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I hate to have to report this, but it looks like comprehensive health care reform, in either the Senate or the House version, will not be carried to term:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/health/policy/22health.html?ref=us

This binds the creative class all the more irrevocably to either poverty or slow death by full-time work. It also denies what would have been a boon to young entrepreneurs and small business owners either unable to afford or unable to qualify for private insurance.

Some pundits are saying that the defeat of Coakley in the Massachusetts senate race was actually a referendum on health care. That seems unlikely to me, since Mass residents are already provided with affordable health insurance, and 95% of Mass residents are currently insured. If it is true, then it’s just plain selfish of the Democratic Mass electorate, to deny the rest of the country health care reform for the sake of their personal misgivings about the Democratic candidate.

What’s more likely is that Coakley bungled the campaign.

I’ve had my instructional design team working with Laszlo templates for some time now, but haven’t had the time to clean the templates up for release to the public. OpenLaszlo isn’t the easiest platform to work with—especially if you’re using Linux (that dang JAVA_HOME)—or the easiest language to work with, but it’s cross-platform, and can compile SWFs in Flash 8, 9, or 10.

I created several templated eLearning interactions, and taught my developers how to modify background images, x and y coordinates, and text for prompts and feedback. The end result is that for the last 6 months, my team has been rolling out Flash interactions embedded in Moodle HTML pages with no software overhead.

More to come. Feel free to comment upon, improve upon, expound upon, as you see fit. Cheers!

Download click hotspot laszlo template [zip]

Well, Joe Lieberman has almost single-handedly screwed the nation’s working and middle classes. It’s a wonder, or perhaps a testament to the copacetic nature of liberals that there isn’t a price on his head, as there so often seems to be, watching “tea-bagger” gatherings, on President Obama’s.

And what about the President? And the so-called Democratic majority? I remember the ecstatic UW-Madison students that left campus, last November, to stream to the capital in celebration, then stream back down State St. So much happiness, so much capacity for disappointment.

To all of you, “blue-dog” “Democrats,” shamefully moderate President, turncoat Joe Lieberman, whom we should never have let back into the caucus after he campaigned for John McCain. (That was Obama’s decision, it was. So much conciliation, so much openness and generosity.) In the end, it will cost the politicians nothing. It will cost the rest of us the trajectory of our lives.

All of you small business owners, all of you entrepreneurs, all of you young folks with ideas that you won’t ever leave your jobs to try on the market, all of you artists, who won’t have the means to reduce your income, to go below the 38, or 35, or 32 hours per week your state requires you to work in order to qualify for employer health insurance, I hope you’re consciously mourning your alternative futures, as I am mine. Shame we aren’t infuriated. Shame, perhaps, that we haven’t the time. After my 8 or 9 hours at the computer, I’m busy enough just getting exercise and feeding myself. Perhaps sitting down again at the desk to pay the bills.

Well, anyway, what does it matter? We’re just the lazy, sloppy, no-good working class. We would only have wasted our potential, had we been given the safeguards to use it. Nothing good would have come of it, only, perhaps, revolutionary social and political change.

Yesterday I had a customer ask me why a video was loading slowly in her SCORM package. Upon investigating, I found that she had imported a 90mb Flash vid into her Articulate presentation. I let her know that it’s not a good idea to present such a heavy video file without a streaming server. In general, I told her, no more than 5mb files for an end user with a broadband connection, and no more than 2mb for an end user with a dialup connection.

The week before, I had more or less the same question from a different person who had done the same thing with Captivate. In his case, I think, he exported a 30mb SWF from Camtasia and imported it into Captivate.

The problem with these SCORM/eLearning authoring suites, aside from their posing as the magic bullet for corporate eLearning, is the fact that any old person can pick them up, without knowing any of the fundamentals of Web design, and go crazy with them. And there’s no special warning in Captivate that says, “Hey, Idiot, you’re importing a 50mb FLV for playback in your SCORM mod. Are all your learners on their own T1? If not, you better find a different solution.”

You end up with a mini-community of users who are acclimated to the look and feel perpetuated by the authorware. They wouldn’t know good Web design, good CSS, good Web usability, if you hit them over the head with it. What they want is images that fade in, little blinking click boxes, what they say to you is, “Flash, Flash, Flash.”

