General

Health Insurance for Self-Employed

John Watson — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:58:16 GMT

I noticed this post on the GWB main feed regarding one person's complaints with health insurance in Arizona. I'm facing similar issues and I'm going to name the culprits.

For several years (2000-2007) I was co-owner of a small, regional consulting firm which at our peak had 10 full-time and 1 part-time employees on the payroll. We peaked out paying over 10K per month for health through Anthem BCBS in NH for a PPO plan and dental through Northeast Delta Dental, also in NH. A family health plan cost around $850/month for each employee. I used to call that the "hidden" extra employee - that's how much it cost in benefits annually. Over the last few years we operated, that cost rose to over $1000/month. Towards the end before we dissolved the company I was paying $1300/month from my own pocket for our family plan. This was a "middle of the road" plan - not the best and not the worst.

When the company was rolled into a larger software company we all went on Anthem BCBS/CA and began paying the employee-portion which was just under $500/month. I stuck it out the year that I said I would and when I left this summer the cost of COBRA for health, dental, and the VSP vision plan was up to $1700/month. That's just over 20K for a family plan insurance per year.

Figuring that it must be really high in California, I went shopping for health insurance in NH and for a comparable health plan (health only) it was nearly the same as the full package. For the time being, I'm just paying the COBRA and hating it.

In addition to the doubling of costs is the reduction in benefits. We can't go to any type of doctor visit or treatment where it's "just covered" - the billing costs are always high and we end up paying the difference out of pocket. Thank God we're all in good health with no issues - I can see a family going bankrupt if something bad happens.

The real kicker is that HEALTH INSURANCE COSTS MORE EACH MONTH THAN THE MORTGAGE ON A 4 BEDROOM HOME WITH 3+ ACRES OF LAND!!!

Back from the dead

John Watson — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:52:39 GMT

Just about a year ago I blogged that I had made some big changes professionally. Specifically that I and my business partner had negotiated the absorption our our small consultancy into a much larger software company. My partner had already been off "doing his own thing" with his own contract for 2+ years so it was a logical and smart way to unwind things and give everyone a home. Last July 1st I and five engineers joined another company. At the time I agreed to stay on for a year and...guess what? The time is up. July 31st is my last day as an employee and for the moment I am unemployed and completely free of all professional attachments for the first time in a quarter of a century.

What does a person do on their first official day off? My wife and I are heading to the beach to enjoy a fun, relaxing summer day. What are the plans beyond that? I'm going to take August off and enjoy the summer - in four weeks we help our oldest daughter move into a college dorm for her first year away from home. Not a huge shock because we've been through this once before with my son. But not only is she off to college but her sister (a.k.a. the "baby") is right behind - a junior in high school and already driving. Sigh.

Once fall kicks in after labor day I'll be looking for contract work for the time being - no doubt starting to line something up beforehand. Until then, I'm going to enjoy the remainder of the (short) summer here in NH and catch up on several home projects I've been putting off.

Catching up

John Watson — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:16 GMT

In the last eight months I have...

Gone on a 2nd annual mission trip to western Louisiana with my two daughters to build a new home for a family of six who lost everything in Hurricane Rita 18 months before. [Editorial tirade: Funny how the media jackals are off to find fresh meat and nothing is mentioned about the people still struggling. If it is mentioned, it's always a brief aside about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina and that's it. I guess Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, and God forbid, let's not forget about poor Anna Nicole are far more important headlines. Gimme a break!]
Navigated the sale, along with my business partner, of our small consulting business to a software company. I along with 5 employees converted to full time employees joining the new company. For me, it's a change from being your own boss, a.k.a. "the boss" to being in an organizational chart that's 25 times larger.
Re-doubled efforts to build a membership system for our local church, on the side (several more posts coming from this effort).

Build XML Directory Structure

John Watson — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 13:34:00 GMT

I've hacked together a little VBScript utility that will generate an Xml representation of a directory structure which you can download here. I looked around for something that already did this and came across Pat Coleman's DIR2XML utility. It provided a basis for what I needed but there were a couple of things I had to tweak - it generated a "flat" listing of all files and it produced an XHTML document via an XSL transform. Pat did a lot of the heavy lifting with the recursive directory scanning and getting file version information.

My bldDirXml.vbs does the following:

Generates a nested Xml containing <folder> and <file> tags.
Supports a "flattened" mode [-f] which pulls the information up into attributes of the folder or file tag instead of child elements.
Generates a unique id for each folder and file.

