Bruce Clement

US Medical Insurance

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +1300

In most of the third world, you can only get good medical care if you can afford it, and for most people it isn't an option. When Tessa and I were touring India a few years back, she had a cold that was turning into bronchitis, we were rich tourists by local standards and had medical insurance but for reasons that really aren't worth dwelling on at length the only doctor I could get Tessa to was a night clinic in the shops by our hotel. The Dr there charged us Rs 50/- (About 2 NZ $) for the consultation and a course of medicine cost another Rs 100/- for us a trivial amount, but for the average Indian manual worker at least 2 days pay. In retrospect we think we probably stumbled across a charity clinic and if our $6 helped provide a doctors visit for a couple of locals then I don't mind. If they'd asked I would have donated a bit more than that.

The first world on the other hand largely has socialised medicine, a visit to a doctor here probably costs at least NZ$ 70, but various government subsidies bring that down to $20 to 30 and if you need to go to hospital the tax payer picks up the whole tab. Most other first world nations are similar although details vary from country to county. For reasons that are obscure, the glaring exception to this is the USA, and for once we have it so much better. Over there, if you aren't super rich, don't have health insurance and get sick you are worse off than those Indian workers, from what I understand the charity clinics provide almost no help.

This has made an enormous opening in the market for companies offering lower cost insurance offerings. Have a look at this site HCI Medical "People are finding it difficult to obtain and keep sufficient coverage at a cost they can afford. Unfortunately, healthcare insurance costs continue to rise." And goes on to point out that Americans need medical insurance to protect from the costs of medical disasters. [...] Having medical insurance is essential when it comes to keeping yourself protected from the expenses associated with medical disasters."

All I can say is that for once we seem to have it better than they do.

Source: US Medical Insurance

High Ranking Sites Directory

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +1300

I've long had a few general and a couple of special purpose reciprocal web directories. I started with Search New Zealand, then added Search Me NZ and Weblinks, Weblinks was originally a restructured Search New Zealand that was intended to replace the original and Search Me was an experiment to see if formatting, web thumbs etc. would make a difference (the answer was yes, and the result was negative). In the end each directory acquired a life of its own and now exists as a resource in its own right.

Inspired by the success of the other directories I created a couple of special purpose directories, Sports Directory and Affiliate Directory to try and list information about affiliate programs available for NZ web masters. Neither of these have been either a complete success or a total failure, they pretty much limp along.

On Saturday I stumbled across an American directory that lists only Google PR 4 or better USA sites, I found this idea inspirational. All my current sites are restricted to NZ sites (or foreign sites with strong New Zealand association) only, but given the number of foreign junk sites out there always hammering on my sites submission pages I thought it would be nice to try listing only high ranking quality NZ sites and Top Ranking NZ was born. For the moment I've set the limit at PR 3 but will raise it to 4 if I discover that there is sufficient interest to make it likely to be a success at that level.

So be quick and submit your quality PR3 NZ sites before I raise the limit

Source: High Ranking Sites Directory

Musings on change

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +1300

On Saturday Tessa and I went up to the top of Mt Albert and looked across to what had once been my teenage home, just as I had stood there and looked across a many times when I was a teenager in the 1970s, before I moved away from first home, then Auckland and now back. The trees are taller and it is harder to pick out the house among the trees, but the mountain is the same and in many ways the house. All around there is change, the new motorway, changed buildings, but the basic layout of the roads is unchanged and so is the geography.

Businesses aren't like that, many of the iconic businesses of my youth and early adulthood are still around but merged or changed beyond recognition. I have a life insurance policy taken out in the late 1970s with Norwich Union, this afternoon out of curiosity I visited their web site to discover they are now Aviva and I vaguely remembered hearing of some merger, perhaps it's middle age, but I feel nostalgic for the old name.

People aren't like that either. Tonight Tessa and I went to another of my old haunts, Albert Park, for the Chinese lantern festival which we really enjoyed. Again things had changed, when I was in my late teens and early twenties and frequently visited the park it was different, Central Auckland was very much a city for the English descendants, now it is a much more vibrant, truly multi-cultural city the festival was attended by a truly multi-ethnic mix of people, another change that has made Auckland better and stronger, just as the business changes make them better and stronger. While we were there we saw the first fresh durian I've seen in Auckland (canned and frozen don't count) we bought some and ate it as we walked ... a middle aged Asian couple stopped and remarked that they thought Europeans didn't like durian.

