Author: cosmo

The tally is in. This year I sent 8,024 e-mail messages. That’s an average of 22 messages every day.

Yikes. No wonder I feel out of touch when I’m on vacation or whatever, and can’t check my e-mail for a day or two…

So at 2:00 this morning the city of Boulder lost power. It was out for three hours, during which time the facility where I’m co-locating my web servers had a diesel generator running. Around 4:00 the generator sprung a fuel leak and shut down, so my UPS batteries kicked in. They lasted a little over half an hour, and then all my computers shut down.

When the power came back on, four of my systems rebooted themselves. The other two didn’t. This was, of course, a problem– those were the database servers. I woke up to clients calling and asking where their web sites were.

Although this is really just a case of bad luck, it goes to show how complicated it is to keep servers going all day, every day. Fortunately my clients are understanding; they could easily fly off the handle and scream at me about incompetence…

Today I was struggling with writing some web code that would work in both Netscape and Internet Exploder. Of course Microsoft has put together their own little flavor of Javascript, so the stuff I was writing worked just fine in Netscape but gave big ugly errors in IE. When Laralee came into the office and asked how I was doing with stuff, I explained my woes. Her response about Microsoft:

“They’ll burn as stubble.”

For the first time, Alex read a book entirely on his own. It’s part of a big ol’ collection called “Learn to Read Storybook” or something. I had it as a kid, and my mom copied the first few (easy) stories and bound them. He breezed through the first one, even though it was mind-numbingly dull:

I see a bee.
I see a tree.
I see a bee fly to the tree.

It goes on for about fifty pages. However, these are all words that are easy for kids to figure out, and Alex did it. I was pretty proud.

I hope to have him reading “The Lord of the Rings” next spring.

Win the battle, lose the war?

I was in court yesterday, suing a former client who refused to pay for work I’d done. After a year and a half of broken promises, I finally went to court over the issue. I won– by default– because the guy didn’t even bother to show up. Yippee, I should get my money now, right?

Of course not. Now begins the exciting process of “discovery” where I submit papers to the court (at cost to me, of course) to force him to reveal his debtors– clients or otherwise. I could also ask for bank account numbers, but I have those. The problem is, I called the bank to see if there’s enough money in the account to cover the court-ordered payment, and there isn’t. He could easily open a new account somewhere, use it instead of the old one, and I’d never know. More to the point, he could refuse to disclose his debtors and I wouldn’t have anywhere to turn to get the money.

So I’ve learned, through hard experience, that you can be a complete idiot and refuse to pay for things, and in the end you can get away with it. The only way I’ll ever see my money is if I persist– perhaps over the course of a year or more– and in the end it’s a question of whether it’s worth my time and headache to collect.

Sigh.

At times it’s hard to be a “nice guy” in business. This morning I had a meeting with a longtime client to discuss a project that would mean several months of steady work and a check for fifty grand at the end. Yet as we were talking about the project, it became apparent that what I was proposing might not be quite what they really needed.

So, rather than trying to push them into a solution that would’ve been expensive (although very cool), I suggested they explore some other options and have me do some integration work, rather than full development. I probably cost myself the contract, and certainly won’t be taking home the big check, but in the end I feel better about it. After all, I’m in business to help clients. Paying the mortgage is just a nice side benefit.

Alex to Kyra:

“I noticed that your burps are almost as loud as mom’s.”

I’ve got bilingual kids. Tonight at dinner Zack was standing up in his chair (a favorite pastime) and Kyra– always the disciplinarian– pointed at him and shouted:

“Zack, NO COMPRENDO!”

At the airport the other day it was hard to tell which group outnumbered the other: the security screeners or the passengers. There was literally an army of white-shirted FAA people running people through the scanners. It was almost comical, seeing a line of people standing at attention (with their rubber gloves on) waiting for the chance to “wand” someone who sets off the beeper.

This time I left my pocketknife at home.

Laralee and I saw “The Two Towers” this afternoon. Opening day, of course.

All I have to say is that the movie is awesome on a grand scale– yet at the same time, it has disturbing digressions from the plot in the book. It’s as if Peter Jackson took the characters and the situations from the book, and kind of made up his own little story with them. Even
more so than FOTR, this movie twists characters and events in a way that may make for good cinematics but, in my opinion, lessens the story Tolkien wrote.

Anyway, it’s fun to watch and I’ll definitely get the DVD (will there be an extended edition with another hour of footage?)…