hubert's home

Health Care

2009-06-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

I'm a liberal, but in my old age I'm a bit more conservative and I'm swayed by using proper economic incentives to achieve societal goals. I am generally a fan of using free markets and pricing to guide people because it's the simplest, most predictable method of encouraging change. But health care is a massive, complex problem which clearly is not working and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it without massive government intervention. I start with the premise that we want at least basic health care with universal coverage. A couple of things I've heard recently make me think that free markets are not the way to go. The various components of the health care industry have perverse a set of incentives that are sort of contradictory to overall public health.

First, doctors are paid by the procedures they do and not the overall quality of life that they provide to the public they serve.

Second, health insurance agencies can achieve financial success by avoiding paying out claims. Insurance companies spend a large amount of effort to avoid covering expensive patients and procedures.

Third, consumers have no way of ever understanding, valuing or navigating through the health care system without professional help.

I think we need a publicly funded health care option. It's critical for someone you trust to step in between the consumer and health care provider to give you the best value for care, set cost limits, and negotiate with providers. Government may not be the most efficient way of doing this, but at least you don't have to second guess the intentions of the government like you do with an insurance company.

New car stereo

2009-06-03T02:45:00.000-07:00

This weekend we went strawberry picking and I also got a new car stereo for my Prius. Mainly I was looking for better iPhone integration. My 2005 Prius had pretty limited options for that. Mostly I wanted something that would charge my iPhone and play music, other features would be nice to have, but not a requirement. Another factor is that the navigation on my Prius sucks badly, it has a number of annoying traits, bad UI, and bad directions. A friend recommended All Pro Audio in Santa Clara, and the owner Jim Lee is a nice, knowledgeable guy. He recommended two options. If I was just looking for iPhone integration, the Parrot MKi9200 which had all the basics, bluetooth phone, ipod music, small display mounted separately wherever I wanted. If I wanted to add in a navigation system, then he had the Pioneer AVIC-7010 which was a full replacement for the existing car stereo and navigation system but would leave some of the features on the existing display(climate control, trip computer, engine/battery monitors).

I opted for the Pioneer and got it installed overnight. I'm pretty happy with the system so far, but it has a few issues. I have to go back for a second install because they didn't have the parts do the dashboard finishing and they disconnected the old display features like the climate control system. The unit itself is pretty good, but a couple of the controls I had to look at the manual for. The nav system is pretty good. The ipod controls are good. The Bluetooth phone seems fine but I've only used it minimally and I don't really expect to use it much. Among the less expected features, a USB jack, an auxiliary RCA jack, a mini SD card jack, voice recognition for playing albums, software upgradeability, HD Radio ready. It cost about $1k installed(the Parrot would've cost about half that), but I now have the audio flexibility I wanted.

Back from vacation

2009-05-27T00:10:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged that much lately because I'm using twitter a bit more. It's bad because twitter's short messages discourage well thought out writing. I'll try to do a bit better.

We're back from our 1 week vacation in Cabo San Lucas. Lucas liked to call it Cabo San Me. We met Tracy's family there and we spent a lot of time in the sun at the pool and on the beach. The great thing about Cabo is the location, it's less than a 5 hour flight from almost everywhere in the US. While at the airport coming in, we were roped into getting a timeshare presentation in exchange for a bunch of discounts on activities.

The timeshare presentation was actually mildly interesting. I'd never had one before, so it was an experience to learn how they sell it. They had deals from about $15-30k for a 1-2 bedroom unit for a week. Doing a full purchase of the 2br unit would cost over $2 million. The timeshare program was more flexible than I'd realized. You can use it at any of several different properties, you can bank your weeks or take an advance on them. There's also a full 3rd party timeshare exchange program in case you don't feel like using those properties. Not that I was really interested. I guess it's my parents influence that I'd prefer real ownership, though not at that price. Two of the ridiculous things they did in the presentation were to project out the cost of your future vacations with an inflation rate of 6-9% and to charge 15% interest if you financed the purchase.

