Lost in all the Sturm und Drang about the new healthcare law – AKA Obamacare (Affordable Care Act, ACA) – is an interesting dynamic that I’ve not seen commented on: The stated equivalence of the heathcare.gov website (portal for ACA sign-ups and information) and the law itself by both opponents and proponents of the new healthcare law.

Failure to get healthcare.gov up and running well is the same as saying the new healthcare law is a failure.

Which is like saying that if Amazon.com suddenly experienced months of outages, no one would be able to buy a book or stream a movie.

In both cases, poppycock!

I get that from a political point of view, hammering the failure of healthcare.gov to deliver as promised is a handy cudgel against the law. It’s symbolic, easy to grasp, a very good sound bite. Even proponents of the law are buying into this ridiculous equivalence – that the law could be doomed if they can’t fix this web site.

Why is this equivalence ridiculous? Because of the following:

• The federal exchange – healthcare.gov – was set up as an ACA information and an exchange to purchase insurance for those in states that didn’t create their own (over half of the states). That’s a lot of data to compile, present to user, and pass to insurers in any given state. A lot could go wrong, and – by many estimates – almost everything has.
• Many states did elect to set up their own online exchanges, and this is a much simpler than a multi-state exchange (like healthcare.gov). States have their own regulations/rates and so on, so the exact same plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield may cost $x in Virginia, and $y in Maryland. If you only have to worry about one set of regulations/group of insurers etc., it makes your life much easier. Many states are doing very well with these exchanges, states such as California, Vermont and Kentucky (led by a Republican governor State congress/Democrat govenor).
• Other states have set up their own exchanges, and – like the federal exchange – are struggling. Most notably, Oregon – a heavily blue state that has embraced the ACA – is having such problems that it has yet to sign up a single user. Yet you don’t hear much about this (maybe in Oregon?); for ACA opponents, the federal exchange is the more appealing pinata. And that’s understandable. More buck for your bang.
• In most states, insurance companies have web sites that are working well – but we don’t hear anything about that, do we? Agreed, you can’t do comparisons (to other insurers) on these sites, but if you liked your old BCBS plan in the past and now need a new ACA-compliant plan, maybe hit the site and see what’s offered.
• The other pre-web methods of signing up for ACA insurance are all there: toll-free numbers; federally mandated workers (navigators) to help you on a walk-in basis in local areas; your local insurance agent; filing by snail mail.

Bottom line: Agree/disagree with the ACA, the abysmal launch of the healthcare.gov site is inexcusable. As a programmer, I’m not at all surprised, but this puts a black eye on what has become the public face of the ACA.

But I still think it’s amusing to equate the failure of a single instance of many web sites (state, insurance companies) with the demise of a sweeping law, but that’s what it’s come to.

And it’s fun to see these old white dudes on the news – the ones that can barely use Twitter – explain how to fix this web site (to salvage the law they have voted to repeal about four dozen times).

Just a thought.

Well, we lost Jack today – he was never really ours, but I hope that over the last year and a half, we made his life as cat-happy as possible.

A few weeks ago, he stopped eating, and vet visits showed nothing. He has barely drunk any water in the last five days – I’m surprised he was still able to get around. For mammals, dehydration usually leads to organ failure after a few days. And he was a 15-year-old cat.

He will be missed – when I’d get home and feed the birds, he’d pop out from wherever he was hiding (miscanthus, Joe Pye weed, by the goldenrod…) and trot over to me, flopping on the grass and demanding a belly rub.

It’s never fun to put an animal down, but when the quality of life has all but gone for the animal, it’s the oddly humane thing to do.

He’ll always be aka Action Jackson to us.

Sad but not unexpected event – Borders bookstore filed for bankruptcy about two/three years ago.

This freestanding Borders store close to my house- that I shopped at many times – stood empty since the bankruptcy.

Until this week.

The store is being torn down, a somewhat emphasis point on the decline of the bookstore and the rise of Amazon and eReaders.

Kinda sad, but not in any way unexpected.

Came home yesterday to discover our land line (you know, those ringee things you don’t carry around with you) was down. No dial tone – not a line physically down.

