RoasterBoy on the move

I am in the process of migrating this blog to WordPress. You can find out more here: RoasterBoy on the move « Hakkarainen Clipping Service.
These links  and other services will continue to work for quite a while. When I get the email and RSS feeds set up, all new content will go onto the new site. My goal is that current readers should have to do anything to receive the blog posts at the new site. I'll let you know directly if I learn otherwise.
Thanks so much for your interest and support.

The daily news of the future

Giving us a chance to say as much as we want about nothing.

Worcester Telegram & Gazette - telegram.com -

Book Review: Social Media for Lawyers

Professionals such as attorneys and physicians are using social media to establish their professional reputations, promote discussion of important topics, and, yes, build their practices. Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier offers practical tips for attorneys who are new to the idea of using social media such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter as a part of their marketing and outreach. The book walks you through the setup of these services and suggests some best practices for using social media specifically and marketing in general. The book concludes with the expected notes of caution regarding ethics. You can see the table of contents here (PDF).
The book is useful, but could be a lot more so. The biggest problem, by far, is the lack of an online resource to help the reader with the number of lengthy links used in the book.

The book includes a number of sidebar notes. The trouble is that they're called Factoids. Norman Mailer coined the phrase to describe "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." (via Online Etymology Dictionary).
At $50, the book is too expensive for what it offers. A bit of web research and perhaps even a copy of Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies would be more useful and less expensive.

G'bye, delicious

One of my maxims based on 30 years of high tech:

All software will break your heart.

I've used the public bookmarking service delicious (formerly known as del.icio.us) more than six years, nearly a lifetime for a web service. I've relied on it to park items of interest, share topics with friends and strangers, and  build blog posts from the accumulated links. I currently have more than 9500 bookmarks stored there. You can see them on my links page.
Yahoo bought delicious from its founder in late 2005 and did very little to help or hurt it. Late last year, Yahoo signaled that it was going to shut down delicious, prompting a bit of panic. Along with many thousands of other bookmarkers, I opened an account with pinboard.in. They had some fun dealing with the sudden influx of interest, but they survived: Anatomy of a Crushing (Pinboard Blog). Pinboard later got through an unfriendly visit from the FBI: FAQ about the recent FBI raid (Pinboard Blog).
Pinboard costs a few buck; delicious is free.
I was in the habit, though, of using delicious. I had browser extensions, scripts that put selected links into selected blog posts, and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't feel like replacing. I was lulled into this inertia by delicious's continued and unchanged presence.
In the spring, a couple of guys who'd been at YouTube formed a company called AVOS and bought delicious for pretty much couch changed. They worked behind the scenes through the summer and launched the new site in late September: A New Flavor…Still Delicious | AVOS.
The reaction to the new web service was consistent: AVOS’ Delicious Disaster: Lessons from a Complete Failure | ZDNet.
The new service has broken too many things that used to work on their way to adding eye candy that almost no  one wants or needs.
I've been patient, giving them time to listen to their customers and respond.  They've tried, but I fear that they've gone too far down the wrong path to come back and fix what they left behind, the stuff that made delicious really useful.
Today, though, I tried to do some real work with my bookmarks and couldn't.
delicious was a pickup truck that was good for real work. Now, it isn't. I don't know what it is, but it isn't what I need.
I'll be re-migrating my stuff to Pinboard over the next few weeks. Most of you won't notice or care, but a few might see a few changes. I'll keep my delicious account, but won't be adding to it.
In the 90s, there was a nifty product called Calendar Creator. It helped you build family calendars with birthdays and other recurring events of note. I don't remember if it was version 2 or 3, but one release broke everything. They tried to make it do more and wound up doing less. I bought the new version, tried it once, and never used it again.
Since then, I've seen countless products bloat themselves out of existence. Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, has added a bunch of eye candy that prevents it from running on older, slower, less powerful systems.  Facebook may be on that track as it keeps adding features that make it more difficult to use.
I like new stuff, particularly in technology. I'll try lots of products in their earliest stages and stick with them if they show promise.
When I find utilitarian products, however, I don't need improvement. I go to the store, point to my shoes and say, "I want these shoes, but new." I've worn button-down shirts for close to 50 years. (No, not the same ones, although not for a lack of trying.) My pillows are older than I am.
Google has it right. The basic design of their home page has changed very little over the years. They've added powerful features, but mostly hidden from view. When they've tried fancy stuff (Wave, Buzz), they failed and quickly dropped the products. They know how to add changes without breaking their core product.
delicious didn't do that. It broke what they did well and gave us new stuff that we neither wanted nor needed.

