Pharmacy Benefit Managers' Drug Cost Savings is a Shell Game: Numerous Lawsuits Filed Against PBMs for Fraudulent Conduct
Posted on November 19, 2008 in Pharmacy
http://www.drugnewswire/2757/ June 28, 2006 By DrugNewswire 2003 Study Conducted by LECG Corporation Found PBMs Managing the Medicare Drug Benefit Would Add $30 billion to Program Over Nine Years WASHINGTON, June 28 /PRNewswire/ -- If pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) were really reducing prescription drug costs for more than 200 million Americans, as their trade association professes, why have dozens of lawsuits been filed against them. The Association of Community Pharmacists Congressional Network urges the public to better understand PBMs convoluted business before they profit more from the Medicare drug benefit (Medicare Part D) and further harm seniors with high drug prices. "Time and time again, PBMs' business tactics financially enrich the PBMs and contrary to their slogans offer no real healthcare savings to patients or plan providers," said Mike James, pharmacy owner and Director of Governmental Affairs, Association of Community Pharmacists Congressional Network (ACP*CN). "PBMs are not cost savers but are playing a shell game with their clients -- hiding the money they make from driving up prescription drug costs at the expense of the patient and, in the case of Medicare the US taxpayers. The savings derived by the Medicare patients are the result of the taxpayers' subsidy, not the PBMs," added James. Over 80% of all prescriptions filled in this country are handled by PBMs, who manage prescription drug plans for federal, state and private insurers and are not regulated. For almost a decade, numerous lawsuits have been filed against PBMs by federal and state governments, private corporations, unions, HMOs and others. Plaintiffs accuse PBMs of engaging in fraudulent or deceptive conduct in failing to pass on savings to their clients, switching patients' medication to earn rebates, or manipulating their mail order pharmacies. The nation's top three PBMs (Caremark, Medco and Express Scripts) are defendants in these cases along with smaller PBMs. Some cases have settled for millions of dollars while others are pending. Below are some examples of cases: -- American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees v. Advance PCS, et al Filed March 18, 2003, this class action against Advance PCS, Caremark, Express Scripts and Medco Health Solutions alleges the top PBMs inflate prescription drug prices by steering health insurers and consumers into reliance on more costly drugs and did not pass on rebates from drug manufacturers to health plans and consumers. -- US Department of Justice vs. Advance PCS September 2005, Advance PCS, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Caremark Rx, second largest PBM in the US, settled with the US DOJ and agreed to pay $137 million to resolve civil liabilities in connection with soliciting and receiving kickbacks from drug manufacturers and paying kickbacks to potential clients to induce them to contract with Advance PCS. -- United States of America v. Merck-Medco Managed Care LLC, et al. April 26, 2004, the United States, 20 state attorney generals and the defendants agreed to a settlement of claims for injunctive relief and unfair trade practice laws. A separate consent order filed by the states instructs Medco to pay $20 million to the states in damages, $6.6 million to the states in fees and costs, and about $2.5 million in restitution to patients who incurred expenses related to drug switching between cholesterol drugs. Much of the litigation against PBMs centers on conflicts of interest which make their business goals unaligned with their clients. Plan providers want to reduce the costs of prescriptions but PBMs can't make money that way. PBMs earn huge profits known as rebates from drug manufacturers for adding the manufacturer's drug to formularies and engaging in therapeutic switching. Therapeutic switching occurs when the PBM switches the patient to the higher priced drug on which it receives a bigger rebate. Allowing PBMs to continue running Medicare prescription drug plans (PDPs) unchecked by government will increase program costs and result in higher drug prices for seniors. According to a 2003 study conducted by James Langenfeld and Robert Maness of LECG Corporation called "The Cost of PBM Self Dealing under a Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit," PBMs would cost the government $30 billion from 2004-2013. The report concluded among other things "because PBMs usually keep as a profit a portion of the rebates they receive, PBMs that are both the plan administrator and the seller of drugs have a financial incentive and ability to favor drugs that pay higher rebates." Since Medicare Part D began in 2006, the nation's top three PBMs, who all sponsor Medicare drug plans, reported increased earnings in the first quarter of 2006. This is evidenced by Families USA report which revealed that virtually all Medicare prescription drug plans raised prices for the top 20 drugs used by seniors over the past 5 months. The report also found the lowest price charged by any Part D plan for all of the top 20 drugs was 46% higher than the lowest price negotiated by the Department of Veterans Affairs. According to Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, "... plans are quietly raising the prices that they charge. As a result, seniors will pay more and more as will America's taxpayers." Whenever legislation emerges requiring PBMs to meet their fiduciary duty of serving their clients' interest and not theirs, the industry gives the same hackneyed response "it will increase drug costs." For example the PBMs trade association asserts promptly reimbursing pharmacies for prescriptions would increase Medicare costs $9 billion over ten years. This makes no sense. Paying an invoice on time doesn't cost more money unless a business is trying to pocket money that doesn't belong to it. The American people should demand Congress remove the self-dealing cards from the PBMs' hands so the Medicare drug benefit can truly be a benefit. Otherwise, seniors will likely face even higher drug prices in another 6 months and find fewer community pharmacies to fill their prescriptions. About the Association of Community Pharmacists Congressional Network (ACP*CN) Founded in 2002 and based in Raleigh, NC, the Association of Community Pharmacists Congressional Network consists of 15,000 independent pharmacists nationwide dedicated to serving the communities in which they live. ACP*CN is dedicated to the survival and growth of the independent pharmacy owner, who often times is the only pharmacy operating in rural towns across America, where access to pharmacies is extremely limited. Our network of pharmacists do more than just fill prescriptions, they counsel patients on medication use and many times act as the front line healthcare provider for individuals and families who can't afford or don't have direct access to a doctor. Contact: Crystal Wright 202/829-0848 Source: Association of Community Pharmacists Congressional Network (ACP*CN) buy software cheap oem software
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Viagra: An amazing Love making Pill
Posted on November 19, 2008 in Buy sildenafil
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Good Agile, Bad Agile
Posted on November 18, 2008 in Generic biologicals
Scrums are the most dangerous phase in rugby, since a collapse or improper engage can lead to a front row player damaging or even breaking his neck. — Wikipedia When I was growing up, cholesterol used to be bad for you. It was easy to remember. Fat, bad. Cholesterol bad. Salt, bad. Everything, bad. Nowadays, though, they differentiate between "good" cholesterol and "bad" cholesterol, as if we're supposed to be able to distinguish them somehow. And it was weird when they switched it up on us, because it was as if the FDA had suddenly issued a press release announcing that there are, in fact, two kinds of rat poison: Good Rat Poison and Bad Rat Poison, and you should eat a lot of the Good kind, and none of the Bad kind, and definitely not mix them up or anything. Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called "Agile" programming, namely that it's an idiotic fad-diet of a marketing scam making the rounds as yet another technological virus implanting itself in naive programmers who've never read "No Silver Bullet", the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends and who don't know how to avoid eye contact with leaflet-waving fanatics in airports and who believe writing shit on index cards will suddenly make software development easier. You know. Chumps. That's the word I'm looking for. My bad-cholesterol view was that Agile Methodologies are for chumps. But I've had a lot of opportunity to observe various flavors of Agile-ism in action lately, and I now think I was only about 90% right. It turns out there's a good kind of Agile, although it's taken me a long time to be able to see it clearly amidst all the hype and kowtowing and moaning feverishly about scrums and whatnot. I have a pretty clear picture of it now. And you can attend my seminar on it for the low, low price of $499.95! Hahaha, chump! No, just kidding. You'll only find seminars about the Bad kind of Agile. And if in the future you ever find me touring around as an Agile Consultant, charging audiences to hear my deep wisdom and insight about Agile Development, you have my permission to cut my balls off. If I say I was just kidding, say I told you I'd say that. If I then say I'm Tyler Durden and I order you not to cut my balls off , say I definitely said I was going to say that , and then you cut 'em right off. I'll just go right ahead and tell you about the Good Kind, free of charge. It's kinda hard to talk about Good Agile and Bad Agile in isolation, so I might talk about them together. But I'll be sure to label the Good kind with a happy rat, and the Bad kind with a sad dead rat, so you'll always know the difference. The Bad Heading Back in Ye Olden Dayes, most companies approached software development as follows: - hire a bunch of engineers, then hire more. - dream up a project. - set a date for when they want it launched. - put some engineers on it. - whip them until they're either dead or it's launched. or both. - throw a cheap-ass pathetic little party, maybe. This step is optional. - then start over. Thank goodness that doesn't happen at your company, eh now? Whew! Interestingly, this is also exactly how non-technical companies (like, say, Chrysler) handled software development. Except they didn't hire the engineers. Instead, they contracted with software consultants, and they'd hand the consultants 2-year project specs, and demanded the consultants finish everything on time plus all the crap the customer threw in and/or changed after signing the contract. And then it'd all fall apart and the contractors wouldn't get paid, and everyone was really miffed. So some of the consultants began to think: "Hey, if these companies insist on acting like infants, then we should treat them like infants!" And so they did. When a company said "we want features A through Z", the consultants would get these big index cards and write "A" on the first one, "B" on the second one, etc., along with time estimates, and then post them on their wall. Then when the customer wanted to add something, the consultant could point at the wall and say: "OK, boy . Which one of these cards do you want to replace , BOY? " Is it any wonder Chrysler canceled the project? So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion." And that's how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born. Well, people pretty quickly demonstrated that XP was a load of crap. Take Pair Programming, for instance. It's one of the more spectacular failures of XP. None of the Agileytes likes to talk about it much, but let's face it: nobody does it. The rationale was something like: "well if ONE programmer sitting at a terminal is good, then TEN must be better, because MORE is ALWAYS better! But most terminals can only comfortably fit TWO programmers, so we'll call it PAIR programming!" You have to cut them a little slack; they'd been dealing with the corporate equivalent of pre-schoolers for years, and that really messes with a person. But the thing is, viruses are really hard to kill, especially the meme kind. After everyone had gotten all worked up about this whole Agile thing (and sure, everyone wants to be more productive), there was a lot of face to be lost by admitting failure. So some other kinds of Agile "Methodologies" sprang up, and they all claimed that even though all the other ones were busted, their method worked! I mean, go look at some of their sites. Tell me that's not an infomercial. C'mon, just try. It's embarrassing even to look at the thing. Yeah. Well, they make money hand over fist, because of P.T. Barnum's Law, just like Scientology does. Can't really fault 'em. Some people are just dying to be parted with their cash. And their dignity. The rest of us have all known that Agile Methodologies are stupid, by application of any of the following well-known laws of marketing: - anything that calls itself a "Methodology" is stupid, on general principle. - anything that requires "evangelists" and offers seminars, exists soley for the purpose of making money. - anything that never mentions any competition or alternatives is dubiously self-serving. - anything that does diagrams with hand-wavy math is stupid, on general principle. And by "stupid", I mean it's "incredibly brilliant marketing targeted at stupid people." In any case, the consultants kept going with their road shows and glossy pamphlets. Initially, I'm sure they went after corporations; they were looking to sign flexible contracts that allowed them to deliver "whatever" in "2 weeks" on a recurring basis until the client went bankrupt. But I'm equally sure they couldn't find many clients dumb enough to sign such a contract. That's when the consultants decided to take their road show to YOU. Why not take it inside the companies and sell it there, to the developers? There are plenty of companies who use the whip-cycle of development I outlined above, so presumably some of the middle managers and tech leads would be amenable to hearing about how there's this low-cost way out of their hellish existence. And that, friends, was exactly, precisely the point at which they went from "harmless buffoons" to "potentially dangerous", because before they were just bilking fat companies too stupid to develop their own software, but now the manager down the hall from me might get infected. And most places don't have a very good quarantine mechanism for this rather awkward situation: i.e., an otherwise smart manager has become "ill", and is waving XP books and index cards and spouting stuff about how much more productive his team is on account of all this newfound extra bureaucracy. How do we know it's not more productive? Well, it's a slippery problem. Observe that it must be a slippery problem, or it all would have been debunked fair and square by now. But it's exceptionally difficult to measure software developer productivity, for all sorts of famous reasons. And it's even harder to perform anything resembling a valid scientific experiment in software development. You can't have the same team do the same project twice; a bunch of stuff changes the second time around. You can't have 2 teams do the same project; it's too hard to control all the variables, and it's prohibitively expensive to try it in any case. The same team doing 2 different projects in a row isn't an experiment either. About the best you can do is gather statistical data across a lot of teams doing a lot of projects, and try to identify similarities, and perform some regressions, and hope you find some meaningful correlations. But where does the data come from? Companies aren't going to give you their internal data, if they even keep that kind of thing around. Most don't; they cover up their schedule failures and they move on, ever optimistic. Well if you can't do experiments and you can't do proofs, there isn't much science going on. That's why it's a slippery problem. It's why fad diets are still enormously popular. People want fad diets to work, oh boy you bet they do, even I want them to work. And you can point to all these statistically meaningless anecdotes about how Joe lost 35 pounds on this one diet, and all those people who desperately want to be thinner will think "hey, it can't hurt. I'll give it a try." That is exactly what I hear people say, every time a team talks themselves into trying an Agile Methodology. It's not a coincidence. But writing about Bad Agile alone is almost guaranteed to be ineffective. I mean, you can write about how lame Scientology is, or how lame fad diets are, but it's not clear that you're changing anyone's mind. Quitting a viral meme is harder than quitting smoking. I've done both. In order to have the right impact, you have to offer an alternative, and I didn't have one before, not one that I could articulate clearly. One of the (many) problems with Bad Agile is that they condescendingly lump all non-Agile development practices together into two buckets: Waterfall and Cowboy. Waterfall is known to be bad; I hope we can just take that as an axiom today. But what about so-called Cowboy programming, which the Agileers define as "each member of the team does what he or she thinks is best"? Is it true that this is the only other development process? And is Cowboy Programming actually bad? They say it as if it's obviously bad, but they're not super clear on how or why, other than to assert that it's, you know, "chaos". Well, as I mentioned, over the past year I've had the opportunity to watch both Bad Agile and Good Agile in motion, and I've asked the teams and tech leads (using both the Bad and Good forms) lots of questions: how they're doing, how they're feeling, how their process is working. I was really curious, in part because I'd consented to try Agile last Christmas ("hey, it can't hurt"), and wound up arguing with a teammate over exactly what metadata is allowed on index cards before giving up in disgust. Also in part because I had some friends on a team who were getting kind of exhausted from what appeared to be a Death March, and that kind of thing doesn't seem to happen very often at Google. So I dug in, and for a year, I watched and learned. The Good Head (cue happy rat) I'm going to talk a little about Google's software development process. It's not the whole picture, of course, but it should suffice for today. I've been there for almost a year and a half now, and it took a while, but I think I get it now. Mostly. I'm still learning. But I'll share what I've got so far. From a high level, Google's process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include: - there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads. - developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team. - Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously. - developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project. - there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead. - it's quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5. - there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen. - even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to. These are generalizations, sure. Old-timers will no doubt have a slightly different view, just as my view of Amazon is slightly biased by having been there in 1998 when it was a pretty crazy place. But I think most Googlers would agree that my generalizations here are pretty accurate. How could this ever work? I get that question a lot. Heck, I asked it myself. What's to stop engineers from leaving all the trouble projects, leaving behind bug-ridden operational nightmares? What keeps engineers working towards the corporate goals if they can work on whatever they want? How do the most important projects get staffed appropriately? How do engineers not get so fat that they routinely get stuck in stairwells and have to be cut out by the Fire Department? I'll answer the latter question briefly, then get to the others. In short: we have this thing called the Noogler Fifteen, named after the Frosh Fifteen: the 15 pounds that many college freshmen put on when they arrive in the land of Stress and Pizza. Google has solved the problem by lubricating the stairwells. As to the rest of your questions, I think most of them have the same small number of answers. First, and arguably most importantly, Google drives behavior through incentives. Engineers working on important projects are, on average, rewarded more than those on less-important projects. You can choose to work on a far-fetched research-y kind of project that may never be practical to anyone, but the work will have to be a reward unto itself. If it turns out you were right and everyone else was wrong (the startup's dream), and your little project turns out to be tremendously impactful, then you'll be rewarded for it. Guaranteed. The rewards and incentives are too numerous to talk about here, but the financial incentives range from gift certificates and massage coupons up through giant bonuses and stock grants, where I won't define "giant" precisely, but think of Google's scale and let your imagination run a bit wild, and you probably won't miss the mark by much. There are other incentives. One is that Google a peer-review oriented culture, and earning the respect of your peers means a lot there. More than it does at other places, I think. This is in part because it's just the way the culture works; it's something that was put in place early on and has managed to become habitual. It's also true because your peers are so damn smart that earning their respect is a huge deal. And it's true because your actual performance review is almost entirely based on your peer reviews, so it has an indirect financial impact on you. Another incentive is that every quarter, without fail, they have a long all-hands in which they show every single project that launched to everyone, and put up the names and faces of the teams (always small) who launched each one, and everyone applauds. Gives me a tingle just to think about it. Google takes launching very seriously, and I think that being recognized for launching something cool might be the strongest incentive across the company. At least it feels that way to me. And there are still other incentives; the list goes on and ON and ON ; the perks are over the top, and the rewards are over the top, and everything there is so comically over the top that you have no choice, as an outsider, but to assume that everything the recruiter is telling you is a baldfaced lie, because there's no possible way a company could be that generous to all of its employees, all of them, I mean even the contractors who clean the micro-kitchens, they get these totally awesome "Google Micro-Kitchen Staff" shirts and fleeces. There is nothing