Category: Office Tech

Back before the Internet happened, the way that a patient interacted with his or her primary care physician was, well, who can remember?  It was so long ago.  I guess it was mostly telephone calls, postal mail, and the occasional in-person visit.  Nowadays for most of us, the chief mode of interaction is the “patient portal”.   Recently my health insurance changed, and so I found myself interacting with a new (new to me) patient portal.  Whoever designed this particular portal made a dumb mistake in the programming of its “add to calendar” function.  The result was that when I showed up on time to my first get-acquainted appointment with my new primary care physician, I was told that I was an hour late and had missed my appointment.  I will describe the programming mistake.  Continue reading “How to get “add to calendar” wrong”

Sort of by accident I learned just now that there is a whole fairly new emerging industry category called CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management).  This CIAM industry category is populated by a bunch of companies, all of which are only a few years old, and many of which are growing fast.  It turns out that CIAM is “a thing”.  There are industry analysts and writers who apparently make a living writing about and analyzing the players in the world of CIAM.  It turns out that lots of enterprises and corporations are willing to pay lots of money for CIAM services.  In this blog article I will name some of these CIAM companies and I will poke fun at how one of the companies markets itself.  Continue reading “Companies that offer CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management)”

Yes one looks at the headline for this blog article and one realizes that the headline does not narrow things down very much.  But I will guess that this particular embarrassment that I am about to touch upon is one that most of us in the US have not thought about for a long time, given so many other more recent national embarrassments.  But somehow it got into my head to reflect recently on the unenviable rankings that the US earns in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, with the acronym PISA.  Continue reading “A reminder of a national embarrassment for the United States”

Alert reader Mike mentioned an internet-connected garage door trigger (see comment to previous blog article).  He’s right.  These triggers are very handy. And they only cost $30. Continue reading “Internet-connected garage door trigger”

Why is it that nearly every homeowner chooses to install the dopey garage door keypad shown at right?   I suppose the answer is that most of the time, the homeowner is not the person who actually makes the choice.  The choice is usually made by the company that installs the garage door opener.  The company that installs the garage door opener does not know any better — this is the only kind of keypad that they know how to install.  It is the only kind of keypad that is made by the company that makes the garage door opener.  But this keypad is dopey.  It only has one code number.  If you give out the code number to somebody, say a plumber, and later the plumber does not really need access any more, what are you going to do?  Change the code number?  Sure, except that now you have to somehow communicate the new code number to all of the other people who still need to have access.  They now all have to memorize the new code number.  There must be a better way.  And of course there is a better way.  Continue reading “Better and worse garage door keypads”

Some months have passed during which I sort of failed to realize that I have been using two-factor authentication with my car. Continue reading “two-factor authentication with cars”

In two recent blog articles (here and here) I have called out the USPTO for programming Patentcenter so that its Acknowledgment Receipts list false information about what a filer uploaded in Patentcenter.  The practitioner wishing to independently check such things will thus be interested to know how to calculate a SHA-512 hash (Wikipedia article, what the USPTO calls a “message digest”) of a PDF or DOCX file on the practitioner’s hard drive. One way to do this is with a command-line utility within Microsoft Windows. Continue reading “How to calculate SHA-512 hashes in Microsoft Windows”

The other day I heard from a friend of mine that somebody they know “has a living situation in which she needs a VPN” and the question was, could I recommend “a good VPN”.  These questions always drive me crazy.  I will explain why.  Continue reading “Getting a VPN”

If I am in my house and I hear a certain chime, it tells me that a vehicle has entered the driveway.  I find this to be very convenient.  Maybe this is during the day and it lets me know that a UPS truck or Fedex truck is arriving.  Or maybe it is in the evening and it lets me know that the expected dinner guests are arriving.  Either way, I can bestir myself and head down to the front door and greet the arriving visitor with a bit of advance warning.  How does it work, you might wonder?  I will tell you.  The photograph above right helps to explain how it works.  Continue reading “Being alerted when a vehicle enters your driveway”

In a weird way I got lucky.  Fifteen months ago, two things happened:

• an inattentive driver smacked into the back of my ICE car, totaling it (and thankfully not injuring anybody), and
• a client of my firm that had left some bills unpaid for a very long time happened to pay its bills rather unexpectedly.

I then paid cash for an electric vehicle. Continue reading “Time to switch to an EV”