White House Archives

Google's new instant search feature promises results instantaneously with every letter typed into the search bar. But I find it more annoying than useful.

Google Instant also performs searches based on your location. A search for federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, using just his last name, pops up different letter-by-letter results in Washington and New Mexico.

The location specific default of Google Instant became apparent when I typed in a "K" into the search bar field here at What's Central in northeast New Mexico. The "K" prompted Google Instant to pop up three Albuquerque TV stations by their call letters as the top results: KOAT, KRQE and KOB.

When Nextgov executive editor Allan Holmes typed "K" into his computer located at the Watergate in Washington, the first result he saw was the Kings Dominion amusement park just north of Richmond, Va.

This location-skew continued when both Allan and I typed in a "U" after the "K." My first hit for those two letters was KUNM, the public radio station in Albuquerque, with a local translator I can pick up here in The Original Las Vegas. Google decided Allan really needed to know about the Kushi Izakaya & Sushi restaurant several blocks away in Washington.

Google Instant seemed to drop its geo-mania once Allan and I both typed the third letter in Kundra's name: We both got "Kung Fu" and a Wikipedia entry for Kundalini, some sort of yoga thing.

Google finally delivered results on the federal CIO only when Allan and I typed the fourth letter of his name, making all the results beforehand an interesting intellectual exercise, but neither relevant nor useful.

But if your mission is to make money by organizing all the world's information, developing a location specific way to display it sure can help the bottom line by steering folks to restaurants, amusement parks and TV stations.

Knowledge, however, has no boundaries, and we need to keep that mind as Google takes us down the instant search rabbit hole.

The Veteran Affairs Department's paperless claims processing system ended up on the list of troubled IT projects that are up for review and possible termination. I wonder if federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra has a back up plan if he delays or cancels the paperless project.

A fast growing population of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans pushed the number of claims filed with VA past the 1 million mark for the first time in 2009, and it expects claims this year to reach 1.2 million and in 2011 top 1.3 million, Michael Walcoff, acting undersecretary for benefits, told a House committee hearing in June.

VA has budgeted $145 million in fiscal 2011 for paperless claims processing, which Walcoff told the hearing it needs to keep from drowning in the applications.

I wonder how long Kundra can hold VA's paperless claims system hostage before vet organizations such as the VFW and their pals in Congress raise a ruckus?

Videos showing how to navigate websites are all over the Internet. What's unusual is seeing one done by the president of the United States.

But there it is, right on the White House blog: Barack Obama giving viewers a tour through the new Healthcare.gov site, saying, "it offers a few simple tools to help you take your health care into your own hands."

"I have pretty good health care these days," the president admits. So he has to turn back the clock and imagine he's back in Chicago in his pre-presidential days to enter hypothetical information about his options.

My favorite part of the video? Obama's laptop has the presidential seal on it

Despite reports by National Public Radio, Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, who quietly left her position as director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury on Monday, did, indeed, make the Thursday opening of a $56 million center focused on treatment of post traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.

But the same could not be said for any member of the House or Senate, none of whom could brave the close to 100 degree heat to make the eight-mile trip from the Capitol to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where the opening of the National Intrepid Center of Excellence was held.

My spies at the Intrepid ceremony carefully eyeballed the audience and reported they could not see any senator or representative sitting with the VIPs in a nicely shaded and fan-cooled tent.

The White House evidently had other priorities yesterday too, the Washington Post reported.

Arnold Fisher, chairman of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which ponied up the money for the facility, criticized the lack of White House representation at the ceremony. "These are the very people who decide your fate. . . . We are all here, but where are they?"

Sutton, who, among other things, exchanged hugs with Dr. S. Ward Casscells, former assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, understands a simple fact lost on all the pols: Showing up means far more to the troops than hollow words of support.

President Obama announced on Wednesday he plans to nominate Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Jonathan Woodson as assistant secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, filling the military's top doc slot. The post has been empty for a year, ever since Dr. S. Ward Casscells resigned in April 2008. I had heard Woodson was the top choice back in January.

Woodson is a vascular surgeon and an associate dean at Boston University. He was appointed in March 2009 as assistant surgeon general for mobilization, readiness and reserve affairs, deputy commanding general for the Army Reserve Medical Command. He did a tour in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War in 1990-1991.

The folks over at the multiagency National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing posted a notice reminding us that the "U.S. government strongly encourages all GPS users to maintain backup capabilities for positioning, navigation and timing" in case of jamming or other outages.

