Last month I mentioned that this website had a record number of new visitors. I honestly thought that was an anomalous one day spike in traffic. Instead we’ve had a sustained increase in new visitors and people signing up to use the workers’ compensation calculators for free.
Since February 13, 20091 I’ve enjoyed posting about:
Ever since I relaunched this website I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind that getting to 500 users would be a big deal. There are literally hundreds of workers’ compensation professionals who rely on this website and its calculators to make their lives a little easier. This certainly feels like a big deal to me.
I’ve just finished the COLA / SAWW future life pension rate calculator to determine what the future life pension rates are assuming a COLA / SAWW increase of 4.7% per year. If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester for this COLA / SAWW calculator for life pension increases, please drop me a line and ask for access. 2
Please keep in mind that this is not a life pension with SAWW / COLA increase commutation calculator. The actuarial math involved in performing that calculation is … intense.
As an interesting side note, this week I saw my very first DEU commutation of a life pension with COLA increase. Unlike the typical commutations everyone receives from the DEU, this commutation calculation was devoid of the actual methodology used. I was pretty disappointed to find this out.
No matter! Help beta test the new calculator by dropping me a line. After you’ve given it a whirl, let me know what you think.
At the end of January I was fortunate enough to witness more security shenanigans.
A man in line behind me took off all metal from his person and placed it in the provided gray plastic bin. Here’s a summary of the exchange between this gentleman and the security guard:
Security: Sir, you’re going to have to take off your belt.
Man: My belt buckle is metal. I took it off, see? There’s no metal in my belt.
Security: That doesn’t matter, sir. Please take off your belt.
Man: But, there’s no metal in it.
Security: Sir, you’re going to need to put your belt through the metal detector.
The man finally took off his belt…
I have several problems with this2 “security procedure.”
It is irrational and absurd.
This system encourages security guards to be lazy and unobservant, encouraging the hiring of unsophisticated or untrained security guards.
This system places too much importance on the value of x-ray machines.
Let’s take this point by point, shall we?
First, when challenged to provide any rationale for their demands, the security staff resorts to argumentum ad verecundiam. 3 There’s no reason why a non-metal belt buckle or, heaven forbid a piece of paper, needs to be fed into the x-ray machine. They’re not security risks.
Second, the current system allows the security guards to insist all detachable belongings be fed into the x-ray machine. 45 The current system essentially removes the incentive for hiring trained, competent, or intelligent staff. And, really, why should they? A mannequin with a sign around its neck could instruct everyone to remove all belongings.
Finally, the current system allows all the security guards at the Oakland state building to place too much importance on the x-ray machines. Once you’ve placed your belongings6 in the plastic bin, you aren’t given a second glance. What happens if someone decides to conceal a dangerous non-metalic object on their person? These security guards believe that paper should be x-rayed! I’m supposed to trust in their powers of keen observation?
Can you tell I’m frustrated with the security situation at the Oakland WCAB?
Latin argument for “appeal to authority” aka “I have a badge so I must be right” aka “‘Cause I said so, that’s why.” [↩]
Don’t forget to put your right to privacy in that bin. After all, you don’t have anything to hide from Big Brother, do you? [↩]
For a while they actually required the removal of shoes too. Taking your shoes off at the airport is bad enough. But at the Oakland state building??? [↩]
And dignity! Don’t forget your dignity! Don’t worry, after a couple of times through this system it will be small enough to fit comfortably between your cell phone and belt buckle. [↩]
A few months ago someone e-mailed me this video clip about an attorney struggling with EAMS. My thanks go out to Matthew Brueckner of the Law Office of Matthew Brueckner for putting this together.
Get your prescription. When getting your eye prescription, being sure to have your physician provide your “Pupillary Distance.” 2 I’ve put together a chart at the bottom you can take with you to the doctor’s office.
Measure your glasses. Measure your current glasses using a metric ruler. The most important measurement is going to be “Temple Width.” The “Temple Width” is the overall front width of your glasses.
Choose frames. On the website of your choice, narrow down the available glasses by the “Temple Width.” From there you can narrow down the available choices.
Wait. Both of the websites I ordered glasses from took about two weeks to get the glasses to me.
Double check. Take your new glasses back to your eye doctor. They will have a machine that can check the prescriptions on the lenses.
I’m out of the office for one lousy day and what happens? A record number of visitors to PDRater.com, that’s what.1 I suppose I should spend more time up at the Santa Rosa WCAB, eh?
On Wednesday February 18, 2009 this website had a record number of individual visitors. On that day I 234 unique visitors. 2 In the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly low number of unique visitors to a website.
This sort of website traffic is considered to be very “high quality” as in the number of people from my target demographic comprise the vast majority of those people who actually visit my site.
