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Today I called up Commonwealth Care to see what my options are for health insurance. It wasn’t as bad as the customer service at Straight Talk, but still, it seems unavoidable that the 3-week processing time for your application will lead to gaps in coverage for people who unexpectedly lose their insurance. And you have to fill out a long, clunky form to sign up for state-mandated coverage.

Why do we not have universal coverage again?

PDFs are often the best way to transmit information: reports, flyers, or just information you want to look a very specific way. The best way to create a PDF is to save the document in that format; nearly every program offers that option. When you save as PDF (or print to PDF), the text becomes searchable & highlightable, and the file size is quite reasonable.

However, a lot of authoritative entities don’t tend to create PDFs this way; they tend to create PDFs by scanning physical documents. When you create a PDF this way, it’s essentially an image file, it cannot be searched or highlighted, and its file size is huge.

How do you get around this when you don’t have the original digital file in front of you? I would spend 5 minutes looking for the digital file. Then for short documents, I would recreate the file before scanning it. That takes a little time, but it creates a much more useable document.

Also, there are some things for which a PDF is not the best format. Images should be in image files (JPG, PNG, TIFF). Websites should be linked to (or saved as a PDF; browsers let you do this). Anything you want someone else to edit should be sent as a Word/Excel/whatever document (or better yet, uploaded to Google Docs).

I understand that this isn’t something they teach you. But it makes workflow and digital storage space much more efficient.

There’s currently a discussion happening on the “Contra Dancers” Facebook group about rides coordination & having a web clearinghouse for dance information. I chimed in, and generally think it’s interesting, so I’m posting (selections from) it here too.

Original post: Rona Weiner, 6/19/13 10:46pm

Dear dance gypsies and dance organizers, are any of you working on a better method to coordinate housing and rides? I’m thinking this would be a lovely project for me to tackle. I’ve seen a couple of sites that have interesting concepts (like Ricky Rides), but nothing that seems like a perfect fit. Thoughts?

Tavi Merçapulcu, 6/20/13 1:01am

Let’s create a contra rideshare website!! I’ve been thinking for a while about asking the CCD folks if they would be willing to give away the url contradance.org so i could found a site that combines the basic introduction to contra, listings for any regular series contra that would submit, a log-in enabled collection of contact information for callers/musicians/bookers, perhaps even a choreography page for anyone who’s willing to publish their dances, and why not add a rideshare board while we’re at it?! Unless of course dancegypsy wants to add that, in which case i’d say go right ahead!

Rona Weiner, 6/20/13 9:07am

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, just to clarify, I’m thinking of something a little more automated than a mailing list or posts page. For example, something that will let me list that I have 1 bed and 2 floor spaces available, and allow people to “book” them. Some features that come to mind… offer and “book” housing space, hotel space, and carpool space, request bedding (when flying into a camping event, this is a life saver), use pre-defined lists to easily match requests (e.g. list of nearby airports for rides), etc.

Alex Krogh-Grabbe, 6/20/13 10:33am

Something automated like that would be great. Perhaps look at the (technological) model of AirBnB? I’ve never used it, but it’s quite popular.

Two other thoughts: a mailing list can do something, but I’m skeptical about how widely used a rides-specific mailing list would be. In Western Mass, we have the PVCD email list, onto which organizers post information about upcoming dances, people ask for or offer rides, lost & found notices happen, and OCCASIONALLY there are massive conversations about dance etiquette & philosophy. This list seems effective for rides, because people sign up for it for other reasons too.

Secondly, I’ve organized rides for Youth Dance Weekend for the past four years, and I’ve always wanted a more automated web interface like Rona suggests. Lacking that, I’ve found little reduces the need to just send lots of emails. The main thing that’s useful is to get rides information on the registration form (need/offer/all set? what region? how many seats?). After that, what I’ve found to be the most efficient is to just send out batched emails to all registrants within each region, saying “this is the ride situation in your region. Figure it out!” And they usually do. The main piece of information registrants are lacking is specifically who else in their area is going to the event. If the rides coordinator THEMSELF tries to match everyone up, it’s a ridiculous amount of work, and registrants get frustrated because they can do a lot of it themselves.

Also, Tavi’s idea of a contradance information clearinghouse is a cool one. It’s a huge undertaking, but would be cool. Maybe also a reddit-style voting system on which videos of contradancing are best to give a sense of what it is? Two other thoughts on this: thedancegypsy.com has a LOT of information about regular dance series and performers, though I think it might have a slight focus on the northeast. I’ve heard it’s a hassle to update it, though. Second, the CDSS website is a place I’d think about hosting such a web endeavor. The goal of CDSS is to be a resource for folk traditions such as contradance, and I can see this being a reasonable fit. But again, massive project.

