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My six minutes on Iraq and no more.

Last night, during a 60 minutes interview, Bush used the word “succeed” again when there has never been a true definition of “success” in Iraq presented by Rebuplicans or Democrats. Is it defined as a stable Iraq? Clearly there won’t be a Wal-Mart ribbon cutting ceremony in downtown Baghdad any time soon. So at this point what exactly is our mission? Too keep Sunni’s and Shia from killing each other? This is something they’ve wanted to do for hundreds of years and we removed the only thing stopping it: A “strong man” who basically said if there’s any killing that’s gonna be done in these parts, I’m the one who’s gonna be a doin’ it. Anyone with any knowledge of the middle east could have predicted this outcome. Many did and their warnings were ignored.

So now we stand in the middle and try to break up the fight using the lives of Americans and tax payer dollars. If we stay 100 years the minute we leave these people will try to kill each other. They are driven by religious, sectarian ideologies we cannot deter. Neither Republicans or Democrats want to present their idea as anything but the path to stability. When will it be admitted that we cannot “give” freedom and stability? We might as well get out of the way and let them settle it. As for those who argue this course would jeopardize western security I would like to ask how? How will it put us in harms way to call our troops back for national defense (novel idea) and let the Sunnis and Shia have it out? Tragic, yes. Our problem? – I don’t see it that way.

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Holidays be gone.

After at least five Christmas celebrations our holidays are thankfully over. I took the last of the decorations down yesterday. We do four family Christmas celebrations each year, three of which are all out gift giving extravaganzas. It becomes quite tiring and old after about the second or third time.

Connor got a battery powered 4-Wheeler and now we will never have another living flower in the yard again.  It rained on Christmas day so he spent the morning crashing it into the walls.  It was a good but busy holiday season.

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2006 Roundup.

Holy crap life has gotten routine lately. Hold on, I’ve got to go kill a spider for Amy. Okay, now that I’ve killed it she’s mad at me for not putting it in a cup and letting it go outside. What are we Buddhist now?

Where was I? The same ‘ol day to day going into 2007. I go to work, get harassed to solve other peoples problems, make 50 phone calls and come home to spin Connor around in the living room for 20-30 minutes before cooking and bed time. That’s it, every week day of my life. We do have the baby coming in a few months and Amy and I are real happy with everything. Bored but happy.

Despite managing the IT deployment of 21 new franchise and corporate facilities this year for 1-800-Pack-Rat I wanna do something that has a bigger impact with more personal satisfaction. So I decided to get my Project Management Professional certification from the Project Management Institute. If I could eliminate the amount of “dead time” I spend during my work week supporting end users through routine tasks and providing basic PC instruction I could be designing some serious wide area networks, back-end server architectures (farms) and negotiating major telco contracts through agency.

That may not sound like fun to most people but it would mean a sense of accomplishment and money to me. The accomplishment part would come from acting as the agent for unsuspecting corporate primes who are routinely getting ripped off by integrators, telco vendors and even unskilled internal staff who allocate money for the wrong technology. I see it happen all the time and Executives are unable to determine right from wrong in the midst of disenting opinions. There are CEO’s of SMB’s out there who need unbiased assessments and I’d like to be the impartial voice helping to determine what will really take their company in the right direction, not boost the Integrators profit margins.

It’s easy to see why I got out of being a Consultant for a VAR relatively quickly back in 2000. As hard as I tried I couldn’t stomach proving unnecessary recommendations to clients on behalf of a sales rep knowing the same technologies could be implemented faster, more securely and cheaper (or free).

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Now this is interesting…

For some reason this fact from Gullible Info really intrigued me once I thought about it for a minute:

“Due mostly to increasing life spans, the number of living people is set to overtake the number of people who have ever died by 2008.”

Brings to mind lots of questions for the next two hundred years like mandatory cremation?

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Register.com sucks. Transferring a domain from them sucks even more.

Register.com requires $35.00 for me to renew toddsingleton.net with them for one year. For those of you not familiar with domain registration, that’s a ransom right now. For example GoDaddy.com charges $6.99 for a new registration and usually less for a renewal. So tonight I went to transfer my domain to GoDaddy. Part of the transfer process requires providing GoDaddy with a domain “Authorization Code”. I went to Register.com to get this as required. I was told I would have to “speak to a special customer service representative to handle that request” who is only available from 8am to 6pm EST. Funny, every other registrar I know of will send the authorization code to the administrative email on record for the domain (mine).

