Goodyear misdoings

The Yum Thong blog refers to a local newspaper story regarding the decline of Goodyear under Sam Gibara. For most people, reading these stories doesn’t really have a serious impact. Once in a while, though, we encounter things that make events in the news a little more personal.

My wife and I were at an attorney’s office today. While we were waiting, an elderly gentleman came in to leave some information for his attorney. The gentleman had come down to the office to let his attorney know that he had canceled his telephone and they would have to contact him by mail. He went on to tell the secretary that he had canceled his phone because he was a Goodyear retiree and he was worried about what might be happening in the future.

He went on to talk about how canceling his phone service would save him $500 a year. He also talked about being proactive with his finanaces because he is worried about his pension. According to the newspaper article, Goodyear has an estimated $2 billion dollar shortfall in their pension fund due to poor investment decisions under the leadership of Sam Gibara.

It’s hard for most of us to fathom $2 billion. To this gentleman, though, it means at least $40 a month.

Happy Anniversary II (actually 3)

Another anniversary wish goes out today. This wish is for my wife. I hope the joy I have experienced being married to you for the last three years will continue unabated for as long as we both live.

Happy Anniversary

I want to publicly wish my grandparents a happy 60th wedding anniversary. Married 24 June 1943, they’ve only been apart while my grandfather served in the South Pacific during World War II. He’s 92 years old and just as ornery as ever.

No shows

I can’t understand why so many people don’t follow through on commitments. It is very frustrating for those who are making plans and then have to change them at the last minute. Here’s a few examples I’ve had to deal with just in the last couple weeks.

We had a department outing (bowling) this past weekend. When the idea was brought up three weeks ago, 24 people committed the event. I contacted local bowling houses, and we made reservations for 20 people and ordered enough munchies for all. By three days before the event, we were down to 14 people. On the day of the event, 11 people showed up.

Those who were there had a good time. But we had a ton of leftover food. I ended eating a dozen jalapeno poppers for lunch the next day. I didn’t really mind that, but it was disappointing to have so few people show up. I’m disappointed the most with the people who didn’t even bother to tell anybody they weren’t going to be able to make it.

Here’s a pic shot from my best side…

Another example is one of the community bands in which I play. I happen to be the email contact for one group. I had two conversations this past month with two people who had stated they were planning on playing with the band this evening. I went to the trouble of providing them directions to the concert, information on the concert attire and notified our director that we would be having visitors, so we could have chairs and music ready for them.

Neither person showed up. The show went on, as it must, but it was again somewhat disappointing to have made all these efforts for nothing.

As I type this message, I’m reminded of the similar problems my brother-in-law is having selling his Ford Probe. He gets a couple calls every week on the car, for which he’s only asking $1000. He makes appointments with the people to come out and see the car. 75% of them never show. Sometimes he’s lost an entire Saturday afternoon because of people not showing up.

If you’re like one of these people, do you realize how selfish an act this is? If you promise to do something, you should make every effort to keep that promise. We all understand that things come up, but you should let people know. Otherwise, you leave them hanging. This is especially frustrating when other plans could have been made once it was known that you couldn’t make it.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood

We’ve been suffering through weather that is more appropriate to early April. The cold, rainy weather has been really depressing. Finally, on the first official weekend of summer, we have some weather that is appropriate to the season.

At our local community band concert, a few band members felt it was a good night for some shorts. Most of the audience members were decked out in shorts, too. Of course, there was a fair share of people wearing sandals with socks, or black socks with their shorts, but you’ll have that in an audience that could be mistaken for an AARP convention.

Hardware failures

One of my computers was acting funny tonight. I noticed that the CDRW light kept flashing periodically. However, there was nothing in the drive. Then my mouse starting halting as I was moving it.

Finally, I decided to cycle power, which I hadn’t done for quite a while. The startup cycle took a very long time. There appears to be a problem recognizing one of the drives on the secondary IDE channel. I’ve got both the DVD and CDRW drives unplugged for now. I know what I’ll be playing with this weekend.

Maybe this can be my justification to the wife to get a DVD burner.

EWF

We just got back from seeing Earth, Wind, and Fire in Cleveland. I’d never seen them live before. It was an exciting show and people were standing the entire time.

Philip Bailey has an amazing voice. The horn section, which is what my wife and I love to hear, was super tight. If they’re coming to a location near you, you won’t want to miss the concert, even with the nearly $20 in fees Ticketmaster charges. I’ll leave that for another day, though.

Ping frustration

I am so frustrated with trying to ping weblogs.com. It appears that I am able ping the blo.gs, but weblogs is a lost cause. It keeps responding that it is missing a sub-table.

Well, it is late, so I’ll have to get some sleep on it and maybe I’ll find a solution over the weekend.

Server migration utility testimonial

I needed to migrate a Windows 2000 Server from a 10 GB drive to a 30 GB drive. I’ve done this many times with Partition Magic over the years. I never realized that it didn’t work with the Server operating systems. I looked at Volume Manager, but it was overkill — in features and in price — for a task we go through once every couple of years.

I considered Ghost. But it also seemed like overkill for my needs.

In the end, I found a product called MigrateEasy. It does exactly the task I needed, only cost $40 when downloaded, and seemed easy to use. It turns out it was all these things. The installation program even burned a bootable CD for me. Starting from the time I booted off the CD, I had the data copied in less than 30 minutes. Within 45 minutes from when I started, the old drive was out of the computer and we were running off the new drive.

The only weakness I found was the user interface to manually size the destination partitions. It could have been more mouse-oriented. You have to type sizes into text boxes. It would have been nice to be able to size and slide the partitions graphically and just use the text boxes to tweak the sizes.

UPDATE: John Lam also talks about how Acronis MigrateEasy rocks!

Snake oil

I’ve read a couple articles recently regarding FastTCP. The first article was on Slashdot. The second article was part of the ZDNet Tech Update newsletter. If you go to the links, I encourage you to browse some of the comments posted on both these articles.