Author Archives: lkeyes70

Fairpoint/Verizon: Change Number of Rings before VoiceMail

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This took an hour to figure out…and three lengthy calls, two of which were cut off.

This applies if you have the newly switched-over Fairpoint residential service, which, as of April 1 was taken over from Verizon. (Maine/NH/VT) Rather than going through the multi-level call director a (800) 870-9999, they’ll forward you to what they say is the business office at 1 (866) 984-2001. It is this latter number where you can ask them to change the number of rings before your residential line goes into voice mail.

Why can’t this be a “personal option” directly within the phonemail system is a mystery.

Seems silly to post this in a blog, but there was nothing online about this, that I could fine in the Verizon or FairPoint web sites.

The automated call directors represent a whole new level of obnoxiousness. It is as if they are trying to drive their customers insane.

Chron this week and NPQ

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The Non-Profit Quarterly has been out for several weeks. Although most on-line articles are for subscribers only, they publish a summary sheet of the issue’s articles.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s May 1 issue has been published. Haven’t gotten very far, but there was an interesting review of Oprah Winfrey’s Big Give program, which sounds like a version of Survivor:Philanthropist. Hey, whatever works, right?

American Telemedicine Association Annual Meeting

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I attended the ATA annual meeting in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. This is a roughly two-day affair with pre and post sessions available for those who wish to take full or half-day seminars. The ATA is one of the largest associations for implementers and practitioners of telemedicine in the U.S. There was a good-sized trade show with impressive exhibits by well-known companies like Intel, Polycom and Tandberg as well as dozens of smaller companies. A portion of the show floor was given over to about eight enormous mobile clinics, large buses or recreational vehicles transformed into mobile hospital or clinic facilities.
The meeting was divided into several different tracks. These included:

  • Emergency and Remote Telemedicine
  • Patient sensors and home telemonitoring
  • Videoconferencing
  • Business models, management and finance.

This was my first ATA meeting, and the first time I had been in Seattle.
The format for most presentations was a fifteen minute lecture followed by a few questions. Presentations fell in to the tracks as described above. I was interested in particular in hardware, including video and sensors. While there were a couple of presentations that described work similar to ours, nobody described a program delivered over multi-point videoconferencing. Some random notes:

  • Every person in the United Kingdom is registered with a family doctor
  • Virtually all primary care in the UK is computerized
  • When an entity (like the National Health Service in Britain, or Kaiser Permanente in California) is both the payer and the health-care provider barriers to automation and improved productivity via electronic medical records and telemedicine are reduced. Much of the lag in the U.S. of implementing the electronic medical record is due to the lack of clarity over who benefits, and who pays for its implementation. When these are not the same entity, there is conflict.
  • The Continua Health Alliance is an industry group implementing interface standards for sensor data transmission using exisiting hardware; Bluetooth, USB and Zigbee.
  • Sensors are a big deal. There was a great deal of discussion of patient self-administered readings which are sent via a wireless connection to a hub connected to a telephone.
  • Some patients may have a different perception of “good health”, than might otherwise be expected. Some patients described themselves to be in good health, although they are on oxygen, confined to a scooter or wheel chair, and have had a third heart bypass operation.
  • In focus group studies patients said they liked being able to take readings at home. It allowed for more privacy, and allowed the patient to be involved in their own care.
  • Things that people didn’t like about home health-care equipment; having to move it around, “smells like a hospital”, disruptive of routine.
  • The “smart home” for assisted living could involve sensors and motion detectors . Think of smoke detectors, which are an example of a sensor.
  • All medical students have PDAs. When they get out of medical school they are going to be expecting digital connections. They don’t expect to see patients for 12 hours a day. There may be a whole new group of physicians in areas like correctional telemedicine.
  • We don’t have “real-time” now. I have to walk across the street to get my meds, down the hall to get blood drawn. Patients wearing sensors are already much faster (whether tele or not).
  • The American crisis in health care is THE opportunity for Telemedicine.
  • Find a forward-thinking governor in a small state that would be willing to grasp the opportunity with long-term care and telehealth, Opportunities under medicaid “308”? Pennsyvania “ERA” program. Remote monitoring and chronic disease management Several very large self-insured employers are taking this on.

My Dimming Vista

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With all the controversy on Microsoft Vista, here is my contribution to the pile.

