I've been working on my robot, which requires ordering some parts from a reseller that usually does business with real companies. When you call to talk to their sales folks they toss around the terms inside or outside sales. Curious what that meant I went looking for a definition on the web, and had a very hard time finding one. The best I was able to come up with is this page from the US Department of Labor. Apparently outside sales folks are ones who primarily make sales by visiting customers at their place of business, and therefore presumably inside sales folks primarily make sales via the phone or Internet.

This happens to me

Hem is a great band. Besides their albums, they've made a handful of MP3s available of other songs they've recorded. They don't have them all listed on the MP3 download page on their website so I thought I'd collect a list here. There have been several other songs that have come and gone from their download page over time. In particular, if you can get ahold of "St. Charlene" I highly recommend it.

From their download page:
Beautiful Sea
Now The Day Is Over

From their News page:
Valentine's Day

From the Rabbit Song album pages:
Half Acre
Lazy Eye

Update: Unfortunately all of the above links are now dead, but on the plus side St. Charlene is available on the Birds, Beasts, & Flowers CD.

Buy our house

Several years ago, while riding the ferry out to the San Juans, I wrote up a new system for measuring time. I'm tired of carrying the piece of paper around so I'll put it here for the world to see.

We have this great metric system for measuring mass, volume, etc. But we still have 60 second minutes, 60 minute hours, and 24 hour days. What a mess. Instead I propose a system with 100,000 seconds a day. Each minute would consist of 100 seconds. Each hour would consist of 100 minutes. And each day would have 10 hours. Compared to old time (with 86,400 seconds/day):

New second = .864 old seconds
New minute = 1.44 old minutes
New hour = 2.4 old hours

You could name the new units something different if that would be less confusing to people. I'd propose the following lengths for common daily activities:

Work = 3 hours
Lunch = .5 hour
Sleep = 3.5-4 hours

Yes, that's a little more sleep and a little less work than Americans are used to. This is a good thing. :) I have some ideas for reseting the calendar system back to match the solar/lunar cycle, but that isn't fleshed out yet. It would be fun to write up a little clock program that displayed this time format.

It's big, complicated and scary, but we need to do something about health insurance in the USA. I'm not saying this for my own benefit, I've always worked for employers that provided nice PPO health plans. But the system seems really broken to me.

First off, having employers as the primary providers of health insurance seems weird. You don't get your auto insurance from your employer... Having the insurance provided by your empolyer means you have to change plans, and frequently doctors as well, whenever you change jobs. I want to be able to shop for my own health insurance plan just like I can shop for my own auto, boat and life insurance. At the same time I think there is a real benefit to society of providing some basic health insurance for everyone.

So I think the federal government should ensure that everyone has basic health coverage. Nothing fancy, no transplants or super expensive drugs, but if you break your arm or whatever you should be able to get that taken care of. I'm on the fence as to whether the government should administer such a program or let various private insurance companies vie for your business. There are pros and cons either way.

But then I think individuals or employers should be able to supplement the basic government program with more full-featured plans from private insurance companies. Employers would certainly want to use this as a recruiting tool as they do now. And many people would want more complete coverage. In order to avoid payment disputes between the basic carrier and the employer/citizen funded carrier I would have the government program function as a voucher system, like some folks want to do with public schools. I.e. you would buy a higher-grade plan from Medical Insurance, Inc. or whoever and the goverment would kick in whatever they consider to be your share of the basic government plan and you and/or your employer would cover the rest. I also think that any employer contributions should also come in the form of a voucher so that you aren't locked into the Plan X that your employer has chosen like you are now, but rather can go out into the market and pick the one that works best for you.