Joshua's Thoughts

a few months ago, the mp3 player i regularly took with me during exercise decided to fail. shortly thereafter, i ended up at a toys ‘r us (presumably to buy something for felicity) and i decided to peruse through their feeble electronics dept.

what i found was this little black looking “thing” that cost a mere $12.99. it promised an mp3 player and radio. well. let me tell you – this is possibly the best little mp3 player i’ve ever used.

it has a radio, mp3 player, voice recorder, stopwatch, usb interface, rechargeable battery which lasts several hours, and a very simple on screen display. not only that, it’s waterproof – which is good because i’ve washed it by accident twice and it’s still chugging away.

now it doesn’t hold a ton of mp3s, but i mainly listen to the radio so that’s not a big deal for me.

i don’t think they make these puppies anymore, but i did quick search and found some businesses selling them.

here’s basically what i think about healthcare reform in a nutshell. it should be fairly straightforward and hopefully fair.

first: i’m extremely satisfied with my healthcare situation today. i (and my daughter) have great coverage at an affordable price. true, my company pays a lot of my insurance, but i assume they do so because it is worth it to them. if they couldn’t afford it, they put more of the burden on the employees or lay off more people … but they aren’t so here we are.

in principle, i’m not for government controlling anything related to my personal life. i believe government’s role is to protect it’s people and from a financial standpoint, tax people so that it can provide “public goods“. anytime government or any big governing body tries to run something (any big corporate employee knows this) – it becomes difficult to effect change and manage the company. this is why you see smaller startups often referred to as being more “agile”.

i do believe healthcare is something that should be universally available to everyone. for instance, if someone just got their arm chopped off, they should be able to walk into an emergency room to get care.

i also think that people need to look at a healthcare a lot like the way they look at their light bill (or cable – depending on how far south you live). it’s a fact of life. you cannot expect to use the ER as your doctor. you must purchase some sort of healthcare.

i do not think that i should subsidize poor people’s healthcare. why? it’s not because i do not care about poor people. i care very much for them. whether you believe in the bible or not, i adhere to this scripture:

Leviticus 19:9-10 – “When you reap the harvest of your land, you are not to reap to the very edge of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You must not strip your vineyard bare or gather its fallen grapes. Leave them for the poor and the foreign resident; I am the Lord your God.”

basically, i think we should “leave the edges of our crops for the poor”. but the way i look at it, i already pay over 30% of my income towards taxes. that’s beyond the edges of my crop. at some point, i think we the people have to hold our government accountable for that 30% and how they manage that money. i have lots of thoughts and opinions on how the government manages our current tax dollars, but for the sake of time and for simplicity, i’ll just say what i think: there is enough money going into the system. find a way to encourage universal coverage without eliminating private insurance, increasing taxes, and de-valuing the dollar by spending what we don’t have.

lastly, i think there is a way to express your opinions on government. 90+% of the time, yelling pointlessly at a town meeting (no matter which side you are on) is NOT the way to do it. however, if the controlling/decision-making party is not providing a way for the public to express and/or they are not acknowledging public concern, then sometimes the only counter is a more vocal power-driven response.

oh – and a 1000+ page healthcare bill seems wildy complicated. this is not an issue to be rushed – so stop rushing it! what sucks is that these bills are written by lawyers so even if you read it all and think you understand it, it could be interpreted by a judge to be something else. that fact alone should be enough reason to give the public plenty of time to be onboard.

there’s a ton of stuff i’m leaving out like conservatives blaming a lot of waste on illegal immigrants clouding up the system, but i think i’ve covered what’s most important to me.

as i told one of our interns today at work, what’s important to me are the facts. if you have thoughts or added information that could help me form an opinion, please share it.

- joshua

look at that title. how’s that for seo?

anyways, i’ve been getting tons of spam from site called tagged.com that i DID NOT sign up for. today, i decided to click on usubscribe (knowing good and well that doing so almost always opts you in for even more spam), and the monstrosity of what i encountered is below.

that’s right, there’s an email pref. for basically every possible action that occurs in nature, including: “email me when someone uses the bathroom”, “email me when something falls on the floor”, and my personal favorite: “email me every time someone gives me LUV”. *sigh

If you have a question about QuickBase, the use of the api in particular, please ask in the comments of this post. I will update this blog post to include your question and my answer so that others who come across my site can see it. Many of you have been emailing me GREAT questions that I would love to share with the rest of the QuickBase community.

Any questions about QuickBase are open game, but my speciality is with the QuickBase API. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find it and/or get you in touch with someone who can.

This is not an official alternative to contacting our support at http://quickbase.intuit.com/support/. You should still contact our support team if you have any urgent or business-critical inquiries.

1. Question: I have a custom form, created with the QuickBase custom form wizard, which anyone can use to add a new record to my table in my QuickBase application.

   Ideally, though, I would like users to be able to edit existing records with the form. Unfortunately, I have only found commands that point the form to edit existing records. Is there anyway this form can edit the form if some of the fields match? E.g. The name field in the existing record is ‘Joey’. When the user enters ‘Joey’ into the form, it would automatically point the edited record to edit the entire record that includes ‘Joey’ in the name field.

Answer: In order to do this, you would need to invoke either javascript or process the form via a backend script (like PHP) to handle the logic of whether or not to do an add_record or an edit_record.

I’d recommend you host the form yourself on your company’s website (if you aren’t already) and use the api for processing the form. Doing this gives you more flexibility in what you can do with the data that is submitted and what records are affected.

so i was doing some seo today and i noticed that in google webmaster tools, the “backlink” report was reporting thousands more links than what google was reporting in a link: search.

so, i went and i posted a question in the webmaster tools forum here. ultimately, the answer i was given was that yes – there are two different reports and neither are accurate.

it turns out that link: is a “random sampling” of the number of backlinks you have while webmaster tools shows all backlinks, including links with rel=”nofollow”. my response was that i think this is pure silliness on google’s part. it makes it very difficult for people to gauge how well their organic efforts are paying off.

my exact response:

“Well, this is just silly. There are two reports, neither are accurate. Without being able to at least extract out which links are valid (meet PageRank and do not have rel=”nofollow”), there’s no real way to gauge how many backlinks we have and/or how our competitors are performing and/or how well our organic seo efforts are paying off. Seems odd to me that the response from Google (in the FAQ) would be: “This is normal and you don’t need to worry about it.”

matt cutts gives his explanation of what is going on here:

so there you have it. link: is not the best tool for determining how many and/or what quality backlinks you or your competitors have.