The mountain and the stream remain, the people change and those of us remaining change with them.

Source: Musings on change

Valuing A Revenue Producing Domain Name

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

This is a response I gave on the Namepros forum to the question "I have a portfolio of parked domains making 10K per year, what should I sell them for"

The value of your portfolio depends on who you are selling it to. If it's an experienced investor in parked domains they should have their own view of what multiplier of the revenue they are prepared to pay.

If it's to someone that wants the name or its traffic for some other purpose they may have a different view of the value of the domain to them.

When I'm offering to sell a domain with good revenue to a non-domainer I explain the site's current traffic profile and the revenue it's generating me. Then I explain that for me the value of the domain is 5 years profit (revenue less registration renewals) and make it clear that this figure is my opening offer.

So in that scenario I'd ask a little under $50K and I'd settle for a lower value. If I really wanted to make the sale now I would probably accept somewhere between 30 and 40. Don't go any lower than three years revenue, unless you suspect it will tail off, for example if it's related to a current fad.

On the other hand if it's a small group of domains that are producing that amount of revenue it is likely be composed of names with attributes that extend well beyond the mere parking revenue it generates. You owe it to yourself to seek other forms of valuation or get a proper appraisal to ensure that you don't sell yourself short.

Bruce Clement is a keen domain name investor and commentator. You are free to copy this article under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ licence as long as you publish it unchanged and link either to Bruce's blog Domaining .nz at http://domainingnz.blogspot.com/ or to his hub site at http://www.clement.co.nz/

Source: Valuing A Revenue Producing Domain Name

Internationalised Domain Names

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Domain names are human readable names such as Example.com that people can use to find web sites. When first defined, domain names could contain only the ASCII letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and the hyphen (-).

These characters are all that English requires to create meaningful names, and served for the early days on the Internet, but since the Internet has gone international, native speakers of other languages that require different characters for intelligibility have become major users of the internet. This restriction on internet domain names has disadvantaged them.

For example, the content of NewZealand.com is pretty obvious to any English speaker, but to Chinese speakers it may be completely unintelligible and they would be more likely to look for the same information on ???.cn

Since changes to the underlying mechanisms to directly support these names could not be achieved quickly a work-around was developed where international characters could be encoded into ASCII and the authors of web browsers adopted this convention. ???.com would be encoded as xn--95q960c09z.com, but as the web browser did all the translation work, the user only needs to type the Chinese characters and never sees the xn-- name.

When used for its intended purpose it was a great boon for non English speaking surfers. Unfortunately criminals quickly saw an opportunity because some non-English languages contain characters that look superficially like English letters, for example the Greek letters Chi and Rho on the Papal arms look like the latin letters X and P.

If you display the domain name xn--pypal-4ve.com it looks remarkably like paypal.com (xn--pypal-4ve.com was used by an Internet security expert to demonstrate the problem and has now been retired). Because of their use in phishing, some browsers refuse to show IDNs and some registries, including the .nz one, have refused to register domain names using this convention. This has frustrated legitimate users of IDNs.

Source: Internationalised Domain Names

Negotiation, more than just haggling

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

About a year ago I received a simple inquiry through NameDrive on one of my parked generic domain names. "Are you interested in selling this domain name? If so can you please contact me" giving an ISP customer email address. That's very little information and as email is fairly inscrutable at the best of times, I didn't have an idea why this person would be interested in this domain name, so I knew I'd be negotiating blind.

I am contacted by a lot of people who believe I should sell them my generic names for nothing and unless there's some identifiable reason why the prospect desperately wants a specific domain name, queries as bare as this stop as soon as I quote a realistic starting price, so I couldn't be bothered with the usual sales spiel and simply sent back a one line reply "Yes, I would be prepared to sell it, I'd want NZ$ 500 though." and thought nothing more of it.

Two days later there was another email from him. "Would you accept $300.00."

Normally I'd haggle over the price and would most likely have agreed to something around $400, but I felt like I'd like a little more this time.

