Health insurance solution

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have ideas on how to handle universal health care. Both plans are pretty weak in my opinion. McCain's plan talks about giving each person a $2,500 tax credit to pay for insurance. That doesn't pay for squat and requires that individuals actually qualify for insurance. As someone with a pre-existing condition (ulcerative colitis), I'm not sure that I could quality for an individual plan which would put me up a creek or leave me stuck with the plan for those that can't afford insurance even after the tax credit. While I pay a significant amount for health insurance now, I get decent care.

Obama's plan may sound a little better, but where on this earth is the money going to come from to pay for it? The government has already taken on a significant amount of debt with this financial bailout.

So my solution is quite simple; now that the federal government is going to own a very large insurance company (AIG) that sells insurance, use that to provide universal health insurance for everyone. Since we've already bitten the bullet to waste taxpayer money bailing out private companies, why not use that to their advantage?

That wasn't so hard, was it? Maybe I should run for political office. Nah, no party would support me as my views are all over the board and I manage to offend everyone. I guess that's what happens when I'm a free thinker and actually think about issues on an issue by issue basis instead of doing what my "party" tells me to do.

Final word on phone GPS

After one success with the Sanyo Pro-200, I began to feel confident that a phone based GPS would work. However, the following day, we used it again and I didn't quite follow its directions, so it had to recalculate the route. Unfortunately it was far too slow at recalculating the route to be useful. It had to upload the GPS information to the server, recalculate the route and then send it back to the phone. By the time the phone got the information, I was in a different place and it had to recalculate again. Stopping the car and letting it figure out where we were got things going again.

I'm used to the GPS unit in my wife's Honda CR-V and it's extremely fast at recalculating its route. I've also used Garmin and TomTom units and been pleased. Before my next trip that I have to rent a car, I'm definitely buying a Garmin nüvi (the new ones look pretty cool) to save me a lot of frustration.

Smartphone GPS Followup

After our disaster with a smartphone based GPS yesterday, I was given another phone to try, this time not a smartphone, but a Sanyo Pro-200. We used the Sprint Navigation service and we were quite pleased with it. It gave us directions and spoke the turns. I took another look at the Treo 800w and found the issue; I was using Google Maps's navigation instead of the Sprint Navigation (which was available on the 800w). However, Sprint Navigation has a monthly fee and still won't work when you don't have data coverage. So while my initial review was a bit harsh, I still think I want to get a Garmin nüvi as it doesn't require a data connection, has a larger screen, and just works.

Lovely HP Scanner

My dad has some random HP Photosmart scanner and keeps running into problems with it and ReceiptWallet. His messages imply that it is an issue with ReceiptWallet and that very well may be the case. I looked at his ReceiptWallet log today and saw:

               XResolution: 200.0000
               YResolution: 200.0000
        imageInfo:
                ImageWidth: 616
               ImageLength: 1528
           SamplesPerPixel: 3
             BitsPerSample: 5605
              BitsPerPixel: 16815
                    Planar: 0
                 PixelType: 2
               Compression: 0
got the image info 0...
setupMemXfer.MaxBufSize: 16777216
setupMemXfer.Preferred: 1048576
bytesPerRow: 0
Getting image via memory based transfer...
totalMaxDestBytes : 0
rc: 1
Got image via memory based transfer: 1

This means that the scanner says that it has 16815 bits per pixel! Most scanners do 24 bits per pixel. His scanner must be so advanced that it can capture color 800 times better than the average scanner! OK, so the scanner reported an error and somehow ReceiptWallet didn't properly handle this (I think I fixed this). The better question is why oh why do HP scanners report bogus information? It seems like the HP scanners are the ones that randomly screw up scans the most. I worked on an issue last week with a different HP scanner doing something similar. Did I mention that the scanner logs debug message to the Console? This is very bad form in a shipping app. ReceiptWallet's debugging information is turned on via a hidden switch and logs it to its own file to make it easier to troubleshoot. I'm hoping that someday the drivers get better.