*PDRater up, the Dow down
PDRater up, the Dow down

September 2008 was a pretty good month for PDRater.com.  Yay! ((Original photo courtesy of Daniel Martini.  Mad photoshop skillz, all mine!))

Not so good for the economy. Boo! Perhaps this website needs a new, darker, tagline?  How about: “When you’ve lost everything else, you’ve still got PDRater.com”

Here’s my favorite posts from this past month.

I had the most fun with the “End of the World” posts from mid-September.  If you read nothing else, check out the one labeled, “The End of the World: A To Do List“.  That one is worth a look for my mad photoshop skillz alone.

For the more practical minded, the Road Warrior Checklists might be helpful.  I think I’ve got at least one more “Road Warrior Checklist” in me.  Also, I’ve provided some advice on what to do when your laptop stops working.

Six new calculators this month!

  1. Retroactive Benefits Calculator
  2. Convert WCAB and DWC “legacy” numbers into the new EAMS ADJ numbers
  3. Search with all EAMS registered Offices
  4. EAMS Body Part Codes search engine
  5. EAMS Document Type and Title search engine
  6. EAMS and DWC forms search engine

The World Ended on 9/10/2008

Laptop Repair Saga

Road Warrior Checklists

Virtual Real Estate (since the non-virtual kind is dead)

Google
Google

Google has a saying, “launch early and iterate.”  Launch your idea, get feedback, make it better, keep doing it! As a friend of mine has delicately suggested, I’m no Google.  This doesn’t mean I can’t learn from Google, right?

Two of the calculators I’ve been developing are a commutation calculator (for pre-1/1/2003 injuries) and a retroactive benefits calculator.  I’ll discuss the commutation calculators more closer to their launch.

However, today is the day I’m publicly launching my Retroactive Benefits calculator!  Its fairly straight-forward.  You tell it the weekly rate, start date, end date, payment date, and an interest rate.  It tells you how many days, how much is due, how many days the benefit was delayed, and how much is due with interest.

Take a look, play around with it, let me know what you think.  Drop me a line or post a comment.

Lately I’ve been working on cleaning up all of the calculators and making them easier to use. You can see the latest version here. Hopefully in the very near future these “updated” calculators will replace the ones currently available on this site. I’m retooling these calculators because the current calculators were built specifically for the old site. This also gives me a good excuse to implement some of the improvements I’ve been kicking around.

  • Improved graphical user interface. I find this new layout more intuitive. Let me know what you think about it.
  • More calculators. I have a working retroactive benefits calculator that can be plugged right into the new calculators. Got an idea for a new calculator? Drop me a line and let me know!
  • Help information. The current calculators don’t offer a lot of help information – except when you try to do something wrong. I’ve designed these new ones to give a lot more feedback.
  • Quicker load times. The current calculator page takes about a full second to load up. That’s too long!

My arbitrary self-imposed target date to get the new calculators working is July 23, 2008 – the one year birthday of this website. I’ll have to find some screenshots of the original site for you to snicker at. It was pretty ugly.