We took a bunch of pictures and they are at http://tierneychen.shutterfly.com/. We stayed at the Puerto Bonito Blanco and it was pretty nice. Not the nicest hotel around, but all the rooms had ocean views and it was conveniently located. We ate a bunch of local restaurants, Casanova, Alexanders, Mi Casa, Sweet Bistro, Peacocks, Arts and Sushi. Mi Casa had really good carnitas, I had a good sea bass at both Casanova and Peacocks. The prices were a bit more than I expected, probably about comparable to what you'd pay in the US. One thing about the restaurants in Cabo is the different speed of service. They were all extremely slow compared to typical American restaurants. I think every meal out lasted more than an hour and a half.

The whole area was the emptiest I've ever seen a tourist town. Several nights there were only 1-2 other parties at the restaurants. It's a combination of the swine flu aftermath, the economy, and the slow season, but I couldn't see how any place we went was making money. One of the restaurant owners talked to us a bit and he said that the Mexican government was offering businesses super low interest rate loans so that they could keep people employed for a bit while they suffered through the downturn. Things did seem to be picking up when we were leaving.

We went on a glass bottom boat tour and I played a very bad round of golf at the Cabo San Lucas Country Club(I shot around 120 I'm pretty sure). Lauren didn't sleep very well and that prevented us from sleeping really well. At the airport on the way home, she had an epic vomit. She must have projectile vomitted 12-16 ounces of curdled milk. It was pretty nasty. Thankfully it didn't happen in the airplane, so Tracy was able to get something different to wear that didn't smell.

Good fun all in all. I highly recommend it. I hear they are having great deals on hotel and air. And the location was convenient for everyone that went.

Gaming the golf action

2009-04-09T23:04:00.000-07:00

We were down in Big Sur for the weekend for a bachelor party. The highlight of the weekend was a round of golf at the Pacific Grove Municipal course. I've only played a full round maybe 6 times in my life and this is the only course I've played twice. It's a beautiful course with holes near the ocean with spectacular views. Because we're all pretty bad, when we'd played before it took forever and was exhausting. To make things suck less, the 5 of us decided to play best ball, with the me and Kojo playing against the trio. We learned later that what we called Best Ball is actually Scramble, and Best Ball really means Best Hole. We all knew what we wanted, so it wasn't a problem. The main bet was a simple stroke count which we agreed was fair because Kojo was the best player. I also ran side bets with two of the players in the trio about the percentage of balls that they would play. I would have to make 40% of the shots in my round and the two best players in the trio needed to make 40% and 35% of the shots respectively.

My round was the best I've ever played, we shot an 87 with me taking 40 and Kojo 47. On the first hole I hit a tee shot within 8 feet of the hole and then sank the putt. That was the only birdie I've ever made in my life. I only had a complete whiff once, and I only shanked 1 or 2 other tee shots. All my other drives were clean and my putting was very good as well. My short game is pretty bad though, I can't hit a sand wedge at all. There was one hole where I hit it onto a different fairway and Kojo hit it onto the correct fairway, but my shot was actually closer to the pin, but Kojo insisted on using his ball. The tee off #12 will forever be known as "the shot that Kojo stole".

We lost the main bet due to a minor meltdown double bogie on 18th where the other team parred. We pushed on the side bets because every person made their required stroker percentage I needed 40% and made 45%, the other two made their requirements by less than 2%. This is either a clear sign of cheating or brilliant odds making by me. You choose.

All in all, Scramble is a super fun format. It's much better for us beginners because it prevents the meltdown +4 holes that are so frustrating. I hope to someday play as well as I did.

Not much new going on

2009-03-29T09:08:00.001-07:00

Sorry, been slow updating here. Been busy taking care of kids and life and such. Tracy has been running a lot, and I'm really proud of her. She's lost a lot of weight and she's running a lot faster than I am now. Lauren is almost a year and and doing great, she's crawling well, but can't stand up on her own yet. Lucas is quite a talkative little 3 year old.

We went out to Phoenix a couple of weeks ago to visit Tracy's brother and dad. That was good, it's nice out there. It wouldn't be a bad place to retire, but the summer heat can be tough.

