Patrick’s Rants

JP Morgan (Chase) has offered to purchase the “ailing” Bear Sterns for $2.00 per share. Bear Sterns is essentially imploding due to their exposure to risky mortgage lending practices, selling interest only loans to people who barely understood what they were getting. Bear Sterns will not be the last institution to fall. The stock price has gone from a one year high of nearly $160 per share to next to worthless. JP Morgan might be able to survive this, we will probably only know for sure in five to ten years.

A housing market slowdown and what arguably looks like a recession have contributed to record foreclosures as people who have nothing left walk away from their homes as the value slides down and their payments ratchet up. Numerous rate cuts by the Fed have done little to slow down the rate increases that have spilled into the revolving credit card market. The so-called stimulus package approved by the government will push part of next year’s tax refund into people’s hands today. That’s all well and good today but it’s an advance and it will have to be paid back. Unfortunately, people will not see it that way next year when their refunds are cut or their tax bill increased - it will look like the shell game that it is.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit digging around an Access database since starting my new job. I’ve gone in and made changes to table structure, queries, reports, etc. Access is a great program. (heh- sure) I’ve learned that you can’t read Microsoft’s instructions and learn anything - that takes external web sites. I once wanted to be able to duplicate certain records in the database and Microsoft’s help excruciatingly detailed how to write a macro. A day later I found there is a built in function that requires as many as three lines of code instead of the 40+ that Microsoft’s web site was forcing me to write.
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It’s been a few days since I had a post about #2, so you may be wondering, “is it all OK, now?” The answer is no.

Last week I noticed a paper on the printer with a user name and password for Quickbooks (Intuit or whatever) for online tax preparation. “Hm,” I thought to myself, “#2 has signed up to file her taxes for free on the internet.”

The following day I noticed an envelope designed to hold W-2s lying on the floor next to the garbage can. I made the assumption that she had filed her taxes while being paid by the school district.

Yesterday, I noticed that she had a folder with her tax return sitting on her desk and in the afternoon I watched her log in and check the status of her electronic filing.

You know, it’s one thing if you browse a news web site from time to time, it’s another when you spend the amount of time that it takes to prepare a personal income tax return, print it out and check on it during the day. That’s aside from the amount of time that she spends surfing Craigslist for single men and headboards, checking the schedule for her other job, snacking every 30 minutes* and shuffling 3 inch piles of paper around to make herself look busy. I don’t have that kind of time at work.

*She claims - while wiping crumbs from her mouth leftover from her 10:30am “snack” - that when I get to work, 11:00am, is too early to eat lunch. Which is why she eats her lunch at her desk after 12:00pm when she returns from her lunch break. I guess before she comes to work is too early to eat breakfast too since she eats breakfast at her desk and then the aforementioned midmorning snack.

1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me alone.
2. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a leaky tire.
3. It’s always darkest before the dawn. So if you’re going to steal your neighbor’s newspaper, that’s the time to do it.
4. Don’t be irreplaceable. If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.
5. Always remember that you’re unique. Just like everyone else.
6. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.
7. If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
8. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
9. If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.
10. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.
11. If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
12. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
13. Some days you’re the bug; some days you’re the windshield.
14. Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
15. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
16. A closed mouth gathers no foot.
17. Duct tape is like ‘The Force’. It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
18. There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works.
19. Generally speaking, you aren’t learning much when your lips are moving.
20. Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
21. Never miss a good chance to shut up.
22. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

Will Renzi get his due now?
Arizona GOP lawmaker indicted - CNN.com

#2 is at it again.

She received an email and then began telling me that the system was going to be down for maintenance. Before I took a look at the email, I understood that the “system” was going to be down for maintenance at 6 PM, which I thought was inconsiderate since I’m there until 7 PM and use the network fairly heavily (everything is in client-server architecture). She even made a big show of shutting her computer completely off at 5 PM so as to not mess up the maintenance being done.

The email sent out the users advised that the District Exchange server, hosted by NAU, was going to be offline for maintenance from 6 PM through midnight last night. We have been “forced” off of the Outlook clients for all of our users throughout the District and have to connect using WBA - the web interface. So, since I don’t generally connect to District email (I refused an email account) and even if I did the machines undergoing maintenance are not even contained within the District I left my computer running. I really hope I didn’t mess up the upgrade or whatever.

I have been searching around for a free solution to a minor problem. The problem is snow days or snow delays. The school district posts snow day schedules online but there are lots of people who don’t bother to check the web site, or listen to the radio or watch TV including some of our own employees. A “simple” solution would be a system that first would alert our drivers that the schedule has been changed through text messaging. That way up to 80 phone calls could be averted in favor of 80 text messages. Advancing such a system to begin alerting parents would save hundreds if not thousands of phone calls answered,

“Transportation, school’s canceled”

whereby there is usually one of two responses. The first,

“Is it a two hour delay?”

“No. School’s canceled.”

“School’s canceled?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. OK.”

<click>
Or, just <click>
I envision a system that allows people to register their phone number with multiple levels, Transportation employees who tend to be up earlier and might need different kinds of alerts, other district employees and parents. I’ve found some programs that would allow some of this and others might be able to be bent to work, but nothing “out of the box” so to speak especially when you consider that I’m also thinking that a web based system would be best - and our web server is a Mandriva box so it has to be a *nix based solution… that kills the $29.95 solution from Notepage which looks like it covers most everything except, of course, the the fact that it runs on Windows . And digging a little more I notice that at least one solution has a per-pager licensing structure.
I suppose a package that will send a text to the phone through an email interface could work, but the mailing list solutions that I’m familiar with (Mailman) require some sort of two way authentication that may or may not work so well when we’re talking about phones and text messages.

If anyone has experience with a Linux based solution that isn’t too cumbersome, I’m interested in hearing about it.

I have recently spent some time reading an internet friend’s blog and come to the conclusion that life is not about the road not traveled but about the road actually traveled. We all make decisions about our lives on a day to day basis, some decisions are minor while others may have long lasting, but unforeseeable effects on us and those around us. It is every step forward that we make in this life, every minor decision that makes us who we are. It can be as simple as leaving a couple of minutes early for work one day and not being in a car accident or as profound as finding the next great mathematical theory. The tiny steps and missteps make us who we are.

The time you fell off your bicycle at four years old trying to learn how to balance, the time you ate a worm or a mud pie or even huddling with your friends in front of the hot window air conditioner exhaust shivering until the warm air dried you enough to throw off that towel and jump back into the chilly wading pool. These may just seem like fond memories of a long ago past, but they are more than that - they are part of the road map that makes you who you are.

I’m kidding of course, it’s not Microsoft that did this, they just made the “speculated tools” in the (so far) biggest bank meltdown in Europe.
How to lose $7.2bn with just a few Basic skills | The Register

I “broke” my step daughter’s mp3 player the Sansa e250 and after some searching around on the web I had to contact tech support at Sandisk. I found that I was apparently unable to list more than one e250 device in my list of hardware. It might be possible, but I wasn’t able to simply add a second device to my list of owned devices. Both of the older girls have one, both purchased at the same time.
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