I still endorse Captivate, as the best of a bad lot. It’s the easiest to support, and the easiest to hack. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have thousands of untrained “instructional designers” who know nothing about HTML, JavaScript, ActionScript, or CSS running rampant over usability and good instructional design with the help of Adobe, Articulate, LessonBuilder, etc etc etc. There are more of these trash-churning SCORM engines every day. Every prospect drops the name of their product on me in the preliminary call as though it’s *the best*, *cutting edge*, and we won’t get the job unless I’ve heard of it. What does one say? How best to respond to the unwitting? Articulate’s taken away half my jobs, and now it will take my honor, too.

This is going to seem sort of smarmy and self-care-ish, but bear with me. I was working on an essay last week, and wracking my brain for a particular line of Wendell Berry’s. I couldn’t remember the essay, or the title of the book, but I was sure that I’d used it before. I went to my closet and pulled down the old box that contains all of my published work, and went thumbing through my thesis.

What I found was a disappointment, not in the sense that I couldn’t find Berry’s quote, but that I found it embedded in several pages that were almost identical to my present project.

One gets a memory of lines and phrases, as one works on an essay or a poem. The sound of the lines stick in the mind, even after the words are forgotten, and so coming back to them is like a walk in a familiar wood, or the smell of a favorite book, or the scent of coffee on one’s clothes one or two days after having visited the coffee shop. It was touching to look back at myself putting these ideas together, to remember the desk at which I had worked, and the room in which it sat, the window it faced, and think of myself working away at these ideas, which would still be important to me six years later. I felt validated, not, as validation usually comes, from the outside, but from the inside. I felt as if I’d received a note from my past self, asserting that the thinking and writing I’ve done is of value, and that there is an overarching direction, a vision, to my work.

Supposedly, writers are to feel ashamed of their earlier work, to look back on it and see the errors, the slippages, the oversights, the naivete. What I saw was a driven, directed young intellectual, not nearly so embittered and exhausted as myself. There was the spark of the ideas themselves, fresh from my own hands, and there was the startling enthusiasm I held, then, for my avocation. Six years of rejections, of academic and corporate employment, has certainly changed that. But it’s invigorating to see what I was, and what I believed in.

Finally! Finally! Look at this photo, look how many there are! Don’t stop, kids, don’t stop. Higher education should not be a bourgeois privilege.

Though many of you are just getting degrees in business, or marketing, or engineering with which you will wholeheartedly pursue your own financial good—the civil rights of economic minorities, the condition of the environment, and the foreign policies of your nation be damned.

Working on a SWF today that will call a PHP script to write XML. I’d really like to get the PHP script off of my development Moodle server, so that I can take off the crossdomain.xml file (major security risk).

Mac ships with Apache *and* PHP, but you have to turn on Apache, and enable PHP. I was able to fire up Apache using this resource. But when I continued on to enable PHP, following the same set of directions, no-go. The config is a bit different in Snow Leopard, and that’s why. Fortunately, this tutorial by Adam Hunter was there to bail me out.

Update to this post: the new version of Stanza now allows full copy and paste from a single ereader screen to another app. Yay Stanza, and thank you!

—

I’m one of those weird people who prefer reading to listening to music, to playing video games, to, in many cases, watching movies. Reading ranks just below walking in the woods and far above dance parties. So when I got an iPhone, I was one of the weirdos who didn’t give a damn about Shazam, or Twittering my mundanity, or waving around a glowing screen that sounded like a light saber. I downloaded eReaders. As many as were available for free, and a few that were not.

Stanza is by far the best eReader, in my opinion, and it improves with every release. Amazon Kindle for iPhone, however, has the selection Stanza lacks. Kindle for iPhone lameness begins with the words themselves: you cannot change the font to sans-serif (a better font for on-screen reading, Amazon, in case you didn’t know that yet, though you must, because you are Web folks, in which case, you are just doing it to annoy iPhone users for not purchasing a Kindle, which is lame).