We also spent a weekend up at Yosemite. There was some drama because we were totally unprepared for snow and it dropped more than a foot on us overnight. We got stuck for a bit, but it wasn't too bad once the sun came up and melted some of it away.

More pictures at: http://tierneychen.shutterfly.com/

Work is fine, working on some interesting projects that I can't really talk about. Tracy's work is fine. The economy is making life interesting, there's lots of opportunities for making money I think. I wish there was a way I could invest in the toxic asset purchase plan or PPIP as it's called.

SSDs of the future

2009-01-24T06:54:00.001-08:00

I admit I get overly excited about new solid state drive technology. But I think this OCZ Vertex 2 is the future of high speed storage for gamers. Getting 550 MB/s reads and 480MB/s writes is quite a feat. It's essentially 4 SSDs in a RAID 0 with an onboard raid controller. SSDs are great candidates for RAID because they get a nearly linear speed increase when you add them to a RAID 0. A regular spinning disk RAID will only be able to approach the average seek time of the drives for random access.

What's interesting to me about the article is that they have to show their performance as a simulation. The reason is that the SSD RAID outruns the SATA 2 interface that all current motherboards use. To get the performance they show in their simulation, you'll have to have to buy a new SATA 3 motherboard which can run at the required 600MB/s. Probably the better alternative is for them to to just build their drive onto a PCI-e card and bypass the limitations of all the SATA interfaces.

New Bailout

2009-01-13T17:06:00.000-08:00

This article brought up some interesting ideas to me in how we bailout consumers from the ongoing financial crisis.

When I think about it, having the government continually lower borrowing costs to push mortgage rates down and having Fannie and Freddie continue to buy up mortgages at these low rates seems like one of the best solutions to the overall problems. Surely it is better than bailing out the Big 3 automakers. By encouraging affordable refinancing, it will help spur home buying and refinancing. It rewards people who are continuing to pay their mortgages because it lets them refinance. It helps people who may be facing a large ARM reset. Those two things will help keep people in their homes without rewarding people who over-leveraged themselves during the housing bubble. And fewer foreclosures will slow the down spiral of home values. Maybe it even keeps a few more real estate people employed. Refinancing also helps resolve problems where mortgages are tied up in sliced and diced into derivatives and can't be modified.

Lenders have already learned their lesson and are much more selective about making loans, and the collateralized debt market has already imploded and won't recover for quite a while. So the largest systemic dangers have already been scared away.

If the government is actively pushing down mortgage rates at least it seems like the right way to go about re-inflating the markets. Plus, I want to save some money.

Eve Online

2009-01-05T00:49:00.001-08:00

I've been playing Eve online for a month and I am impressed. I've signed up for a few more months. It is the most complex game I've ever played. I haven't played much WoW, so it's possible that in total WoW is more complex. But I'm sure that from the perspective of any one individual character, Eve is more complex. Wow skill trees are confined to specific classes, while Eve doesn't have that restriction, though it does make certain things easier for certain classes and races.

I have just been flying around and blowing things up. I haven't done much of the mining, manufacturing, corporation management types of things. The economy is supposedly one of the most interesting in an MMO, and I look forward to investigating it some more.

Christmas fun

2008-12-28T11:26:00.001-08:00

The Tracy's family all came over for the past few days to celebrate Christmas. Nothing too exciting really. We opened some presents and mostly just hung around the house. Tracy got me a running jacket, even though I said I didn't need anything. Lucas got a small basketball hoop which he and his uncle Ed had fun with. Tracy got some clothes. Overall, not too exciting it was nice for the kids to get to spend time with the family.

Mocha, big cat

2008-12-15T22:24:00.000-08:00

Last week our dear cat Mocha died. She'd been sick for a few weeks, not eating well, avoiding us and generally not being her happy self. We may not have taken her to the vet soon enough, and I feel a bit guilty about it. They diagnosed it as probably cancer and probably incurable, but I don't know if there would have been more options if we had noticed it earlier. She was big and brown and furry and we miss her.

