Cut out the dental in$urance middleman

 I've written about my experiences with dentists in the US before. Dental care is big business in the US and competition must be fierce, as demonstrated by my recent visit.

My regular dentist is gentle fellow, wearing Hawaiian shirts and listening to KFOG. And he does great work. However, his schedule must leave him plenty of time to catch a few waves in the morning. Appointments are typically mid day and not on Monday or Friday.

With my busy schedule, I decided to try out a new dentist just around the corner from my home. I always see the lights on, several people in the chairs, even after 6pm and in the weekend. I got an appointment at 6:30pm for a cleaning. After the mandatory X-rays, a second set of regular pictures with a mouth camera were taken before they started scraping away any plaque. All was professional and went great. Since it was my first visit, they also explained how they handle my dental insurance (Delta Dental). This was a big surprise to me.

First of all, the dentist is out-of-network. (Why did I not check this?) But do not worry, the coverage is the same as in-network. Huh? Why even distinguish if the co-payment and coverage % are the same? But it gets better.

Because they do not want to deal with Delta Dental and all the paperwork, they will bill the insurance. However the insurance will send the cheque to me. All I have to do is to bring the cheque in. Easy, right? Let's get to the details:

• No co-payment: although normally I have to pay a co-payment for in-network dentists, I do not have to pay this dentist any co-payment. 
• Don't worry about the difference between what the dentist charges and what is the normally negotiated between the insurance and the dentist. If the dentist charges $2400 and the insurance considers a procedure should only cost $2000 and covers it at 100%, just bring the cheque for $2000. If the insurance only covers it at 80%, do not worry. Just bring in the cheque sent to me by the insurance and we're even. 
• If the insurance denies the coverage, there is no cost to me at all. Just bring in the denial of coverage letter. The rational is that they will verity my coverage prior to the procedure and if a mistake is made, it is on them. 

It sounds all too good to be true. However, they have been in business for over 20 years, have a great deal of business with between 5-8 dentists on staff, and cosmetic dental surgeons visiting once of twice a week.

I figure their business model is all about volume. They don't deal with the insurance and save on the insurance fees and paperwork. Pass some of the savings on to the customers to make sure you have lots of clients to keep the big staff of dentists fully occupied. They basically take out the insurance middleman.

Pescadero, CA

Too far South for the San Francisco crowd who will make it to Pacifica or perhaps to Half Moon Bay. Too far North for the San Jose crowd making the drive over Highway 17 to Santa Cruz. A little south of Half Moon Bay, in the middle between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, you find San Gregorio and Pescadero. It does take a little more than an hour via a highly windy Highway 84 and La Honda to reach Pescadero.

View Larger Map

While officially Pescadero is a few miles in-land, the Pescadero Beach State Park is California coast at its best: not a lot of people, rugged coastline and beatiful rolling hills. It is also a great place to find treasures on the beach with the kids. The landscape is overall not unlike the landscape near Point Reyes, perhaps with steeper coastal hills.

Lunch stop in Pescadero has to include Norm's market. This little supermarket serves excellent warm artichoke bread with homemade garlic butter to be devouwered in 10 minutes at the picnic tables in the back.

Before heading to the beach, check out the goat farm on North street. Excellent goat cheese and a fun detour for the kids.

There are several state parks nearby. Pescadero State Beach was a big hit, for its combination of sandy beach, rocks and tide pools.

On the way back, warming up near the wood fire within the San Gregorio General Store is a nice place to have a drink before heading back over the mountains towards Woodside and the Bay Area.

On outliners

I've been on the look out for a powerful outliner tool for a while. At work I use primarily the outline mode of Microsoft Word, and it does it decent job. Although it lacks search and tagging capability. OneNote appears to be great, but is only available on Windows only systems (I use a Mac). For my to-do list I build a system around RememberTheMilk.com. I'll try to document this in another post. As for outliners, every so often I return to Evernote to check if they added a true outliner feature, but I walk away disappointed that it is more about the images and videos, than about providing the true outliner capability. I've been experimenting recently with Workflowy.com as an outliner tool.  So far, I've been impressed about its snappiness, and copy/paste functionality. I started to keep track of a list of items I like in a good outliner:

(note: the copy/paste feature from Workflowy ain't perfect yet)

Outliners

• Outline are not the same as lists or a to-do list. Trying to do both results in a liger.
  • Outliners allow you to take organized notes, including larger text blocks, drawings or pictures.
  • To-do lists have more context
    • Priority
    • Location
      • e.g., @work, @home, @web
      • GPS: e.g., @TraderJoes, @Lowes
    • Items belong to Projects
    • You can organize items using tags, resulting in Smartlists
    • State: nextAction; waiting (following the GTD workflow)
    • Notifications/Alerts
      • Mobile device
      • Instant Message
      • Calendar integration
• Outliners support many levels of Indentation
  • Supporting Folding (a must)
• Notes should be easily converted to email
  • Send from the outliner
  • Or support easy Copy/Paste
• Outliners allow for easy importing notes
  • From Microsoft Word documents
  • From email (forward email to a specific email address)
  • Copy/past text as note details.
• Outliners shall support exporting notes
  • Microsoft Word (Outline mode)
• Provide support for Online/Offline access
• Organization of notes
  • Folders
  • Tags == context
    • SmartLists
• Search
  • by date
  • by tag
  • by topic or keyword
• Collaboration and access control
• Formatting
  • bold/italic
  • color

