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Stormy’s Update: Week of April 19, 2010

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.

  • Quarterly report. Put together the GNOME Q1 2010 quarterly report. Thanks to all the team members who wrote up the actual updates, Vinicius Depizzol who worked on the design and Vincent Untz who published it on the website during his vacation.
  • Review. Wrote up first half of fiscal year 2010 results for the board to review.
  • Orbitz. Worked with Orbitz to see if a business account would help the travel team. Still working with them.
  • 1:1’s. Met with Brian and Rosanna (separately.)
  • Marketing hackfest. Booked travel for the marketing hackfest. (Was waiting on some final scheduling before booking.)
  • Odds and Ends. Weighed in on a few discussions, had a few discussions with board members, pushed a few things along.

Overall, it was a very productive week. Here’s hoping this one is too!

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When something is free, pretend you paid for it

Chris Brogan lost all access to his Google accounts today. He can’t check his email, his calendar or even use his Android phone.

We need to learn how to evaluate free products.

When we pay for something, we tend to read the terms and conditions, make sure there’s support, compare it to other alternatives, etc. When it’s free, we go “oh, cool, thanks.”

But free web services aren’t like free pizza. You come to depend on them and you give them your data and control of your life. Shouldn’t you know what agreement you have with them?

From Google’s Terms of Service:

4.3 […] you acknowledge and agree that Google may stop (permanently or temporarily) providing the Services (or any features within the Services) to you or to users generally at Google’s sole discretion, without prior notice to you. […]

I think the responsibility lies with users to evaluate the terms of the software they are using. Google provides a lot of great services. It’s up to us to figure out how best to use them and to demand better terms if we want them.

So when you sign up for a free web service, pretend you are paying for it. Read the terms. Raise your concerns.

Disclaimer: I use a lot of Google services and in general I’m quite happy with them.

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Do men and women have different standards of success?

This quote has been haunting me because it rings so true:

men tended to stick with their studies as long as they completed the coursework, while women did so only if they earned high grades

I don’t see that in all fields but I definitely see it in computer science. I wonder if it’s because only really competitive women tend to stick it out in a field that’s often less than 20% women (and comes with all the problems that entails.) They are used to working hard, competing and doing well. And when they don’t, well they figure they should be doing something else. Something they excel at.

I’ve seen it happen. (And for the record the women I know went on to be really successful in other scientific fields. I think they would have excelled in computer science too.)

What do you think?

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Stormy’s Update: Week of April 12, 2010

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.

Logistics:

  • Spent Monday traveling home from the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans.
  • Tuesday I caught up on a ton of mail. Like a lot of mail. Got back down to 10 mails in my inbox.
  • Wednesday-Friday I traveled to and attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. I hope everyone from Europe makes it back home soon!

What I actually did:

  • Had a lot of great conversations with existing GNOME Foundation sponsors and members at the Collaboration Summit about things we are working on and GUADEC. I talked with (some in depth, some very briefly) Robert McQueen(Collabora), Phillippe Kalaf (Collabora), Quim Gil (Nokia), Juan Jose Sanchez (Igalia), Ryan Singer (InitMarketing), Amanda McPhearson (Linux Foundation), Alan Clark (Novell), Rob Taylor (CodeThink), Jono Bacon (Canonical), Dave Neary, Paul Cutler. And if I talked to you and you aren’t on the list and want to be, just leave a comment. I talked to a lot of people!
  • Had a couple of great dinners. Yorba hosted a great GNOME dinner (Adam Dingle got  us all together!) and I had a great time catching up with the Yorba folks, Philip from Igalia, Christian Schaller, Paul Cutler, Phillippe Kalaf and Robert McQueen. (There were more people there but I wasn’t able to hear them from down the table. 🙂 Had dinner the night before with Ryan Singer, Jonathan Corbet, Jake Edge, Paul Cutler, Dave Neary and Josh Berkus. Don’t ask me who all I chatted with at the evening event on Wednesday …
  • Spent most of the day on Thursday in the MeeGo talks … when I wasn’t meeting with people individually.
  • Ran the Desktop track on Friday morning. Many, many thanks to Dave Neary and Zonker Brockmeier for helping put it together. We had some good sessions and great discussions about web applications and the desktop. (Talks about Snowy, KDE web apps and Mozilla Weave.) We wanted a controversial panel and we got one. I think the whole room shouted through the whole thing but I think I kept it enough under control that we got a few questions answered. It was exciting if not 100% productive.
  • Heard my favorite idea so far with what to do with the funding that Nokia has given to GNOME Mobile. Robert McQueen suggested that we do like a Google Summer of Code but for mobile. And not limit it to students. I really liked the idea and ran it by several others like Quim and Juanjo and everyone seemed to like it.
  • Got a free Nexus One phone from Google. (They gave one to everyone that attended their keynote!)
  • Attended the GNOME Board meeting.
  • Sent thank you’s to people who donated to Friends of GNOME through Paypal.
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Stormy’s Update: Weeks of March 29th and April 5th, 2010

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.