Eve and Left 4 Dead

2008-12-08T22:47:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I bought Left 4 Dead. It's pretty good, but I guess it's not my kind of game. For one thing I'm not really good at it, so that makes it less fun. Also the zombies are our friends, so I feel bad about killing them. It is a really well conceived game though and the graphics are very good, so I applaud it for what it is, it's just not my style.

I started playing a bit of Eve Online. It's possibly one of the deepest games I've ever seen. There's many different play styles, a vast number of skills and options, and active developers and community members making constant improvements. It's not for the faint of heart though. I don't know if I will stick with it, because of the amount of time that it could require.

Political Winners and Losers

2008-11-05T00:44:00.001-08:00

To me the biggest loser of the election is the divisive politics which were brought to America by Karl Rove through Bush. Obama's win shows that a 50 state ground game is successful long term strategy that doesn't get derailed by appealing to only a certain base of voters. It was a strong statement by voters that they want to be united in hope, and not picked apart into constituencies.

The Republican party needs to seriously regroup and figure out how they are going to appeal to a bigger percentage of today's voters. I feel sorry for McCain because he followed a campaign path similar to what was successful for Bush and in doing so really dampened his appeal to independents. I don't blame him for believing it would work because it had worked so well for Bush. But there were just too many factors leading voters to demand change.

Political divides

2008-10-25T09:40:00.001-07:00

I know a few Republicans, but not that many. I get exasperated when I talk with them about politics honestly. When I think about the easiest way to describe differences between Democrats and Republicans I do it this way: Democrats believe that by working together we can make the world a better place. Republicans know that everyone will look out for himself.

Unfortunately, these days that statement is probably better a description of libertarians than Republicans. The Republicans have something of an identity crisis since the rise of Rovian politics of divisiveness and partisanship(maybe it started with Monica Lewinsky). The Bush administration has really brought the Republicans to a new low.

I think voting on the expected effect of macroeconomics policies is pretty difficult because no one can predict the economy and how it will really perform, it's far too complex for any analysis. There are too many variables and too many externalities, and even economists frequently disagree.

Voting on the effect of microeconomic policies is fine though. I won't fault someone for voting on McCain because they think McCain will lower their personal tax rate. I won't necessarily vote that way, but I am sympathetic to those who do, particularly struggling low income workers.

For me, the issue is about how the parties treat people. In general Republicans are cynical about the intentions of others. Republicans support a strong defense because they don't trust other countries, they believe in always having a military threat to enforce stronger bargaining positions. Bush is one of the most extreme of the group. Bush advisors personally drove in the war on terror, the unilateral decision to invade Iraq, the detention of enemy combatants at Guantanmo, torture, and unauthorized wiretapping.

I am an optimist and I like to believe that working together we bring out the best in people, but it's tempered by the realization that everyone has to look out for their own interests before they can work for the good of the people.

Go Obama.

Aruba Recap

2008-10-05T17:45:00.001-07:00

I didn't last much into Day 2. There was a missed opportunity or two, but nothing that I felt like I hugely misplayed. I did wait a bit too long and let myself get blinded away to almost nothing. One reason for this is that there were two big stacks right behind me and one of them was playing super loose, so I didn't feel like I could steal that easily without a big hand. I didn't get any big hands the second day, and I was already short stacked.

The tournament was very well run. The tournament dealers were excellent, some of the best I've seen. Everything went off in a timely manner, no big changes or surprises.

Even though I didn't make the money I did make some decent money in regular cash games. They have a couple of weird structures/features to their games. The casino is dealt by locals but the tournament is dealt by special tournament dealers that are flown in as part of the UB crew. So the local dealers aren't quite as good, but they are fine. The only games they had are Hold'em(both limit and no-limit) and pot limit omaha. They unfortunately didn't have any of my specialty omaha hi/lo.