My reply:

Advertising on the parked domain brought in US$ 80.79 during the year 01/10/06 to 30/09/07. Using 3 years revenue as a yardstick that means that the domain has a revenue producing value of NZ$ 311.42 without any further changes.
Using what I've learned since parking the domain I'm sure I could increase that relatively easily, especially as it was only making US$ 0.09 per click. A 2 minute search shows affiliate possibilities through The Surf Shop, Godo, and Easy Bed that should easily outstrip that and there's probably a lot more out there.
I think I'd prefer to hang onto it rather than accept any less than $500.

A little over twenty minutes later, the sale was agreed, at my asking price.

All the relevant revenue records are stored at Name Drive so it took me a about 5 minutes to research and write these two short paragraphs that increased the price $200 over the offered price and $100 over what I would normally have taken.

The lesson is that if you can justify the price to yourself, you're half way to justifying the price to your potential purchaser.

Source: Negotiation, more than just haggling

What is Domain Parking?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

In its simplest form domain parking is a service where someone owns a domain name and another person or company provides a very simple website for that domain. Some domain registrars automatically park domains that their owners don't host elsewhere on a simple page they construct on their servers.

In the early days that's all parking was. Then an entrepreneur realised that there were a lot of page views going to waste on these empty sites. The world of commerce hates wasting resources and before long

Source: What is Domain Parking?

Viral marketing of Open Source Software

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

When plain text isn't enough we often need to use Microsoft formats because so many people can read them on their computers. We can't use other formats because only a few people have the software to read them.

So, let those of us who don't like this change it. It isn't going to happen overnight, but over time it can happen. I'm not going to argue why we should wish to do this, that's a whole other article, this intel is written to help those who already want to promote Open Source Software (OSS).

I use Open Office.org as my example as it is a standards compliant, cross platform, office suite that many people who are not open source advocates choose to use. The same technique would work for many other open source products, once they have reached a moderate level of acceptance.

What an individual can do

As one person, you can't do a lot, but you can do a little. As the auld Scots saying goes Many a mickle maks a muckle meaning any little help you give will add into the efforts others are making.

Whenever you need to send a document, send it in Open Office.org's native format. You'll get a reply back saying 'I can't read this', to which you reply with something like one of:

You need to download Open Office.org from ...
Oh. I'll send it in another format first chance I get, or you can save time by downloading ...
Sorry, I forgot you can't read those, might be best if you download Open Office.org ready for next time I forget

Obviously you have to pick your moments. It's not a good idea to do this to an important client, or with your resume when job hunting, but other than that just do it!

One thing an authority (business or academic) can do

Mandate that documents sent by applicants / suppliers are in Open Office.org format. If questioned about this explain that you use Open Office.org internally and can't risk any mistranslations

For hardware vendors

There's a local chain store that sells their own house brand of (sometimes re-badged) computer accessories.

In recent times I've noticed that they are filling the unused portion of the "driver" CDs with Open Office.org. So far I've received copies of Open Office.org with a TV tuner card & an ADSL modem.

No idea why they have chosen to do this, maybe they just see it as a low cost way of making it look like they can bundle software like the "big boys"

So, if you're sending out a CD and there's space on it, pop in a copy of Open Office.org.

Summary

There's many ways to get people to adopt open software. Evangelism is one, giving it to people is another, even forcing it down people's throats.

Let's get out there and get the world on open software.

I wrote this three years ago, but I believe it's as true today as it was then. This is a very slightly expanded version of the original article.

Bruce Clement is a keen domain name investor and commentator. You are free to copy this article under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ licence as long as you publish it unchanged and link either to Bruce's blog ¿Que? at http://www.que.co.nz/ or to his hub site at http://www.clement.co.nz/

Source: Viral marketing of Open Source Software

Meat does more for climate change than food miles

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

With all the recent concern about fuel miles affecting New Zealand's meat exports to Europe by causing people to avoid buying it I was fascinated when I found this interesting report in the environment area of New Scientist

Source: Meat does more for climate change than food miles

Beware the Free DNS

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

When people first start publishing on the internet they often start by creating content on free services like Geocities or Blogspot. After a while they decide they need their own domain name to help separate their content from the other denizens of the free host.

Source: Beware the Free DNS

Teen uses microbes to biodegrade plastic bags

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Polyethylene bags are an environmental curse because they are expected to take thousands of years to decompose, and worldwide their use is growing.