I was able to ascertain that it was not an inside line issue, but when I called the phone company (always a joy), I was told that – due to recent storms in the area – it might be until Monday before a tech could get out here.

What are you going to do? At least we didn’t have to sit around and wait for a tech, as the trouble was outside the house.

But – credit where credit’s due – AT&T had the line up and running by around noon today.

Sometimes it’s the little things.

We just arrived home a little less than 24 hours ago from a (too-short) week in South Dakota.

We flew in to Rapid City, on the western edge of the state, and used this as a jumping off point for trips to some wonders of nature (the Badlands, Devil’s Tower) and to some not-so-natural wonders: Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse memorial, Rapid City itself.

I’ll be updating this entry as I process more data; best – after the fact – to have just one entry.

Before I forget – This was the first real (not just overnight or day trip) vacation I’ve taken with a smartphone. All I can say is this: How the frick did I get by without one? Mapping, calling restaurants, taking pics, looking up info…incredible. I cannot overemphasize how useful it is on a trip. Mind-blowing.

• Rapid City
• Mount Rushmore National Memorial
• Crazy Horse Memorial
• The Badlands National Park
• Devils Tower National Monument
• Spearfish/Lead
• Custer State Park

Rapid City

Yes, Rapid City was our “point of origin,” and we stayed at a very nice hotel: Hotel Alex Johnson, an old hotel that is undergoing renovations and is pretty much visible throughout the city. (Hotel Alex Johnson’s website) Only 11 stories tall, the hotel pretty much dominates the downtown area, with only a couple of other (newer) building rising more than a few stories tall.

The Vertex Bar sits on top of the hotel, and it’s a members’ only club: But hotel guests get access. Score! Pricey, but great views and it’s just nice to sit on the roof, enjoy the nightfall and have a martini. Sounds good, yes?

The room we had – a suite – was small, but for us, that’s fine. The hotel room is just a jumping-off point. But it was on the 8th floor, with a western view (toward the foothills of the Black Hills). Nothing to really write home about, but the history of the hotel, the motifs (American Indian/German – go figger), and it’s location made it a winner.

I’m glad we stayed there. This is – to me – “the” place to stay in Rapid City, and we’ll never be in the town again. Good choice.

Rapid City itself – overall – is pretty much a nothingburger. There are approximately four blocks (to be generous) around the Hotel Alex Johnson that maintain the old Rapid City looks, but that’s about it. And while the city seems to be trying to keep the downtown alive (parking garage, corner park in the historic district with frequent events), I don’t have a whole lot of hope. Just driving in and out of the city, we ran across wide swaths of “outlying” areas that are in the midst of construction booms. Think large malls, Walmarts, lumber yards, restaurants (nice and chain). This is going to steal from the downtown area, the little that’s left.

Kinda sad.

That said, the historic district – mainly Main and St. Joseph streets, bounded east and west by 5th and 7th streets, respectively – had some interesting architecture and some nice restaurants/watering holes.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial

OK, let’s be honest: Probably the main reason tourists come to South Dakota is for Mount Rushmore.

Is it a tourist-centric National Memorial? Sure.

And is it pretty much just the carved heads in the hills? Pretty much, except for the stray mountain goat (there were two, and they were like cats in second-hand bookstores: They didn’t pay any mind to the people milling about).

That said, it’s pretty impressive. They have a nice parking garage, neat paths and so on. Very clean and with not a lot of fuss. Yes, there is a walkway with shops and all, but it’s at a respectful distance from the mountain.

Everyone should do it once.

Crazy Horse Memorial

While I really didn’t have any expectation for this other mountain-carving locale south of Mount Rushmore, I was still let down.

This is a private facility, devoted to creating a huge center of Native American culture/study and so on. They have very ambitious plans – which is to be commended – but not much there there yet.

The mountain carving began in 1948 – that’s 65 years ago, and they really don’t have much to show for it. Mount Rushmore, as a comparison, was started in 1927 and was done (as it is today) a dozen years later.

They did have a Native American museum with pictures/artifacts of tribes from all over North America; I can’t say if it’s good collection or not, but it was fun to look at – especially the drawings and photos of Indian tribe leaders.