The pot limit omaha game had this awesome structure for smart players. I played a 5-5 game, and the way the rake works is that once every 1/2 hour before a hand, they throw a little "Time Pot" indicator into the pot. When it's a Time Pot, if the pot reaches a certain size($210 at the 5/5 game I was playing), they take out $70 from the pot before it goes to the winner. If it doesn't reach that size, the next pot is a time pot. So if you're paying any attention at all, you just play super careful when it's a Time Pot. I probably played 5 hours of the game without paying any rake.

The other odd thing about the Aruba cash games is their Mississippi Straddle rule. Any player can straddle for at least 2x the big blind. When they do, the preflop action starts immediately the straddler's left(yes even if it's any blind), and then it proceeds around to the left ending with the straddler. I've played in lots of games with kill pots like this, but when the someone kills action would always start to the left of the big blind and then go around skipping the straddler and it would come back to his action after the big blind. This Mississippi Straddle means it's even better to straddle than a regular game, so in both the 5-5 pot limit omaha game I was playing and in the 2-5 no limit hold'em game I played, straddling for 10 on the button was very common. This made the games play much bigger than normal. I saw a $3k pot at 2-5 nlhe.

All in all, it turned out very well. I'm happy with how everything went. I hope to win another seat next year.

In to day 2

2008-09-30T21:15:00.000-07:00

I'm into day 2 of the poker tournament, but I expect it to be a short day. I'm a very short stack with 6800 chips when the average is 27k. I'll post more of a recap later, but I didn't have many cards or steal opportunities.

Live from Aruba

2008-09-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

We're in Aruba this week because I won a seat at the Aruba Classic. We flew in yesterday on a trip that took more than 12 hours. So far, it has been excellent. The kids were really well behaved on the trip.

Aruba is a nice touristy town. Hot and humid of course. The beaches are clean and not too crowded. Prices are high, but English and USD are pretty much everywhere. There's a lot of American restaurant chains, McDonalds, Wendy's, TGIF, Tony Roma's, Sbarros, Hooters. We ate at one of the the hotel's restaurants having a decent prime rib buffet dinner.

Ultimate Bet and the Radisson have really gone all out. UB has a pretty big staff on hand and they reserved the whole hotel. The UB branding is everywhere. We got a nice bag of schwag which includes a decent bag, 2 shirts, a deck of UB cards, a silkscreened wrap. In addition to that bag, I got a second pretty nice shoulder bag because I'm a VIP online.

The tournament starts on Monday at noon(local time is EST), but I don't play until noon on Tuesday, because the whole family is here I won't be playing cards much until Tuesday. I'll try to get an hour or two of poker in after they go to sleep. I played a bit last night. At the end of the night I overheard them at the 5/10 plo table next to me explaining to a player that he had to play exactly two cards. Obviously I was in the wrong game. Results for last night: 2 hours at 2/5 cash nlhe +$50.

I'll try to twitter results too when the tournament starts.

Yes He Can

2008-09-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

There's a change coming, a change we can believe in. Lucas went pee in the toilet for the first time at home yesterday.

Parental Political Poker

2008-09-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

I made a deal with my parents. I promised not to give Barack Obama any more money if they didn't give John McCain any more money. Unfortunately, I think I got the worse end of the deal because they weren't going to give him that much, while I might be willing to give the limit to Barack. My dad mentioned that we could do mutual abstaining, but that doesn't really matter because both our states are solidly decided already. Maybe I can have Tracy give to Barack instead.

Judith Tierney

2008-08-28T04:39:00.000-07:00

On Saturday Tracy's mother passed away. She had been fighting cancer for about a year and in the past couple of month she had gotten very weak. She was always kind to everyone and never said a bad word about anyone. She was an elementary school teacher for over twenty years in Three Rivers, Michigan. I'll remember her as someone who was always warm and welcoming to me, someone who cared deeply for her family, and someone who was loved by everyone.

Tracy and Lauren will be going home this weekend for the service next Wednesday. I'll be staying home to take care of Lucas.