Created with WorkFlowy.com

Safari West

One of the differences between Belgium and California is that nature can get pretty wild here. You rarely hear about a family making a wrong turn in Belgium and ending up stranded for days in the wilderness, sometimes even with deadly consequences. Belgium is on the bottom of the list of most dangerous animals in the world. Though I wouldn't want to cross paths with a the wild boar (video) unless I was accompanied by Obelix. From bobcats, mountain lions, rattle snakes and tarantulas, to some of the animals in our backyard, you often enough get reminded that California's wild isn't very far away.

Last week, we made a trip to an even wilder part of nature: Safari West. This is a park near Santa Rosa and Calistoga, where you can experience an African Safari. Although not cheap, the visit was definitely worth it.

Standing eye to eye, without a fence, with a Cape Buffalo (photo), one of the most dangerous animals in the world, is an incredible and scary feeling.

Planning a trip to Marin County

In between Christmas and New Year this year, we decided to escape for a few days to Marin County. It is only a short two hour drive from where we live. While we've visited some areas (e.g., Muir Woods, Sausalito, Stinson Beach and Bolinas - one of my favorite towns along the coast), there is plenty more to visit.

We had some ideas in general of what we wanted to visit in Marin County, but the evening before we left, my wife and I opened up our laptops and put a quick plan together. It became clear to me that a simple travel planning tool was missing. There are great travel websites which point you to the pletora of hotels in the area, or provide a list of things to do. But that's not a travel plan. That's just access to information. It takes time to stitch it all together into a trip. 

Wouldn't it be a great to have a Travel Notebook web application, which could assist you to plan your travel. Here's an initial list of its functionality: 

1. Browse around the web and each time you find something interesting in the area you can tag it for your notebook. It could keep track of the URL, phone numbers and location to put ithe place on a map. This should work for anything and everything: restaurants, wineries, cheese factories, beaches, musea, historic monuments, national or state parks, vista points, images, etc. 
• A map provides you simple overview of all the areas you tagged. Icons indicate the type of place. 
• A directory provides you a list of all locations and phone numbers. 
2. Based upon the weather forecast and opening hours of various sites, Travel Notebook would suggest a particular itinerary, or you could assemble one yourself and Travel Notebook would highlight which places are closed. 
• E.g., we found out too late that the Point Reyes light house was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. Sure it is listed on the website, but it does take a lot of searching around to figure out all the places. 
• Similarly it could indicate recommended times to leave to drive to the next site and arrive on time. Although if you wanted to stay longer it will easily adjust. It will help with the simple question: what time should we get up so we can shower, have breakfast and drive to the place to be on time for a 10am Safari? 
3. Since you may be going off the grid, the entire Travel Notebook can be easily printed or downloaded for offline use on your iPad, smartphone or laptop.

There are a couple of crude tools which can help you with this: we started with a custom Google MyMaps (how-to video). Each time we found a place, we googled the location in Google Maps and it provides a link: "Save to Map". Later on you can adjust the icons if you like. Both of us could be editing the map together, each from our own laptop. This was handy to have an overview of all the sites we wanted to visit. (Note: I did find it buggy in that sometimes not all icons showed up, or that the Save to Map either worked only in the left side and not in the pop up balloon, or vice versa.)

View Exploring Marin in a larger map

With this overview, we planned our trip in 3 pieces: 

1. Mount Tamalpais / Muir Woods / Mill Valley
2. Point Reyes
3. Safari West (in Sonoma County) / Sebastopol / Cheese tour and Sausalito. 

We'll continue our trip next time with a visit Angel Island. 

Cycling 2011 in review

The best Dutch cycling commentary remains Sporza. At the end of the year, the Sporza team creates a nice summary of the cycling year. Unfortunately, because of ownership reasons and television rights, it can not be shared outside of Belgium. Come on guys - this is a rebroadcast many months later in support of the sport.

Ons audio- en video aanbod is, om juridische redenen, enkel te bekijken in België. Als het access point van uw internetverbinding niet wordt herkend als Belgisch, dan kan u evenmin genieten van ons audio- en videoaanbod. 

Met vriendelijke groet, De sportredactie

Or translated to English:

Our audio and video programming is, for legal reasons, only viewable inBelgium. If the access point of your Internet connection is not recognized as aBelgian, you can not enjoy our audio and video offerings. 

Sincerely, The Sports editor

When you visit the Sporza link to watch "Cycling 2011 in review" outside of Belgium, you would never know what's going on with the video. It goes into an infinite loop trying to load. Is it my ISP? Is my browser? My wireless router? There used to be a simple "This video can not be shown outside of Belgium" error message. Usability is a lot about what happens when it is not usable. 

