Author: Todd

For a long time now this site’s been the top results of a Google search of my own name.  I would be proud of that except that there is one other Todd Singleton that deserves to be first.  That honor should belong to Sgt. Todd Andrew Singleton who was killed in Iraq in 2007.

“When he was no more than 13 years old, [Todd Andrew] Singleton rescued a friend who had fallen through the ice from drowning.”

I can’t top that. None of us can.

Other notable Todd Singleton’s include former Duke basketball player and Stanford graduate Todd Singleton who lead the search rankings until about 2007. He works for IBM and contacted me through this site a while back when he was working on their recently canceled Aperi Storage Management product (note to IBM: control API’s will always be platform proprietary from now on.  Ya, NetApp rocks the market and lucky for EMC they have VMWare).

Then there’s Philadelphia chef and restaurant owner Todd E. Singleton who’s even doing interviews on CBS lately. I recall we communicated about a common interest in mountain biking a few years ago. I follow his “FoodieDaddy” entries on Twitter and he is the owner of toddsingleton.com. I actually never even tried to register the .com from the beginning because I’m not a very commercial entity. I’ve always felt more like a .net and I’m still geekin’ out over it.

There’s also the entirely commercial Todd W. Singleton, the owner of The Singleton Company which specializes in guess what… promotional products. Well there you have it Singleton Company, a link from the number one Todd Singleton result on Google. Can I get a free back pack with my name on it? I did it because I really dig your website. Good stuff.

In the end the reason I wrote this entry is because of the strange, almost unbelievable, search result for Todd Singleton that produced the human being who is my polar opposite. I could not have found this person if I had searched the planet with help form a team of scientists from MIT. And all I had to do a few months ago was search my name. I present David Todd Singleton. Seriously? Really? I can’t explain it in words but I’ll try:

Think Vanilla Ice turned hyper-christian.  Put him in a tanning bed, bleach his hair, add really fruity sunglasses, a cheap pastel suit and gold chain then make him sing like a bad Vegas lounge act. That’s about as close as I can come. The level of makeup and narcissism is quite disturbing. The guy wrote a book he’s selling through his website called “You Are God”. Oh yes he did. And his “Complete Collection” of songs is titled “Thundersounds”.  It’s music to help pets scared of thunder.  No, really. It doesn’t stop. And his website is subtitled “All Things David”. I thank everything more powerful than myself we don’t share the same first name.

No, Todd is not my first name. I’ve gone by my middle name since birth and my first name is only disclosed on my resume which incidentally, is a major factor in the top search engine rankings.

Update: Here is the funniest thread ever on Harmony Central dedicated to David Todd Singleton.

I have a real conundrum and  I’m not sure what to do.  I genuinely and honestly have no idea if I am responsible for the wreck I was in this weekend.   The details are below.  I’m prepared to admit up front that I was on my phone.  But that’s not a crime in NC, sorry haters.  And it doesn’t automatically mean I was at fault in this wreck.  In fact my passenger has repeatedly insisted I was not at fault.

I was coming down South Salisbury Street talking to Amy.  I caught the red light one block away from the intersection of W. Edenton and S. Salisbury where the wreck occurred.  I left the light when the signal turned green and was traveling towards Edenton.  From my point of view, perspective, whatever, I began crossing Edenton and the next thing I know I was popped real hard in my door by a blue mini-van.  Amy heard the whole thing on the phone.  The truck got spun around in the intersection, hitting another parked car during the slide.  I was stunned and then said to Amy, “I was just in a really bad wreck”.

As I was trying to free my leg from being wedged between the steering wheel and door I look out my window and a woman is screaming “Your still on the phone!  I have my kids in the car and your still on the phone!”  So I naturally assumed, oh damn, I just ran a red light because I was on the phone.  I appologized to the hystarical women several times as I finally got out of my twisted truck.  My ribs were hurting real bad but I didn’t pay attention to them at the time.

At some point I know I said “I must have run the red light” and the driver of the mini-van said “well, at least you’re willing to admit it”.  My passenger was still telling me I didn’t run the red light.  So there we were, me and the mini-van family waiting for the police.  The husband went on about how people get tickets for talking on cell phones while driving in England.  What I wanted to know is: did I run the red light?  I really did not know, still don’t.

I was about to tell the police I might not have run the red light but an unidentified witness on the street said I did.  That was actually very reassuring at the time because I wasn’t certain.  But then I thought about it.  There is absolutely no way that witness would have been able to see the color of the lights on Edenton and Salisbury from where she was standing on S. Salisbury St.  No way at all.  They are both one way streets and no lights face in the direction of where she was standing on Salisbury.  The woman was simply drawn to sympathizing with the mini-van family.  That’s all.  You can’t tell me with the spectacular wreck that was unfolding in front of her she ran up the road far enough to make a conscious effort to identify the color of the lights, before they had time to change.

My guilt of being on the phone at the time of the wreck and the fact that I was hit by a family with kids in tow blinded my judgement as to whether or not I actually ran the light.  Or did the mini-van driver?  One thing that concerned me is the statement the other driver gave to the officer when asked how fast he was going.  He stated “20 maybe 30 miles an hour, we don’t know because we were trying to find our turn”.  So he was trying to navigate his way through downtown.  Did he know what color his light was?

The officers immediate response to his comment was “So help me get my head around this.  You were going 20-30 mph and managed to spin a Dodge Dakota 180 degrees in the intersection at impact?”  Clearly the officer couldn’t add up the physics based on the other drivers statement.

