Richard's Blog

One side benefit of the work we are doing with the State of New Mexico are some photos on Maureen’s blog like the following from White Sands National Monument

As I have been travelling with my family and working in different time zones, I have had the opportunity to experience working in various time zones.

I periodically wonder which is the theoretical optimal time zone to live and work in.

At present this is a somewhat  theoretical analysis – because in actuality I live in NY which puts me near 3 major airports, the Amtrak train which gets me anywhere from Boston to Washington roundtrip in a day, and is 90 miles from the office in Waterbury, CT.  This puts me in good geographic location to get to various meetings.

Plus Dana and I have family in the New York area.

But I am writing a blog post at 6am which is middle of the day for the office in Dhaka and Therap team members are still online in Oregon and Hawaii.  Last night I was able to contact Justin and others in the United States after my kids went to bed and it was still a reasonable end of work day time in the US.  During the middle of the day its much harder to talk and interact with people – as they are generally interacting with customers or others who would not be as available after general office hours.

As technology advances, the issue of how to split up work and non-work evolves. Clearly having cellphones and portable devices lets people go to a school activity or a medical and still be reachable for work.  And there are still many rules about what hourly vs non-hourly employees are able to do under various laws.

But if society were drawing up plans what would make sense?  For efficiency? For enjoyment? For national competitiveness?

Would people really prefer to be indoors and at work between 10am and 2pm when that is often the nicest time of the day with the most light.

When I am home and my kids are asleep, I generally prefer working to any other activity. I find thinking about technology change or conference planning or developing new concepts  or most of the other issues I deal with more interesting than most other activities that people do inside.

So if I didn’t have to get to physically get to meetings, I would just as soon be in a different time zone from people who prefer to be reached during a different time of day than I would like to be working.

It will be interesting to see how changes in technology allow not just shifts in location (rural vs urban, telecommuting, etc) but significant shifts in time zones. Obviously part of the problem with this is that very few countries have multiple time zones to pick from (Russia, France if you include Tahiti, the USA if you include Hawaii and Alaska).

I came across an article on yahoo with the following symbol.  We spend a lot of time at Therap trying to have useful symbols on our website. As I have been traveling around Europe I have paid special attention to symbols and Icons as I generally can’t read the words on signs.

 So apparently that is the symbol for a low tire-pressure warning on a car. 

I am not sure what the lesson is from this. But its an interesting question of whether symbols should be easily and obviously recognizable – or is it sufficient to have to educate people on what symbols mean.  It seems to me they could have made that more obviously a tire – I have spent enough time in Montana and Wyoming that that could also have been a symbol for a horse getting outside a corral without a horseshoe (ok that wouldn’t show up on a car dashboard).  But do you really want to be going 70 miles per hour and have some symbol appear you have to guess what it means.

We are starting to think about conferences for 2011.  It feels like only yesterday we ran the first Therap conference in Southbury, Connecticut and wondered if people would come to a conference where all of the sessions related to electronic documentation for providers of service to people with developmental disabilities.
Later this year we have our 3rd annual conference coming up in both Maine and Oregon.  We have 2011 conferences already on our planning calendar.

We will be adding regional conferences in additional states for 2011.

However, these conferences should not replace attendance at our annual provider administrator conference coming up in Fishkill, NY in Febuary 2011.

In addition to the conferences we are adding a lot of state specific material in state specific pages on our website.

We also have continued to increase the Therap team with people with extensive experience who are based in states ranging from Hawaii to Kansas to New York to Tennessee and more.

Some people come to Europe and visit Paris and the Louvre and various art museums (which I might add many people never visit while home in New York or elsewhere).  I have taken different trips which ended up having assorted themes. In addition to travelling with Dana and the kids, this trip has been a lot about seeing the changes in former eastern Europe and thinking about change in general (which is a favorite topic of mine and partly why I like doing businesses which focus on using technology to help people’s daily routines).

We visited the Museum of Communism in Prague. There were pictures of Prague in 1968 with the Russian tanks during the Prague Spring.    I had visited Prague in 1976. There were many changes between my visits to Prague in 1976 and 1981 when I drove around eastern Europe with friends from college.  Back then to call my parents and let them know I was doing ok – I had to go to the central post to get an international line. Now we have high speed internet access from almost any hotel room.

Many changes are quite apparent – when we drove around in 1981 there were very few cars, we drove in towns where everyone came out to see who was driving a French car through town. Today the towns are filled with tourists.

This got me thinking about changes. Some good, some not so good. And it also depends on perspective. There is a different perspective that I have as a tourist or visitor, than a resident would have.

In  Berlin I commented to someone that I had not been in Berlin since 1981.  The woman who I don’t think was born in 1981 commented that every 10 years Berlin has changed.  1989 the Berlin Wall came down.  In the early 60’s the Berlin wall went up. During the 1970’s Berlin was split between East and West – with periodic changes in relationship between east and west.  Obviously during the 1940’s Berlin was a center of World War II. After the war Berlin was divided into sectors.  The list goes on. (And I am excited to visit some of the museums focused on Berlin’s history).

