Shay’s Blog

Gaelic Storm is a very good band. This was my second time seeing them. I saw them for the first time last December. They were scheduled to play at Gypsy Tea Room in the ballroom, but when we got there was a sign saying that they were playing in the tearoom which is on the other side of the block from the ballroom. I was confused about the actual start time. The tickets listed the doors opening at 9. (more…)

We started it today.  The idea of this was inspired by Super Size Me and 30 Days.  What we are doing is not eating out for the next 30 days.  Our rules are:

1. No eating in restaurants.
2. No getting takeout.
3. Nothing from the vending machines.

The last one is aimed at me since I frequently grab some junk food from the vending machine at work.  The goal of the 30 days is two fold.  First we are going to eat a lot better.  The second is we are going to save money.  I am looking forward to it.  If it goes well, we are going to expand the 30 days for another 30 days.  The second set will be nothing processed.  My starting weight this morning was 224 ½ pounds.  I am hoping to lose 8 pounds over the 30 days.  I need to get to the gym 3 to 4 times a week too.

All I can say is wow about last night’s UT / Texas Tech game.  I was in shock after the first quarter while I watch Tech seemingly moving the ball at will against UT’s secondary.  I do not think I have seen them burned so badly since the two UCLA during the ill-fated Makovic days.  The horns went down 21-0 at the end of the first quarter.  21 points is a whole a lot of points for a defense to give for the game much less the first quarter.  The horns finally got their offense going and scored 21 of their own points in the second quarter.  The defense allowed 10 more with the touchdown coming right at the end of the half.  The defense buckled down and shut out Tech for the rest of the game.  There were several nail-biting moments when Tech went for it on 4th down twice in the fourth quarter only to be denied both times by the longhorn defense.  The horns won the game 35-31, but it was down to the wire.

It has been a while since the contact form is on the front page of the blog.  I also added a page to access this form too.  It is reached on the right side bar.

I have spent some time working on my blog.  I removed the notable plugin since it was creating invalid HTML and the rest of my site is strictly XHTML 1.0 compliant.  I am going to search for a replacement for it.  I also got the RSS feeds working correctly.  These got broken when I moved the blog into its own directory.  I also added a link on the side panel to subscribe to the RSS feed.  The caching plugin is still not working.  I need to get that one working again.  I also fixed the HTML content in Some Interesting Statistics post.  It had some formatting left over from word where I composed it.  It should look a lot better now, and the blog page is back to strict XHTML 1.0 compliance.

My director, VP, and CIO demo’ed the application I have been working on for the past eleven months to the CEO of the parent company yesterday.  This morning when I get work, I got a meeting invite.  I knew it was going to be a biggie based on the length of the meeting (an hour and a half) and the meeting attendees (CIO and VP).  They announced that the CEO was very impressed with the application and that we were being transferred to the services company.  I think this is a good thing.  I hope that we do not have to move out of the Galleria Towers.  It is an awesome location for me.
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These are some interesting statistics courtesy of the Dallas Morning News. Funny that Collin County used to be one of the top-ten highest median income counties in the country. Not anymore. The debt figures are staggering. The median household income is 70,784, but the media household network is only 97,750. What is everyone planning on retiring on? The average loan or lease is 20,940 is higher than every other county on the list. Dallas suffers from a materialistic attitude. A lot of people subscribe to the philosophy you have to keep up with everyone else. In the Uptown area of Dallas, there are a five or six high-rise condominiums going up. They start out at around a million apiece and go up. It is simply amazing how many people that think they can afford to live in something like that.

Lawrence Lessig wrote a very good response to John Earnhardt’s blog post about him.  The topic at hand is network neutrality which is a subject I care very much about.  The root of the issue which Lawrence points out is the lack of competition in the market place.  The so call last mile is very an oligopoly or monopoly in a lot of areas.  Where I live (suburb of Dallas), the only real choice broadband choice is cable.  If my current provider which is now Time Warner decided to downgrade service from certain providers, it would very much adversely affect me since I could not switch except to dialup.  The lack of competition is only getting worse with the FTC and FCC support or bowing to political contributions.

The server that shaylogan.com lives on was down for part of the
afternoon and the evening on Oct 23. The server lost one of its
disks. The hosting company (Site 5) installed a new disk and restored
the data to it. They must be a small company since the COO was giving
the updates on the outage. Service was finally restored at 6:10am
this morning so the outage was around 16 hours. It is amazing how
dependant you get on technology.

Today Jeffery Skilling got 24 years sentence for his role in the Enron
collapse. Unfortunately Kenneth Lay passed away before his appeals
were exhausted so his conviction was removed. That is interesting
legal concept that even though you were convicted, your conviction can
be removed upon your death if your appeals are not exhausted. This is
unfortunate for the Federal Government in this case since they were
trying to seize his assets based on the conviction. They can still
seize them, but they have to get in line with the rest of his
creditors. I hope they continue to pursue the seizure. I am glad
that white-collar criminals are being strongly prosecuted. If you
would like to learn more about the Enron collapse, you can read
Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of
Enron or check the documentary, Enron - The Smartest Guys in the Room,
based on the book.