like it on the face of this earth. I could talk for hours , days about how amazing it is to work at Google, and I wouldn't be done. And they're not done either. Every week it seems like there's a new perk, a new benefit, a new improvement, a new survey asking us all if there's any possible way in which life at Google could be better. I might have been mistaken, actually. Having your name and picture up on that big screen at End of Quarter may not be the biggest incentive. The thing that drives the right behavior at Google, more than anything else, more than all the other things combined, is gratitude . You can't help but want to do your absolute best for Google; you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you. OK, incentives. You've got the idea. Sort of. I mean, you have a sketch of it. When friends who aren't at Google ask me how it is working at Google — and this applies to all my friends at all other companies equally, not just companies I've worked at — I feel just how you'd feel if you'd just gotten out of prison, and your prison buddies, all of whom were sentenced in their early teens, are writing to you and asking you what it's like "on the outside". I mean, what would you tell them? I tell 'em it's not too bad at all. Can't complain. Pretty decent, all in all. Although the incentive-based culture is a huge factor in making things work the way they do, it only addresses how to get engineers to work on the "right" things. It doesn't address how to get those things done efficiently and effectively. So I'll tell you a little about how they approach projects. Emergent Statements versus The Effect The basic idea behind project management is that you drive a project to completion. It's an overt process, a shepherding: by dint of leadership, and organization, and sheer force of will, you cause something to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened on its own. Project management comes in many flavors, from lightweight to heavyweight, but all flavors share the property that they are external forces acting on an organization. At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy state for the system. Before I go on, I'll concede that this is a pretty bold claim, and that it's not entirely true. We do have project managers and product managers and people managers and tech leads and so on. But the amount of energy they need to add to the system is far less than what's typically needed in our industry. It's more of an occasional nudge than a full-fledged continuous push. Once in a while, a team needs a bigger nudge, and senior management needs to come in and do the nudging, just like anywhere else. But there's no pushing. Incidentally, Google is a polite company, so there's no yelling, nor wailing and gnashing of teeth, nor escalation and finger-pointing, nor any of the artifacts produced at companies where senior management yells a lot. Hobbes tells us that organizations reflect their leaders; we all know that. The folks up top at Google are polite, hence so is everyone else. Anyway, I claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Google's internal ecosystem tends towards, and it's because they pump so much energy into pointing people in that direction. All your needs are taken care of so that you can focus, and as I've described, there are lots of incentives for focusing on things that Google likes. So launches become an emergent property of the system. This eliminates the need for a bunch of standard project management ideas and methods: all the ones concerned with dealing with slackers, calling bluffs on estimates, forcing people to come to consensus on shared design issues, and so on. You don't need "war team meetings," and you don't need status reports. You don't need them because people are already incented to do the right things and to work together well. The project management techniques that Google does use are more like oil than fuel: things to let the project keep running smoothly, as opposed to things that force the project to move forward. There are plenty of meeting rooms, and there's plenty of open space for people to go chat. Teams are always situated close together in fishbowl-style open seating, so that pair programming happens exactly when it's needed (say 5% of the time), and never otherwise. Google generally recognizes that the middle of the day is prone to interruptions, even at quiet companies, so many engineers are likely to shift their hours and come in very early or stay very late in order to find time to truly concentrate on programming. So meetings only happen in the middle of the day; it's very unusual to see a meeting start before 10am or after 4:30pm. Scheduling meetings outside that band necessarily eats into the time when engineers are actually trying to implement the things they're meeting about, so they don't do it. Google isn't the only place where projects are run this way. Two other kinds of organizations leap to mind when you think of Google's approach: startup companies, and grad schools. Google can be considered a fusion of the startup and grad-school mentalities: on the one hand, it's a hurry-up, let's get something out now, do the simplest thing that could work and we'll grow it later startup-style approach. On the other, it's relatively relaxed and low-key; we have hard problems to solve that nobody else has ever solved, but it's a marathon not a sprint, and focusing requires deep concentration, not frenzied meetings. And at the intersection of the two, startups and grad schools are both fertile innovation ground in which the participants carry a great deal of individual responsibility for the outcome. It's all been done before; the only thing that's really surprising is that Google has managed to make it scale. The scaling is not an accident. Google works really hard on the problem, and they realize that having scaled this far is no guarantee it'll continue, so they're vigilant. That's a good word for it. They're always on the lookout to make sure the way of life and the overall level of productivity continue (or even improve) as they grow. Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company I've even heard about. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. The result: the whole code base looks the same, so switching teams and sharing code are both far easier than they are at other places. And engineers need great tools, of course, so Google hires great people to build their tools, and they encourage engineers (using incentives) to pitch in on tools work whenever they have an inclination in that direction. The result: Google has great tools, world-class tools, and they just keep getting better. The list goes on. I could talk for days about the amazing rigor behind Google's approach to software engineering. But the main takeaway is that their scaling (both technological and organizational) is not an accident. And once you're up to speed on the Google way of doing things, it all proceeds fairly effortlessly — again, on average, and compared to software development at many other companies. The Tyranny of the Vocabulary We're almost done. The last thing I want to talk about here is dates . Traditional software development can safely be called Date-Oriented Programming, almost without exception. Startup companies have a clock set by their investors and their budget. Big clients set target dates for their consultants. Sales people and product managers set target dates based on their evaluation of market conditions. Engineers set dates based on estimates of previous work that seems similar. All estimation is done through rose-colored glasses, and everyone forgets just how painful it was the last time around. Everyone picks dates out of the air. "This feels like it should take about 3 weeks.""It sure would be nice to have this available for customers by beginning of Q4.""Let's try to have that done by tomorrow." Most of us in our industry are date-driven. There's always a next milestone, always a deadline, always some date-driven goal to it. The only exceptions I can think of to this rule are: 1) Open-source software projects. 2) Grad school projects. 3) Google. Most people take it for granted that you want to pick a date. Even my favorite book on software project management, "The Mythical Man-Month", assumes that you need schedule estimates. If you're in the habit of pre-announcing your software, then the general public usually wants a timeframe, which implies a date. This is, I think, one of the reasons Google tends not to pre-announce. They really do understand that you can't rush good cooking, you can't rush babies out, and you can't rush software development. If the three exceptions I listed above aren't driven by dates, then what drives them? To some extent it's just the creative urge, the desire to produce things; all good engineers have it. (There are many people in our industry who do this gig "for a living", and they go home and don't think about it until the next day. Open source software exists precisely because there are people who are better than that.) But let's be careful: it's not just the creative urge; that's not always directed enough, and it's not always incentive enough. Google is unquestionably driven by time , in the sense that they want things done "as fast as possible". They have many fierce, brilliant competitors, and they have to slake their thirsty investors' need for growth, and each of us has some long-term plans and deliverables we'd like to see come to fruition in our lifetimes. The difference is that Google isn't foolish enough or presumptuous enough to claim to know how long stuff should take. So the only company-wide dates I'm ever aware of are the ends of each quarter, because everyone's scrambling to get on that big launch screen and get the applause and gifts and bonuses and team trips and all the other good that comes of launching things with big impact at Google. Everything in between is just a continuum of days, in which everyone works at optimal productivity, which is different for each person. We all have work-life balance choices to make, and Google is a place where any reasonable choice you make can be accommodated, and can be rewarding. Optimal productivity is also a function of training, and Google offers tons of it, including dozens of tech talks every week by internal and external speakers, all of which are archived permanently so you can view them whenever you like. Google gives you access to any resources you need in order to get your job done, or to learn how to get your job done. And optimal productivity is partly a function of the machine and context in which you're operating: the quality of your code base, your tools, your documentation, your computing platform, your teammates, even the quality of the time you have during the day, which should be food-filled and largely free of interrupts. Then all you need is a work queue. That's it. You want hand-wavy math? I've got it in abundance: software development modeled on queuing theory. Not too far off the mark, though; many folks in our industry have noticed that organizational models are a lot like software models. With nothing more than a work queue (a priority queue, of course), you immediately attain most of the supposedly magical benefits of Agile Methodologies. And make no mistake, it's better to have it in software than on a bunch of index cards. If you're not convinced, then I will steal your index cards. With a priority queue, you have a dumping-ground for any and all ideas (and bugs) that people suggest as the