Well, President Obama zeroed out in his fiscal 2010 budget funding for the only 99 percent reliable electronic GPS back-up that I know of -- the e-Loran system. The Coast Guard merrily went along, so it did not have to staff Loran stations in decidedly noncoastal places such as Boise City, Okla.

The Federal Railroad Admininistration is eyeing GPS as the core technology for a Positive Train Control System for all railroads within the next five years.

What is the engineer of the Amtrak Super Chief supposed to do if his GPS signal is knocked out by a $94.99 GPS jammer as he rolls through What's Central in Las Vegas, N.M., five years hence? Use a sextant?

The executive committee wants all of us out here in GPS-land to know that the Air Force is working on an unspecified GPS back up.

I bet it will cost more than the $190 million the Coasties expect to save over five years from shutting down the 24 Loran stations.

Teresa "Teri" Takai, who President Obama nominated as the Defense Department's chief information officer on Monday, taped a video message for her workers in February that could easily be applied to Defense: work together more effectively.

Takai taped this piece to address new information technology policies and consolidation that will result from an executive order issued by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that also defined targets and time lines for IT consolidation and shared services, including data centers, network unification, e-mail and antispam/encryption services.

Sound familiar?

Takai told her workers the objective of the order was to "provide more services for the dollars that we are spending on IT, and more importantly, to change the way we're delivering services, as I said, to be sure that they are more secure, to make sure that they're more reliable."

It sounds like she already has a grasp on the challenges she could face if confirmed for the Defense CIO job.

The transparency thing touted by President Obama in his first full day in office evidently does not apply to all patient safety alerts issued by the Veterans Affairs Department.

In fact, the alert page of VA's National Center for Patient Safety makes it clear that the list of alerts posted on the site "is not complete."

I guess this means that the department does not post alerts of wide public interest -- such as the one I reported on Thursday thanks to an alert leaked to me, which detailed a software glitch that resulted in VA clinicians getting bum data when they accessed patient data in Defense Department electronic health record systems.

Since next week is National Patient Safety Awareness Week, I suggest VA honor the occasion by making a decision to post all patient safety alerts online.

It's amazing what I can find trolling through thousands of pages of budget documents. Like this one: the location of a highly sensitive system.

Be warned that in the era of plain old Google and Google Earth any small hint of a system's location will lead any reasonably good searchmeister right to it.

I did that on Wednesday when an agency I will leave unnamed put the building number in its fiscal 2011 budget documents where it planned to install an unbelievably sensitive system. It did not include the city or street name.

I fired up Google, typed in the name of the agency and the building number, and in less than a minute had the name of the installation where the building was located, the city, the street number and the zip code. I then cranked all that information into Google Earth, fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and was then looking into that building's front door.

This is open source intelligence, and if I could find the building, so, I imagine, can any number of bad guys. I'm not disclosing the name of the agency, building or system, but I did send them a note about what I considered a rather serious OPSEC flub.

I'm really sensitive to this kind of stuff. In 1998, while on assignment for Federal Computer Week in Bosnia, I was captured by a U.S. Army rifle platoon after a seemingly innocent trip to a remote hilltop to do a telemedicine story.

Army Lt. Col. Jim Cronin, the public affairs officer in Tuzla, Bosnia, at the time, told me I could take all the photos I wanted, and so I snapped merrily away, including many shots of some really weird radio antennas.

Turns out that the weird antennas belonged to, shh, an outfit headquartered at Fort Meade, Md. As a result, the Army dispatched four Humvees to capture me.

Oh yeah, they wanted the film, which I did not give them. (Nowadays, I don't need my own film, just Google Earth.)

Cronin tried to explain it all away by telling me "we had a slow peacekeeping day."

The Veterans Affairs Department kicked off the Veterans Health Administration Innovation Initiative on Feb. 5 and asked its employees to come up with some good ideas to help it do the transformation thing.

VHA said its "competition is rooted in the simple belief that the ingenuity of the people who work on the front lines of VA know best how to improve health care and quality, access, and transparency in service to our nation's veterans."

Wow, what a concept. A management that believes its employees - not contractors - have the inside track on how to improve things.

That's almost as startling as suggesting that Washington, D.C., would be crippled by a snowfall measured in feet twice in three months.

Speaking of snow, I think VA may have to extend the original contest deadline of Feb. 21 by a few days if the snow continues to lead to shutdowns of the government in Washington.