Four weeks ago I was going to write a post entitled something like Despite Almost Universal Opprobrium, Windows Vista Works Just Fine for Me or something similar. Sure, I had spent a lot of time futzing with the betas almost two years ago. By the time I installed the first RTM version in November of 2006 with bad results I decided to give up for awhile. But recent first experience of a production copy seemed to belie all of bad press and complaints that I heard from the pundocracy. Examples:

1. Friend buys inexpensive Acer laptop. Comes with Vista Home. Works flawlessly with everything we could throw at it.
2. I installed a copy of Vista Business on my MacBook in a virtual machine provided by Parallels. Works fine, so far. Even with only 512K allotted for the virtual machine.
3. Additional Windows Vista Business licenses installed on our Mini-ITX boxes seemed to work pretty well. There were occasional crashes, but no detectable or replicable pattern.

Then we installed Enterprise on our boxes through a site license and all hell broke loose. What I can’t figure out is how much of a difference there is between Enterprise and Business and Home, other than things that are left out. Perhaps it is the footprint? (We’re running only in 1 meg of RAM).

So after spending, no kidding, over a hundred hours on this, we’ve decided to go back to XP. And there everything is solid as a rock again.

We have said it before, and we’ll say it again. In a production situation, i.e. your network, use the available time to upgrade everyone to Windows XP service pack 2. Microsoft may not make XP available forever, although it keeps pushing out the end-of-life phase for XP as Vista fails to gain traction.

More specifically, our main problem is a driver crash or incompatibility between our application, and a hardware driver on both Vista Business and Vista Enterprise.

However, I may get shot for saying this, but I prefer the Vista look and feel (even without Aero Glass over the Macintosh OSX’s “east-European-behind-the-iron-curtain” look. And Vista is a vast improvement over the XP cartoon look.

Ten Ways – Redux, the final 3

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Following up on Ten Ways to Improve the Federal Grantwriting Experience post, here are three more suggestions to provide an even ten ideas:

  • Mind The Indirect
    Grant budgets include direct expenses; money that is spent on items and services directly related to fulfilling the grant objectives, and indirect expenses; money that is spent as the cost of doing business, such as office expenses, heat, utilities, etc. Grantor agencies may or may not allow you to charge indirect expenses to the grant…but you do have to be able to account for those expenses. Enlightened grant-givers will allow you to charge a portion of your indirect to the grant and they will acknowledge these expenses. They will be suspicious if you don’t account for the indirect expenses.

    Indirect can be called different things. For example, the National Institutes of Health call it ‘F&A’ or “Facilities and Administration”. Depending on the nature of the institution, the percentage rate can be quite high. For example, the current rate for our university is around 56%. This means, of course that if I want to receive a hundred dollars worth of services from the uni, it will cost me $156.00. Ouch.

    My own history with indirect has been less than stellar. Attempting to follow the example calculations, I came up with a 33% rate, which I thought was fairly reasonable. Turns out NIH has a default rate of 25% if you don’t start negotiating a different rate. If you say you’re going to negotiate a higher rate, then they’ll only give you a provisional rate of 10%. After spending some days on this, including hiring and firing a CPA/consultant who was supposed to figure it all out, (and almost losing my own CPA and bookkeeper in the process), I gave up temporarily and have been living with the 10% rate.

  • Plan For Financial Management
    Related to the indirect issue, I was amazed and surprised at the amount of time required to just manage a federal grant. Let me count the ways:
    1. Obtain a DUNS number
    2. Register for the Central Contracting Registry
    3. Obtain a Federal Wide Assurance (FWA) number for my company.
    4. Register with the Institutional Review Board at the university
    5. Create a plan for the Institutional Review Board (which manages human subjects data and protection…in our case because we’re doing research with human subjects).
    6. Repeat the above three items on a yearly basis
    7. Manage three separate online government web applications for reporting and submitting, as well as an application for transferring money to my company bank account
    8. Maintain separate bank accounts for each grant
    9. Manage the grant as a separate class or company within QuickBooks.
    10. Develop the consortium agreement with the university (including budget, and scope of work)
    11. Pay consortium, and about eight separate contractors or organizations on a bi-weekly basis

    I could go on. But the point is, in addition to direct work, there is a 20-25% level of effort that can reasonably be charged for administration.

  • Realize that the first grant will change your life and organization.
    This is the “be careful what you wish for” idea. For all the effort required to write the application and get all the pieces in place, the real work starts in month 1 of your first budget year.

There are moments of exhilaration. After weeks of trials and tests, we’ve gotten our research project into production beginning this week.

Earned Income Strategies from the Grantsmanship Center

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EMail from The Grantsmanship Center, below reproduced in its entirety. The seminar is in Schenectady NY.

Would you like to generate unrestricted funds,while strengthening your nonprofit organization’s core mission and developing more credibility with funders?

