“Binders” of Women

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A few years ago, I got a phone call from a headhunter who had been given my name in connection with a position he was trying to fill. After I answered the phone, he introduced himself, confessed that he didn’t realize who I was working for until our receptionist answered the phone and concluded with “so M. finally got her female engineer“. It turns out that one of our execs had repeatedly asked him to find her a woman.

Romney’s comment during the second Presidential debate may have been poorly worded, but I can’t find any fault in what he did nor can I understand why it’s being portrayed as a huge issue by the media.

Independents Play A Major Role In 2012

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To give a bigger sense of why this is such an important number for Romney, consider this: In 2008 Obama won the national popular vote by 7.2 percent overall. If you assume equal turnout in 2012 as 2008 (39 percent Democrats, 32 percent Republicans, and 29 percent independents) but take Obama’s 8 percent win with independents and give it Romney, that 7.2 percent 2008 margin drops to 2.6 percent. If Romney can get Obama’s lead down to 2.6 percent before they even chip away at the giant turnout advantage Democrats had in 2008 (or win over some Democrats to Romney), it is going to be almost impossible for Obama to win.

Josh Jordan Obama’s Independent Problem

Really?

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We have seen that it’s possible to overcome the politics of division and distraction; that it’s possible to overcome the same old negative attacks that are always about scoring points and never about solving our problems.

Barack Obama after winning the North Carolina primary May 2008

Would you trade a dollar for seventy-five cents?

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Nancy Pelosi thinks you would:

The Affordable Care Act extends the life of Medicare by nearly a decade by reducing the rate of increase in payments to health care providers, by reducing costly taxpayer subsidies to insurance companies, and by reducing waste, fraud and abuse.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/15/opinion/pelosi-medicare/index.html?hpt=op_t1

But I keep running across comments from medical professionals that seem to suggest that Nancy Pelosi is naive:

Both a 2010 American Medical Association (AMA) survey and the 2011 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey found that about 17 percent of physicians were already restricting the number of Medicare patients they treat even before ObamaCare.

…

A recent survey from the Doctors Patients Medical Association found that 74 percent of doctors say that they will stop accepting Medicare patients due to the restrictions of ObamaCare. It is not clear that restricting Medicare choices by cutting doctor and hospital reimbursements for procedures that are deemed unnecessary by the new Medicare board will save money if it leads to doctors dropping out and patients becoming sicker if they end up with less access to timely care.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/20/cure-for-medicare/#ixzz29UL37C5M

So, who do you believe?

The Truth About GM

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For months, I’ve been wondering why no one wants to challenge how the politicians spin it. During the Vice Presidential Debate, Biden said:

“Romney said, ‘No, let Detroit go bankrupt.’”

According to the Washington Post:

This statement is drawn from a headline — “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” — on an opinion article written by Romney for The New York Times. But he did not say that in the article. (He repeated the line, however,on television.)

Although “bankrupt” often conjures up images of liquidation, Romney called for a “managed bankruptcy.” This is a process in which the company uses the bankruptcy code to discharge its debts, but emerges from the process a leaner, less leveraged company.

Ultimately, along with getting nearly $80 billion in loans and other assistance from the Bush and Obama administrations, GM and Chrysler did go through a managed bankruptcy. But many independent analysts have concluded that taking the approach recommended by Romney would not have worked in 2008, simply because the credit markets were so frozen that a bankruptcy was not a viable option at the time.

Biden also overstated the Obama administration’s role in saving the auto industry, glossing over the fact that the outgoing George W. Bush administration first bailed out General Motors and Chrysler.

There you have it. See Wikipedia for all the gory details.

Entourage 2008: Dealing with duplicate event notifications

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Scenario: There’s only one instance of the event in my calendar, but 15 minutes before the scheduled time Entourage pops up a notification that lists the event twice.

Others seem to have been able to resolve the issue by rebuilding and repairing the Entourage database, but that didn’t work for me. Since the events I’m having trouble with are recurring events that were scheduled several months ago, I had to take a different approach.

I waited for Entourage to pop up a notification window with duplicate events. I double-clicked on one of the events to open it. When prompted, I selected “all occurrences”. After the event was displayed, I appended some recognizable text to the end of the event title (e.g., “2”) and saved it (ignoring all of the warnings). This allowed me to distinguish between the visible and phantom events by simply looking at my calendar. Return to the notification window, double-click the event that’s not appearing in my calendar, delete it and the duplicates are gone.

 

Visual Studio 2010: The type or namespace name ‘type/namespace’ could not be found

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I recently converted a solution from VS2005 to VS2010. After changing all of my projects to target .NET Framework 4.0, I was plagued with the dreaded CS0246:

The type or namespace name ‘type/namespace’ could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

As suggested in the numerous blog posts I found…

  • I verified that all of my projects were targeting the same Framework version (4.0 vs. 4.0 Client Profile).
  • I relaunched Visual Studio (several times).
  • I cleaned and rebuilt (several times).
  • I removed and re-added references.
  • I disabled my one and only add-on (Resharper).

After all of that, it still wouldn’t build.

It turns out that the error was in my config files. Several months ago, we used assembly redirection to resolve some version conflicts:

<runtime>
  <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
    <dependentAssembly>
      <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Extensions" publicKeyToken="31BF3856AD364E35" culture="neutral"/>
      <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-3.5.0.0" newVersion="3.5.0.0"/>
    </dependentAssembly>
  </assemblyBinding>
</runtime>

As soon as I removed the redirection, all of my projects built successfully.