To run it, use the following command: cscript bldDirXml.vbs "folderPath" [outputFilename] [-f]

All the usual disclaimers apply - it's a pretty brute force approach, not heavily tested, your mileage may vary, hold your nose if you look at the code, etc.

Enjoy!

Windows Live Writer Beta

John Watson — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 19:47:00 GMT

Back in August, Jeff Julian posted a detailed explaination of how to configure Live Writer for posting to GWB here. I had to hunt to find it again so I could install it on Vista RC2 so I figured this was worth a "link" here.

DHTML Editing Control removed in IE7+

John Watson — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 19:41:00 GMT

This hasn't seen a lot of circulation (ok, I didn't pay much attention to it) and I was just bitten by it so I wanted to capture the links I found. The symptom is that using Exchange and Outlook Web Access from Vista (beta 2+) will not allow you to compose a new mail message. The DHTML ActiveX control for rich text editing doesn't get downloaded or instantiated.

This was warned about here back in June by B. Ashok on the IE blog. In there he also states "In the near future, we will also killbit the Safe for Scripting control in IE7 in Windows XP so that it will not get instantiated from the browser".

There is a critical patch for Exchange mentioned and linked to in his (her?) blog post which will correct this issue.

Also, I found a white paper on MSDN that talks about this control and ways to work around it. The white paper explains how Vista does not get the control automatically any more but that they are making available an MSI installer which will put it on Vista if you choose to manually install it.

Fall in NH

John Watson — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 21:14:00 GMT

Dave Burke (a.k.a "davebu") has Murray and Julie has her dogs, but down here in NH I've got Fritz and a flock of wild turkeys.

DB2 UDB 7.1, JDBC, and NULLID.SYSSH200

John Watson — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:32:00 GMT

This is an obscure problem which took a lot of digging. It was finally Roger Bjärevall's post here that lead to the answer. Roger is the developer of Minq Software's DB-Visualizer which is a great utility for connecting to a variety of databases as I often do.

The bottom line is you can't use Type 4 drivers to connect to DB2 7.1 so this one won't work. You have to configure the connection using the one installed with DB2 (\SQLLIB\java\db2java.zip). I got that far pretty easily. However, you need to specify the 'com.ibm.db2.jdbc.net.DB2driver' for the connection which isn't the first in the list of drivers. It was Roger's casual post that made it come together and finally work! Thanks for the tip and the great little product that's reasonably priced (remember when TOAD was cheap before Quest jacked the price up through the roof??).

Antec P160

John Watson — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 17:50:00 GMT

Features:

1.2mm anodized aluminum delivers increased rigidity and a finish that won't lose its luster.
Swiveling front control panel
- Swivels up to 45 degrees.
- Connectors: 2 x USB 2.0, 1 x IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.Link) and 2 x audio jacks.
- LED temperature display with two built-in sensors
Windowed side panel
Removable motherboard tray.
Accomodates any ATX12V power supply
10 drive bays
- Color-coordinated CD-ROM & floppy drive covers
a. 4 external 5.25"
b. 2 external 3.5"
c. 4 internal 3.5"
- Rubber mounting grommets in hard drive trays
Cooling capacity:
a: 1 x 120mm low speed fan
b: 1 x 120mm fan mount
Fan Specs:
-RPM: 1600
-CFM: 56.13
-dB(A): 28
Built-in washable air filter
Removable Side Panel
Fits motherboards up to Standard ATX

DIY Workstation / Gaming Rig

John Watson — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 17:31:00 GMT

Last winter I decided to upgrade my 6-yr old Dell 733 Mhz figuring it was long overdue. What got me started was a Christmas wish list over on ExtremeTech. Here's the specs:

Antec Anodized Aluminum Mid-Tower (P160)
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (nVidia 4) motherboard
AMD Athalon 64-bit X2 dual core (4200)
Twin nVidia GEForce 6600GT cards
4 Gb memory
Two Seagate Barracuda 250 Gb IDE drives (still can add a pair of SATA 3/Gbs drives with dual RAID)
Dell 20-in flat panel HD monitor

It turned into a long afternoon/evening to get everything installed and ready but I was pleased that it booted up perfectly the first time I turned it on...

www.flickr.com

John Watson's DIY Machine photoset