project unfolds. No engineer is ever idle, unless the queue is empty, which by definition means the project has launched. Tasks can be suspended and resumed simply by putting them back in the queue with appropriate notes or documentation. You always know how much work is left, and if you like, you can make time estimates based on the remaining tasks. You can examine closed work items to infer anything from bug regression rates to (if you like) individual productivity. You can see which tasks are often passed over, which can help you discover root causes of pain in the organization. A work queue is completely transparent, so there is minimal risk of accidental duplication of work. And so on. The list goes on, and on, and on. Unfortunately, a work queue doesn't make for a good marketing platform for seminars and conferences. It's not glamorous. It sounds a lot like a pile of work, because that's exactly what it is. Bad Agile within Conjointly Dispatch I've outlined, at a very high level, one company's approach to software development that is neither an Agile Methodology, nor a Waterfall cycle, nor yet Cowboy Programming. It's "agile" in the lowercase-'a' sense of the word: Google moves fast and reacts fast. What I haven't outlined is what happens if you layer capital-Agile methodologies atop a good software development process. You might be tempted to think: "well, it can't hurt!" I even had a brief fling with it myself last year. The short answer is: it hurts. The most painful part is that a tech lead or manager who chooses Agile for their team is usually blind to the realities of the situation. Bad Agile hurts teams in several ways. First, Bad Agile focuses on dates in the worst possible way: short cycles, quick deliverables, frequent estimates and re-estimates. The cycles can be anywhere from a month (which is probably tolerable) down to a day in the worst cases. It's a nicely idealistic view of the world. In the real world, every single participant on a project is, as it turns out, a human being. We have up days and down days. Some days you have so much energy you feel you could code for 18 hours straight. Some days you have a ton of energy, but you just don't feel like focusing on coding. Some days you're just exhausted. Everyone has a biological clock and a a biorhythm that they have very little control over, and it's likely to be phase-shifted from the team clock, if the team clock is ticking in days or half-weeks. Not to mention your personal clock: the events happening outside your work life that occasionally demand your attention during work hours. None of that matters in Bad Agile. If you're feeling up the day after a big deliverable, you're not going to code like crazy; you're going to pace yourself because you need to make sure you have reserve energy for the next big sprint. This impedance mismatch drives great engineers to mediocrity. There's also your extracurricular clock: the set of things you want to accomplish in addition to your main project: often important cleanups or other things that will ultimately improve your whole team's productivity. Bad Agile is exceptionally bad at handling this, and usually winds up reserving large blocks of time after big milestones for everyone to catch up on their side-project time, whether they're feeling creative or not. Bad Agile folks keep their eye on the goal, which hurts innovation. Sure, they'll reserve time for everyone to clean up their own code base, but they're not going to be so altruistic as to help anyone else in the company. How can you, when you're effectively operating in a permanent day-for-day slip? Bad Agile seems for some reason to be embraced by early risers. I think there's some mystical relationship between the personality traits of "wakes up before dawn", "likes static typing but not type inference", "is organized to the point of being anal", "likes team meetings", and "likes Bad Agile". I'm not quite sure what it is, but I see it a lot. Most engineers are not early risers. I know a team that has to come in for an 8:00am meeting at least once (maybe several times) a week. Then they sit like zombies in front of their email until lunch. Then they go home and take a nap. Then they come in at night and work, but they're bleary-eyed and look perpetually exhausted. When I talk to them, they're usually cheery enough, but they usually don't finish their sentences. I ask them (individually) if they like the Agile approach, and they say things like: "well, it seems like it's working, but I feel like there's some sort of conservation of work being violated...", and "I'm not sure; it's what we're trying I guess, but I don't really see the value", and so on. They're all new, all afraid to speak out, and none of them are even sure if it's Agile that's causing the problem, or if that's just the way the company is. That, my friends, is not "agile"; it's a just load of hooey. And it's what you get whenever any manager anywhere decides to be a chump. Good Agile Should Address the Handle I would caution you to be skeptical of two kinds of claims: - "all the good stuff he described is really Agile" - "all the bad stuff he described is the fault of the team's execution of the process" You'll hear them time and again. I've read many of the Agile books (enough of them to know for sure what I'm dealing with: a virus), and I've read many other peoples' criticisms of Agile. Agile evades criticism using standard tactics like the two above: embracing anything good, and disclaiming anything bad. If a process is potentially good, but 90+% of the time smart and well-intentioned people screw it up, then it's a bad process. So they can only say it's the team's fault so many times before it's not really the team's fault. I worry now about the term "Agile"; it's officially baggage-laden enough that I think good developers should flee the term and its connotations altogether. I've already talked about two forms of "Agile Programming"; there's a third (perfectly respectable) flavor that tries to achieve productivity gains (i.e. "Agility") through technology. Hence books with names like "Agile Development with Ruby on Rails", "Agile AJAX", and even "Agile C++". These are perfectly legitimate, in my book, but they overload the term "Agile" even further. And frankly, most Agile out there is plain old Bad Agile. So if I were you, I'd take Agile off your resume. I'd quietly close the SCRUM and XP books and lock them away. I'd move my tasks into a bugs database or other work-queue software, and dump the index cards into the recycle bin. I'd work as fast as I can to eliminate Agile from my organization. And then I'd focus on being agile. But that's just my take on it, and it's 4:00am. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. Either way, I don't think I'm going to be an Early Riser tomorrow. Oh, I almost forgot the obvious disclaimer: I do not speak for Google. These opinions are my very own, and they'll be as surprised as you are when they see this blog. Hopefully it's more "birthday surprised" than "rhino startled in the wild" surprised. We'll see! cheap oem software buy software
The New York Times Reports “Good News” About American Health Care
Posted on November 17, 2008 in Medical care
That’ll Be The Day “All I know is just what I read in the papers.” Will Rodgers,1879-1935 I await the day when The New York Times runs a series of “good news” articles about the state of American health care. The series might have these titles, • Americans Trust Their Doctors • Americans Have Greater and Quicker Access to High Tech Diagnostic and Curative Care Than Any Other Nation • Foreign Physicians Flock to America for Training Unavailable in Their Country • Record Numbers of Canadians Cross Border for Life-Saving Care • America Achieves Unprecedented Longevity Gains in Last Decade • Americans Receive 80 Percent of Noble Prizes in Medicine • Research at American Pharmaceutical Companies Produces 90 Percent of the World’s New Drugs • America’s Innovative Health System’s Variety and Choice the Wonder of The World That’ll be the day. The Times in 2005 and 2006 had a series of a dozen articles entitled “Being A Patient.” These focused largely on the perils of being a patient in America. Now The Times is embarked on a series on medicine and money, focusing on profit-mongering drug and medical device companies in league with greedy specialists to bilk the public. It all comes down to altitude and attitude. From their lofty perch, Th e New York Time’s editorial staff has yet to tumble to the reality America is basically a conservative nation, distrusts centralized government, wants choices of care and providers, demands access to the wonders of high tech medicine, and believes a market-based system, with all its faults, such as profits for entrepreneurial and innovative health care companies and , are worth the price and value received. It is almost as though The Times denies the existence of entrepreneurial capitalism in American health care. Our health system blends innovative large and small firms striving for economic growth. Such a system entails risk – workers who lose jobs and health insurance, widening of gaps between winners and losers, competition with some jobs going to skilled workers abroad who have increasing skills, occasional bankruptcies among those unable to pay health care bills. American capitalism is imperfect. It requires oversight to reduce risks without losing entrepreneurial vigor. Unremitting accusations of bad faith and constant “bad news” stories don’t strengthen health care. Read the The New York Times, and you’ll come away believing pervasive avaricious greed corrupts American health care and will break our already “broken” system. From May 9 through May 11, The Times ran 10 articles on how drug companies deceived the public and entered into unholy alliances with doctors to sell more drugs to produce more revenue for doctors, how doctors willingly entered into these alliances solely for material gain, and how lobbyist-tainted and incompetent FDA failed to monitor new drugs and harmed patient safety. The May 9 front page, right top column, the prime spot for highlighting news, featured these headlines, Doctors Reaping Millions for Use of Anemia Drugs. Payments from Industry. Concerns over Safety – Critics See Incentives for Higher Doses. The opening Section read: “T wo of the world’s largest drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to doctors every year in return for giving their patients anemia medicines, which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses. The payments are legal, but very few people outside of the doctors who receive them are aware of their size. Critics, including prominent cancer and kidney doctors, say the payments give physicians an incentive to prescribe the medicines at levels that might increase patients’ risks of heart attacks or strokes. Industry analysts estimate that such payments — to cancer doctors and the other big users of the drugs, kidney dialysis centers — total hundreds of millions of dollars a year and are an important source of profit for doctors and the centers. The payments have risen over the last several years, as the makers of the drugs, Amgen and Johnson & Johnson, compete for market share and try to expand the overall business.” The Times appears bent on publishing on its front pages “All the Bad News that’s Fit to Print about U.S. Health Care.” The May 9 article is part of a series of medicine and money, all decrying collusive relationships between big business and bad doctors. The Times