Mephistos

Where does it go?  I recall when much younger that it did seem like there were long moments when time all but did stand still.  It occurs to me though, as the all the older generations told me when I was in those moments, that time speeds up as one moves through it.  I have to, as aside thought, wonder if that has something to do with Einstein’s theories regarding relativity in some additional way that has not been here to considered.  Anyway, I digress – what I was really looking for is a moment of reflection.

This is largely being brought on by the fact that almost five years back was the time that I relocated back to Kentucky from the wonderful Commonwealth of Virginia.  I know that was right around the first of August that the official move back took place, but I know that some of the first few trips (of a total of about five – maybe six) back and forth over the mountains took place in late June or perhaps early July.  I am really having a hard time counting up the total of five years though – seems like I have lost one in there somewhere.  Suppose I have not though, just year three four were so much fun and so incredibly busy I guess the passed by in the seeming time span of one year.  The ten months have gone by incredibly fast too.

I have to keep thinking about, as my mind just seems convinced that it is four years.  I know however, that it is five years.  As right after I moved back, my high school class had a reunion of fifteen years.  I know that it was odd, but it was held later on in the fall, maybe as late as September.  Tomorrow even is the the twenty year reunion.

I have debated in my head about attending the event and had kind of pretty much dismissed the idea, especially with plans to attend a SCA equestrian event in Michigan this weekend.  However, with gas prices being where they are and limited time until after next week around work to work the horses, I don’t feel like it would be in my best interest to head out for that – and driving that far to marshal doesn’t seem that appealing either.  Aside from that, with this big install have 2/3 of it go life July 1st, there is more then a little work to be done over the weekend at the office.

Now however, it is one day away and I did not RSVP.  Not sure if I am really up to going to such an event on the morrow though.  Wouldn’t mind seeing some old friends, but then on the other hand really only a couple of them that I would really want to talk to for very long.  Of course there is the always odd chance of running into someone that I had nearly forgotten about and talking to them – which is always enjoyable.  A choice that I definitely have to make in the morning if I am going to make one – though I may just end up letting this choice being made by default by not pursuing it at all.

What I need to do is re-evaluate where I am at in life.  Those things of where do you want to be in five, ten, and twenty years – well I have reached those (and reset the five one a few times).  Life has taken many different courses that I never anticipated and I am certainly not where I expected to be twenty years out from the summer of 1988.   Have made some accomplishments and achieved some things, but have also felt like in the last year or so (and again back around 1994-1995) I have the reset button pushed on me.

That is, I am sure, more then enough of the waxing sentimental nostaligic turing into dribble to your ears.  Better stuff on the morrow for sure.

The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution has been up held today in a narrow decision by the Supreme Court.  At issue in the particular case was the right of residents of the city of Washington, D.C. to own handguns or not.  The case was brought forward by a number of the defendants, but the named defendant was Dick Heller.  His action was motivated by being a security guard (apparently armed) and not being allowed to bring said arm home with him when not at work.  The case was brought forward by Robert Levy, a libertarian lawyer, who obviously felt that the laws in D.C. were a restriction of individual freedom explicitly granted by the amendment.

There were a number of other defendants in the case, one a woman who had her life threatened by drug dealers when she lead a neighborhood watch program targeting drug dealers.  This paticular aspect largely shows how gun ownship restrictions only leaves such weapons in the hands of criminals.  Sure, the laws in D.C. allowed this woman to have a rifle or shotgun for her defense, but only with trigger locks, unloaded or disassembled.  Think about the drug dealer that breaks in seeking revenge and how long it was take to unlock the trigger, load, and protect oneself.

At the core of the issue, was the interpertation of the amendment and wether it applied to the right of a state militia to bear arms or the individual people to bear arms.  I think it is clear as day that it applies to both groups and that the federal goverment can not (nor can local goverments) take those rights away in a reasonable sense.  This is the first ruling in over 70 years on such an issue and it is a clear victory for the individual.  It will have an impact on several other local gun bans, such as the those found in Chicago.  It is worth noting that this will likely not effect things like the restrictions on machine guns, felons ownership rights, and such as that – as just like the 1st Amendment rights to free speech, there are limits (yelling fire in a crowded theatre for instance).

(Yes – for those wondering, I went from an average of 1 to 2 posts a week for the month of June, to now 4 in less then a 24 hour period!)

A quick short post of frustation for anyone that may care to read.  JP Morgan Retirement Planning Services just plan do NOT get the idea of customer service.  This all started about six weeks back when I noticed that several of my accounts had dated information regarding address information and decided to get that updated.  All of them for the most part went without any major problem, most even allowing a quick change to be done (and then followed up with validation) on the internet, given that I had previously enrolled and went through the process to valdidate the internet access.

Not so with JP Morgan though.  I could not change the address on the phone, via the internet, or even via mail with the proper form.  However, after several calls through to the customer service, they eventually (after over two weeks of figuring out and going through process) finally got this special magical form which could not even be downloaded sent to my, you guessed it, NEW address that was given to the customer support person on the phone.

Now, I was expecting this magical form to have prefilled identifing information on it or the requirement of a notary public or some such creditial that would validate that it had indeed been recieved by me, filled out by me, and sent back all properly.  No, in fact, it was sent to my new address (a PO Box at that), given over the phone, regular first class mail.  The form required nothing other then the old address, the new address, and my signature (which I am pretty sure to this point they did not have the signature on file otherwise to even compare that too).