When blog becomes onomatopoeic

It appears that the FeedBlitz, the service that delivers email to readers of this journal, has sent some messages that include links to nowhere. (You click on the link and an empty window opens up.) This appears to be a transitory problem that FeedBlitz claims is fixed. I'll continue to monitor it. If you see any further odd mailings, please let me know directly.
Thanks for reading.

Happy Birthday, Lily

Happy 12th

More on the Sheriff

If you recall, I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago, The Sheriff and Secure Communities, about Worcester County Lew Evangelidis and his then-recent publicity regarding the Secure Communities program.
...
Continue reading More on the Sheriff  at Telegram Towns.

Fox 25 undercover reporter uncovers non-story. Film at 11.

Mike Beaudet, reporter for "FOX Undercover" on WFXT in Boston, broke a story over the weekend. He teased it a bit on Saturday and gave the it full treatment on Sunday evening. (His report, Boston schools seek pricey consultant, is on the station's website.)
Let's review, starting form the end. The Boston Finance Commission turned down a request by Boston school superintendent Dr. Carol Johnson to hire a consultant, Dr. Rudy Crew, at a reported $1500 per day. Because the total contact was above $10K, the FinCom gets a chance to review the proposal. They decided against it. As a result, Dr. Crew probably won't be hired.
The rest of the story is as follows:

• Dr. Crew would have charged $1500/day. Beaudet used the number in the sub-headline and six times in the story.
• Dr. Crew, a nationally recognized education leader, was "fired" from two jobs.
  One, in the Miami-Dade County system, was for, as Beaudet reported, "after being accused by critics of mismanaging the budget."
  Beaudet didn't report that Crew and the school board agreed to sever his contract, that the district is one of three finalists in a national competition. (Awards will be announced on October 14.) Beaudet also didn't report that Crew, according to A U.S. News and World Report article,   removed under-performing principals and corrected previously wasteful construction practices.
• Dr. Crew would have charged $1500/day. Beaudet wishes he was making  that kind of money.
  

  With all due respect Dr. Johnson, $1,500 a day. I'd love to be making that much money. Is he really worth all that money?” asked Beaudet.

• Dr. Crew lost his job with the New York City school system in 2000 after repeated run-ins with Mayor Rudy (no relation) Guiliani over the issue of school vouchers to private schools. The mayor wanted vouchers; the superintendent refused.
• There's no disputing that the daily rate is a lot of money. It's also in the range of his 2010 Miami salary,  The New York Times reported. Salaries at that level are reserved for the superintendents of the largest school systems. Miami-Dade is the fourth largest system in the nation. According to the survey by District Administration magazine, a CEO of a comparably large company would make more than $1M annually.

Crew has a long, successful, complicated, and controversial record of effecting improvement in difficult school systems. He gets a good wage for that. An organizational consultant in private business gets that kind of money.
We want outstanding schools on the cheap. We want to have schools run efficiently and meet goals, just like businesses must do, but we'll only pay one-third the going rate for the education, skills, and experience.
I can't make the determination if Dr. Crew is worth that kind of money. Neither, it appears, can Mike Beaudet. We learned very little about Dr. Crew's past work as a consultant or the value of consultants in reforming education. We learned nothing about what consultants and professionals earn in education or any other field. What we heard was a number that Beaudet envied. (The average salary for a news reporter in Boston in $42K.)

For the locals: Dr. Crew worked as a teacher in the Worcester school system in 1972-73.

Fallon Clinic - new name, same stock photography doctors

Fallon Clinic is changing its name to Reliant Medical Group on October 1. The goal is to help remove confusion between the clinic, where medical services are provided, and the Fallon Community Health Plan, which provides medical insurance. The two have been separate businesses since 2004. Patients and others continued to confuse the two.
As a result of a new alliance affiliation with Atrius Health Group, the clinic decided it was a good time for a name change. It would help to eliminate the confusion between the clinic and the insurance provider.
Naturally, patients are showing up at the clinic saying, "I guess I'll have to get a new doctor now that you're not longer part of Fallon." Or, "Does this mean I have to change health plans?" Or, "I changed to Harvard Pilgrim. Do I need to get a new doctor." Just exactly the kind of confusion that Fallon was hoping to eliminate.
The reassuring tent cards places around the clinic tell the patients that they'll still have the same great doctors and service providers that they did before.

 Nice, except that none of these smiling folks are Fallon providers. They are models. The picture is commercial stock photograph. A Google image search will show these good folks practicing all around the world.

via Studio shot of medical professionals smiling by Tetra Images

Take a class in Photoshop and call me in the morning.