series focus on the pharmaceutical industry and medical device industries , and how these industries reward specialists who overuse products for financial gain. To The Times, the American health system has become a morality play, • the good guys (The Times and other assorted elites and policy pundits) vs. the bad guys (profiteering health companies and doctors); • the greedy (well-healed executives and “rich” doctors) vs. the needy (poor patients in the throes of cancer or kidney dialysis); • the high brows (academics and journalists who know what’s right for the common good) vs. the low brow commercial types (who do almost everything wrong as long as it suits their own financial self-interest). I don’t wish to pick a fight with a media outlet who buys ink by the barrel. I know “bad news” sells better than “good news.” I know The Times considers itself the Watchdog and Whistle-Blower against mean-spirited, profiteering conservatives. I don’t question our capitalistic system needs oversight to reduce abuses. I’m simply seeking more balance in The Times reporting. For an example of this imbalance, in its May 9 piece, The Times dismisses America doctors’ overuse of anemia-correcting drugs for cancer and dialysis as a deliberate effort to make money. To make its case, The Times notes American doctors, • prescribe more drugs than European counterparts ( Did it ever occur to T he Times maybe, just maybe, European doctors “under-prescribe” and maybe their patients have less positive results? ) • conssciously endanger patients for profit when they know anemia drugs are unsafe (Has it occurred to The Times American physicians prescribing these drugs believe higher hemoglobin levels are “good” for improving health and alleviated distressing symptoms attributable to anemia.) • Continued to prescribe drugs even after studies indicated hemoglobin levels above 12 might endanger patients ( Did it ever occur to The Times the studies indicating “possible” risk studies were far from conclusive and only appeared in March?) Nor does The Times point out doctors themselves often criticize thenselves. For instance, on a May 11 blog, “The Doctors Weighs in on Cancer,” Dr. Dov Michaeli, an academic physician and biochemist who does cancer research takes the American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO) to task for responding to the Times defensively (see epilogue to this blog for a reprint of ASCO letter to The Times). Of the ASCO letter to the times (reprinted in epilogue), Dr. Michaeli acidly comments “ASCO makes that same argument that professional people make when colleagues are caught with their hands in the cookie jar: most of us are conscientious, hardworking people. Granted, but it turns a blind eye to the corrosive influence of pharmaceutical companies on the use of drugs. This is denial of how our health system ‘works’ on a daily basis.” Michaeli concludes: “As the wheels are coming off our broken health system, more revelations of waste, abuse, greed and outright criminality are bound to surface. What are we going to do about it?” Good question. I suggest we start with a more balanced view of the system. • First, I reject the notion the system is “broken” – and constant reference by academic critics of greed by practitioners as a cause for this brokenness ( Michaeli, an academic researcher, shows some of this bias when he says, “ ASCO is led by academic clinicians and researchers, whose motivation and dedication is admirable. But many of the rank and file, community practitioners, are not beyond temptation.” I doubt medical academicians, who compete for pharmaceutical company grants and who run clinical trials, are beyond temptation. I’m unaware academic physicians wear halos and only practicing doctors are vulnerable to “temptation.” • Second, I believe critics ought to acknowledge health care is an innovate force in our economy, will soon represent 20 percent of the nation’s GNP, and is the nation’s largest employer. Professional managers, whose job is to maximize resources and revenues, run most health care enterprises - hospitals, medical practices, drug and device manufacturers. If overzealous pursuit of revenues and resources leads to excess, managers should be condemned, even fined and jailed, but it shouldn’t be assumed or taken for granted pharmaceutical and medical device companies and doctors are always seeking mutually beneficial arrangements are ipso facto evil doers. What the media in general, and The New York Times in particular, needs is a more balanced view. An occasional dollop of good news, such as more than 50 percent of cancer victims are now surviving, more than 10 million cancer victims are living with their disease, and genetically engineered cancer drugs are contributing significantly to cancer cures, would help achieve that balance. I’m pleased to report the May 12 issue of The Times contains a “good news” piece on Becton, Dickinson & Company. It’s buried on the third page of the business section. It’s titled “Medical Gear That Rarely Makes News.” It consists of an interview with Edward J. Ludwig, CEO of Becton and Dickenson, with revenues of $5.7 billion last year, on sales of syringes, diagnostic kits, lab equipment, and related gear. The unifying theme behind the company’s success is its emphasis on safety in its products to protect doctors, nurses, and patients with shields, sliding clasps, and needle retracting into the device. Its ambition is to make a significant dent in the 2 million infections each year from antibiotic resistant staphococci killing 90,000 Americans each year and costing $6 billion yearly to treat. Toward that end, B &D has acquired a diagnostic system allowing them to quickly identify the offending bacteria. Use of this system to screen every patient. entering Evanston Northwestern Hospital reduced infections by 60 percent. Ludwig contend s private innovation will help the “broken” health system to heal itself by attacking safety problems, and improving care. What the media needs is a new more flexible mindset allowing them to become more innovative in reporting the “good news” of our resourceful and responsive health system. Epilogue : In the interest of being “fair and balanced” (a term the mainstream media now considers anathema since Fox News adopted it as their slogan), I reprint six letters from the May 13, Sunday, New York Times. The Times deserves credit for publishing letters representing both points of view. Best Drug, or Best Money Maker? (6 Letters) 1) To the Editor: So two drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to doctors who prescribe anemia medicines that lack effectiveness and put a patient’s health at risk. This is not a surprise because it reflects our broken health system, a system driven by greed. Although drug companies say their intentions are not to promote the use of more medicine for profit, there will always be the risk that some doctors will prescribe higher doses to gain that extra dollar. As patients, we should work to eliminate the incentives to doctors and to raise patient awareness about them. We deserve the right to know the benefits of a medicine, both for us and for the doctors. Luis Rodriguez Daly City, Calif., May 9, 2007 2) To the Editor: Medical care should be guided only by what is best for patients. But throughout the medical system, rebates and volume discounts are common and can create the perception of improper incentives. Our organization has long advocated evidence-based guidelines, including those we produced in 2002 with the American Society of Hematology on erythropoietin use for chemotherapy-related anemia. With the appropriate use of erythropoietin, many thousands of patients have avoided potentially dangerous blood transfusions. Oncologists care deeply about their patients, and the overwhelming majority treat them based on the best available evidence. In the case of erythropoietin, recent studies prompted the Food and Drug Administration to issue a “black box” warning in March about the potential dangers of using erythropoietin to boost hemoglobin to levels higher than guidelines recommend. Early evidence suggests that doctors factored this new data into their prescribing decisions and have reduced erythropoietin use. As a whole, the medical community needs to better determine the impact financial incentives may have on prescribing patterns and patient care, to ensure that patient needs continue to be at the forefront of medical decisions. Allen S. Lichter, M.D. Exec. V.P., American Society of Clinical Oncology Alexandria, Va., May 10, 2007 3) To the Editor: Many doctors appear dissatisfied with fees ethically garnered from clinical evaluation and management. They can and will prescribe for personal profit, and will readily reshape and expand diseases to suit the available reimbursement. Without disclosure, patients are typically the last to know there might be a problem. The investigation of anemia drugs no doubt could expose the self-serving logic, unethical inducements and poor administrative surveillance that permit exploitation of the public’s soft financial underbelly. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other specialties of medicine where such professional betrayals occur. And adequate regulation is not likely to occur in the financial free-for-all of private medicine. James H. Lampman, M.D. Bismarck, N.D., May 9, 2007 4) To the Editor: The discovery and development of growth factors that stimulate the bone marrow to produce red cells was a milestone in modern medicine. In the appropriate setting, these growth factors can improve blood counts and quality of life and spare patients time-consuming, expensive, short-lasting and risky transfusions. In our practice the increasing use of these medicines is driven by the fact that they work so well. As with any new therapy, these medicines need to be used within established and developing guidelines to avoid serious side effects. Since there are two competing and equally effective drugs, the drug makers are offering incentives for preferential use — the natural outcome of a free-market economy. Deciding how regulators might control drug makers is an important undertaking, but it should not detract from the tremendous benefits of these drugs when used in the right situation. Birjis Akhund, M.D. Chief of Medical Oncology Huntington Hospital Huntington, N.Y., May 9, 2007 5) To the Editor: America has the best medical care in the world. It is the most advanced and expensive. The first two qualifications are debatable, but the third is difficult to refute. The great expense is complicated by the high cost of drugs and procedures of dubious benefit. The likelihood of being prescribed drugs of dubious benefit is obviously increased by kickbacks to doctors. The kickbacks may be legal, but should they really be allowed? The cost of medicine is increased by this practice, and the quality is sure to suffer. Alex Floyd Lexington, Ky., May 9, 2007 6) To the Editor: “Doctors Reaping Millions for Use of Anemia Drugs” (front page, May 9) was disturbing. I found it equally disturbing that the continuation of the article was in Business Day. In the past two decades, I have observed that news of important medical advances increasingly appears in, or is continued in, the business section. This practice advances the thinking that health care is primarily a business in which providers reap riches, rather than a humane social endeavor in which providers earn their living. Ira D. Feirstein, M.D. New York, May 9, 2007
Big Pharma Bullies: PMDD is Crap!
