For the majority of consumers, the biggest thing you can do with a tablet form factor is to drop the price.

Personally I was reminded of the dwarves digging too deep and unleashing a Balrog upon Middle Earth. Have we learned nothing from Tolkien?

I work in the healthcare industry, though admittedly just on the web side of things. There's been a lot of talk getting our current EMR to the place where we're getting the maximum amount of healthcare dollars. Our healthcare organization is at a pretty good place, far ahead of most organizations. At the same time, we're being asked to do so much with reduced staff due to minimal hiring. I'm not sure we'll really be able to manage it all. There are also a number of non-technical issues, such as getting all the doctors ready for electronic order entry. Cultural issues often drive technology decisions.

That being said, I think it's a good idea to move people towards using EMRs in healthcare. They're expensive, difficult to maintain, but can produce much improved healthcare. As we often say, the main challenge facing healthcare these days is getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Doing that electronically is the only approach that makes sense.

I've never seen the 8% number before. What's interesting to me is that viruses that have their entire lifecycle in the neurons somehow infect germ-line cells.

We're local admins of the application servers, and a couple of us have domain admin rights. We generally haven't run into problems with this, as we have a strict policy of making fun of anyone who screws up badly. It involves Photoshop and is generally a memorable way to resolve the situation.

Human beings are well adapted to most common bacteria, adjusting immune responses to a ancient equalibrium created by evolution. The problem is that we haven't had time to adapt to antibacterial soap, everything we eat carefully sanitized, and constant cleanliness.

I'm increasingly convinced that a healthy diet reflects eating habits established tens of thousands of years ago.

My preferred approach these days is what I think is technically called Evolutionary Prototyping. Basically you start with some rough requirements, make something to show people, get more refined requirements, and repeat. At some point when the product is useful, you go live, but in reality you're never done and just the time between deployments gets longer.

This approach is horrible for things that have to work perfectly the first time (e.g. rockets to Mars), but for web development seems to be a decent approach. It's also hard to estimate how long something will take, as the requirements aren't known up front. Still, it's what I've been using for years. I don't think I knew what it was called until our organization brought in a consultant to talk about this stuff.

After all, we're pretty bright and realize that everything we make or do will eventually be destroyed and lost. Still, we persist despite that reality. Careers end, marriages break up, and eventually health fails.

On second thought, maybe I should just go play video games for awhile.

Fortunately it's been many years since I last went through the breakup blues, but I ended up coming up with a list of things that seemed to help.

• Indulge. I typically start by throwing my normal rules out the window and use short-term strategies to make myself happier. Buy something. Eat cheesecake. Don't get in the habit of doing so, but it helps the first few days.
• Maintain your health. This means eating for me, as I usually stop when depressed. It also means exercise in moderation, sleep, and so on.
• Socialize. I always make sure I'm around someone, friends and family, as it's too easy to be depressed when alone.
• Meet someone new. This is obviously the eventual end goal, but there's nothing like another romance to ease the hurt of the last one. Don't rush into the next, though, as you may end up jumping from one failed relationship to the next.

I don't know how many times I've had "that SSN discussion" within our organization. Just the other day someone working with our HR department asked if our team really needed the SSN. I just laughed out loud and dropped a few high level names that were involved with these discussions over ten years ago.

SSN is a great identifier, as nearly everyone we deal with has one. It's a horrible password, though, and any organization that uses it as such should be held liable for any of the consequences that causes.

I'm responsible for tying in a wide variety of systems together and often SSN is the only common link. We actually do generate an internal ID for people, but no one knows what it is and it can theoretically change if an error occurs, unlike SSN which is far more reliable.

I have no idea why my son is so excited about this particular game, but every month or so he keeps asking if it's out yet. We saw some of the demos and evidently it stuck with him. I think he likes the idea of being able to change the world.

I ended up getting quite a few job offers after my Neverwinter Nights modules became successful. It was flattering, but the reality is that my current job as a developer in the healthcare industry is way too good. I've managed to keep it in a recession while the gaming industry has become far more cutthroat.

I still love making games, but purely as a hobby.

Ironically we're doing an implementation of a "new" HR system and a big chunk of it was written in Cobol. We have one guy past retirement age who knows it, but otherwise the bulk of our developers just know those fancy new languages.

Some of those older languages have a surprising amount of life left in them, out in the real world.

NASA is a big user of SharePoint, strangely enough. My coworkers run into their folks at conferences from time to time.

I personally am ambivalent about SharePoint. Its roots are in document management, so it seems to do that relatively well. The publishing features are fairly nice as well. I don't think it's the best system for making web sites, but it may some day get there. Currently it feels like a 2.0 product (the magic rule is to never buy anything from Microsoft before 3.0).

There are gotchas. SharePoint is tightly coupled with your clients. If everyone accessing the documents are using the latest version of Office, you'll be okay. If not, you'll run into problems. You may also need to throw a lot of hardware into SharePoint, as storing files inside of SQL has some built-in inefficiencies.

Still, some of our users seem to love SharePoint, so it might be a good option for you.

I've had my own site since last millenium, primarily as a way to journal my family's life for myself and people in my extended family. It's been a great communication tool to keep up with everyone, and a huge time saver when it comes to sending individual e-mails to everyone.

It's also been a great historical record of when things happened. I'm embarrassed to say that I've checked my blog more than once to make sure I remembered my daughter's birthday right.

It was also a great way for everyone to stay in touch on 9/11. Two of my family were flying that day, and it was a central place where everyone could post their flight delays and locations.