At work recently I’ve been involved in some conversations about what distinguishes Amherst (especially downtown) from other places. Here’s my answer: we are a mix of urban & rural and of young/modern and old/historical. I jotted down this diagram on some scrap paper, and here cleaned it up to show to you.

The way these charts are supposed to work, the concepts would be at various locations around the grid depending on how much they embody the characteristics. But this chart is just a sketch to demonstrate the components of town that I think best exemplify the different quadrants.

Obviously there are some nuances here: cafes should be in the upper left too, and Barry’s hard to pin down as both an old-New-England farmer and a downtown developer. But what do you think of the general conceptualization of Amherst?

I’ve been setting up my new phone, a Samsung Galaxy S III on Straight Talk. I switched to it from my Samsung Nexus S 4G on Credo Mobile for several reasons:

1. Credo is on the Sprint network, which is not as robust as I would like in Western Mass.
2. My Credo plan was getting expensive, around $100/month and I was brushing up against the top of my 300 text limit.
3. My phone was feeling very sluggish, and I just wanted something shinier.

So I was reminded that pre-paid plans tend to be much cheaper ($45/mo in this case), and heard that Straight Talk uses a number of different networks. I did the math, and even though I had to pay full cost for the new phone and I had to buy out of my Credo contract, I would break even in eight months, and after that would be saving money (and not bound by contract, either).

However, I have been plagued by some typical but thoroughly frustrating customer service issues:

1. The website has been slow.
2. The website has been unclear about what the service is an which network plans are on.
3. The first customer service rep I called (to activate; I would’ve used the website but understood it to be discouragingly slow) had a thick accent and required me to re-spell all my information multiple times.
4. My activation took a while, so I checked with the website, which basically told me “hold tight”.
5. After we’d passed the two business days they said was a maximum for activation, I called back up. After giving my information and repeating my question to several more heavily-accented reps, and conferencing in a Credo rep, it turned out that I had given the wrong Credo account number, and the first rep may have spelled my name wrong as well (not hard, but something that should’ve been caught). The triumphant rep told me it should be all set by 6am the next day, if not before.
6. It was indeed activated by the following morning, and I happily got to setting up my voicemail. I use Google Voice. The phone didn’t like that. Now, instead of the comfortable and delicate split I had set up, with both work and personal numbers ringing my phone and then going to separate mailboxes if I didn’t pick up, both were going to my personal number, the non-Google-Voice one. I tried a bunch of different settings (having done this before) and none of them worked. I figure out that Google Voice didn’t know what the carrier was, and that might’ve been the problem. So I called customer service again.
7. The first time I tried, the customer service number wasn’t working. After a little while, it did work.
8. But the reps had no idea what I was talking about. “So what you’re saying is you want to set up your voicemail box?” “No, that’s working fine; I want to set up Google Voice and need to set up conditional call forwarding. Can we just start with what network I’m on?” To which the rep asked me to call from a different phone so she could verify the model of my new phone, so she could tell me the network. Is it reasonable to expect someone who’s calling about their phone to have an entirely different phone lying around?
9. Finally she was able to tell me what network I’m on. I’m on the Sprint network. Just like my old phone. Which I was trying to get away from. *facepalm*
10. I don’t even remember what she told me about Google Voice.

The thing is, I’m sure this is all perfectly ordinary! And yet it caused me such seething frustration this morning! It’s not my calling, but it is seriously low-hanging fruit to make these processes more customer-friendly. This whole experience has destroyed what hopeful trust I had in this new carrier. I doubt that is something they’re trying to do.

Since I’m leaving my job soon, I’m in the midst of evaluating what I want to do next. That means thinking about what Jobs I would like, but even more fun, it involves thinking about what I want to do with the free time that I will have when not spending 16 hours a day in work mode!

To the rescue: lists. Blank piece of paper, brain, and pen. Here are what I identified as my priorities:

• Reading
• Writing
• Playing music
• Running/exercise
• Cooking
• Spending time in cafes
• Playing games
• Eating
• Seeing friends
• Movies/TV
• Cleaning/house projects
• Learning online skills
• Computer mapping

It can be helpful making lists like this. Because of this one, I started weeding internet time-sucks out of my life. Facebook is great, but I spend to long scrolling through my news feed. So I decided to do less of that. It feels great! I’ve been really into decluttering in the past, and it’s so nice to return to that!