I wasn’t going to post anything about this, but I’m here in Canada (home of a National Healthcare System), and I just watched Michael Moore’s documentary, Sicko.

I’m a mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program. While out at the park with my little brother, he got into an accident. He crashed his bike and was hurt. Many people around quickly jumped to his aide, some going out of their way and even injuring themselves to help him.

An ambulance was called. His mother came, and there was discussion about how they would pay for the ambulance ride. After some discussion, it was agreed that because his health insurance didn’t pay for the ambulance ride, they would drive to their doctor’s office later.

I couldn’t believe this, and I wasn’t going to let this happen. I paid for the ambulance ride, and I went to the hospital with him. How do you put a value on someone’s safety? How do you weigh the risk of $500 versus making sure a child is OK?

If you don’t think that America’s health care system is broken — wake up.

When Jodi lived in France, and I in Barcelona — when we got sick, we simply went to the hospital, or went to the doctor. We laughed at Jodi’s roommate who could never find out how to pay for one of her emergency hospital visits (she never did).  Why is that so hard for us Americans to do?

If 5 people can jump to the aide of one little boy, why can’t we all jump to the aide of 47 million Americans that can’t afford basic health insurance?

I’m consulting here in Winnipeg, Canada for a very cool dot.com. Teaching these developers Ruby on Rails is just too fun. They are Web Developers, mainly having used PHP, and like every great development shop, they’ve rolled their own tools for doing database access, managing the database (migrations), templating, deployment, etc. After teaching them the basics of Ruby on Rails and all these things that are built right in, they’re in love. I can’t wait to show them the built-in AJAX, testing, RESTful web-services, deployment, and all the other ruby-love and rails-goodness that I’ve come to love myself.

I certainly remember the day I fell in love with Ruby on Rails. Sigh.

If you’re a web developer doing web-stuff and you haven’t taken a look at Ruby on Rails, you’re missing out. Even learning a new framework (and language like Ruby) will expand your repertoire in your current language/framework of choice.

Did I mention I’m available for hire for consulting/training/project-kick-offs/development?

Just a quick note — I get requests from people who are actively seeking and promoting jobs for both PHP, Ruby, and Rails development (and other jobs like Engineers and IE Operations).  If you are in the market, shoot me an e-mail or just check out the Ruby and PHP meetups on meetup.com.

Last night I attended the Georgia Tech Computing Alumni Mixer at the new Klaus Advanced Computing Building.  It was a great event, and I’ll definitely be attending more.  I’ll also be dragging along all you GT folk who are reading this.

The new Klaus building is fantastic.  I gotta admit that the landscaping outside is still, quite horrific, but I didn’t actually notice until Jodi, who is the student liaison on the GT Planning and Design Committee, and architect extraodinaire pointed it out to me.  Nevertheless, the inside is just plain rad.  There are several nooks in between classrooms and offices with big plasma TVs with hookups freely available — making it perfect for impromptu Wii gaming presentations and generally just being able to say, “check this out” and fire up your laptop’s display on the screen.

I spoke with several people about possibly hosting the Atlanta Ruby User Group meetings at Georgia Tech, though it appears we have some space planned out at the ATDC, which should be great.

I’ll definitely be promoting and attending more of these events.  I am feeling very successful these days in life and in business, and much of it I owe to a great, challenging, and rewarding experience at good ole Georgia Tech.

I just watched No End in Sight tonight with Jodi. It left me wishing it was just a movie. I mean sure, it had evil villains, greed, explosions, murders, violence, over-the-top acting — but alas, it was sadly a very real documentary.

It is just utterly amazing (enraging/frightening) to me how badly the Iraq war has turned out, not just for the Iraqi people, but for the U.S. and the current (and future) Administration. This movie does a most excellent job of *not* covering the already hashed out “illegitimate reasons” for the war and instead just focuses on the hard facts that caused the U.S. to essentially lose Iraq the moment after we invaded. I wish the simple explanation was that we let a few men (and Condi) with little to no direct military experience, no real knowledge of the Arab world, and no direct experience in Iraq just continue to escalate under mismanagement and lack of leadership (they are the leadership), but it can’t be that simple. After watching this video of Dick Cheney circa 1994 talking about how invading Iraq would be a quagmire, there has to be something we Americans are just too dumb for those in the Administration to let us in on.

I remember thinking while watching it, that anyone currently thinking of public service or in public service really needs to see this movie. I know I’m just a whiny liberal, and now probably a traitor for using the words “lose” and war in the same sentence, but I really just can’t wrap my head around what possibly it is that the Administration knows and is “protecting” us Americans from.

America needs leadership who can actually lead instead of simply wanting to lead. We need leadership that rewards loyalty as equally as dissent. We have a serious problem on our hands, and the worst thing we can do is not learn from our mistakes and move forward.

Random Political Rant Over.