The Future of Programming Languages

2008-08-22T03:26:00.000-07:00

A co-worker and I got into a discussion about the new features of C++0x and I got to thinking about where we are going with programming languages. I think there's only so much farther that standard procedural or object oriented languages are going to go. The next thing is going to be a new wave of distributed computing programming languages, something that will have language features to support MapReduce and a new kind of parallel programming. Maybe it'll be Sawzall. I read the paper, but I have a hard time thinking in terms of how to write code with it. Hopefully whatever comes along won't require that much of a change in how we think of programming. I never really got the whole Lisp thing. I'll re-read up on Sawzall and see if I can better understand it the second time around.

Going to Aruba

2008-08-16T23:17:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be headed to Aruba in late September. I won a poker tournament online at Ultimate Bet which will give me an entry to a $5,000+500 buyin event and $3,000 in travel money. I have been playing a lot of poker this year, so as a reward Ultimate Bet gave me a free seat to a poker tournament for this morning.

Tournament 1 was a satellite which if I placed in the top 20%, I'd get a seat into another tournament. About 1/3 of the people didn't show up for that tournament, so getting to the top %20 wasn't that hard. That won me a seat into another satellite.

Tournament 2 was another no limit hold'em satellite with a prize of 50 $8500 packages, so anyone placing in the top 50 gets to go to Aruba. I played a very good tournament, didn't get great cards, but picked my spots and all my hands held up and I did get some good cards when I needed them. It was a bit nerve racking near the end, because I was very close to the bubble. I played some of the tightest poker of my life, including folding AK to no bet, AK to one raise, QQ to a raise, reraise preflop. I'd never do some of those things if the payout structure was more like a standard tournament, but with the "all places pay the same" there's no need to try to accumulate chips beyond what you need to make the money, so you can play super conservative.

I'm excited to go. This will actually be my second time. About 5 years ago I had a similar experience, won a seat and went to aruba. I didn't get anywhere then, but it was still fun.

This year they are guaranteeing $4,000,000 in total prize pool and $1m to first place. So that means they are expecting at least 800 players at a $5,000 buyin. Wish me luck in September.

Facebook/Blog integration

2008-08-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

I'm testing Simplaris Blogcast which will automatically update my facebook mini-feed when I post to my web site. Hopefully this works.

Precautionary ER visit

2008-08-10T01:25:00.000-07:00

Last night we had a bit of an incident. I set Lauren down in her car seat on our kitchen table and then I stepped away. A couple minutes later Tracy and I were horrified to hear the crash of the car seat hitting the floor and Lauren fell out of it crying. She cried for several minutes and we were pretty scared. I decided we should take her to the ER just in case. She seemed fine, but there was no harm in taking her in anyways. As expected, they checked her out and everything was fine. It did take a while(about 4 hours total) between admitting, triage, seeing the resident, waiting for the attending and the discharge. I blame everything on my careless and my underestimating her mobility.

3 months already?

2008-07-30T23:00:00.001-07:00

Tracy's 3 months of maternity leave is almost up, so that means Lauren will be headed to day care soon. The time has passed pretty quickly and our baby girl is growing up so fast. She's already outgrowing some of her 6 month outfits because she's over 90th% for height and weight for her age. We're happy that one of Lucas' favorite teachers at day care will also get to be Lauren's teacher too.

We've now gone to outsourcing, which is ironic given the current exchange rates. Although we're not exactly offshoring. I hired someone to do our taxes and someone to clean our house. Our tax guy seems good. Very experienced and reliable. We'll see how our new house cleaner does this weekend, but the rates are very reasonable. It's funny that we haven't done these before.

I've always done my own taxes because I didn't want to explain them to someone else, but it really wasn't that bad. The data collection is the hard part and I'd have to do that either way, and the explaining took only an hour or two. The thing that I'm buying with his services is peace of mind in knowing that things are done right and I'm not losing any big money due to missed deductions, credits or putting some item in the wrong line. Stupid complicated tax code.

Twittering

2008-07-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

I started to twitter. I'm not sure if I'll keep it up, and I haven't yet decided how I'll put it on this page. But you can look at Facebook or follow my feed here: http://www.twitter.com/hubt/
The service does have a lot more downtime than it ought to, but the UI is nice and simple, and it mostly works.