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Amanda and I got a cheap GPS for the cars recently and with that we decided to try our hand at Geocaching. Over the weekend we went out after 3 sites that are nearby and managed to find two of them, though one of those took two attempts. It’s a remarkably fun activity that’s low cost (never mind the billion dollar satellites it requires, that’s a better use of my tax money than the bombs that use the system to blow the crap out of “insurgents” in Iraq. I’ll take a few more smart leaders and a few less smart bombs any day, but I digress).

I’ve you’ve ever thought about trying it and have a car GPS that’s really all you need. It’s a little funky because it’s normal map mode just doesn’t provide useful information, I need to put it into setup mode where it shows the exact coordinates of my current location. It also displays speed and direction if you’re walking, though the accuracy at low speeds isn’t great. We generally pick the cache we want to find on the geocaching website and download the .loc file associated with the cache. Google Earth can import the file which does two things – first it makes it easy to visualize about where the cache is on the map, and since it’s satellite footage can give you a pretty good idea of about where something is unless the tree cover is heavy. Second you can set Google Earth to display the coordinates in the same way your GPS does.

Most handheld displays use the degree, minutes, seconds method which gives you something like N41deg 32′ 48.21″. Confusingly some give you degrees, and minutes only, with decimal minutes, so N41deg 32.8123′. A bit more straightforward, though less common it seems is the decimal degrees method which would just be something like 41.541234deg. Our car unit uses the latter method, but unfortunately only gives four decimal places of accuracy, which, if my calculations are correct, can’t really get you within more than 40 feet of the object. Finding something small and usually well hidden in the woods in a 1600ft^2 area isn’t trivial. Compound that with the accuracy or lack thereof of the hider’s GPS and you may be nowhere near the reported location. Anyway, we’ll probably pick up a handheld unit in the near future and that may help with some of the harder caches.

We’ll probably put some pages up in the near future detailing our adventures, which we’ve been photographing.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/19/18451/0971

Yes, I’m athiest.

A few times every week we spend some hours relaxing at the coffee shop of our neighborhood Borders store. Part of the reason was the gratis rewards program that gave you a a personal shopping day (10% off) if you spent at least $50 in the previous month. At the end of the year they also gave you a percentage of your entire spending over the course of the year to spend as a holiday reward. In the meantime they benefited because they had us sitting in the cafe, buying magazines, books and drinks in an effort to get that shopping day each month.

Well recently they sent out notice that the rewards program is changing. Of course, it’s a free program, so you can’t really complain about changes, but between the fact that it’s now significantly more difficult to get any sort of reward from the program and that they attempted to make it sound like they were benefiting you in some way, has really earned my ire.

Look at it like this. Previously the program gave you a 10% off shopping day if you spent $50 in a month. If you tended to save the bulk of your purchases on one day you got actually a 10% benefit, though on other trips, maybe just for some coffee in the cafe you basically received nothing. On top of that 10% benefit at the end of the year you received a percentage back of all your purchase that I believe amounted to about 5%. So in a worst case scenario you wound up maybe around 10% off of all your purchases, depending upon how much you took advantage of the program.

Well, in the new program you get $5 off of every $150 you spend. The mathematics is challenging, but after setting a small computational cluster to work on the problem it turns out that’s just over 3% benefit that you now receive. No personal shopping days and no year end benefit. Just that 3.33% off. (Both programs include weekly coupons in the mail, hence I ignore that, presuming that they will be roughly equivalent under the new program, but if you use the actual coupons you can save more than just the base benefits rates.)

So what – a company isn’t required to continue a free program, right? I’m guessing they found that perhaps people took advantage of it too well and it was impacting their bottom line. (Ever hear of actuarials, guys?) The issue that I’m taking in particular with their decision and why I’m encouraging you to write them if you’re a Borders rewards customer is the disingenuous way that they presented the program change to their customers.

They didn’t use deliberately misleading wording, the primary message is that the program is now “simpler”. However calling it a “new program to celebrate” certainly is intended to give on the feeling that the new program is somehow better for the participant. Saying “[i]nstead of the $200 necessary to qualify for Holiday Savings Rewards, you only need to spend $150 to start getting Borders Bucks” might sound like an improvement to the plan, but is it not misleading to leave out the fact that the percentage of the savings is much less?

Of course of all the injustices in the world today, this is a pretty minor one. Still, companies deserve to have their hands slapped when they try spin a negative impact to their customers as somehow helping their customers. For better or for worse I came accustomed to spending some of my relaxation time in Borders stores as a result of this program (and certainly some of my disposable income) so this will have an impact on me and perhaps others in how our leisure time is spent.

So if you’re a rewards customer I encourage you to go ahead and write them to berate them for their disingenuous communications. They should at least have the courage to tell it like it is. Maybe instead of just trying to improve their bottom line they would have managed to keep a few more customers.

I won’t post their email address here, but their contact information for the rewards program is on this page:

https://www.bordersrewards.com/CustomerCare.aspx

After a rather successful run of both the HL7 Browser and HL7 Comm I’ve finally come to the conclusion that because both are primarily used as interactive tools, it is better to combine the two into a single utility. Why should HL7 Browser have a half-ass network utility and HL7 Comm provide the ability to get detailed views of messages? I won’t be limiting the abilities of either in any way (in fact, both will be enhanced by the upgrade), including better support for the Comm to run in stand alone mode (remote administration and monitoring).

This new thing needs a name, however. I’m hoping to avoid calling it HL7* due to the fact that at any moment the HL7 organization may decide they don’t like that. Its focus will still be to simplify the acts of troubleshooting, testing and integrating health care information (well, the 95% that’s HL7), so it needs a name that reflects that. It would also nice not to be so generic.

So if you have ideas, please check out the contact page to the right and send me an email. Because it will utilize the pretty solid Light HL7 Library and the Integrate Client Library I hope to get things pretty useful in pretty short order.