Saturday, June 28, 2003

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Amtrak Kept Afloat by Fear of Flying? Beth is looking into Amtrack reservations for my father-in-law, who is a non-flier. $296 from Albany to Minneapolis. That is more than I would expect to pay for a restricted airline ticket (I aim to never pay more than $200). It occurs to me that a significant portion of Amtrak's anemic revenue must come from people who are afraid of flying. 9:56:05 AM    comment []

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Getting Docs to Write Rx's for Generics We are having a hard time getting ourselves to remember to always, but always, ask physicians to write a prescription for generics. I really don't understand why they don't write prescriptions for generics by default. It is obviously in the best interest of their patient. I also think it is in their best financial interest, in a very indirect, macro-economic way: if less of the "healthcare pie" is consumed by non-physician healthcare costs, such as prescriptions, then more pie remains for the docs themselves. My only hypothesis would be that physicians are engaging in an energy-conserving strategy: some percentage of patients will object to a prescription written for a generic, and physicians don't want to waste time arguing with them, so they tend toward the path of least resistance. I'm not in love with this hypothesis, though:  I would think that the patients who object to generics are becoming ever-smaller in number. 9:53:13 AM    comment []

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Auto-Numbering Shapes in Visio You know how you have this big flowchart, and you are trying to walk people through it, and you keep having to say things like “okay, now we are at the second diamond in the top left corner”; or, you just hold up the piece of paper and point at the node you are on? Wouldn’t it be AWESOME if Visio would just number the dang things for you? Of course, you would want the option for those numbers to be static, even if you move shapes around and otherwise futz with your diagram, wouldn’t you? Well, guess what, Visio does this! Just go: Tools-Marcos-Visio Extras-Number Shapes. Hopefully this is available in your version of Visio (I have Visio Pro 2002). I have no idea why this is buried so deeply. I’m sure that if there were a numbering option off of Tools it would see a lot more use. 8:26:31 AM    comment []