Nevertheless, it was just a matter of time when good cycling loving souls shared the wealth. Here's one rebroadcast (for as long as it lasts). Enjoy!

Tapas

Rather than a large Christmas Eve meal, we decided to have an onslaught of little bites: tapas! (paired with beer).

California and bust

I keep roughly the same schedule on weekends as I keep during the week. I wake up early, I have a macchiato and read emails. However, in the weekend, I read blogs and personal emails I've saved up during the week. The Consumerist blog pointed me to an interesting article by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair on California. Go read it - in its entirety. Here are a few interesting quotes to wet your appetite:

The average Californian, in 2011, had debts of $78,000 against an income of $43,000. 

The head parole psychiatrist for the California prison system was the state’s highest-paid public employee; in 2010 he’d made $838,706. 

San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States, after New York. It has the highest credit rating of any city in California with a population over 250,000. It is one of the few cities in America with a triple-A rating from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, but only because its bondholders have the power to compel the city to levy a tax on property owners to pay off the bonds. The city itself is not all that far from being bankrupt.

For instance, back in 2002, the San Jose police union cut a three-year deal that raised police officers’ pay by 18 percent over the contract. Soon afterward, the San Jose firefighters cut a better deal for themselves, including a pay raise of more than 23 percent. The police felt robbed and complained mightily until the city council crafted a deal that handed them 5 percent more premium pay in exchange for training to fight terrorists.

He didn’t view the city’s (Vallejo) main problem as financial: the financial problems were the symptom. The disease was the culture.

Dr. Peter Whybrow thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. ... The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. 

After reading the article, two things came to mind:
(1) It is wrong we spent more on prisons than on education. (And yes, they are related.) Let's start by  revisiting the three strike law, especially for minor, non-violent felonies. At the same time, nobody is worth an $800K salary.

(2) Where is the time when people lived within their means; people valued simple stuff. For my grandma, having survived two world wars in Europe, key was to have daily a good cup of coffee and a ham sandwich. It is a somewhat like in the old days on farm - live within your means.

I sometimes have the hear how in Europe this or that is better - "We drive smaller cars. We use less water. We produce less waste. We don't use as much plastics. etc. etc." All true. But it is only true because governments have made people care and adjust by levying higher taxes. As Peter Whybrow stated in the article, it is because we don't know what to do with abundance. So if you want the people to care, let's raise taxes (temporarily) to fix both at the same time: adjust the culture and have some funds to fix the educational system.

Impressions from visiting LSU

As my flight home from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had been canceled twice, including a overnight stay in a Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport (BTR) airport hotel, I had a few moments to document my first on-campus recruiting trip to Louisiana State University - LSU in Baton Rouge for Real-Time Innovations.

I had the honors of presenting my first US company, VLSI Technology, many years ago at an info session and on-site recruiting event to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. But it has been too many years ago to remember the details. But Cal Poly dwarfs in comparison to some of the universities on our current roster in size. Nevertheless we also are visiting Cal Poly and have recently hired some great engineers from Cal Poly.  

A couple of observations:

• The first scenes on-campus were those of large couches outside the frat houses and guys throwing the football while onlookers were sipping a beer. These could have been scenes straight from Revenge of the Nerds. 
• The Cook hotel on-campus is right next to the lake. The hotel is all about sponsorship: very room has a sponsor name tag with one of the best room being the Shaquille O'Neal suite. 
• Computer science students focus on HPC, thanks to Eric, the on-campus cluster at the CCC, and the Queen Bee cluster at the Baton Rouge capital building. Louisiana has invested a lot in compute and communication infrastructure. HPC talent is in demand among the Oil and Gas exploration companies in the Gulf of Mexico. At the career fair, all the Oil and Gas exploration companies were recruiting heavily for both petroleum engineers, but also computer scientists able to help them run the compute clusters. Beyond HPC, LSU didn't impress me with lots of education on distributed computing or networking.
• Career services is a well oiled machine. I am not used this at my university in Belgium. 
• A well run career fair
• Nice on-campus interview booths
• Displays educate the students on proper interview attire (sponsored by Mervins and Target). 
• Feedback forms on students.
• This is a wealthy university. The Student Union is very modern, with great facilities and including three giant screens to watch the LSU football games. We were (un)fortunate that our company introduction was right before the LSU-Alabama game. LSU football (undefeated in the 2011 season) must bring in quiet a lot of money. The stadium is larger than the largest soccer stadium in Belgium and in Argentina combined. It would be a unique experience to tailgate and watch a game at the LSU stadium. 

LSU Tiger Stadium can fit more than 92,000 people 

• LSU has on-campus tiger, Mike the Tiger (official site). This is a real tiger and mascot of the team. No stealing the mascot here. 

We ended our visit with some blackened alligator and one of the many international (including Belgian) beers at Chimes. Alligator is very tasty and it's better (and a little more chewy) than chicken! 

A visit to the Norton Winery in Mendoza, Argentina