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A boxer named Maxim Dadashev died today in Maryland. I’m not a fan of the sport but I’ve seen a lot of fights from my youth. It used to be that boxing was a big deal in America. There was a televised boxing card every Friday night. Men like Muhammad Ali were national figures. But […]

OMG! I just looked at this WordPress site because version five is now available. It’s been three years since I last posted something. Jeez! Not that the world has been beating down my door for nuggets of wisdom or anything. But wow, looks like I’ve been busy. On the other hand, perhaps it’s been a

I have a customer that has a large auto dismantling business. They provide an online car part search function (that I created) on the site based on a third-party database. Periodically I reload the database with refreshed data. That data comes to me as a Microsoft SQL Server database backup. I crack that file open by

After running this blog for a number of years, I have finally caved to the annoyance of all the random subscriber registrations. I really didn’t want to do it. But I have obviously been deluding myself. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have been thinking that my occasional commentary on the state

This morning I downloaded the Select Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture. The entire document is 525 pages. However, the forward and executive summary are considerably smaller and a manageable read. Reading what had been done in the name of the American people – in my name – brought me to the point of

My wife and I started playing the California lottery on a regular basis shortly after we got married some seventeen years ago. No big prizes yet but we’re always hopeful. 🙂 I’m always the one who buys the tickets. We play the same numbers each time so I use the “advance play” option which means

It seems that all I write, when I write, is about bad customer experiences. I’ve got another one to detail today. But before I do so, I’d like to make the point about why I write these reviews. First, I can get this aggravation off my chest. I’ve had to take action that I didn’t really

One of my favorite shows on television is one that appears weekdays on ESPN. It is called Pardon The Interruption, or simply PTI. The show began broadcasting in 2001. I’ve rarely missed an episode. The format is simple: two veteran sportswriters sit at a table and talk about the sporting events of the day with

I was watching a football game the other day. One of the players that was on my fantasy team got knocked out of the game early. I was bummed. Then I got what I thought was a brilliant idea. Why can’t they get some of those accelerometers that they use in cell phones and put

On August 2nd, the network switches to the Ace Datacenter in Utah went down, taking out millions of websites managed by HostGator, BlueHost and many others. The majority of my customers were on a dedicated server at that Utah facility. The outage was massive and an entire day of business was lost. Along the way