All that aside, my bone of contention with every single eReader available, and, therefore with the iPhone in general, is that because I cannot copy text from an eReader and paste it into Notes, or some other app that can send email, or sync with my laptop, my notes are just as proprietary as the book I’m reading or the eReader I’m using. I’m stuck trying to highlight or add notes in the Kindle for iPhone interface. On occasion, the app crashes, and if I haven’t recently quit it normally, an hour’s worth of notes and highlights are gone when it starts up again. This is not a sane way to prepare a book review.

I can understand why preventing copy and paste would make sense to publishers and eReader developers alike. No one wants me to copy all and then email the whole text of the book to all of my friends. But if texts on eReaders are going to be of value to intellectuals, if they are going to be of more value than print on paper, then developers and marketers will have to give me the only thing I really, truly want in an eReader: the possibility of streamlining the annotation/note-taking workflow by being able to copy small portions of text and paste them into any text editor.

There are easy ways to do this without allowing me to copy the entire text. Allow copy and paste of a limited word count, for example. Allow me to export my highlights and notes, or email them. While the publishers and developers dissolve into a bubbling puddle of DRM craziness, students and academics are retyping passages which they wish to annotate or quote in a paper or article from one electronic device to another. This is ludicrous.

I’m not surprised that Kindle would do this, because they like to yank books people have already purchased off their devices without notifying them. But the fact that it’s all eReader apps available for iPhone means it’s an Apple policy. That’s too bad, because we’re denying users the one thing that could be really useful about books in electronic format.

Let’s look at it like this: you may own the trademark on the device or app, the rights to distribute the book, the patent on the double-click, whatever, but you do not own my personal thoughts about the text, and I should be able to copy small portions of a book I have legally purchased onto other applications, like text editors, without having to rekey those passages.

Otherwise, let’s face it, what’s the use of having an eBook at all? Print on paper is a pretty great technology. It’s durable, not fragile, and much more energy-efficient than an iPhone. Stanza, Kindle, iPhone, can you wow me already? Is this all ya’ got?

It’s been bothering me for a month that I couldn’t put my little code poem into a better formatting. I wondered this morning whether there might be some plugin for Wordpress that would force the rendering of <pre> and <code> tags. Very nice. And I can play with the coloring as well, if I want.

if (oldHippieMan == misogynist){
    thatFigures=true;
} else {
    whatTheFuck();
}

This NYT page is the best all-around summation I’ve found of where health care reform currently stands. The only thing actually written and approved by one of the governing bodies, at this point, is the House bill. I am very happy to see that the House bill does include a public plan. Though I can’t see anywhere in the article what the qualifying requirements are for the plan.

If it is going to be similar to Wisconsin’s HIRSP, then you will have to prove that you are very poor to qualify for it. You will have to have exhausted your COBRA (and perhaps your bank account, in the process). And the premiums will still be very expensive. For HIRSP, when I was applying, in 2006, it would have been quarterly premiums over $900. That particular plan from HIRSP, the cheapest one for women, came with a $3000 deductible. About the same cost that COBRA had been. With my meager freelancer’s income, about $1500 a month, I was actually over the minimum income benchmark for a rate reduction. By comparison, I was paying $600 a month for rent, and $300 a month for food. With no insurance, my prescription for venlafaxine was $125 a month.

Please, House, Senate, tell me it’s going to be better than that. Tell me I won’t have to prove destitution to get affordable health care. Tell me I won’t have to prove that I’m ineligible for an employer plan in order to get the public plan–because I’m eligible for my employer’s plan right now, but I have to drive 30 miles outside of Madison (the state capitol) to get to an in-network provider. Are you going to help the smart, hard-working middle-income people, as well as the working poor? I sure as hell hope so. Make that public plan available to me, and I’ll sure as hell buy it. Along with going back to freelancing and writing. Give the option of not working a 40 hour week, of reading and writing and contributing to the nation’s literary conversation without having to self-censor in order to acquire the patronage of a university, or burn the midnight oil after a full day at work, and I’ll take it. But somebody’s gotta’ have the courage to throw me that bone, somebody in the ruling class. Are we that humanitarian? Or is it better to keep the productive middle-class from indulging their artistic impulses? How about it, House, Senate? Throw me that bone.