Chris' little place on the web

I miss my dog…

camattin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:14:39 +0000

This past Saturday we had to have our dog put to sleep. It was the first time I ever had to go through that experience and it was very painful. I am very proud of my sweet Ally, though. She wanted to be with us in the room when it was time to put her to sleep. We really thought she would lose it and need to leave the room (the grandparents met us at the vet just in case this happened). She was a trooper though – and in the end, I think being there with Shellie and the end helped Ally with closure. Joey — our 4 year old — still seems to be in denial. He stayed at the house with Grandpa.

We first got Shellie (a Shetland Sheepdog) as a tiny pup back in 1999, when Karen and I were just dating. Since the first day she was always a little neurotic but a lot adorable. She was with us through thick and thin. She welcomed with open paws both of our children (and she was protective of them too, which just showed how much she loved them).

I work at home and Shellie was always here for me. She would usually be in my way wherever I needed to walk. I often referred to having to step over her as a ‘traffic jam’ for my commute. Now there is no more speed bump to step over and it breaks my heart.

Not sure what the future holds for us in regards to getting another dog. I think it may be beneficial for us to hold off for a while. The kids will probably start the begging before too much longer, though.

Trying free wordpress hosting

camattin — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:49:11 +0000

My VPS will be up for renewal soon and I do not need to spend the that kind of money to just have a small site. A few months back I moved our email to google apps and that has been working out pretty well.

This meant the only thing left on my VPS was the website — which I don’t even do a whole lot with. Years ago I had the gallery hosted on there, but with almost all of our pictures that we want to share going up on Facebook there isn’t a need to maintain that anymore either.

Given all that and the cost of keeping the VPS, looking into a free wordpress hosting account seemed like a good idea. As you read this post this site is now hosted by Free Hostia (http://www.freehostia.com/). The free account has some limitations but nothing that will really bother me given how little traffic and content I have on this site.

I may keep looking for alternatives (always have to keep the options open!) but this will do for now.

AMR – what the heck?

camattin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:08:11 +0000

AMR has posted significant losses ($471M in 2009) yet continued to reward top executives with wonderful salaries and other compensation. In 2010 the CEO received $669,646 in salary alone. The poor sap got no cash bonus but was still able to cash in $4.6M in stock awards and options. The newly-promoted CFO got a 45% income increase.

In the real world in which I live, if I don’t perform well, I don’t get a bonus. I don’t get a 45% pay raise with a promotion. Clearly I am in the wrong line of work.

What will happen to Sun (by Oracle)?

camattin — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:03:10 +0000

I read an interesting article with some quotes and insight from Marc Andreessen speculating that the end of Oracle may be near. While he makes some good points I don’t think this is true.

On the hardware front (the legacy Sun portion of Oracle) this may be a valid point. Between commodity priced hardware solutions and outsourced virtualized solutions (to include “cloud” – though that term annoys me to no end) the days of needing the Sun hardware architecture are most likely limited.

But on the software front there are numerous large corporations that are heavily invested in Oracle products – from the well known database to the application server and identity products. Many large shops do not have any desire to attempt to run critical applications on the Microsoft platform. Outside of IBM’s WebSphere suite (Portal & Commerce, in particular) I don’t see anyone rushing out to get UDB/DB2. MySQL is coming up to speed pretty fast but since this is another product from Oracle there’s really no harm if MySQL continues to accelerate in adoption for critical applications.

The question that remains is can Oracle survive as a company on the software alone? Is there enough of a market to keep them afloat? Only time will tell. I’m hoping they do, but hope alone doesn’t help the balance sheets.

Wholesale gas prices versus retail

camattin — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 18:29:53 +0000

For a few years now I’ve been wanting to keep track of the wholesale gas prices compared with the local retail prices. It would be interesting to see the elasticity between the two. It would also be interesting to track the deltas in price between Kernersville and Greensboro – some days there is a $0.14/gal spread while other times the prices may be identical. Very curious as to why the spread changes in both of these data.

But to do track this information I’d have to keep track of it better and just haven’t had the time to put together a good way to track it. Any suggestions?

Trying this out…

camattin — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 15:38:29 +0000

So I’m going to test wordpress and see how it works for managing my site content. I haven’t done much of anything with the web content on my domain for a very, very long time.