Think about how much change has gone on in so little time in some places. In the United States there are many changes we have lived through – especially with regards to technology- but in Eastern Europe they have had both technological change and all of this political change – which has had dramatic effects on neighborhoods and quality of life. Life in Prague today in terms of purchasing food at a supermarket or bakery bears very little resemblance to my recollection of purchasing bread in 1976 and 1981 in Prague or Dresden, when basically there always seemed a line to purchase just basic loaves of bread. However,  life in New York City for example seems to have changed a lot less – the big differences in going to the local market is that all our purchases are now tracked, we can call our family on a cellphone if the brand of food we wanted to buy isn’t available, or (as my son points out who is watching me type this blog) we can point our droid at a barcode and it will tell us information about the product and where else it is sold.

I enjoy thinking about all these changes and the possibilities for improvements in quality of life for people.  Seeing all these changes in Berlin and Prague got me thinking about whether we are ready for even the next changes at Therap. The product we have today is the one we were planning as an improvement and change when we started in 2003.  What are the changes we will see in 2020?  I have all sorts of thoughts on that – but I will leave those for another blog.



Travelling around Europe by train has been an interesting and enjoyable experience for the most part.

Most of the trains are well marked once you know how to read the schedules. The schedules are pretty consistant throughout Europe so no matter which language I don’t speak – from Italian to Hungarian to Czech – they use similar schedules so I can follow what is happening.

However, it seems I generally make each possible mistake once on the trains and then I understand the rules.

I was looking at the overall electronic schedule to find the track for a train from Budapest, Hungary to Brno, Czech Republic.  First they didn’t have a track listed. Then I saw a number 1 – so I walked all the way from platform 6 to platform 1 – and then heard an announcement that the train would be leaving soon on track 7 – actually all I heard was praha and 7 – but assumed that was the announcement – and then confirmed on these printed forms they had.

It turns out that all of the electronic signs had 2 lines – and the 2^nd hadn’t posted yet. So I was looking at the first line which had a 1 on it.  I still don’t know what the first line was for.

This got me thinking a bit about consistency of signage and interfaces.  One of our goals is to make Therap easy to have staff go from one module to another – with similar interfaces and wording.  I know we don’t fully have that accomplished.

I recently wondered what sort of experiences are useful to reinforce consistency for programmers. Is it only using ipads, macs, pcs and other electronic devices – or are there useful lessons to be learned from daily life events – such as train travel.

If you are interesting in presenting or being on a user panel at our 2011 national provider administration conference in Fishkill NY in February – please let us know.

It will be our biggest conference ever.

Friends of ours had recently been in Venice and said they saw Andrew Zimmern of the Travel Channel at a restaurant called Al Covo in Venice.

So we decided to try and find this restaurant. Finding anything in Venice is always fun given the small streets and canals. It was even more of an experience traveling on a vaporetto (a water bus) in a rainstorm. 

So we arrived at the restaurant on a Thursday night to find out that the restaurant is not open on Wednesday or Thursday. That was fine – we checked and they were open for lunch the next day. And lunch hours were until 3:30pm.

We arrived at 2:05pm and were told the the restaurant kitchen was not open.  After 5 or 10 minutes of discussions with one of the restaurant staff – we realized that right under “Opening Hours – 12:00-15:30″ it stated ” Summer Hours  12:00-14:00″ .

At that point I realized this really was a user interface issue. Why would someone put a misleading piece of information first and then the needed piece (and contradictory piece) of information second.

We were able to speak with Diane who runs the place. Diane is originally from Austin, Texas and moved to Venice with her husband. We talked about living year round in Venice. And we are looking forward to seeing her restaurant on Andrew Zimmern’s new show on the Travel Channel – as we didn’t get to taste their cuttlefish.

We ended up having the pizza around the corner – which was quite tasty.

I had a nice day of swimming and waterskiing in Lake Como, Italy – which partly explains why I haven’t had a cellphone attached to me 24×7 lately. At night we went to a local restaurant.

For those long time readers of my blog – I am sure you are wondering – how is this going to relate to Therap.

So at night we had probably the best focaccia bread I have ever eaten. However my family ate it rather quickly after a day of waterskiing and hiking and I didn’t get a picture of the focaccia bread.

So all I have is this description of that focaccia bread which came out of a wood burning stove with wonderful seasonings. It differed from almost every focaccia bread I have eaten in the US. It was very flat – flatter than a thin crust pizza. But a picture would have given a better sense of what it was like.

This is why we have added the capability to add pictures to incident reports and other documents in Therap. It often is not enough to describe an injury. On persons description of a large cut is another persons small cut. And even using words  on colors or other important information can vary by person doing the reporting.

Perhaps a picture would not do justice to the focaccia I had – but we haven’t yet thought how to create a taste sample over the internet.

I will be leaving tonight for Europe.  My family will be doing some train travel.   I am not quite sure exactly where we will be heading, but we will be starting in Italy.

I will have email and phone contact with the office on a daily basis.

However, I will not be as available for phone calls as when I am in the US.  Essentially I will have a break from a 24×7 on call schedule for a bit.
Therap however has a whole team of people covering the system and support as usual.

Please feel free to reach out to me through the office or my email.