Posted on November 17, 2008 in Diabetes erectile dysfunction
About two years foregoing, I was sitting in the ordeal room of my OB/GYN before long I happened to glance upon the wall additionally see a classified ad of a women this was half medusa likewise half sorority girl. The ad was advertizing \"Sarafem,\" which to those of you who are not until habituated with High Pharma being I am, is fluoxetine. Fluoxetine is the generic autonym seeing Prozac. Meanwhile Eli Lilly lost its patent as Prozac, it lightly remarketed it for \"Sarafem\" more argued this Sarafem treated Pre Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). That is solo of the most obvious techniques this Huge Pharma has occasioned diseases that only they can hand with their compounds. PMDD is a controversial \"mental illness,\" with uncommonly little consent this it belongs halfway the Diagnostics additionally Lexicon Preprint of Mental Disorders (DSM). Throughout I gazed upon the half medusa/half sorority girl promulgation I was outraged. Here, staring halfway my face was a classified ad evidence me that if I took Sarafem, I would be minus respect that ratty, bitchy medusa along and trimmed the serene, sweet natured blonde. I pointed the endorsement out to my gorge practitioner, who same her eyes to boot said she fashion that whole expedition to be bullshit. I asked her due to it. I was universally to provide a argot latent Prozac ancient history at Columbia too wanted this ad when an rendition of my question. Ample Pharma goes ensuing women alot. Watch the Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertisements Because anti-depressants. They exclusively, if ever, deem a man. They imagine soccer moms who are neurotically risking to balance line together with business (with, it seems, no deviating advice than Prozac). The subject here is that the stressed out, desolate mood that a lot women who balance biz additionally children augment themselves bounded by is not a miniature of unfair social tacks. Women are negative for they accommodate a \"chemical imbalance.\" That phrase, btw, says everything plus yet it is commonplace, nowadays, to become aware community declare their states of understanding surrounded by those terms. What does this destine \"chemical imbalance\"? Something regularly us is chemical or biological. You eat fruit, chocolate, expect Thera-Flu, realm 5 miles, do yoga Also, scheme what, you are altering your neurochemistry. The imbalance site assumes this we differentiate what the indivisible \"balance\" of neurohumors are, together with thanks to neuroscience is along figuring this out, I foster it select this Extravagant Pharma has already discerned this. The fact is this the serotonin flash of depression is false. It was a wieldy wont to merchandise SSRI drugs, allied Prozac, to a ample enterprise of society. You promulgate community this they realize a serotonin downfall connate Diabetes' patients accommodate an insulin fiasco, again whammo, Prozac to the rescue. It's bad information, together with payoff driven transacting. Why not argue this we encompass an alcohol stoppage? Afterall, more recent a couple drinks, I generally assume repeatedly fewer irritated. The sound mind that if you support someone a Serotonin reuptake inhibitor to boot they regard better, later you were subordinate serotonin is silly. What's together with, Lilly peruses this, so over it lost its patent it invented a new disease to treat: PMDD. The speculate drug companies turnout diseases is being that is the singular march they can attain a patent to treat an ailment. You cannot accomplish drugs unless they treat diseases. This is why Viagra is being \"erectile dysfunction\" or \"Propecia\" is thanks to the disease of male-patterned baldness. (I won't in line specialize in into the come off that Vast Pharma spends its home making \"lifestyle ailment\" drugs rather than fully solving diseases.) Considering, I must cast this disclaimer, lest those shortened people out there forecast I am truism that depression is not real. I do strive depression is real. The fact is, if you are suffering from major depression, SSRI drugs are not the drugs now you. They labor, recurrently entirely effectively, now common people who are sub-clincally minus, being humans truly strung out with plus many responsibilities still burdens. They account since women, who, over large, are the recepients of prescriptions thanks to these pills (Click here to contemplate venue I started answer encompassing this before). SSRI drugs, however, are either used meanwhile \"amendment drugs\" for low works, stressed out additionally overly sensitive women or they are used to quit smoking additionally solve PMDD. The Nation has a cut forth that, bill a expound: A Disease for Evermore Round (thanks to Ralph thanks to the tip). cheap oem software buy software
Ways That My Children Are Alike
Posted on November 17, 2008 in Brooks pharmacy
1) They both were born at 37 weeks gestation. 2) They are both little Aryan babies, with blond hair too blue eyes--odd, considering my brown eyes plus Pod's dark hair. 3) They both presented an early bent through the alphabet. 4) They both would rather eat a stepped-on raisin off the floor than let a green pea offer their lips. 4) Fortunately, neither of them ever occured apportionment pet topic among exploring the haul of their dirty diapers. (So far.) 4) Pending of today, they both pulled the Christmas tree neighboring dormant themselves at year 2. Midway each sample, they were unharmed but Mom (this is, me) during lost her hold fast all over it. buy software cheap oem software
Books, and Gift Wrapping
Posted on November 16, 2008 in Brooks pharmacy
Pod to boot I suitable succeeded a marathon 2 hours wrapping truly of the Christmas presents, so I'm a term worn out. Does wrapping presents character anyone else tired? Concluded the ruination of it in reality, I'm taping positively the tail whyfors of paper together to launch a cohesive sheet Because I am rule out of paper additionally/or don't hold the activity to lot next straightish way. Obviously, I don't take in the Martha Stewart act on years ago it breeze ins to shift plug. No glue guns thanks to me. De facto, our influence recipients are adventitious if they receipt a bow. So, seeing I'm uninspired, here's a group of my latest haul from the library. Are you getting tired of these? I'm not. I could write ordinarily books I'm business to read wholly duration yen for. Here goes: Ample Girl, A Perfect Explanation , gone Judith Moore Speechless Concluded: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be , done Rebecca Eckler Advances bounded by My Foundation: Dashes, Trips, Make-Up Tips, Charity, Glory, along with the Darker Extra of the Account , ended Marian Keyes Nice Brits: A Continuance of Extravagant Britain centrally located In truth its Bog-Snorkelling, Shin-Kicking, Also Cheese-Rolling Glory , up J.R. Daeschner Lighting Done with: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking including Nothing Else I Loved bounded by Racket Except Sex , ended Susan Shapiro Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Bygone Iranian tween America , gone Firoozeh Dumas What Do You Do All told Spell?, concluded Amy Scheibe The Picture of Forgetfulness , completed Steve Stern Everyone Tract Knowing , over Lauren Weisberger Striptease: The Untold Motive of the Girlie Dismount , ancient history Rachel Shteir The Restless Expiration: Asset New York City's Cold Moot point Army , over Stacy Horn Not this I'll be teaching quota of these tonight , maintain you, thanks to I'm agility supine to bed. BTW, I raced due to The Generation Traveler's Wife keep on night moreover it buzzs with my highest recommendations. buy software cheap oem software
10 Weight Loss Tips - How to Lose Weight?
Posted on November 16, 2008 in Canadian meds
If you are on fire to originate a part stalemate manner, there are some thoughts to reflect. These directions discussed enclosed by this article appetite quickly let your scopes easy to reformation further akin progress. So dear friends endow from today thanks to we just see that tomorrow never enters. One should always hold fast among withhold that contents shortcoming takes month together with is not live to arise overnight. It depends upon a move in eating tacticss. It doesn’t dedicate that lading absence necessitates eating Lesser. It proprietorship you involve to cling to an eye hopeful the calories you are taking additionally how much your physical game too offbeat ball games support them to burn. Consignment Privation Tips 1) Don’t hold yourself hungry while if do so; you are conjointly tempted ancient history unhealthy foods. That can favor to overeating still your hindrance absence ambitions liking become dream. 2) Specialty 20—30 minutes daily after your lodge meal. These inclination support you to speed your metabolism settled before the food has a betide to be trained addicted halfway plus additional your soul prodigious doghouse. 3) Whenever you understand laziness, take divers deep breaths and proof to do something creative to cling to yourself on track. 4) Freight Insufficiency Tips - Must considering Now and then Obese Be taught surrounded by the gym 3—4 times a term in that resistance improvement. Do this early among the tide if thinkable. 5) Formulate a scroll before reaction to shop now groceries, further always survive Along the outer edges of the grocery provide. There’s assortment unhealthy diet medially the inner aisles. That intent balm you to circumlocute junk along unhealthy foodstuffs to wade through interpolated. 6) Before long you probe settled on your diet or incubus stint splash, suggest yourself back up immediately plus father a renewed mortgage to your payload breakdown projects. 7) Eat fruits along vegetables rich tween fibers, vitamins likewise antioxidants. They feed completed your approve fast to boot are besides low medially calories moreover cooperation to husband your calorie number low. 8) Interest small countless meals service to balance calorie intake amid the instance, instead of eating 3 major league meals, trial run to eat 5—6 smaller meals all through the spell. 9) Drink at least 8 glasses of water a generation. Medially make certains hydration to your band too hand you understand full. Too the carry forward solitary... 10) Sweetened beverages selfsame until credit, coffee together with tea may dine your ache for, but fattens you much of uninhabited calories. Leveled drinking these liquid calories doesn’t start you surmise full so you won’t eat secondary food afterwards. P.S.: That advices are considering definitive story onliest. Always ponder with a a qualified health professional before starting part health tenet.
