Pletzke’s Chapel Hill Blog

Here is an article worth reading about the nature of health care expenses, how we make the decisions about what to spend and how much, and why having your own health insurance policy may mean that you are a better cost risk than someone on a government or employer’s plan:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/15/miron.health.costs/index.html

Jonathan Pletzke is a consumer expert on health insurance and author of the health insurance book Get a Good Deal on Your Health Insurance Without Getting Ripped-Off, available online and at bookstores nationally. Additional details can be found at the consumers health insurance book and resources website www.BestHealthInsuranceBook.com. Copyright 2007-2008 Aji Publishing.

I presented today at a combined meeting of The Carolinas Chatper of the America Society for Information Science & Technology with the Society for Technical Communication. The topic was content management systems and featured a presentation defining content management systems (CMS’s) and specific sessions on Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal. The topic of Plone came up, and in fact a paper was circulated that compared all four of these solutions. I spoke on Joomla as Your Content Management System which is available as PDF and web slide show. This is one way that I can give back to the open source community for the benefits that I have received from Joomla and Wordpress.

This health insurance question came to me recently and I thought it worth sharing:

We are meeting with our health insurance broker tomorrow to review and select options in providing our employees HMO/PPO health insurance benefits.  We have many options, and many rates in front of us between two insurers.  Would you be able to suggest a few key critical review questions we should be asking our broker both from the perspectives of 1) lowest cost options to the company and 2) acceptable employee options?  We have under 50 employees now, and are going to contribute 50% to the plan for the employees.  None of us are experts in benefits, so we want to be sure we are making the choices in both the best interest of the company and to our employees which range in age from 22 to 75, half of which are over 50. 

From a benefits perspective, you certainly know more about what it takes to attract and retain employees in your industry. My recommendation is to make sure you get all the numbers to make your health insurance spreadsheet for comparison and know how high a health insurance deductible your group will be able to tolerate (the higher the health insurance deductible, the lower the monthly health insurance rate). Depending on the group of employees and creative strategies allowed in your state, some companies are able to create reimbursement packages for employees such that they buy their own health insurance and/or receive HSA contributions from the employer.

Buying health insurance will be an annual exercise for your company, and of course there are other options such as employee leasing companies that can handle all of these details for you. Be sure to check out news stories (such as those from the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal) on these health insurers as well as to check them out via the free online databases in the health insurance resources center. You may also wish to make sure you are considering all of your options by looking at the insurers rated best at in the health insurance resource center and ensuring that you have health insurance quotes from them.

Best wishes on your search.

Jonathan Pletzke is a consumer expert on health insurance and author of the health insurance book Get a Good Deal on Your Health Insurance Without Getting Ripped-Off, available online and at bookstores nationally. Additional details can be found at the consumers health insurance book and resources website www.BestHealthInsuranceBook.com. Copyright 2007-2008 Aji Publishing.

James Taylor played to a lively crowd in his hometown this evening: Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The gates opened at 5PM for admission to this free concert, held at Fetzer Field on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill, apparently as part of the Young Democrats group on campus.

The weather was beautiful, though just a little chilly. The announcements and music started at five minutes after 7PM and the event went something like this:

1. Pledge of Allegiance.
2. A nice prayer said with the request to keep your heads up and eyes open.
3. An introduction by Congressman David Price, a longtime representative of the district that includes Chapel Hill.
4. James Taylor playing his songs, a few new ones, a few old ones, and one specific one where the crowd sang “Go Obama Go” with James Taylor, and then he did some singing around that while the crowd continued to sing “Go Obama Go”. James also had a few things to say about voting early and how it helps to avoid lines in voting, and can be a more pleasant experience than waiting until November. He also gave some good reasons why he supports Obama.
5. For the last song, “Carolina on My Mind”, James was joined by his wife. She also stayed onstage as he performed a few encores, and then with a reminder that there would be a rally at “the pit”, the concert was over.

The night was pleasant, children were playing, people were swaying, and James entertained with stories, including how he came back from a year abroad (woven into a joke) and created the song “Sweet Baby James” for his nephew back home in Chapel Hill. He even played happy birthday for a child up front celebrating what I believe was an 8 year old birthday.

Somehow every time I look at the W3C website, I find a new free web tool that really helps me out. This note is an effort to share these essential web development tools, with some tips about how to best apply them.

http://validator.w3.org/ - You can put in a URI, upload a file, or cut&paste your HTML into this validator. It will tell you whether you have any problems in the code. I’ve found many times where the content management system (CMS) and the plug-in’s will cause a problem. Why does this matter? If your code is clean, then it will be more likely to display correctly across browsers and be indexed more easily by search engines, resulting in more happy visitors to your website. I like to select the “show source” checkbox so that any errors can be easily found in the source code, leading to quicker fixes. I’ve also found that sometimes by fixing one problem, a number of other ones go away.