I have no intention of manufacturing FEC Ranks 9 through 20 for the following reasons:
Maintaining Standards. The entire point of a rating schedule is to allow a standardized method for calculating disability and expressing those disability calculations. If I invented my own FEC Rank system beyond the scheduled 1-8 Ranks, I would essentially be creating my own rating calculation system. I’ve gone to considerable lengths to ensure that the rating strings produced by these permanent disability calculators are as standardized, recognizeable, and universal as possible.
FEC Ranks are Irrelevant. The FEC Rank system is a simplified method of applying DFEC adjustment factors. When you use the FEC Rank of a particular body part to adjust the standard using the charts on pages 2-6 and 2-7 of the 2005 PDRS (permanent disability rating schedule), what you’re really doing is essentially multiplying your standard disability against the FEC adjustment factor associated with the particular FEC Rank for the body part in question. An FEC Rank is only useful for telling you the appropriate FEC adjustment factor to apply to the standard disability. Thus, FEC Ranks are irrelevant and FEC adjustment factors are all important.
Arbitrary FEC Ranks. FEC Rank 1 has an FEC adjustment factor of “1.100”. However, using the OgilvieDFEC rebuttal formula, it is possible to end up with very low FEC adjustment factors. In extreme circumstances it would be possible to have a negative FEC adjustment factor. The only way to resolve this would be to have several possible negative FEC Ranks. Besides being somewhat silly, worrying about additional FEC Ranks2 misses the point. If you’re using the OgilvieDFEC rebuttal formula properly, the result will be a new FEC adjustment factor. If you already have the FEC adjustment factor, you have no need for the FEC Rank!
When I had discussed the impact of Ogilvie earlier, I had pointed out that in some cases the resulting formula will dictate that you use a different FEC Rank than the one indicated by the affected body part. In other cases you will need to use an entirely new FEC adjustment factor. In order to keep the 2005 disability calculator current I will eventually have to create a way for the user to override a body part’s standard FEC Rank and specify a new FEC Rank or their own FEC adjustment factor.
I’m not in any particular rush to develop this feature since Ogilvie seems to require three years of post-injury earnings. I doubt we’re going to see litigation begin in earnest over Ogilvie issues for another 18 to 24 months.
I often refer to myself as a Workers’ Compensation nerd. The other day I realized that would be a GREAT website name! Unfortunately, WCNerd.com is already taken by “white collar nerd.” Bummer, no? What a great e-mail address that would have been, too!
With well over a 100 posts and counting I thought it was time to include a “tag cloud.” Its on the bottom of the right sidebar of this website. Its basically a grouping of the common words I use to tag various posts. The more common a word is the larger it appears. The top contenders are pretty telling
To help with the website navigation and use of the “tag cloud” I’ve started being more liberal with how I tag my various posts. Its actually kinda fun.
I’m using a new e-mail contact form. I was using “Contact Form 7,” which has a truly impressive feature list. While effective, I didn’t much care for this plugin because of its complexity. What I really wanted was a quick and easy way for website visitors to send me e-mail. Recently I found “Tiny Contact Form” by Tom Braider to be exactly what I needed. It is small, simple to configure, and easy to include. I’m actually using a modified version of the really fantastic “Tiny Contact Form” plugin. I’m rather proud of my modification on this plugin and even sent Tom Braider my changes which he ended up incorporating into the next version!
Google recently swallowed up Feedburner. I was using Feedburner to manage the RSS feeds for this website. The only problem was that it was causing all kinds of problems. My RSS reader wasn’t picking up the new posts from my own blog! So, I scrapped the Feedburner management of my RSS feed and went back to the native WordPress support for RSS (which is pretty damn good).
February has been a wacky month. And, on Friday February 13th the 400th user registered for this website. 1 Since the 300th registered user, quite a lot has happened:
Besides being Friday the 13th, today has a very special meaning for the truly nerdy. Unix is a computer operating system developed back in 1969. For those of you who remember DOS, that kind of what it looked like. The up-and-coming operating system Linux is based on Unix. The Unix epoch, the time from which it starts to count “up”, was on January 1, 1970. On 2/13/2009 at 6:31:30PM ET the Unix epoch reached the time “1234567890“.
I upgraded to WordPress v2.7.1 as soon as it came out (after testing on another website, of course). I can honestly say WordPress is the only software I use that I actually look forward to upgrading.
Since version 2.7 RC 1, upgrading to the next version of WordPress has been this easy:
How to Upgrade WordPress
You click “Upgrade Automatically” and wait about 5 seconds.
You’re done.
Not entirely off topic: a friend of mine asked me yesterday about the best way to put up a new website. She had thought about using Yahoo Site Builder or some such. Yahoo and its like are great at building free, quick, and ugly websites. If you’re going to publish on the internets, why not just opt for something just as easy and that has hundreds, if not thousands of possible totally free themes to choose from? I say, go with WordPress.
I used to code sites by hand – that’s a chump’s game. Just install WordPress and call it a day.
