Month: January 2014

More Obamacare News

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The CMS has a new contractor for Obamacare, not just the web site. The previous contractor, CGI Federal, has been replaced rather suddenly.

“Accenture, one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level and built California’s large new health-insurance exchange. But it has not done substantial work on any Health and Human Services Department program.
“The administration’s decision to end the contract with CGI reflects lingering unease over the performance of HealthCare.gov even as officials have touted recent improvements and the rising numbers of Americans who have used the marketplace to sign up for health coverage that took effect Jan. 1.”

CGI Federal is the company connected with Michelle Obama through her classmate, a fellow Princeton alumna.

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Selected Posts from 2013, continued

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One more batch…

Freedom, the Village, and the Internet. Will social media re-create the kind of social control once often found in the village community?

301 Years of Steam Power. What they told you in school about James Watt and the invention of the steam engine was very likely wrong.  Related:  175 Years of Transatlantic Steam.

An Age of Decline? Is America in one, and is the situation irretrievable?

The Baroque Computers of the Apocalypse. The remarkable air defense system known as SAGE.

Book and Video Reviews:

Fly the Airplane. Two flight instructors write about their romance, their flight around the country in a 1938 Piper Cub, and the life lessons that can be derived from aviation.

Elective Affinities. Goethe’s novel about a love quadrangle.

Wish Me Luck. A very good TV series about Special Operations Executive agents working in occupied France during WWII.

Author Appreciation: Rose Wilder Lane. RWL was both an astute and thoughtful political philosopher and a pretty good novelist.

Seeing to Business

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Around the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008, I was working two days a week at a Tiny Bidness owned by a friend of mine, Dave the Computer Genius. I had known Dave off and on since 2002, ever since I had looked for a local computer tech to tell me what was wrong with my very first computer. I think that I found Dave through some on-line search, possibly through some local variant of Craig’s list. Anyway, he pronounced my computer well and truly dead, and sold me a rehabbed unit which even if rehabbed was still a better and more up-to-date one than the defunct unit, which I had gotten ten good years out of since buying it at the Yongsan PX. So, I referred Dave to my then-employer, the consultancy dealing in intellectual property (read did marketing packages and a provisional patent for people who had invented a gadget), and later on he referred me to one of his clients, the ranch realtor, when I was job-hunting.

Dave did computer installation, training, and trouble-shooting rather like a one-man Geek Squad and having a nice collection of regular clients, he did pretty well at it. He talked once or twice of one of them, another Tiny Bidness a little local publisher owned by Alice G. whom he insisted I would get on with like a house on fire. He promised that one of those days he would take me along when he went to her home/office to work on her computer system, and introduce us. He always thought that we should get together, since he thought we both had a lot in common. And so we did, eventually although that wasn’t until six months after Dave died of a sudden heart attack.

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