Give this one a pass unless you’re a Native American buff.

The Badlands National Park

Two important data points about South Dakota’s Badland National Park:

1. Aptly named. There are prairie parts – potentially for grazing or farming (were it not public land…), but for the most part, it’s like a geological museum. Erosion is the keyword, yet the erosion varies depending on where you look.
2. Not much to the park beyond the (varied) eroding hills. Little wildlife; few plants beyond grass/short scrubby plants. Unless you enjoy looking at rock formations, you’re probably going to want to take a pass at this park.

I really enjoy looking at rocks and so on, so – for me – the day we spent at the Badlands was – overall – the highlight of the trip.

We got there early, had good light (important to me for photography) early on, though it got a mixed sunshine/overcast as the day went on. And by the time we were getting ready to head out of there, the traffic had begun to ramp up. We pretty much hit it just right.

The Badlands is pretty much just an area with geology that is making the hills melt (or not) at differing degrees. Lots of hills that look like wedding cakes left out in the rain. Very uneven “melting,” shall we say.

There is surprisingly little wildlife for such a big park, but that’s – again – geological. It’s basically a park that’s an enormous tribute to sedimentary rocks. Much like the Grand Canyon, it’s all about eroding rocks. (NOTE: From my one trip to both parks, the Grand Canyon has way more wildlife than the Badlands, probably due to the sparseness of water and plants in the Badlands vs. the Grand Canyon).

Unlike the Grand Canyon, the Badlands is not a uniform erosion. It’s eroding at different degrees, sometimes right next to the other. That’s what make the rock formations there so wild.

In keeping with the “it’s eroding at different degrees, sometimes right next to the other” statement above, I can expand this (and offer photographic support) that there will be this canyon a hundred yards deep…next to miles of prairie. It happens all over the place in the Badlands; it’s quite the sight to see.

Of all the places we went to during our South Dakota trip, I think I’d like to go back to the Badlands again – but only for photography (learn the place so you capture the sunrise on this hill; do it with infrared; multiple lens [wide/telephoto] selection). Will probably never happen, but – unlike Mount Rushmore National Memorial – I’d like to do it again.

This is a National Park that I’ll probably DIS-recommend to pretty much anyone that doesn’t like…rocks and no Dairy Queens. Me? I likes.

Devils Tower National Monument

On our third day, we ventured northwest across the state line into Wyoming, to see – among other things – Devils Tower National Monument.

Devils Tower (the name seems to be non-posessive) is a remarkable presence. Rising out of modest hills, this large cylinder of igneous rock towers above all around it, and it is unlike all other rocks/hills around it.

It looks like the state of Wyoming is giving a giant “thumbs up!” to something. Remarkable rock. Facebook should buy the state and rename Devils Tower the “Like” tower.

There’s really not much to the area – just the tower, for the most part. And so I’m not going to apologize for all the different views of the tower in my gallery – it’s a photogenic mass, and there’s not much else. OK?

Spearfish, Lead and Spearfish Canyon (and Sturgis)

On the trip back from Devils Tower, we stopped – briefly – in the towns of Spearfish, Lead and Sturgis, and drove back home through the Black Hills National Forest area known as Spearfish Canyon.

Spearfish: We stopped in Spearfish just to have some breakfast/lunch (we left Rapid City early to get to Devils Tower early, a winning strategy!). Nice, very clean city with some nice old architecture in the town center. But nothing remarkable about it beyond that.

Lead: I’m assuming they also mined lead around here, but The Homestake Mine is a deep underground gold mine located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002 it was the largest and deepest gold mine in North America. Before that, it was a deep open-pit mine. And that’s what I wanted to see – the big hole in the ground. You can’t really get close enough to get the real impact, but, still, impressive. Romy was “meh”; maybe it’s a guy thing (massive anything).

Lead seems to be trying to move past its mining past (while capitalizing on that history, obviously) to a more “slice of the Old West” gentrification. Right now, a mixed bag. We went to a new bar (in an OLD building) that’s part of the gentrification; I wish them well. But I dunno. And why I didn’t buy a T-shirt from the bar – Bumping Buffalo – escapes me. I’m an idiot.