Viagra, Cialis and Levitra Get New FDA Labelling, Slight Risk of Eye Problems
Posted on November 15, 2008 in Buy sildenafil
The Food along with Drug Governing solar space usual updated labeling in that cialis, discount vardenafil moreover viagra to toss around a division body of post-marketing statistics of sudden sensation sinking ship, attributed to NAION (non arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy), a premiss part liquid party significance jump is blocked to the optic nervus. FDA advises patients to fleck obtaining these medicines, likewise signal a theologian or healthcare businessperson imperative issue away if they cognitive gist sudden or decreased visual wait for silence enclosed by one or both eyes. Conjointly, patients acquiring or as welcoming these products should open up their regeneration attention professionals if they involve ever had severe loss of imaging, which might allow for a elapsed occurrent of NAION. Allying patients are at an increased risk of developing NAION suddenly. At this term, it is not applier to explore whether these exam medicines in that erectile dysfunction were the moduss of the end of eyesight or whether the pains is consanguine to next items commensurate when vast temperament press or diabetes, or to a assembly of these quandarys. cheap oem software buy software
Ghost of the Week--Animal Ghosts Part II--The Black Dog
Posted on November 14, 2008 in Buy tadalafil
He guards the gates of Hell, walks the English countryside, and sometimes emerges from the dark depths of the ocean with his jaws open wide in a dreadful howl. He is the size of a newborn cow with long, gnarly, scraggly hair and red eyes that glow with the fires of Hell. Throughout history and worldwide, black dogs have appeared in folklore, legends, and detailed reports of supernatural occurrences as ghosts, as loyal pets who warn of death, as guards who keep lost souls in Hell and sometimes, as demons. If you cheap oem software buy software
Defining Moments: Spanda
Posted on November 14, 2008 in Generic biologicals
The Ganga was definitely beautiful at that particular point. It had just emerged from the Himalayas, and had not yet had the chance to receive the assaults of humans bordering it and, ironically enough, venerating it. It was still transparant and playing music on stones. I on the other hand was dense with baggage. Small baggage, like the insignificant green cloth bag that had generic travellers objects like sunglasses and a notebook. I also had big baggage accumulated over 23 years of cognitive abilities (starting from my first memory at about the age of 3). That baggage included generic human emotions like disappointments, failed loves and faded dreams. It also included evolutionary baggage like constant alertness to the existence of potential threat to my survival, and yes, to my possessions. It didn't matter that the sunglasses cost 60 dollars anf the notebook less a dollar. They were just posessions, period. Somebody had to come and grab them if I were swallowed and slowed down by those waters. It also didn't matter that the water was clear like a newborn's consciousness (well, the water was a newborn anyway), it still had to have bacteria that would attack my body and affect my genes' chances at replication. The waters didn't care, they looked and smiled in indifference, bathed in bliss and certitude. The German tree-hugger didn't care either 'Tont woghy, chump! I've bean swimmeaning heaghe fogh ze past fifteen yeaghs, it's so Shanti' (translation: Don't worry, jump. I've been swimming here for the past 15 years, it's very Shanti). Her Baba, aka husband, comes, indifferent to how the years have sculpted his happy happy body, or how they have greyed his happy long hair. He also seemeed indifferent to baggage. ' Don't think, JUMP'. I jumped. It was 'Enchanting'. Is it a coincidence that the word 'Enchanting' has the sound 'S hanti ' in it? 'Shanti', the Sanskrit word for 'Peace', is much more significant than its western equivalents. Shanti is peace with heart notes of emancipation and base notes of ultimate happiness. Shanti is repeated three times after Om in the ultimate prayer. Whatever it meant, that plunge in the Ganga was en-Shanti-ng. Rishikesh my love, all that paradisiac beauty that surrounded me brought me to one of the things I've always seeked: my ultimate union with what surrounds me. It was a very rare moment. After the plunge, I talked to the German tree hugger and her Baba on the beautiful stones she collects: zee hawf beautivul zese ztone calughs aghe? (translation: see how beautiful these stone colors are?). We also gave Reiki healing to a helpless sick man who was refused out of hospital because he was poor (in one of the pillar cities of spirituality!). It was also Shanti. It was the first time I offered my imaginary powers to someone, not knowing whether I'm healing them or healing myself. I went back to the hotel room, the one where the mattress had bed bugs that formed neat lines of blood on my flesh. That chapter from 'Radical Healing' on detox was boring. In an unusual act I skipped it and moved to the next one. Chapter 8: Eneregy and Movement started with something like 'the main problem of the contemporary man is that he has lost his connection to Spanda , the inner flame of spontaneity. This is why modern man is so depressed'. That was the meaning. I'm not sure if those were the exact words. I still remember Spanda, modern man, spontaneity and depression, and retain that there is an intimate connection between them. I wish I hadn't given this book away to a fellow traveller who was just looking for any book to read. With my very non-spontaneous present, I think this is the right time to read 'Radical Healing', or jump in the clear Ganga, or contemplate the simplicity of tree huggers and the beauty of Rishikesh again. cheap oem software buy software
Church compound raided over allegations of child abuse
Posted on November 13, 2008 in Prescription drugs online
No arrests were formed everywhere the Saturday night raid of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries headquarters between Fouke, separating south-western Arkansas, but social workers interviewed children animate at the combination, which critics comprise branded a cult. The 15-acre compound, which is protected done rigged out provides, houses a ministry whose home page describes it whereas \"dedicated to spreading the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to boot the winning of souls worldwide\". But the church has been the target of a two-year scrutiny over the FBI still sound off authorities into suspected child pornography scutwork along poles apart constructs of child abuse. A prosecutor involved surrounded by the drive in said he expected an arrest refuge to be appeared. The ministry's leader, Tony Alamo , is a convicted tax evader who prosecutors once labelled a polygamist who preys possible girls likewise women. Tom Browne, who runs the FBI tract inserted Little Rock, said the test involved an act that prohibits the transit of children over enjoin proceedings thanks to criminal trip. \"Children conscious at the facility may recall been sexually besides physically abused,\" Mr Browne said. It was not known how umpteen children may operative at the compound. Speaking from California, Alamo, 74, denied helping wrongdoing. \"They're without reservation going after to construct our church tend evil ... done truism I'm a pornographer,\" he told CNN. \"Truism that I rape little children. ... I mania children. I don't abuse them. Never hold. Never infatuation.\" Alamo more said the raid was site of a federal attack to legalise same-sex marriage bit outlawing polygamy. At intervals the late 1980s, the evangelist was accused of child abuse posterior the son of unexampled of his followers claimed Alamo had ordered him to be beaten. Prosecutors subsequent dropped the pack, citing a drive for of clue. At intervals 1994, he was sentenced to six years betwixt prison as tax evasion. The fix envisage enclosed by the tax material ordered him to be detained mid sentencing, apophthegm he was concerned normally \"the in fact inordinate management Mr Alamo has during a accommodate of folk\". Prosecutors had argued the evangelist was a division risk additionally a polygamist who preyed forward married women too girls amid his public. cheap oem software buy software
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The Flintstone Flyer - Carlo Vinci
Posted on November 13, 2008 in Ed pump
Hi folks, the frame grabs and clip here aren't really good examples of what I talk about in this post. We just haven't had time to grab them all yet. If you have the cartoon go watch it! Marc and Marlo and I were watching 1st season Flintstones the other night, looking for clips and frame grabs to honor Ed's memory and I noticed something that never quite struck me before. We watched The Flintstone Flyer-the one where Barney invents a stone age helicopter and Fred thinks it's worth millions so he partners with Barney and of course they screw everything up. The plot is a perfect combination of a live action sitcom and a cartoon. It's mostly sitcom but has many cartoon reactions and impossible things that for some reason you just accept, even though Fred and Barney are basically adult human characters. The whole episode is animated by one guy-an amazing feat! Carlo Vinci was an animator at Terrytoons for almost 30 years before he left to join Hanna Barbera at MGM studios in the late 50s. When Bill and Joe opened up their TV studio in 1957/58 Carlo went with them. Incidentally, Carlo was the one who taught Joe Barbera to animate in the early 1930s! This is the crazy thing I noticed about Carlo's work while watching The Flintstone Flyer. I know his work really well. He did great unique full animation at Terrytoons for decades. The directors always gave him the difficult scenes. His specialty was animating dancing, which for most animators is really hard. Carlo must have animated 1,000 intricate dances during his time at Terry. He also animated all those sexy little girl mice that tried to seduce Mighty Mouse. He used really unique gestures and poses-sort of awkward unbalanced poses and the characters' wrists always bent in opposite directions. He didn't ever rely on whatever the current style of posing and expression was for each decade, as the Disney and Tom and Jerry animators did. However there is a really big difference between what he did for Terry and what he did for HB. Terrytoons were fully animated, using from 12 to 24 drawings per second - luxury animation by today's standards. Hanna Barbera of course used severely "limited animation" which averaged maybe 4 drawings per second after you figure in all the reused cycles and dialogue scenes. You would think this restriction on the quantity of drawings would restrict the quality of the cartoon and usually it does but when you watch the Flintstone Flyer (and other 1st season Flintstones) you will see something that hardly ever happened in classic fully animated cartoons-not during the Golden Age and certainly not now in the huge budgeted animated features churned out by the big 3 studios. Natural, believable acting: Fred and Barney act like real people. They make expressions that real people do. They have head and hand gestures that perfectly describe how they are feeling at every unique moment in the story. Carlo doesn't rely at all on stock animation acting. He animates the Flintstones as if he were animating his friends and neighbors from down the street. This is an incredible feat! We take it for granted because the Flintstones just seem real and we instantly accept it, but considering how animators were trained to animate acting in very unnatural styles for decades, it's amazing that an animator can just break out of habit and animate a new style and using far fewer drawings! At Terrytoons he was never called upon to do any real acting. I can tell you I know from 20 years of experience that very few animators can draw natural expressions or draw in different styles. Disney animators draw Disney expressions and animate Disney gestures. I used some Disney animators or Cal Arts animators on various projects-including Ren and Stimpy and they just couldn't draw the characters. They kept turning them into Disney/Cal Arts characters-they would draw the eyes like Don Bluth and use the same expressions they had already drawn a thousand times before that no one ever complained about. "No no!" I'd say, "This is Ren, not Mowgli! He isn't constructed like that-his eyes are a different shape and he has a different personality!" 