So based upon my reassurance of an eye witness, who could not have seen the lights, I accepted responsibility for running a red light I may not have run.  My passenger insists that I didn’t and his statement to the police was that the mini-van “hit us like a missile”.  I know that part is true.  Although cited, I have not plead guilty to running the red light and I’m not personally certain I did.  At this point I’m taking the word of a unreliable witness, who’s not listed on any police report, and the “victims”.  So now I’m not sure what to do.  Do I plead guilty without knowing if I am?  Or do I plead not guilty and force someone to prove it to me and the court?

I dont feel good.  I might write later but I took a big punch from a mini van yesterday.

Now that I blasted Citrix for loosing their way I can write a post about how Microsoft found their way back. I was an early adopter of Vista. That lasted for about three weeks. I was an instant hater. Too many prompts, to much incompatibility with existing applications and the hardware just wasn’t up to the task at the time.

Knowing how much I loathed the Vista experience I wasn’t that enthusiatic about Windows 7. I read it was just a tuned up version of Vista with a little eye candy. It’s a lot more than that. It installed smoothly, it’s fast, has some cool features that are very compatible with IE8 and the eye candy does come close to rivaling Apple’s Snow Leopard, which I played with extensively last week. The main thing is that Microsoft got off their security scare and quit prompting the user into a suicidal mindset.

One of the few benefits of a down economy is that I have a desk full of returned laptops. I grabbed a three year old Dell D820 with 4GB of RAM and a 256MB NVidia Quadro video card to take the Win 7 Professional test drive. I’ll be using this laptop for a while now. It’s mine. They can’t have it back.

To sumarize the experience I’d say Windows is back. Unlike the Vista release that was poorly adopted, and rightfully so, I think users will finally abandon XP. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say I’m enjoying using a Windows OS. I modded XP as far as it could go and I was still bored with it. Windows 7 isn’t frustrating like Vista was, it’s kinda refreshing.

The latest Citrix plugin 11.XX.31560 or whatever release number they’re on now – it blows. Especially if your organizations still using Presentation Server. Let’s face it, that’s most of us. Despite Citrix’s futile attempt to create a revenue stream though forced updates to “XenServer” (the dumbest name ever for a product release) most organizations have sought ways to abandon Citrix verses adopting their expensive, required server upgrades.

I’ve been administering Citrix servers since Winframe, their first real product. Lately Citrix is just flat out falling behind. They’re getting squashed in the virtualization market by VMWare, which is keeping EMC afloat, and many companies are looking for ways to get off Citrix servers if possible. And while GoToMeeting was a good idea, the interface and cost was poorly executed compared to LogMeIn, who dominate the remote support market because their product works better and provides more functionality for less.

To really kick their customers where it hurts Citrix decided to yank legacy clients from their download site and admins are forced to struggle to get “web based” and the newer virtualization style ICA clients to connect to legacy Presentation servers that may not have a Program Neighbor Agent front end server. We have a PNAgent server and I still can’t get the damn thing to connect half the time. And just forget and walk away from your old Citrix Access Gateway with these newer clients. You’ll want to drive to Florida and scream in the face of a Citrix executive.

Anyone thinking about buying stock in Citrix should re-consider. They are failing in their new endeavors and they are leaving their long time followers behind if they don’t upgrade to the next clooky, bug filled release they engineer to keep reinventing the wheel. Wheels Citrix needs to just leave to the other companies that make them a little more well rounded.

“Unfortunately, a test to determine whether someone has the gene variant is not commercially available.”

via Blame genetics for bad driving, study finds – CNN.com.

That’s too bad because I’d certainly like to see the insurance companies get to raise or lower rates with this information.

“The State Board of Elections decided Wednesday that the race for the District 2 Board of Education seat should proceed.”

via Wake school board runoff will proceed :: WRAL.com.

“Truitt, asked for the runoff following the Oct. 6 election, in which she received 24 percent of the vote to contender John Tedesco’s 49 percent. Last week, she conceded the race and withdrew her request for the run-off.

Because state law doesn’t cover instances where a candidate tries to withdraw such a request, the Wake County Board of Elections referred the matter to the state elections board.

Ballots have been printed and absentee and early voting have started. The election will cost taxpayers more than $30,000.”

I should begin by explaining that I haven’t paid a phone bill in over seven years. We don’t have a land line at home and Amy and I have benefited from being the recipients of cell phones on corporate or personal calling plans that are not our accounts. So as a beggar I can’t be a chooser. Well, as the IT Director, responsible for the corporate AT&T mobile account, I can pretty much choose any phone I want with one big exception, an iPhone (it’s a long story about a contract).

If I were a paying mobile phone user I would definitely be carrying an Android phone. Not an iPhone because let’s face the obvious, AT&T’s mobile coverage sucks. There’s no way to sugar coat it, the service is just bad. Not long ago my Samsung Blackjack II got stolen. I made a big mistake and replaced it with a Windows Mobile 6.0 LG Incite touch screen. I doubt I can explain how bad this phone performed but I’ll try.

To start the phone looks like a cosmetic case. It even comes with a mascara wand (the stylus) which doesn’t attach to the phone. It just hangs from a little string. How gay. So I threw out the stylus and learned to navigate the painful Windows mobile touch OS with my fingernail. Until the screen froze. It froze a lot. Each time I had to take the battery out to restart the phone.

Add to all this that the phone wouldn’t respond to attempts to answer it and it was a waste of time. So I got another phone. This time I put criteria in place to be met. The phone had to 1. Make and receive calls. 2. Have respectable battery life. 3. Browse the interwebs and 4. Be easy to type on for email and texts.

So I got a Samsung Jack. So far, so good. The phone certainly looks pro business, almost identical in style and size to a Blackberry Curve. I like QWERTY keyboards a little more than softkeys. Windows Mobile 6.1 is better than 6.0 and plays better with non touch screen phones. I’ll see how the Jack does for a few weeks. If I don’t like it in 30 days I can send it back for something else.