Come find out how! Sign up now for The Grantsmanship Center’s Earned Income Strategies workshop, offered in Schenectady, NY, May 5-7, 2008, and hosted by The Hamilton Hill Arts Center.

New streams of unrestricted funding mean greater stability. Earned income programs can be a key to long-term survival.

Besides increasing revenues, well-planned earned income programs can benefit your nonprofit organization by:

  • Building on your existing capabilities, resources, and relationships to increase your organizational capacity
  • Demonstrating your organization’s sustainability – which is often a key element in winning grants and major gifts!
  • Enhancing your organization’s mission impact – through income-generating programs that further your core purpose and key values

Limited to only 30 participants, The Grantsmanship Center’s Earned Income Strategies workshop combines structured analysis, focused discussions, and small-group work. You will leave this workshop knowing:

  • What it would take for your organization to develop a viable earned income program one that can actually strengthen your core mission
  • What financing options are available to nonprofits like yours
  • How to capitalize on your organization’s existing capabilities…and much more!

Tuition for this comprehensive 3-day training is $575.
To make sure that every participant receives individual attention, enrollment is limited to 30 participants, so register early to reserve your spot.
To register for this workshop: http://www.tgci.com/eisregister.asp
For more information, visit http://tgci.com/eis.shtml
or call The Grantsmanship Center’s Registrar at (800) 421-9512.

Time Management for College Students (and everyone else)

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Cal Newport is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT. He has a terrific blog, Study Hacks with suggestions particularly tailored to college students, but which are all highly useful for the rest of us. If you are sick-to-death of hearing about Getting Things Done, you should subscribe for a week or two. Refreshing.

Ten Ways to Improve a Federal Grant Writing Experience

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Following up on a post a couple weeks ago about applying for U.S. government grants, I had the pleasure of putting together an NSF ITEST grant application with about a dozen colleagues. Briefly, ITEST is:

The Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST)* program was established by the National Science Foundation in direct response to the concern about shortages of information technology workers in the United States. The ITEST program funds projects that provide opportunities for both school-age children and teachers to build the skills and knowledge needed to advance their study and to function and contribute in a technologically rich society. The ITEST program also funds a National Learning Resource Center to support, synthesize and disseminate the learning from the program to a wider audience.

This is a fairly ambitious project, about US$1.5 million over three years. We assembled a collaborative group consisting of a senior professor at a local college, a couple of non-profit executive directors, a local economic development guru from our mayor’s office and a local school board president. All of these folks will get a piece of this grant. We used BaseCamp as our project manager.

Our applicant organization of record was the Vermont Software Developer’s Alliance. This is the organization which, if we receive an award, will administer the grant. This is no small responsibility, and we included a full-time program manager/curriculum developer as a staff person for vtSDA within the grant application.

Grant writing is “on spec” or speculative. You don’t get paid upfront for writing grants. This makes the whole proposition quite a gamble, and the investment in time and aggravation can be significant. I recall being somewhat taken aback when a fellow applicant told me that, for his SBIR Phase II grant application, he had two staff people working on it for three months. This was significantly more time than we put into the ITEST application, and my guess is that it will show. The process wasn’t entirely smooth, and here are ten things I wish we had done better.