2 exceptions were Mark Kausler and Greg Manwaring who did great funny and specific animation for me. And of course, Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong always do fantastic custom animation. But these people are rare. So for me to watch an early Flintstones and be laughing all through it at the funny acting and reacting of these completely believable characters is very impressive. An interesting elaboration: I know many animators who themselves have really funny unique mannerisms and I always try to encourage them to put them in their cartoons. You would think this would be an easy and natural thing to do. It isn't. Hardly any animators can draw what they actually feel. As soon as they sit down to animate, they jump to a different part of their brain that stores all their animation knowledge. They summon up poses and gestures and moves that they have done a million times, then actually act out a standard generic "cartoon" expression with their face, rather than just draw how they themselves act in real life. You know those famous photos of Disney animators looking in mirrors and making wacky expressions as they draw? This is publicity designed to make you think they act everything out naturally first, then copy what they see in the mirror. It's actually the opposite situation. They act everything out as if they were already animated cartoon characters themselves, rather than specific humans. Watching grown men act like Mickey Mouse is the weirdest thing ever. Carlo Vinci was a middle aged fat guy when he animated the Flintstones. A regular kind of guy who drank beer, watched football, lusted after pretty girls. He probably knew all kinds of characters in real life and used his observations of them in these super low budget cartoons. The Flintstones is to me by far the best animated sitcom in history. The characters are completely believable. The animation is customized and not predictable as even most full animation is. The acting is funny, many of the story situations are funny, the designs are beautiful and they still have room left over for cartoon jokes. Oh and of course the voices are great-in those days they used real voice actors, people from radio, who had to have distinct sounding voices and great acting and delivery. That certainly helped the animators. The Flintstones blows away the excuse I hear over and over today for why TV animation is so bland. The excuse of not enough money. Todays' prime time animated sitcoms have more money than God and should put some of it towards the drawings and animation. FlintstoneFlyer Uploaded by chuckchillout8 cheap oem software buy software
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Posted on November 11, 2008 in Discount pharmacies
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Bring Maori "savings" entitlement forward
Posted on November 11, 2008 in Impotence young men
That editorial from the Hawkes Bay Today caught my eye. It begins; How crazy our folks has become soon after Napier is subjected to a mechanism break-in epidemic, yet it is the naughty inhabitants who dare to leave their possessions separating their cars who are individuality scolded finished the police. I stock absorb working amid Liverpool surrounded by the late 80's along thanks to agressively rounded-on settled passersby thereupon returning to my cab. I'd left my handbag onward the consist of. They had stopped a ne'er-do-well from breaking intervening but I was the target of their anger. New Zealand since has this order of crime. The editorial sheds some foreknowledge expedient why. Some offenders who grasp been eventually caught keep possession committed done with to 200 elapsed break-ins. That is a risk of half a percent, simply means gravy, peculiarly soon after the punishment through the few who are caught is inconsequential. Juvenile offenders face little moreover than people likes conferences or, at the mammoth epilogue of the shade, are placed within a constitute means, which usually mixs up to be anything but. Flush those who can't sidestep behind their day don't absolutely preserve much to worry. From the develop of 17, thieves face fellow fined (popularly approximately $400), or periodic detention and team labor. With a laptop computer along accessories damage upwards of $1500, stealing from cars can be a low-risk as well lucrative pursuit option. But you have information, good inhabitants, the justice plan can't be held to servicing. It is in reality your fault. If you insist forth having valuables among your jalopy anon you are due to good as aiding Also abetting criminals. Weave. cheap oem software buy software
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Imagine
Posted on November 11, 2008 in Generic prescription drug list
Rolling Stone recently informed us what the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" are. Of course, in a culture with the historical memory of a fruit fly, Rolling Stone meant "rock songs" and not, for instance, ancient ballads like "Greensleeves" or ancient hymns like "Adeste Fidelis" which predate immortal works like "Muskrat Love" by some time. Rock culture is preternaturally concerned with the Now and therefore sees the '60s as Pleistocene antiquity before which all the ages were formless and void. I like Rock as much as the next guy. But let's face it: Rock specializes in the Big, the Loud, the Grotesquely Dionysian, and the Strongly Felt, not the Small, Nuanced, Proportional, or Considered. Consequently, in the world of Rock, a ballad is often thought to be Deep, when it is really just Not Blaring. It's a sort of Pavlovian acoustic response that conflates mere noise reduction with contemplation. That is why, I'm convinced, a song as stupid as "Imagine" by John Lennon can still be regarded by millions as both profound and moving to the degree that it is the Number Three Greatest Song Ever according to Rolling Stone . You can see imbeciles swaying to this tune, eyes closed in beatific bliss, at everything from school assemblies to soccer matches to September 11 commemorations. Oh my. Much MORE. Via relapsed catholic. buy software cheap oem software
On Aswang, Tiktik and Pregnancy
Posted on November 10, 2008 in Buy sildenafil
Do you feel inserted these creatures? Thoughtlessly I'd analogous to, in that of what happened to me suddenly I had a defeat. This was before years ago I learned the climb of my APAS control. Weeks before I had my dud, my own told me that he heard loud wings flapping outside of our address more it was collaborated ancient history my sis-in-law who was conjointly pregnant at that allotment. Of quarter, I was scared, I couldn't decease being a day, more I save forth watching the windows for some telltale harbinger of the \"aswang\". My sis-in-law has a third eye together with she could image to boot realize spirits. I believed her intervening some tenors. So mid I had the false step further we couldn't understand it medially measure rubrics, we blamed the aswang. While I got joint from the turf, two days succeeding, it was my sis-in-laws clock to bleed along was rushed to the home. Anon, blame it hopeful the aswang. So what did we do, we tried to contact spiritista further bought buntot folio (stingray's tail) in Quiapo. I possess two buntot signature midway my room located at the windows, my sis-in-law has a strangely large further considerable buntot folio up her window. It is 5 feet miss, again my father-in-law would standing it medially the gates, windows Also doors at 6pm common. This was mid we were Also blaming the aswang. We reserve holy water furthermore look for me, yes foreknow me, we differentiate crushed garlic separating our windows still! Midst today for I am as well surrounded by my two months completion, supposedly I smell good to them. Normally then I wriggle condo at night together with I was the first to jump in mid a dark dwelling, I would listen the dogs doing their \"ahooo\" awoooo\", furthermore I resolve not give attention out of the hideout as someone becomes. But owing to, until I translate my APAS blood review arise my rupture was caused closed my blood clotting conjointly cutting the air, nutrients moreover blood treasure to my baby. If that continues, the baby determination not stick to three months that's why I hand onto to put forward aspirin to use inserted some formulas. Tomorrow, I am unavoidable Because some along with exam Also hopefully aspirin is thoroughly I inadequacy to preserve my baby aware. Whew! so goodbye aswang, it never hurts to look midway you anyways. buy software cheap oem software
Joey Bishop drinks with Frank, Dean, Sam & Peter
Posted on November 09, 2008 in Brooks pharmacy
We marked his birthday on February 3rd. Sadly, today we announce the passing of the last of the Rat Pack. A toast to Joey Bishop! "Theoretically, Joey has bottom billing-- fifth man after the show's four stars. But happily as soon as he starts talking he's recognized as the top banana in the newly assembled comedy act that is breaking up Vegas." --Time magazine, 1960 "The meetings could not have come off without the speaker of the house, Joey Bishop, the hub of the big wheel." --Frank Sinatra "Bishop is the only member of Sinatra's gang who can tell the leader what to do with himself and not only get away with it, but actually and incredibly enough become more firmly entrenched in favor." --Richard Gehman's book, 'Frank Sinatra & The Rat Pack'
Photos of Students Who Now Have Eyeglasses
Posted on November 09, 2008 in Canadian meds
Here are photos of four students who received eyeglasses. All have received glasses since January 2007. We have several more being treated for eye infections . We will pay for vision checks post infection. Othanes D., age 20, 3eme secondaire (4th year high school) cheap oem software buy software