Category: General

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.

… were working with laptops and missed the runway by 150 miles and lost contact with ground control for over an hour? Really?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/us/27plane.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

No. They were asleep. You’ll never convince me otherwise.

As part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address in 1933 he said

“Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.”

These actions fixed a much worse economy than we are experiencing now. Our failure to pursuit these sound and responsible advisement’s will result in a worsening recession, greater job losses, a continuous fall in the value of the dollar and a decrease in the living standards for all American’s. Following his inauguration Roosevelt closed all US banks for four days to evaluate their strength and permanently closed those found to be insolvent. Compare this to the weak evaluations recently performed on the mega banks of today that produced mere warnings for some seriously distressed institutions.

Today’s politicians don’t have the stomach necessary to stand up to the bank and corporate lobby’s. The do not have the will to impose “strict supervisions” on an out of control investment banking sector who have resumed their sport of extreme speculative risk taking with other people’s money.

Until regulators are prepared to do their unpopular job on Wall Street no one should begin to feel safe about the future of their savings, investments or the value of the dollar. Contrary to the argument that a lower dollar is better for US exports, the reality is the US manufacturing sector has declined to a point where a weak dollar does very little to offset any trade imbalances with China, Japan and Korea.

Today Mervyn King, The Governor of the Bank of England, paraphrased another 1930’s leader, Winston Churchill, who said

“Never in the field of financial endeavor has so much money been owed to so many by so few.”

He was talking about the banks who took huge risks because they knew they would be bailed out with public funds because they considered themselves “too big to fail”. There has been little change in behavior and little reform. A very few are getting enormously rich by risking investor dollars while taking on little risk of their own. Will it take another full depression and 25%+ unemployment for us to impose the sound solutions of the past?

This was not the first time I misunderstood the instructions for one of Connor’s homework assignments. But after spending a lot of time in college working with Euclidean geometry, Boolean logic and business formulas like Altman’s Z-score Ratio, I thought I had at least until the 5th grade before the math worksheets would defeat me.

Then along came “Double Dominoes”. Don’t know why it became the mind bender from hell. As usual the only complicated part was the instructions. See the actual worksheet below. The part that got me was “Draw the domino that shows the double plus one.”

OK. Does this mean the next “Double Domino” (i.e. the double that is plus one)? Or does it mean the sum of the previous domino plus one? Since the name of the worksheet is “Double Dominoes” I decided to roll the dice and assume it meant the next double domino in the sequence. Nope. The instructions should have said “Draw the domino that shows the sum of the previous dominoes dots plus one.”

I felt bad about not understanding the instructions until I read his teachers explanation: “When you double a number, just add 1”. Hmmmmm. I better let Drew know to check our numbers quick. The auditors are here and we’ve been multiplying by 2 the whole time.

It’s the most talked about topic today. How did it happen and why? The award included a citation praising him for international diplomacy. I actually had to go to lunch with two co-workers today, our CFO and the principal owner of Trimaco. One is a staunch conservative Republican and the other is a bleeding heart liberal. I wanted to hear the argument first hand.

Drew, our CFO, had some valid points and a few ideological rants about Obama in general. David, much to my surprise, questioned the legitimacy of Obama receiving the award almost as much as Drew. Of course I had to interject my two cents. The thing that concerns me the most about Obama winning the Nobel Peace prize is not that he won it. It’s that someone else did not.

Do you really mean to tell me that in 2008 and 2009 no one on earth did more to promote world peace than a guy who made three international motivational speeches? And let’s face it, that’s all he did. Sure he might have displaced a little of the growing animosity towards the US by visiting some cultures where no other US diplomat dared to tread recently, but what specific result did he achieve that made the world a more peaceful place? He didn’t foster any signed peace accords the way Carter did. He didn’t tear down any communist walls the way Reagan did. And neither one of them won the award during their presidency.

I suppose that for the most part the Nobel Peace prize is purely symbolic. Obama’s winning the award may cause contradiction in his ability to defend the nation in a time of war when aggressive action may be necessary. But the bigger problem I feel this points out to the world is that the organizers of the award could not find anyone who symbolized a greater peace movement this year than a man who may have the final call on extending current wars or initiating new ones should they be warranted through the turn of events.