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Now available via IPv6!

Posted by Chris Mattingly on July 8, 2013 in Tech Related |

My hosting provider now offers IPv6 addresses, so I took them up on that offering.  As of today (7/8/2013) you can reach https://camattin.com/ via IPv4 and IPv6.

Happy surfing!

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A good write-up on the current gun control debate

Posted by Chris Mattingly on April 30, 2013 in Uncategorized |

This blog entry from ‘Kontra’ aligns very well with my own views on the whole gun control debate.  I usually say that I’m middle-of-the-road in my political views because there are ideas I support from both sides of the political spectrum.  Though I do typically lean left.

Head over to Kontra’s blog to read it — http://kontradictions.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/dear-democratic-gun-control-lobby-how-to-get-better/

Let me know your thoughts!

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Google needs to learn

Posted by Chris Mattingly on April 17, 2013 in Tech Related |

While Google may have a vast wealth of knowledge (it’s not debatable that there are a lot of smart folks working for Google), there are still some things Google needs to learn.

The biggest thing that they need to learn is openness (or communication, if you will).  I’m not saying that they need to make public all of their secrets — far from it.  What I’m saying is that they need to be open when their paying customer have a service outage.

Today there was a service outage that affected the Google Apps Control Panel, Google Documents, Google Drive, Google Spreadsheets, Google Presentations, Google Groups and Google Mail (GMail).  This outage lasted for _over_ 2.5 hours.  Updates from their Apps Status Dashboard were not that frequent, often having to wait an hour or more for the next update.

You only have to look at Amazon to see how a large company should respond.  One such reference is here.

There is little to zero chance that Google will follow Amazon’s lead here, but beyond any doubt, they should.

Sign in and leave a comment if you have something to say about this topic!

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Well, hello April!

Posted by Chris Mattingly on April 17, 2013 in Uncategorized |

It’s been a while since my last update!

The last post was discussing my grandmother’s health issues.  After thinking she was doing better (in getting to leave ICU), we found out that she was actually terminal.  She clung on for just over 7 days under Hospice care (the Hosparus staff were just wonderful, caring people.  If you have the means, they accept donations!  Visit their site at http://www.hosparus.org/.)

The viewing was a wonderful celebration of her life. My Uncle Joe and mom and brought in photo albums that contained pictures I had never even seen before (pictures from Grandma & Grandpa’s wedding, for example).  It was great to get to see them so young and full of life! 🙂

The ‘death watch’ caused me to have to cancel a weekend getaway that the wife & I had planned, but luckily between her dad & step-mom and my dad & step-mom, we were able to get away last weekend and had an awesome visit to Savannah, GA.

Now life is pretty much back on track – back to the normal hectic schedule, that is.

That’s all I’ve got for now.  Until next time!

-Chris

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My Grandmother’s health issues…

Posted by Chris Mattingly on March 18, 2013 in Uncategorized |

Since Monday we have been on pins and needles with my maternal grandmother’s health.  She started out as being “unresponsive” at the nursing home (but her vital stats were okay) and they sent her to the ER.

Monday was touch and go and they were running several different tests to determine what was going on.  One thing that they did was immediately stop all of her medications (for Parkinson’s disease and alzheimer’s)… but we also found out the nursing home house psychiatrist had also put her on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications.  These were completely unnecessary for my grandmother given her state of mind.

Once the IV fluids helped flush out all the medications, her health seemed to improve.  By Tuesday evening she was talking a little bit – which is an improvement over how she had been for the last 6 months.

Wednesday during the day was not as good as Tuesday had been, but by later in the day on Wednesday she was a little more responsive and tried to talk a little bit.  At this point all she had been diagnosed with was bronchitis.  She wasn’t dehydrated and two sets of chest X-rays did not show any pneumonia.

Thursday morning at around 6:30 her stats crashed – her O2 had fallen into the 60s, her BP was around 65/30 and her pulse was faint and around 55 bpm.  They brought in the rapid response team and were able to revive her – and immediately sent her up to the ICU.  Sometime later on Thursday she had been diagnosed with pneumonia – most likely the bronchitis had transformed to the pneumonia.  By Thursday evening she was coming to a little bit and started to recognize some of the family that was in the room with her.

I made the decision to drive to Kentucky from North Carolina to be there for her and to provide support for my mom.

Today is Monday and this is her fifth day in the ICU.  As soon as they’re able to get one stat stabilized (e.g. heart rate) another one will drop (e.g. blood pressure).  At this point we don’t know which way things will go.  Her chest X-ray from this morning showed good improvement in the pneumonia, but since the lasix did its job in helping get the fluid out of her lungs, it caused her potassium levels to drop.  When potassium levels drop, it’s hard to maintain a good sinus rhythm, so we watched her go into atrial fibrillation (a-fib) multiple times yesterday.

Her BP has finally gotten to a good level and her heart rate has been steady.  So, maybe today will be a good day.

We’ll just have to wait and see how things progress (hopefully) or regress.  She seems to be wincing a lot today, so we’re not sure if something is hurting her – it sure seems like it.  Since she’s unable to talk well (both from the Parkinson’s disease and not having her dentures in) we’re just not sure.

The doctors have been good and the ICU nurses have been fantastic.  We’ll keep on trucking on and hope for continuing recovery!

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What are we exposing our children to?

Posted by Chris Mattingly on March 13, 2013 in Parenting |

The other day one of my Facebook friends was asking if a certain movie was “appropriate” for her 13 year old boys.  That question alone was certainly valid.

What drove me crazy, though, was a comment she made to that post — that she was OK with her kids watching violence and hearing foul language, but she wasn’t OK with them seeing “sexual situations”.

I didn’t feel like starting a discussion via Facebook comments, so I didn’t comment there.  But I’ve been pondering what kind of logic there was behind her thinking.  Why is violence OK  but a sexual situation (even with or without nudity) not OK?  Does she believe that her children watching violence and hearing foul language won’t have any impact on them, but somehow sex is going to turn them into some kind of monster?

With the increased violence that is occurring everywhere – from the Middle East to elementary schools around the country – how is exposing 13 year old boys to make-believe violence OK?

Personally I do believe it’s OK for them to see movies with violence in them, just be sure that they understand the difference between what’s occurring on-screen and in real life.  But the same thing holds true for sexual situations as well!

If your children are 13 and you have not had the “birds and bees” talk with them yet you are far behind the parenting curve.  Children at that age should already have had the sex talk with their parents.  And just like with violence, understand that there is a HUGE difference between what happens on-screen and real life.

I’m going to leave the comments available for this post and would like to see what other parents think about this.

Hello world!

Posted by Chris Mattingly on February 12, 2013 in Miscellaneous |

Hopefully I have made my last hosting provider change for the foreseeable future.  I quickly grew tired of the free (no-ad) hosting sites.  Their reliability was beyond subpar — but since I wasn’t paying for them, I didn’t feel like putting in support tickets and get bombarded with “upgrade! upgrade!” cries.

If you’re diligent you can figure out where I’m hosting this.  It’s only $2.99/mo for an OpenVZ linux instance.  After a month or two I’ll report back on how the reliability has been for such a low cost hosting provider.

Stay tuned!

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