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Misc (and Just for Fun)

Cool geography stuff…

Mapufacture – Online platform for creating maps.  [tag]Mapufacture[/tag] is a geo-aggregatorAn aggregator, like a feed reader, allows you to pull in information from many sources and view in a single location or piece of software. It also allows you to then share this information back out to other devices, or in other formats. With it, you can build maps from feeds such as blogs, photo sites, weather or environmental data, favorite places, and many more. Your maps can let you know what is going on in your neighborhood, or give you local information about where you’re traveling to.

GeoRSS.org – GeoRSS [tag]GML[/tag] is a formal GML Application Profile, and supports a greater range of features than Simple, notably coordinate reference systems other than WGS84 latitude/longitude. It is designed for use with Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, although it can be used just as easily in non-RSS XML encodings. GeoRSS Simple has greater brevity, but also has limited extensibility. It can be used in all the same ways and places as [tag]GeoRSS[/tag] GML.

TerraGo – Get the [tag]Geopdf toolbar[/tag] USGS now uses this capability and this free toobar is very cool.  The free GeoPDF Toolbar turns Adobe Reader into a powerful [tag]geospatial[/tag] application that gives users the ability to view, manipulate and update mapping data while leveraging Adobe collaboration capabilities to share information with others in the field and at home base.

October 15, 2007 by
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B-Travel – 3PM a new low in hotel internet fees

So there are 2 things I think are really horrible about hotels – room service fees (food quality too) and Internet fees. I’ve seen some really crazy fees for both, but internet fees are just illogical. I paid ₤22,00 once for a day and a couple of weeks ago, I paid for €88 for 5 days. I paid for five days because I could get 2 devices and share the connection.

So types of things I have seen in the marketplace:

[tag]Swisscom[/tag]: multiple plans, but the most interesting was a time AND bandwidth limited account with overage fee (what?!?!), as i noted above I opted for the multi-day and multiple device plan

[tag]Four Seasons[/tag]: I don’t remember the location but it was like $24.95 or almost the 50% of my monthly bandwidth fees from my cable provider.

[tag]t-Mobile[/tag]: I like t-mobile’s hotspots, but I normally only use a connection for 2-3 hours, since its typically a airport stop. I have been lucky enough to stay at a hotel which had t-Mobile, but only like twice. In that case it was well worth the $9.99 fee for the day pass.

But the winner on weird configurations for the week was [tag]Wayport[/tag], a session until 3PM. The session is static and I only got like 1 hour in my session for like $9.99, apparently these folks cannot program the logic to manage dynamic sessions or maybe they are just greedy. The art of effectively pricing a captive audience.

Optimistic Prediction: Cell phone wireless cards will more or less obsolete paid wireless connections just like pay phones. I don’t remember the last time I used a pay phone and I long for the day I can’t remember typing in my credit card number for an abusive rate to rent a commodity pipe from a hotel. Although, the real irony is that low end hotels offer FREE wireless – why is that?

October 13, 2007 by
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B-Travel: IAD unusally warm…

Cloud

Despite the picture above, Washington D.C. was a very good trip with very reasonable weather, plus my in-laws were in town so some small town in west Texas would have been fine in a dust storm. This whole global warming thing might just work out 😉 I had the opportunity to learn a great deal, meet interesting folks and better understand the value of being home. This was also one of the times I get to fly my geek flag and not be out of sorts, which is a good thing.

Sometimes business travel is a very productive thing, other times it’s just an unreasonable amount of time in a hotel or conference room. The conference I went to chuck full of smart folks and delivered some very good content around the technology requirements for better automation of [tag]Healthcare Savings Accounts[/tag] ([tag]HSA[/tag]) and [tag]Real-Time Adjudication[/tag] ([tag]RTA[/tag]).  Really fancy stuff for let’s make sure everyone gets paid on time and/or really fast…

The only pseudo-complaint is that it was a little too technical for the most part and focused on the very narrow problem, rather than addressing core platform requirements and business process needs for successful implementation.

That being said, it was a great example of how standards groups (x12 and WEDI) can be relevant and impact knowledge sharing and the realities of how to have a successful technical implementation.

A quick shout out to Humana (I really typed shout out?!?!?) [tag]Humana[/tag] appears to be a fairly cutting edge insurance organization which focuses on the emerging consumerism reality in [tag]healthcare[/tag]. They see self-service and a retail-esque approach to healthcare as the next core delivery model which is truly dictated by open market competition for patients and are rapidly developing solutions and insurance products to support this trend.

October 13, 2007 by
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