My Kayak
So I was poking around Kayak the other day since online travel sites were in the news. I have not traveled much lately but it is one of my favorite hobbies. But I was very pleased to see some great additions to their site, including a Member Page feature, where you can add some info about yourself and keep track of a few places you have been. I have looked at Continento and liked the community aspects, but never invested the time to use it that much. Kayak has nice integration to searching for tickets, and doesn’t include all the bells like photo uploading and tracking a trip. They both mash with Google Maps, so I’m a fan of that, I can see Kayak moving in an interesting direction. More on my Travel page.
I have also added a Kayak search on the right nav for easy access.
Corporate Logos 2.0
Web 2.0 doesn’t get any better than logos 2.0! Some of the great ideas made possible with Photoshop and creativity.
Flavia vs Keurig
While I was out for some training at our Chicago (technically Skokie, but we don’t talk about that), I got to experience Keurig single-use coffee versus the Flavia I have always used. Keurig beats Flavia to the curb, I can’t believe how much better the coffee is. Not that the quality should be surprising since the coffee comes from Green Mountain and the tea from Celestial Seasonings. I have always thought Flavia was very poor coffee and normally have to ice it to swallow it down, so I expected all these single-use systems to match, boy was I wrong. Now who do I need to talk to in HR to switch over…
Trends
Thanks to Google’s data collection and allowing access to that data, there are some pretty interesting uses. Google Trends is one of those. This site allows you to compare searches over time.
Here are the Yankees (blue) compared to the Red Sox (red). A slight lead by the Yanks now but the Sox dominated in 04 due to the World Series.
And for another one that a friend might enjoy, Batman (blue) is losing out to Superman (orange) currently but Batman has a stronger history. While the Web Crawler is in the dust (red).
Thanks to Steve Rubel for the reminder of this.
EgoSurf
For those who talk about blogging to make your name famous and appear on the top of search results, you need to check out EgoSurf. I have been known to talk about it, so I am not above a little ego stroking. But at under 3K of a possible 15K, mine is pretty humble.
We surfed for “adam karas”, looking for links to adamkaras.com. This is what we found;
engine ranking ego points google.com 3rd, and 4th 2592 yahoo.com 2nd, and 4th 1860 msn.com 2nd, and 3rd 1477 del.icio.us 2nd 643 technorati.com nowhere 0
Hoboken Looking to Run St Mary’s Hospital
As an update to my last Saint Mary’s Hospital in Hoboken post, it looks like the City of Hoboken is looking to buy the hospital from Bon Secours. According to the Hoboken Reporter, the NJ state legislature is looking to pass a bill that will allow the city to create a Hospital Authority, similar to the Hoboken Parking Authority, with its own budget and spending, otherwise the city would not be able to increase its spending to afford the hospital.
Hoboken Mayor Roberts said the hospital made a profit of $175,000 last month (June, 2006), and is being run by a turn-around expert Harvey A. Holzberg. This is in comparison of the previous financial losses of the hospital.
… lost $23.7 million in 2002, $10.8 million in 2003 and posted an operating loss of $18.6 million in 2004 …
… Bon Secours reported its first loss in 10 years-$20.4 million on $2.25 billion in revenue-largely because of its split from Christ Hospital, Jersey City…
And of course this all ties back to the three-hospital drama in Hoboken and Jersey City:
The original plan for St. Francis was to turn into a nursing home, but those plans were scrapped when the partnership between Bon Secours and Canterbury Health, the company that owns Christ Hospital in Jersey City, dissolved on Dec. 31.
The reason for the breakup was, according to Canterbury, that Bon Secours did not disclose the fiscal health of St. Francis and St. Mary.
The same Northwestern article quoted above also talks about other Bon Secours financial problems:
In early 2004, Bon Secours said it would restate two years of profits after discovering an executive manipulated seven years’ worth of operating income, assets and liabilities at a handful of Michigan operations, including Cottage Health Services.
Unraveling the scheme wiped $64.9 million in improperly or nonexistent assets from the system’s books.
So I honestly don’t trust the losses attributed to St. Mary’s till I see some specific financial statements, but I also can’t trust what a politician says about profits.