Sturgis: Let’s get this out of the way. The motorcycle-centric town had…no cycle events going when we went there: It was a small, ugly, empty town. Maybe when the Harleys roll in it changes, but what we saw was unimpressive.

Spearfish Canyon Here’s how Wikipedia describes Spearfish Canyon:

Spearfish Canyon is a deep but narrow gorge carved by Spearfish Creek just south of Spearfish, South Dakota in the U.S. It is located on the northern edge of Black Hills National Forest.

From Lead to Sturgis (bleh), we went on State Route 14 through Spearfish Canyon. Not spectacular, but fun and a nice change of pace.

One of the more interesting parts of the drive was that it involved water – yeah, H₂0 – something that just isn’t around in that part of South Dakota. Just a creek, but a change. Compared to the day Black Hills and Badlands, it almost reminded me of Cornell, with it’s gorges and such – but here, mainly conifers. Upstate NY (Ithaca) was mainly deciduous trees. Hmmm.

Overall, Spearfish Canyon is a nice scenic drive, but nothing special. I liked the small waterfalls and cliff walls, but they are nothing compared to Devils Tower or the Badlands. But that’s me; your mileage may differ (YMMD).

Custer State Park

This trip – SW of Rapid City – was all Romy’s idea, and it was great.

Romy wanted to see bison; we got same.

But the park was nice mix of Black Hill and prairie – the Coolidge Tower was just a bonus (wow!). At an elevation of around 6,000 feet, Coolidge Tower – built largely with elbow grease in the 1930s – affords a 360° view of the Black Hills that surround it, at an elevation of at least 500 feet above all (Coolidge was built as – and may well still serve – as a fire lookout station). The views north and west allow you to pick out Mount Rushmore, as well as Crazy Horse. Pretty impressive.

Lots of wildlife in the area – bison, antelope, burros(!), but with the exception of a random crow, very few birds, even when we got out of the prairie regions of Custer and more in the Ponderosa pined Black Hills. Eerily quiet.

Well worth a visit if you’re into big empty spaces and no gift shoppes. You have been warned.

A portion of some test jQuery code I dug up for this entry.

I was messing around with jQuery this weekend – we are interested in jQuery at work, but don’t currently support it.

I’ve been working – just on and off – with jQuery for a couple of years, and I have some strong opinions about the – what should we call it? – the JavaScript framework.

The first, and most important, is that I think it is going to be the defacto JS framework (if not already), which is one of the reasons I decided to dive into it. Powerful, and a lot of future potential.

That said, here are – to me – the current strengths and weaknesses of the framework:

The Good

• It makes some complex JS tasks pretty simple. For example, the hide/show of a DIV is a basic JS device. Pretty easy in JS, but with jQuery, one can do the same but with animations (face, slide up/down). Sexy and simple.
• For the most part, the promise of jQuery has been like the (sorta false) promise of the compiled language Java: Write once, run anywhere. For the most part, jQuery code behaves the same on virtually all platforms/browsers. Sure, there are bugs, but as anyone who has had to run JS (or HTML) against a wide variety of devices, all I can say is jQuery is a time-saver. You still (should always) test, but fewer cross-platform/browser issues pop up. This is, of course, a veddy good thing.

The Bad

• jQuery is a wrapper around JS, and the wrapper makes for ugly code, hard to follow. Mix jQuery with regular JS, and it’s just a mess in many cases.
• Debugging jQuery is tough: Even if the full (max vs. min) version of jQuery is installed, debugging is very difficult due to the wrapper notion of jQuery. This’ll improve in the future, but right now, no tools really work as well on jQeury as they do on non-wrappered JS.
• Like many plug-in environments, jQuery makes the hard simple. Which is awesome. Until someone requests the slightest change. Then, the non-JS developer will be lost.
• In many languages, the dollar sign ($) marks a variable – i.e $firstname=”John” In JS, there are no dollar-sign variables – var firstname=”John”. OK, not a biggie, but — jQuery introduces the dollar sign as an object variable marker. Confusing. Let’s say there’s a DIV with an ID of “fadeMe” and we want to hide it as an onClick event:
  

  $(“#fadeMe”).click(function() {
     $(“#fadeMe”).slideUp(4000);
  }) // end fadeMe click event

  This’ll hide the fadeMe DIV (fade away) after four seconds, but a weird soup mix of $(# and so on. And get a parens or bracket or sqiggly bracket (braces) wrong: well, it all bombs. Make Perl punctuation soup look sane. (NOTE: But still powerful – will animate (slide up) this DIV over the course of X seconds with minimal code.)

