All posts by Jeff Reifman

Jeff is a technology consultant based in the Pacific Northwest.

Lifewise Out of Pocket Maximum

The Out of Pocket Maximum That Isn’t

The Affordable Care Act's Out of Pocket Maximum isn't what you'd expect. In Washington State, it's insurance fraud.

/ September 25, 2015
Jeff Bezos and Tom Cruise

Seattle’s Coming ‘Amazocalypse’

Amazon's male programmers struggling to find bathrooms will soon be able to walk home to pee.

/ September 20, 2015
Summer Cat Shaving

Jasper’s Summer Cat Shave Frightens Sister Luna

When my neighbor Jasper got a cool lion shave this summer, his sister Luna didn’t recognize him when he arrived home. She hissed at him for days … and then she got her own. Here’s what happened next: The video...

/ September 16, 2015

Seattle Traffic Has Grown With Amazon

After reading John Cook’s The worst cities for traffic jams: Where booming Seattle and San Francisco rank at GeekWire, I decided to chart my earlier estimates of Amazon’s employee headcount against INRIX’s Seattle traffic studies. The amount of time a Seattle...

/ August 27, 2015

Amazon’s Terrible on Diversity (The Seattle Times is Wrong)

While I greatly appreciate Nina Shapiro’s front page story on Amazon’s impacts on The Seattle Times, I disagree with her coverage of the company’s impact on Seattle diversity; in fact, her reporting contradicts two other statistical reports from The Times’ Gene...

/ August 6, 2015

It’s Time to Cut Our Spending at Amazon

The company's ignored the massive problems it's created in Seattle. It's time to stop shopping with them.

/ July 26, 2015

How to Import a Compressed MySQL Database From bz2 Format

If you have a compressed MySQL database in bz2 format that you need to import, just do the following: bunzip2 < db_filename.sql.bz2 | mysql -u root -p target_db_name

/ July 20, 2015