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ - Similar to the HTML/XHTML validator, this tool ensures that your CSS is up to snuff. It will validate standalone CSS or CSS inside an HTML/XHTML document, via URI, file upload, or cut&paste.

http://validator.w3.org/checklink - We all need this to reduce user 404 errors. I run this near the end of development and after each time a change is made. Sure there are other link checkers out there, but this one is free and you don’t need to run it locally (although there is a link to download it). Use the “Check linked documents recursively, recursion depth” option with a level of 1 to start until you know how much time and depth you wish to check.

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/ - A free semi-WYSIWYG editor for standards compliant HTML/XHTML. While the WYSIWYG portion doesn’t always render true to the browser, it does provide valuable standards compliant code editing at the right price. Other tools like Mozilla SeaMonkey don’t provide XHTML compliant code generation, which can be a problem if you are targeting standards compliant web documents. The editor also works on MathML and SVG, and will also help get your feet wet with RDF, XLink, and XPointer if you know what to look for.

http://validator.w3.org/feed/ - Check your RSS feeds, whether you are creating them yourself or using a tool. I haven’t had a bad RSS feed yet, though I’m keeping my fingers crossed. You can give a URI, or cut&paste your feed to verify.

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/LogValidator/ - An all-in-one validation that combines many of the above into one tool. You need to download and install this one to run it. I haven’t tried it yet. You could try http://qa-dev.w3.org/unicorn/ instead - it is hosted online, though it hasn’t been updated since 2006, although it seems to do a reasonable job of reporting useful information. Again, three input methods are supported: URI, File upload, or cut&paste.

http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ - For mobile applications, this validates the page and gives a detailed report. I have limited experience with mobile applications (only one a few years back), and I haven’t used this on a project yet.

These are the tools that I know about from the W3C. There are others at http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/. I like tools from a number of other sites too. I’d like to share those other tools too, and learn about your favorite tools for web work. Comment about your favorites or send them to me and I’ll combine them into a future post.

Ever wonder if the break room coffee could taste better? You can change a few things, the water, the coffee, or the process. In order to have the break room coffee taste the best, we changed the water and the process, and used a standard bag of break room coffee. The results were good, but there’s only so much that filtered water and a french press can do to improve the taste. It’s worth trying if that’s all the coffee you’ve go.

I am working with Process 360 from Global360. It provides a distributed computing platform, based on Microsoft servers, that allows for workflow processing, document image/retrieval, and integration with both Microsoft .NET technologies and Java software. The best benefit of this technology is that it is a customizable platform for developing automated solutions to business processes. Paper can be turned into electronic documents and people can participate in the process from beginning to end, speeding up the turn-around of many business processes.

I have installed an image gallery to store and share images. It can be found at http://www.pletzke.com/gallery2/

Get a Good Deal on Your Health Insurance Without Getting Ripped-Off named to "10 Must-have Investing and Insurance books"

"Dummies and Idiot’s guides may get you started in investing and help you understand the intricacies of your insurance policies, but these books are must-haves if you want to be an intelligent investor and consumer."    -     writes Dave Ralis of PhillyBurbs.com, the online version of the Bucks County Courier Times, who placed Get a Good Deal on Your Health Insurance Without Getting Ripped-Off on his list of "10 Must-have Investing and Insurance Books". 

Jonathan Pletzke is a consumer expert on health insurance and author of the health insurance book Get a Good Deal on Your Health Insurance Without Getting Ripped-Off, available online and at bookstores nationally. Additional details can be found at the consumers health insurance book and resources website www.BestHealthInsuranceBook.com. Copyright 2007-2008 Aji Publishing.

Another 5 Star Review for "Get a Good Deal on Your Health Insurance Without Getting Ripped-Off" was posted recently at the Retire Early Home Page, one of the most interesting and useful sites for people interested in what it really takes to retire early. John P. Greaney, who successfully retired early at a young age, has very useful information covering all aspects of early retirement.

Jonathan Pletzke is a consumer expert on health insurance and author of the health insurance book Get a Good Deal on Your Health Insurance Without Getting Ripped-Off, available online and at bookstores nationally. Additional details can be found at the consumers health insurance book and resources website www.BestHealthInsuranceBook.com. Copyright 2007-2008 Aji Publishing.