In India, for example, over the last 15 years plastic bags have taken over from traditional, biodegradable or recyclable wrappings and when I visited there recently I was appalled by how much the urban landscape was spoiled by discarded bags caught in fences, railings, hedges, trees or just lying on the ground.

The Record recently reported that Canadian high school student Daniel Burd from in Warterloo, Ontario, developed a process for breaking down plastic bags and demonstrated it at a school science fair.

Burd reasoned that slow as the process was, something must make the plastic degrade, and that something would probably be a soil living microbe (bacteria, amoeba, or yeast).

He experimented by taking some dirt from a rubbish dump and adding that to a mixture of ground up plastic bags and a bacterial growth medium he made from yeast and simple household chemicals. After a while he discovered a noticeable decomposition in his bags and he extracted the bacteria that were thriving on the plastic.

Eventually he identified two strains, Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas, that when both present and in ideal conditions would reduce the plastic mass by 32%. He then developed a digester that would give the bacteria their ideal environment and achieved a 43% degradation of the ground bags in six weeks.

Burd thinks this would be easy to scale up to industrial scale as all that's needed is a fermenter, growth medium and waste plastic. The bacteria provide most of the energy required by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a carbon dioxide.

Burd won first prize in a Canada wide science fair taking home $10,000 in prize money, a $20,000 scholarship and recognition for his use of science to help the environment.

Bruce Clement is a keen domain name investor and commentator. You are free to copy this article under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ licence as long as you publish it unchanged and link either to Bruce's blog ¿Que? at http://www.que.co.nz// or to his hub site at http://www.clement.co.nz/

Source: Teen uses microbes to biodegrade plastic bags

Pacific Island Pigs

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

The pig followed human colonization of the pacific, so why did it get to the Polynesian islands, but miss out on reaching New Zealand until European contact? Or did it?

I got alerted to this through a web search turning up a paper from 2001 by Melinda S. Allen, Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith and Ann Horsburgh, researchers at Auckland University, who became interested as an outgrowth of the genetic work of Matisoo-Smith and colleagues on the ancestry and historic dispersal of the kiore (Polynesian rat).

Their paper begins "Pig was one of three animal domesticates in prehistoric Polynesia, transported from Near Oceania into Polynesia as far afield as the Hawaiian Islands by the region's earliest colonists."

Summarising Allen et al
Humans introduced pigs into New Guinea at an unknown date with archeological traces from 6000 BP, or perhaps much earlier, and "By 3000 BP, pig had been dispersed to West Polynesia (including Fiji) by Lapita-pottery bearing populations, along with dog, chicken, and the Pacific Rat." They spend some time discussing the absence of the pig from Easter Island and New Zealand, then got into discussing mitochondrial DNA analysis which unfortunately went over my head in places, but if I read them correctly they have been unable to do mitochondrial DNA analyses on ancient bone samples, but on modern pigs they have tests that distinguish Polynesian from European pigs and the New Zealand kune-kune pig corresponds to neither breed.
No pigs on Easter Island (Rapanui)

"In general, there is a decline in flora and fauna as one moves from the large, rich Melanesian islands, to the smaller and more remote Polynesian ones. Rapanui is the extreme of this rule. In ancient times, livestock consisted of the Polynesian chicken and rat (Kio`e), there being no evidence of either pigs or dogs." G. McCall

Pigs in New Zealand

So if the Polynesian ancestors of the Maori had pigs were there pigs in New Zealand before European contact? Apparently not

"There is a most interesting Maori reference to pigs in the journals of Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his first voyage to New Zealand. Near the North Cape of the North Island in December 1769, Cook's Tahitian interpreter, Tupaea, was told by the local Maoris that N.W. by N. or N.N.W. was a large country to which some people had sailed to in a very large canoe, the passage taking up to a month.
"From this expedition some members returned and told their countrymen that they had seen a country where people ate hogs. And for these animals they used the same name, Booah, as is used in the Islands.
"Though Tupaea ridiculed the story, claiming that it could only be believed if they had brought back pigs to prove it there is a good reason to regard this as a memory of a return voyager to Tonga, Samoa, or even the lower Islands." -- Percy Tipene

OK, if the pig wasn't here before the Europeans, and isn't a European or Polynesian breed, where on earth did Cook get them from? If seems possible he didn't. Percy Tipene's paper suggests that the ancestor of the kune-kune may well have been introduced by later European visitors. Presumably supplanting the porkers introduced by Cook's expedition.

