping these takes you to Weather.com through Yahoo (don’t ask me, I just work here), and you are asked for your zip code.  The page that comes up says it’s 98° F.  I hope that science is able to gather temperature data better in other parts of the world, because a 12 degree mistake in some place like, oh, Greenland, is the difference between happy normalcy and a global warming disaster.

And the really sad thing is that I can go to six different sites and get temperature readings for my city that vary by at least twelve degrees, and more so, they will ALL be different.  Granted, a few degrees variance is normal when talking about something like the weather, but this is SoCal!  It’s not like our weather is all that complicated.  It’s either Warm, Hot, or Stay-Inside-With-The-AC-On.  We don’t get snow, rarely get rain, and it’s more likely that we’ll be run out of our home by a brush fire than by anything weather related.

Bah!  Come on Apple.  At least let us choose where we want to get our inaccurate data from to begin with instead of forcing us to go through Yahell.  Yeah, yeah… I know.  ”There’s an App for that.”  But is there an App for doing it right in the first place?

We spent a good portion of this weekend traveling back and forth from my folk’s place in our car.  The trip is about 15 miles and I usually choose to take a slightly longer, but much less stressful back freeway (125) rather than the crowded and somewhat dangerous Interstate 8.  Both freeways have an average speed above 70 mph, though Interstate 8 is frequently packed with traffic.  125 has traffic where it turns into 52, but is currently one of the least crowded freeways in San Diego County, which is saying something since we are quickly turning into the parking lot that is Los Angeles.  Route 125 is also almost entirely straight, with only a few on and off-ramps, and rarely, if ever, has accidents.  In short, it’s ridiculously safe.  It’s also a favorite for our local law enforcement.

They have these little cubbies where they can pull a pair of police speeders just off the main road and out of view, or sit under an overpass.  Armed with a radar gun and a quota, these fine officers spend the entire Saturday and Sunday pulling people over for speeding.  Mind you, they rarely do this during the week, when the real crazies are out.  No, they hit the families traveling home from church and the couples out for a quick trip to the mountains.  Meanwhile, Interstate 8 remains one of the most dangerous freeways in the county, and you NEVER see a cop unless there’s yet another accident.  Oh, well they do sometimes sit just past the entrance of the metered freeway onramps in the morning and issue tickets to people improperly using the carpool lane, but god forbid you should ever break down and need actual assistance on that road.

I have a nearly perfect driving record, even after being behind the wheel for over two and a half decades, so it sort of irks me to see my tax-payer dollars going to fund idiocy like this.  Are the cars on 125 breaking the law?  Sure.  They are indeed exceeding the posted speed limit.  And so are the cars on Route 8.  The difference is that 125 is still a SAFE road.  8 is NOT.  Isn’t their motto, “to protect and serve”?  There’s a time and a place for a speed trap, but busting people on the weekend on the safest road in the county is NOT it.

How about simply sending a few of those cruisers down 8?  Even their presence would help slow things down and make it a safer ride.

I read an interesting article on CNN today, that talked about a blogger that was fired from her job after her secret online persona was made public, on purpose.

Basically, this was someone who was critical of the Pittsburgh mayor (and pigeons, it seems), who decided that it was time to let go of the online anonymous identity she had been known by.  When her employer found out, she was fired.

Something is seriously wrong with this.  Unless it is written into an employment contract, or the person in question is doing something illegal (threatening a government official, say), what a person does outside of their work environment should be none of their employer’s business.  The very idea that we can be fired from our jobs for exercising our rights to free speech OUTSIDE of our work environment is unilaterally whacked.  We protect our ethnicity, our religion, our gender and our age, but when it comes to protecting our right to actually have an opinion, we are left in the dark?

I realize the slippery nature of this argument.  It’s easy to see a scenario where a person working for a certain company (Pepsi, let’s say) could be hired and then go online and publicly trash talk their employer while praising their competitor (Coke).  But this is a direct conflict of interest.  The blogger in the article worked for the Negro Educational Emergency Drive.  It’s not like she was out there dissing on her job, or blacks, or education, or anything else related to her chosen profession (that I am aware of).  She was trash-talking her mayor, which is a right enjoyed by anyone in our fine country, except, it seems, this blogger.

I was entering my car’s mileage into a spreadsheet, thinking how moronic it is that I have to do that manually at all, when I got to thinking about the information in our daily lives.  I’ve said it before, but it really amazes me that something so obvious is completely missing from my “auto experience.”  Think about it.  Most of us park our cars well within range of our wireless network, which is tied into our computers.  How hard would it be for a car to try to hook up and send driving data, including mileage and needed maintenance, out through some protocol, even if only email?  I would LOVE to know how much I drive on any given day.  With built in GPS, it could even upload where I have been.  Sure, I might be worried about Big Brother and possible hackers, but would it be any safer on my home PC?

The point is, there’s tons of useful information out there that’s simply going to waste.  Giving it to marketers is insane, but *I* could certainly make good use of it.  So why not?

Part of the problem is protocol.  Everybody wants to make “the standard”.  Just ask Sony.  But it doesn’t have to be.  There are open source and simple solutions that would work just fine in 99% of the cases.  After all, most “data” is simply text, and relatively speaking, not much of that.  Take the data I could receive from my car.  Baring for the moment that I might be storing an ongoing audio and video record anytime the car is on, it might store or alert me to- mileage, GPS coordinates, vehicle maintenance sensors, speed, braking,  gas used, whether the windows are up (that would be a cool alert notification to get via email), doors locked/alarm on (ditto), whether my car leaves a pre-defined area (leaves the state or country – gulp!), inside temperature (on a hot day), outside temperature (instant weather updates on a grand scale), and on and on.  All of this data could be recorded every second of the day and still be uploaded via a standard WiFi hookup in seconds.  Put a couple of solar panels on the roof and my car could pass me information at any time the sun is shining.  Or, set the thing up so that if I hit the “lock” button on my remote it “wakes up” my car.  The alarm goes off – have a web cam in the back and front start recording video, which is transmitted in realtime to an offsite location.  The possibilities are endless!