Well, here’s the problem: this domain expires at exactly midnight tonight. See the situation that’s forming? I called GoDaddy for help since I already paid them $7.99 for the transfer (which coincidentally includes a FREE one year domain registration extension). The rep laughed at the notion that I had to speak to a “special customer service rep” for an authorization number from Register.com. He then offered to refund the transfer fee if I ‘d like. I said no. I’ll have to pay the freakin’ ransom to Register.com and then I’ll move this domain straight to GoDaddy to get my free one year extension giving me the domain for 2 years. Register.com offered two years for $49.95. Wow, do their prices suck or what?

In the meantime I have another domain currently registered through Register.com, southeasternrea.com. I will begin the process of transferring that domain to GoDaddy immediately for $7.99 so I won’t have to pay over FOUR TIMES as much to renew it for one year. And what does this accelerated pricing buy you? Limited domain management tools in the web interface requiring you to have to call a “special customer service rep” to manage your own domain. That’s about as weak as it gets.

If you have a domain about to expire with Register.com here’s my advice: Transfer it to GoDaddy for $7.99 at least 10 days before the expiration date and get yourself a free one year renewal. This is the best way to let Register.com know their prices bite ass. And for those of you who are wondering why I don’t just let the domain expire and then renew it with GoDaddy for $6.99 I will detail the lifecycle of an expired domain.

  • Once a domain expires the previous registrant has 12 days to renew the domain at the regular price (DNS is disabled).
  • After 12 days the registrant can renew the domain for the regular price plus a surcharge of $80 for up to 30 days.
  • After 30 days the domain is put up for auction for 30 days.
  • After 60 days the domain is returned to the previous registrar (Register.com in this case) who can put it back into the public registry as available. I don’t know if there’s a time frame in which they’re required to do this.
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Additional Hospital Bills Make Contractor Sick :: WRAL.com

Additional Hospital Bills Make Contractor Sick :: WRAL.com

Spokeswoman Stephanie Crayton said Bridges was originally billed too little because the hospital coded the case wrong.

“The confusion started because Bridges was a third party paying someone else’s bill. Most of the time, Crayton said, a third party is an insurance company, and Bridges was originally billed the price insurance companies pay for treatment, which is much less than what people who don’t have or don’t use insurance pay.”

This is the first time I’ve heard a hospital representative make this claim publicly. The question is why? Why do people without insurance have to pay more than the negotiated insurance rates? This is what make programs like Maternity Card so appealing. You get the benefit of participating in a plan with pre-negotiated rates even though you will pay the bill out of pocket. This is a practice by health care institutions that must be stopped but won’t. There’s too much corporate health care influence in Washington.

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Good night Connor.

Tonight Connor ate a huge bowl of spaghetti, went into our bedroom and fell asleep on “Daddies Bed”. I don’t know why it’s not Mommies and Daddies, but I’ll accept the honor of being the presumed sole proprietor.

A few minutes ago as I sat at my PC browsing the web for the perfect new watch (since I now own zero that work) I heard little footprints downstairs and someone calling my name (Daddy). I went to the bottom of the stairs and there was Connor who said “I forgot to give you night-night kisses Daddy”. So I sat on the steps for my big hug and kiss, after which Connor put his thumb in his mouth, cuddled his blanky and went down the hall back to bed.

This is what I’ve waited my whole life for. To be this important to someone, anyone, is the reason we’re all here. It’s not to become rich, famous, or recognized in elite social circles as the smartest guy in the room. Because no matter what kind of super star athlete or Pulitzer Prize winner some of us may become, I promise that you will never mean as much to anyone on Earth as you will your 3-year-old. And in turn your children will never mean as much as anyone else to you. So like I said, you want a reason for living, there it is.

There are many people with psychological conditions I don’t understand. Among these are religious fanatics, serial killers, and people who buy picture frames and hang them without removing the sample photos. But one that perplexes me a lot is people who are so into themselves, and their meager lives, that they make a conscious decision not to have kids. Not only do they not know what they’re missing, and never will, but it also seems they’ve lost touch with their natural reason for existing. I’ve done most of what I can with my life, and maybe there’s more to come, but anything that comes my way now is really my boys.

I once overheard a conversation between two associates during lunch about a father who left his four year old daughter standing on the side of a frozen pond while he dove in to try to save his other child who had fallen through the ice. Both the father and the child drown (it was national news last year). The guy without children argued he should not have done it because he should have thought about his other child. The other associate, who also has two boys, said “You’re obviously not a parent or you would know that man was going to save his child or die trying”. Which he did. – Good man.

Oh by the way, a black face Seiko Titanium Alarm Chronograph is on sale at http://wristzone.stores.yahoo.net/sna107.html.