Is there anybody out there who…

November 18, 2005

Is there anybody out there who has driven from Austin, TX to Charleston, SC (or 1,300 miles)?

With three kids?

Ages seven, five and three?

In a vehicle that just got out of the shop?

For a cracked intake which was leaking anti-freeze into one of the cylinders?

During the 2nd busiest travel weekend of the year?

And then back to Austin (another 1,300 miles)?

That’s what we’re doing for Thanksgiving this year. Tickets to fly were prohibitively expensive ($450 * 5) so we decided to drive. Hopefully we make it there and back without incident.

Wish us luck.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

NPI Goldmine

November 15, 2005

If you’ve got some time between now and May 2007 and want to earn some good money, I suggest that you learn all you can about the federal guidelines around National Provider Identifier (NPI). Once you know enough to talk intelligently about the topic, open a consulting shop and charge $200/hour or host seminars at $500/person for 100 people. Either way, there’s money to be had.

Why NPI? Why not? It’s the next big thing coming down the pipeline for the government and healthcare. It’s the next extension of the HIPAA mandate to decrease the administrative burden for the healthcare industry. And it potentially means huge rewrites in a lot of insurance and billing systems.

If you can get the knowledge pretty quick, I see NPI being a pretty nice little wave to ride on for the next 18 to 24 months. It is similar to the crunch to get the HIPAA transaction sets implemented in October 2003. And not too different than the whole Y2K thing. Learn about something, get your name out there as an expert, and then start raking in the money.

Too bad I like sitting at a desk all day scraping out a living otherwise I’d do it!

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

Revamped

November 14, 2005

I’m trying to break myself of the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. My previous theme for this site was a half-hearted attempt to customize one of the default WordPress themes with a touch of pretty URLs thrown in. I wasn’t all that keen on my changes to the site presentation and I didn’t follow through on all the pretty URL changes so most of the site didn’t even work.

So, tonight I finally spent some time on the internals of the site and got things back up and running. Here’s a summary of all that I did:
* Upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2
* Implemented the Connections theme
* Removed some of the extra sidebar navigation
* Tweaked the settings in my rewrite file to get feeds and paging to work correctly
* Added some advertisements and referral links to the page templates
* Turned on the Textile plug-in

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

FolderShare

November 14, 2005

I ran across a brief blurb on Digg.com about FolderShare now being free since Microsoft had bought it. I had not run across FolderShare before and was intrigued by the marketing literature:

FolderShare™ allows you to create a private peer-to-peer network that will help you to synchronize files across multiple devices and access or share files with colleagues and friends. You no longer need to send large files via email, burn them to CDs/DVDs and mail them, or upload them to a website. FolderShare allows you to share and sync important information instantly with anyone you invite, making it the perfect solution for personal or small business use.

One of the things that really intrigued me was this statement:

Unlimited file space - Store as many files as you wish; you are only limited by the storage capacity of your device

There were many times I thought of using some type of subscription service to additional space, but was never impressed with the thought of having to pay good money every month to access 100MB worth of files. That’s partly the reason I have a static IP at home so that I can do all my own web hosting with no restrictions. I’m not using it for too much, but my brother has 5GB of pictures (non-porn) hosted with me. So FolderShare seemed especially intriguing given that it is free and unlimited space.

Anyway, I installed it on my home PC last night and was quite underwhelmed. I kept looking for some type of interface to select files to share but couldn’t find anthing and according to the literature, I needed a second machine added to the account for it to work.

So, here I am at work and I decided to give it a try. Some of the comments on the Digg post were skeptical that it would work through firewalls, proxies, etc. Once installed however, I didn’t have any problems connecting to my machine. I still wasn’t sure what to expect since I hadn’t configured anything at home. I kind of expected to find an empty folder with some message to configure it to share files. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find that I had complete access to all files and folders through the FolderShare web interface. That is pretty sweet!

Taking a step back, it now seems pretty obvious how it works. Basically I’ve got two peer to peer servers set up that are communicating with each other. For some reason, I thought that files would be stored elsewhere. This seems like the ideal situation for p2p and I can see why Microsoft has invested in it. Especially with the memo sent out by Gates and Ozzie a couple weeks ago.

Has anyone else tried out FolderShare? What are your thoughts?

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under Recommended | Leave a Comment 

Kismet

November 3, 2005

According to Wikipedia, the definition of kismet is:

kismet
Fate, Destiny.

I guess after my previous post about how I didn’t need Akismet it was my fate or destiny to once again have to deal with comment spammers. Seriously though, this blog has gone for months with only the occasional spam comment. Starting yesterday, the free ringtones and poker spam comments starting showing up. I’ve probably already deleted more than 20.

As pointed out in the comments of my previous post, my solution was not going to foil the smarter spam bots. I knew that. But I was pretty happy that it had worked as long as it did. Guess it’s time to implement another solution. I do know that I won’t be implementing one that has to be trained and managed and constantly updated and tweaked.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under Plugins, WordPress | Leave a Comment 

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