The Unknown

• The JS wrapper is rapidly changing, which is good – it’s addressing shortcomings and adding functionality – but it’s also problematic for legacy code. Function x() needs to be changed to xy() or won’t return expected result and so on. This is true of all languages/frameworks, but jQuery is moving at an exceptional clip.
• JS has been around for almost 20 years (launched as LiveScript), but it’s only caught on in the last 10 years (DHTML) and really gotten hot in the last five or so years (AJAX!). jQuery has, as of late, helped fuel this acceleration. What’s next?
• Mobile is all the rage these days, and I’d be stunned if there isn’t some sorta jQuery mobile movement out there. I’m not a mobile developer, but I’ve heard/read nothing about same – but I’m sure something’s there.

ON THE TUBE:
House of Cards
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, Kate Mora

This Netflick-only political potboiler (now on DVD) is The West Wing written by Darth Vader.

Spacey is the centerpiece of this series, who – along with the help of his very politically savvy wife (Wright) – tries to consolidate power and use that not for his constituents or the good of the country, but to advance his own agenda, which is the career of his character. (If it helps others in the meanwhile, well, that’s gravy and makes for a good soundbite with which to raise money.)

The whole series (which has been renewed) is a cliche of sorts: The show examines power vs. money, good vs. evil, does the ends justify the means, why we make the choices we do and so on. Sounds like a yawner.

It isn’t. Surrounded by a stellar supporting cast, Spacey still stands out as the most interesting character. (To be fair, his pronounced South Carolina drawl fades as the series go on….). And there are multiple plot threads going on at once, some that intersect, others that may, but have yet to, converge. Season Two will be interesting.

I’ve catagorized this as TV, as it is episodic, but is it TV? Not a movie, as it was never on the big screen. But had I watched it streaming to my computer/mobile device, would it still be TV? Interesting gray area.

All reviews

New review added.

Read all reviews.

It’s been 50 years to the day that the 1963 March on Washington culminated with Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, facing the crowd that had gathered east of the memorial on the Washington Mall.

I was only four years old at the time, and while I do remember JFK’s funeral procession on TV that November, I don’t remember seeing this event unfolding. (Hey, my Twitter account wasn’t yet active…)

Dr. King said, in part:

I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream the one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

…

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Fifty years on, has this dream been realized? Or is it a dream deferred?

This is not a judgment; it’s an open question. While there have been huge strides in civil rights since the 1963 march, have we – as a nation/world – evolved? How about for other minorities, such as LGBT individuals or women.

Or Muslims in the US.

Or the issues over illegal immigrants that has (thankfully) bubbled to the surface over the last year or so.

And so on.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes, Harlem

ON THE TUBE:
Veep Season One
Starring: Anna Chlumsky, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Matt Walsh, Reid Scott, Tony Hale

This HBO political comedy has more in common with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” than “The West Wing,” but it has a wicked edge and promise for future seasons.

The show circles around Dreyfus’ character, a rising senator whose presidential run crashes and burns, and she is forced to accept the Veep slot (and wins).

She finds that, as VP, she is in an unusual limbo where she is one accident/breath away from the most powerful position in the world – but, as Veep, has far less power than she had as a senator.

And – of course – hilarity ensues.

The writing is a little rough in this first season (here’s hoping for season two…), but the cast is top notch, with running jokes that aren’t dwelled upon, and dialog that I’d be surprised is all scripted. Improvisation seem to really help carry the show.