Here’s the point – Computers are cheap.  Having one in the car that records information for the user should have been implemented a decade ago. It’s NOT there to control the car in any way (doing things like scanning the road ahead for obstacles and then applying the breaks).  Frankly, I don’t want a car that drives for me.  I don’t even want a car that tells me I’m driving too fast.  But I would like it if my car told me that something in the engine didn’t sound right, or that I was 1000 miles overdue for an oil change.  I would especially like it if I could upload a new music mix directly to my car stereo from the comfort of my living room.  This should be standard equipment by now.

Oh, and as a word of warning to car manufacturers that might be reading this (yeah, right), don’t even THINK about trying to somehow pass any of that information to marketing for ANY reason.  Do NOT try and automatically upload our driving statistics to your website to “improve our driving experience” or “help me to find a certified mechanic nearby”.  I can use a phonebook just fine, thank you very much.  Given the amount of crap spam I get from the dealer who sold me my last car, even after I specifically requested NOT to be put on advertising lists, YOU ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED.  I’ll buy a car from you, but that’s where our relationship ends unless something breaks.  Sorry, but that’s the reality of the reputation your industry has fostered.  Deal with it.  You want my trust back?  Make me happy.

And here’s another clue to do just that – One of the biggest problems with the auto industry is that once a customer drives out of the lot, there’s little you can do to improve their vehicle short of selling them another one.  After-market add-ons and extras is a failed experiment.  I’d bet that less than 1% of all buyers ever modify their vehicles beyond possibly upgrading the stereo, and even that they do somewhere else.  You want “in” on the upgrade market?… With computers in the car, you can sell uploadable functions.  And all it will cost you is a server and bandwidth.  You really want to please us?  Give us software upgrades FOR FREE.  Now there’s a concept.

My family has spent a lot of time in the last few years dealing with hospitals.  Whether it’s talking to doctors, or fielding the inevitable calls from billing, I can say without reservation, that the experience is never pleasant in any way.  And to a certain degree, that’s to be expected.  It is a hospital after all, which is not someplace you tend to go for a good time.

But one huge failing of the medical industry is what happens to their “bedside manner” once they step away from the bed.  Sure, your doctor may be great, and the nurses prompt and caring (yeah, okay, that last is probably a stretch) but as soon as they wheel you out the door, everything changes.

Now, you are an account number, and now, they want something from you other than a urine sample.

It’s bad enough that we had over eight different accounts with the same hospital at one point, all of which had their own billing schedule, but to make matters worse, they all had different restrictions on who we had to pay, what medical insurance they took, and how quickly we had to pay them.  And that didn’t even include doctors, anesthesiologists, radiology, lab tests, or ambulance service, all who bill you individually.  I’ve used the car-care analogy before, but imagine if you took your car in for a repair, and instead of getting a single bill, you were billed separately by the mechanic, the guy who changes your tires, they guy manning the lift, the garage itself, and the company that makes the machine that tells you what’s wrong.  Oh, and any parts are going to be extra.  You’d go insane!

And THAT is just what we are experiencing in the healthcare industry.  I have literally spent dozens and dozens of hours this year alone, on the phone and in person just trying to understand the labyrinth of billing pitfalls that have been thrown at us.  It’s nearly impossible NOT to miss something when you are trying to track eight separate billing schedules, all of which look the same, and all of which, when read from the invoice, tell you almost nothing about what you are paying for.  For Sharp Healthcare, I can’t even go online to get those completely obscure procedure codes.  My current bills show me my name, my account number, what I have paid to date, the cost of the “care” I received before insurance (they have to display what a deal you’re getting – kind of like those ‘marked down from’ tags in department stores), the pitiful amount that the insurance actually covered, and then (drumroll please!), what I owe.  If I’m lucky, the bill will also have what division of the hospital is draining my bank account, and a date of ‘service’.  It’s that last bit of information that gives me any idea at all as to what the bill is about, so long as I tracked everything.  It’s likely that the actual service occurred six to nine months previously.  For Sharp, I have bills that are still being processed for hospital care that we incurred at the very beginning of 2008.  I’d love to know if there’s a statute of limitations on billing. UPDATE: Just looked it up.  In California, it’s four years.  In Arkansas it’s only two!  But I feel sorry for those in Kentucky and Ohio…  They can get a bill from their doctor a decade and a half from the time of service.

So the creme-de-la-creme of customer service hit me this morning. It seems that in order to streamline things at their billing office, Sharp Healthcare has decided to implement an automated calling option.  They way it works is this- anyone with an outstanding account gets a phone call from the billing department.  It’s an automated system which basically rings you and then asks you to wait on hold for the next representative when you answer.  And wait…. and wait.  That’s right, they call and interrupt YOU and then ask YOU to sit on hold so they can tell you to pay up.  But the best part is that the calling system isn’t completely in track with the actual state of your account, so after wasting 10 minutes of airtime on my cellphone for “an important message from a Sharp Healthcare representative”, I’m told it was an error, and “is there anything else I can do for you today?”

Yeah, I can think of a few things…