  1. Start Early. I wish we had started earlier for a project of this magnitude. Six months is not unreasonble, 12 months would have been even better. The reason for this is that to successfully compete for grants of this magnitude, you need a program. If the program doesn’t exist, (and why should it, that is why you are looking for grant money), you have to essentially imagine the program in sufficient detail to be able to coherently describe it. Grantwriting is essentially a sales job, and you have to have a value proposition and/or a product to be able to sell.
  2. Exploit the strengths of your the software. BaseCamp has strengths and weaknesses. A notable weakness is the word processor; it is fine for light work but not helpful for the kind of formatting with tables, illustrations, references and footnotes that a proposal requires. On the other hand, BaseCamp has a useful task list, which allows you to list parts or chunks of the proposal as tasks, and attach a “person responsible” and deadline for the task. This is quite motivating.
  3. Have a designated boss. One of our issues was the application couldn’t have come at a much worse time; all of us were deeply into other projects, and of course it is tax season. So no one stepped up to be the boss, we worked more or less as a weaker collective. The boss really needs to have some time to invest, (100 hours or more?) if he or she is going to truly have the whole project scope on their radar. This makes it tough for volunteers. For those who prefer a less hierarchical title, maybe “shepherd” would be a better designation than “boss”.
  4. For BaseCamp users, exploit the BaseCamp “revision system”. This allows you to upload revisions of previously existing files on top of the older files, and which preserves the older version file. You can add notes to each revision, so you can see at a glance what changes were made by each update. We didn’t entirely master this concept, and ended up with several dozen separate files scattered over a three page listing of files, when things could have been more compact. Sharepoint might work better for this, as it allows you to “lock” or check out a file, just like a real revision system.
  5. Integrate the moving parts. Going back to the idea of the shepherd, somebody needs to take the individual components of the proposal and integrate them together so that they all fit. This includes the budget and budget narrative; if you describe a position in the program narrative, you need to make sure that the same title is used in the budget line item. In our case, we actually had no less than five sub-projects or sub-programs, all which integrate beautifully and complement each other. I hope were able to effectively illustrate how well they fit together and how each sub-program contributes to the overall project.
  6. Stay on top of the grant guidelines and the website quirks. Turns out that the NSF FastLane site becomes the “choked commuter artery” several hours before the application deadline, even if the deadline is 5PM local time. If you are still trying to upload PDF files at 3 on the east coast, those lucky folks on the west coast are at it too, and it bogs down the server until nothing works. You don’t get much sympathy from the NSF at this point either, their advice is simply to start early and make sure you’ve everything uploaded before 2PM local time on the east coast.(Irrelevant aside: Is this a problem because java server pages don’t scale?)
  7. Use Instant Messaging. I’m in Vermont in my home office. John is 30 miles away in his office. Peter is in Florida taking a day off from his vacation. Everyone has two or more phone numbers which may or may not work. We’re all working on this for two days before the deadline. Instant messaging to the rescue! We can say who “has” a particular file, or briefly find out what the status is of something or ask a quick question.

I’ll add the other three suggestions next time.

Books Books Books

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Trying to get some of this stuff off my desk, chest, mind, whatever… A spate of new books:

The Big Book Windows Hacks by Preston Gralla
This is a compilation of tricks for Windows users. Although addressed primarily to people struggling, er, working with Vista, many of the hacks work with XP. The book contains a lot of more generic information as well, regarding wireless networking, Microsoft Office, and PC hardware.

Windows Registry Guide, Second Edition This second edition does not include Vista, but is primarily oriented toward XP and Windows 2003 Server. It includes a couple chapters of basic registry description…how the registry is organized, how to back it up, and then goes into some detail about how to change registry entries on your own. Lots of practical advice here. For example:

  • Customizing Folders
  • Renaming Desktop Icons
  • Adding Desktop Icons
  • Reorganizing the Control Panel
  • Adding File Templates
  • Preventing Messenger from Running
  • Customizing Internet Explorer
  • Logging on Automatically.

Some of this we’ve covered ourselves, (indeed using using the same sources). And some of these things are covered by utility programs such as TweakUI and other PowerToys..

The Practice of System and Network Administration – Second Edition
This very fine book of systems administration is broad enough to provide help for everyone from entry-level to senior management. It includes a balance of nuts and bolts tactical information with high level planning and strategic ideas which is a rare thing in a single volume. Backups, disaster planning, and staffing are discussed alongside open source vs. closed source, supporting mixed environments, maintaining your asset inventory, and maintaining your sanity. This is the one book I’d take on a desert island, assuming there was a network to maintain there.

And a trio of hardware books by Jan Axelson…

These editions are by Nuts & Volts and Circuit Cellar author and tech columnist Jan Axelson. If you want to know anything about interfacing computer hardware, she is the go-to author.

USB Complete – third edition
The Universal Serial Bus (USB) has evolved to replace “legacy” connectors on many computers, including serial RS232, keyboard, mouse, and printer ports. In addition, almost anyone who wants to connect to a PC these days will provide a USB interface. This book explains how to develop and debug such interfaces and describes the hardware and software necessary to make them work.

USB Mass Storage
This sub-class of USB devices encompasses things like interfacing a digital camera to a PC via the USB interface, where the mass storage is actually contained on a chip in the camera, or a removable card. Although generic mass storage units (USB thumb drives) are ubiquitous these days, there are a variety of emerging applications for this kind hardware.

Embedded Ethernet and Internet Complete
This is the classic “internet web server on a chip”, where you have a device or sensor located remotely that you want to access over the web, or as the subtitle describes:

Create tiny Web servers and use TCP/IP to communicate over local networks & the Internet

The book as a thorough and readable discussion of the internal parts of TCP/IP. She even talks about crimping cable connectors. But then the book continues on to work through example applications using two popular modules: The Rabbit RCM2300 and the Dallas DSTINIm400. Want to interface your toaster to the web? This book will show you how.