Great show? No. But it’s in the vein of “30 Rock” – funny, topical and just enough out of the mainstream to have extra cachet. And since it’s an HBO show, plenty of f-bombs. You have been warned.

All reviews

Well, there have been about 100 million stories about the upheaval in journalism over the last [pick your time period], but the last few weeks of journalism upheavals have been more interesting than most. Mainly because the events that have transpired recently are not part of the “slow decay of traditional journalism/print” story arc, but really are milestone events.

Consider the following:

• Newsweek announces sale; print publication to cease (8/3/2013): While not a surprise to anyone with any inkling of the current state of weeklies, the sale was noteworthy for two reasons: 1) It leaves only one news print weekly standing (Time), and 2) It sold to IBT Media. Who are they?? – That was my reaction, as well as many of those who wrote articles about the sale.
• Boston Globe sold (8/3/2013): Purchased by The New York Times about 20 years ago for $1.1 billion, the paper is sold to the Boston Red Socks’ principal owner John Henry for $70 million. That’s an enormous drop, and a blow to one of the nation’s most respected publications.
• Jeff Bezos – not Amazon – purchases the Washington Post’s print and digital products (8/5/2013): An online visionary buys a print publication? I dunno – I think this is a good move for the Post. Print is struggling, and if anyone can make a go of it in some shape or form, it is someone like Bezos, who takes a long-tail view of business. (See Farhad Manjoo’s excellent article on same.)
• Patch.com announces cuts (8/16/2013): AOL’s ambitious content farm/hyper-local sites experiment announces significant cuts – roughly 50% of staff and about 60% of its sites. Not exactly good news for this so-called “new” form of digital journalism, especially by a giant like AOL (yes, it’s past its glory days, but AOL is still huge, especially in content – it’s the parent of huffingtonpost.com and techcrunch.com, for example).
• Interesting note about Patch layoffs (8/17/2013): As noted by allthingsd.com’s Peter Kafka, online layoffs are cheaper than dead-trees layoffs. New Media Pink Slips Cost Less Than Old Media Pink Slips

Any of the above events, taken alone, would be newsworthy. All of these together, in such a short interval, give one pause.

I don’t think journalism is going away – I think it’ll, to some degree, change. And right now, we’re in the middle of the big shake out: Experiments will launch and succeed/fail, we’ll move away from the old before slowly gravitating (to a degree) back to the same.

One thing people keep forgetting is that print media is not dead – it’s actually thriving.

But now much of it is digital print: blogs, tweets, online niche sites and so on.

People I know are reading more fiction/non-fiction thanks to eReaders (of whatever flavor); tablets and smartphones have a lot of those who never got newsprint on their fingers to read the NYT or Chicago Tribune on their devices.

Journalism – and print/digital publication in general – is in chaos right now, no question.

But it’s not dead or dying.

Just rearranging itself. (See the Patch – a new media company – site and its issues.)

Radio was supposed to kill print. It didn’t.

TV was supposed to kill print. It didn’t.

The internet is supposed to kill print. So far, not so much.

One final caveat: The internet/devices may well kill physical print, but they won’t obliterate the need for good, concise, accurate journalism. Or entertaining fiction/non-fiction. That’s the big take-away here.

ON THE TUBE:
Damages – Season 5
Starring: Glenn Close, Rose Byrne

The final season of Damages did not disappoint – Patty (Glenn Close) was just as evil as ever, and the first couple of episodes gave away so much that one wondered how they could keep up the suspense.

It did.

After a disappointing – to me – Season 4, Season 5 was almost as good as Season 1. Close and Byrne are both brilliant, and the writing carries this franchise.

Unresolved issues? Sure – but that is (sometimes) – the fun. You try to fill in your own blanks.

Could this series have ever happened on network TV. Probably not. (The Good Wife is close, but not as bitter.)

Good TV

All reviews

Watched the last season of “Damages” this weekend (only 10 episodes), but – I’m sorry – any single episode of this show is better than most network shows (of similar caliber Update: By caliber, I mean a serious show that tries to be intelligent and entertaining; not so easy to pull off).

“Damages” is a bit of a soap opera, but done, so so well.

Watch.