And finally

What happened to the Polynesian chicken? Enquiring minds want to know.

Bruce Clement is a keen domain name investor and commentator. You are free to copy this article under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ licence as long as you publish it unchanged and link either to Bruce's blog at http://kiore.blogspot.com/ or to his hub site at http://www.clement.co.nz/

Source: Pacific Island Pigs

Truth: Pravda Lives

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Remember Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party of The USSR? Despite its name meaning "Truth", for nearly eighty years years it was the boring parrot of whatever its totalitarian masters wanted it to say no matter how remote from truth that was.

Somehow it survived the break-up of the Soviet Union, although it did split between the hard-line communists who now run the paper edition of the newspaper and a more pro-Russian faction that created the Pravda.ru news service.

Pravda.ru is now a tabloid website that contains Google ads and other signs of on-line capitalism, and recently published an article on a group of Americans who met for a weekend of fish-hook suspension.

The article was originally written in Russian and the quaint translation benefits from careful reading which reveals more a whiff of the old communist anti-Americanism and puritanical disapproval of western trends.

Hypocritically they purport to disapprove of the articles they publish that reveal items nobody would know about if not for sites like theirs.

Bruce Clement is a keen domain name investor and commentator. You are free to copy this article under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ licence as long as you publish it unchanged and link either to Bruce's blog at http://kiore.blogspot.com/ or to his hub site at http://www.clement.co.nz/

Source: Truth: Pravda Lives

Auckland, New Zealand, Daily Photo Blog

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

When you live in a country known for its natural beauty and pastoral countryside, it can be hard sometimes to appreciate the beauty of the urban landscape where most of us actually live.

For about 6 months I've been visiting an amazing photoblog called Auckland Daily Photo by a Lachezar Karadzhov about whom I know absolutely nothing except he takes some amazing photographs. According to the site he was a finalist in the Best Oceanian Photoblogs 2007 competition for his Lachezar's photo_notes site, and I find this easy to believe.

With a name like Auckland Daily Photo the content should be fairly obvious although he does sometimes include photos from other parts of the country. He publishes a photograph nearly every day and he's been doing it for around two years. To date, the photo I like best is one from April called The corner that shows a cyclist at the corner of Alex Evans and upper Symonds Streets. He's manipulated the photo to enhance the brilliant hue of the advertising posters and made the rest of the photo black and white, except for the baleful red glare of two traffic lights.

Well worth a browse and one of the few non computer sites I have on my regular browse list.

I have no connection with the site or its owner. It's just one of of my bookmarks.

Bruce Clement is a keen domain name investor and commentator. You are free to copy this article under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ licence as long as you publish it unchanged and link either to Bruce's blog at http://kiore.blogspot.com/ or to his hub site at http://www.clement.co.nz/

Source: Auckland, New Zealand, Daily Photo Blog

Faster short distance commuting by scooter

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A few years back I used to commute to work from Massey on a bus that ended up at the Britomart interchange which is about 2.5 km from the office in Parnell.

With my version of power walking I could cover the 2.5km in about 20 minutes, but I wanted something faster, and I didn't want to arrive at work covered in sweat so I took it a little slower.

There were buses I could catch to get to work but they didn't connect and were slow and erratic in rush hour traffic. What's worse they still only got me to about 800 metres from work.

My solution was to get a child's folding scooter, like the ones that were all the rage with the little ones a few years back, admittedly a sturdier than normal one with large wheels.

On flat ground you can move at about two to three times the speed of walking so I got to work in about 10 minutes without raising a sweat and if it rains I could fold it up and take it in a bus or taxi.

And when I could use it, I got a solid 10 minutes of low impact exercise, twice a day, which was good for the weight loss.

My personal experience is that they are a bit unstable, especially at speed and on rough ground, so make sure you pick one with relatively large wheels and stay very alert at all times, stones and broken paving that you wouldn't even notice on a bicycle will throw you off. Be prepared to hit the ground running.

Bruce Clement is a keen domain name investor and commentator. You are free to copy this article under the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/ licence as long as you publish it unchanged and link either to Bruce's blog ¿Que? at http://www.que.co.nz/ or to his hub site at http://www.clement.co.nz/

Source: Faster short distance commuting by scooter