  • Friends of GNOME ruler was a great success! We met our goal for hiring a sys admin. (My work was just to provide updated numbers frequently and to dent and twitter. And sending thank you notes to all our generous supporters!)
  • Talked to InitMarketing with Paul Cutler about how they might be able to help us with some of our marketing tasks.
  • Planned the Desktop Track at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with Zonker and Dave Neary.
  • Attended the board meeting.
  • Met with Rosanna.
  • Met with Jonathan Corbet from LWN.net to discuss partnership opportunities.
  • Met with Jeremy Allison, our newest GNOME Advisory Board member.
  • Had a meeting with the folks going to the events in Africa representing GNOME and some of the other board members.
  • Started a conversation on the mobile list about how best to use the funding from Nokia.
  • Had lots of exchanges with events looking for me to speak at them. (In all cases I asked for lots more info. In one case I offered to speak in exchange for a donation to the GNOME Foundation.)
  • Started working on my write-up for my 6 month evaluation.
  • Spread the word to recruit a few people for the GNOME press team.
  • Created the GNOME wish list.
  • Agreed to pay Texas Linux Fest a nonprofit $100 booth fee. (Zonker and the Ubuntu team will be running the GNOME booth.)
  • Followed up with a few potential GUADEC sponsors.
  • Sent and received a record amount of email!
  • Taking some vacation – going to the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans! (Also took a day the week of March 29th to get some stuff done.)

Next week:

  • Catch up on email from vacation.
  • Attend the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and chair the Desktop Track along with Zonker and Dave Neary.
  • Continue to follow up with GUADEC sponsors.
  • Help Paul Cutler with prep work for the marketing hackfest.
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10 free apps I wish were open source

When it comes to web applications, I think free and open source software fans are settling for “free” instead of looking for the freedom they would get from open source.

Here are some free applications that I wish had open source software equivalents.  I am not unhappy with these applications. I just wish I had open source software alternatives that were as good!

Here are 10 of the good web applications that I use daily that don’t have good enough open source software equivalents.

  1. Gmail. How many free software developers use Gmail as their primary email interface?
  2. Remember the Milk. I want a way to sync tasks across multiple computers, tag them, date them, prioritize them and share them with other users.
  3. TripIt. I forward any reservation to it and it adds it to my itinerary. I can also share with friends to coordinate travel plans or just to share where we are.
  4. Facebook. There’s Identica as an alternative to Twitter but there’s no open source software alternative to Facebook.
  5. Delicio.us/Diigo. Mozilla is working on tools to help me synchronize my bookmarks across multiple machines. I also want to share and search them.
  6. Kayak.com. The best way to find cheap airfare with all the options you need.
  7. Doodle. Ever tried to schedule a meeting with lots of busy people in different time zones?
  8. Google calendar. I can manage my calendar from any where and invite others to meetings. All synced on the web, not dependent on any particular machine I’m on.
  9. Google reader. Judging from how many open source software users share items with me in Google reader, a lot of us are using this RSS reader to follow our favorite websites.
  10. Dropbox. Dropbox and UbuntuOne have become the default way for users to access files across multiple machines, remotely and to share them. Why don’t we have an open source software option yet?

Why hasn’t open source software kept up with the web application space? What needs to happen for us to have open source software web applications in these spaces?

What other spaces are also missing open source software options?

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Why our insurance costs so much

Our insurance costs so much because the insurance company pays way more than you or I would pay.

I recently went to see a chiropractor.

I was informed that the chiropractor’s appointment would be $45 if I paid in cash.  The sign on the door said a massage was $70. (The doctor prescribed the massage.) Or they could bill my insurance company and they could not guarantee the prices in that case. Thinking I’d save some paperwork, I said please bill my insurance company. They billed my insurance company $144.60 for that chiropractor’s appointment (321% more than they were willing to accept in cash) and $180 for the massage! Who in the world would pay $180 for an hour massage??

Of course, the insurance company didn’t pay that, they paid their agreed up on rate of $65.12 for the chiropractor and $113.92 for the massage. The massage was actually billed as “physical therapy” which I think is also wrong. (In case you are curious, my portions of what the insurance company paid were $26.05 and $45.57 respectively.) The going rate around here for an hour massage is $50-60. And my insurance company paid $114!!

Cash amount Amount billed to insurance Insurance Paid
Chiropractor $45 $145 $65
Massage $60 $180 $114

So I called the chiropractor’s office to complain that they were overcharging my insurance company and they claimed that the state of Colorado sets those prices. They can charge me whatever they want if I pay cash, but if they charge the insurance company, they have to use the codes and prices set by the State of Colorado. However, the insurance company then pays whatever rate the doctor’s office and the insurance company agreed upon when they signed their initial agreement.

This is just wrong. The doctor’s office is getting $113.92 for a 60 minute massage that they were willing to give to me for $70. I can only assume the insurance company agreed to that amount because they either don’t know any better or they are passing on those costs to me or the company backing my insurance.