After attempting to fax it not one time, but three times the form went through.  At least my fax machine indicated that it had done so.  After waiting an additional near week to see the address change show up online and not seeing it I called customer service again.  Turns out the fax machine was down that paticular day or had some kind of problems and hence the address change was likely not received – please resend it.  After trying for three days off and on, I decided to just mail a copy of it.  I tried off and on faxing for another three days and was never able to get a connection on the number that was verified.

Almost forgot, I asked somewhere in there to speak to a manager when on the phone with someone or via email.  I got a call back at nearly 7:00pm when I was on the line with someone else.  The extension number was garbled and cut off and so I was unable to return the call.  However, I have no additional follow up from a manager in over two additional weeks.  Again, if an irate customer asks in frustration to speak to a manager or someone that actually cares – lack of follow through is just that much more reason to be an even more frustrated customer.

Finally, some near six weeks after the process was began, I got the address change put through.  Now, part of the start of this was consilidation of various 401K accounts I have in smallers amounts here and there into one.  So I then requested the appropriate disbursment of funds to do so – and NOTE: address change can NOT be requested online or even over the phone, but a total disbursment of the funds contained in the account can be done online.  Where is the logic in that security?  As the markets have lost something like 10% of the value of my account over the last few days, I requested the express service and paid an extra $10.00 to have this done which included express USPS delivery.  Now, some six days after the request, four after the amounts show as settled on the online system, disbursement still has not been received.

I am so glad that I reconsidered my original choice to consilidate additional funds into this account.  JP Morgan – you need to get a basic customer service 101 seminar in place quickly.  I would strongly suggest you seek and outside consultant, as I am not sure anyone inside the company has a clue what customer service means.  Further,  you need to evaluate your policies – address change nigh impossible – total disbursement of funds – easy as taking candy from a baby.  The reverse should indeed be the case (though I personally thing given access creditials either should be a one or two step process via an online interface).

I am sure that everyone who was almost anywhere back on that first Saturday in May of the Kentucky Derby (or indeed, anywhere near a news cast on television for the week or two that followed) at least has an inkling of what happened to Eight Belles immediately following the conclusion of the race.  For those that don’t know, a little bit of quick background.  She was a filly running against the boys in a race that in 138 attempts only three other fillies have bested the boys.  She ran a tough race and come in second, besting 18 boys and losing only the winner, Big Brown.  Shortly after the race she faltered, breaking both front legs and was immediately and humanely put down.  The two leg breaks, a bit rare, but having to put down a horse occurs probably to often.  The scene of these one on national television brought out everyone. Read more…

First, again I have been very busy with work and was out of town for the weekend.  I see from the stats though that the readers have noticed at the number of views dropped off considerably over the last five days to a week.  I had more then a few hundred ideas of blogs to post about during my time away, but I am coming up almost a blank right now.  I did do that dreaded thing of work all day on hard core computer technology yesterday at the office only to go home and do five or six more hours of it there for personal web sites.

Granted, it had largely been neglected for the six months prior to making the move from one hosting platform to another, but in the interim of two additional months before getting all of the back end componets in place for eligius.org everything has changed.  First a bit of what it is – eligius.org is the home of the Lance of the St. Eligius.  That is the medieval mounted group in which some of us ran and participated – including, but not limited to, jousting at reniassance faires.

When the site was taken offline to be moved, it had little access for the previous three months or longer.  Regardless of that, it was running a Joomla (content managment system) front end – which was also managing all user creditials and such.  This was bridged to both a PHPBB interface (bulletin board system that is hard to beat) and an installation of webcal.  Of course behind the scenes all three of those were running PHP and talking to MySQL databases.

Somewhere along the line the Joomla code base has changed drastically, breaking the way the bridge to PHPBB was set up and working.  In addition, the code was changed to deal with some security issues.  Granted, I didn’t spend much time with it, as the really important part of the former eligius site was the forums anyway, but I could not after more then a couple of tries get the old Joomla code to work.  I think the host I have is aware of the security holes and has a block when that kind of code is detected.  Upgrading didn’t work any better, and seemed to cause worse problems once I got a little of it to work a little bit, as it broke everything else.  After some short amount of time, I quickly dumped the Joomla front end – opting instead to get just the PHPBB code up and running.

Again, when the site went into hibernation it was running PHPBB 2.x.  Due to many new developments and dealing with several exploits, there is now the recommended PHPBB 3.0.  Fortunately, as the database for PHPBB 2.x was fairly clean – there was a nice install 3.0, convert 2.0 database, and woo-hoo, you have the new system up and running with out any problem.  This was was done with out much in the way of incident and is now ready to be seen.  Excepting of course that I was being leary of things and installed it in a sub-directory instead of the root – so there is a redirect from eligius.org to eligius.org/phpbb/ – hardly noticable if you are not looking though and something I will remedy shortly.

I quickly decided that I really didn’t need the webcal to be installed, at least not from the data that was there.  As webcal is a calendar program and the last dates that were actively entered in the old database was from at least back in the late fall of 2007.  Since that time, I have largely kept my own calendar in google calendar – which does offer me the same features that I liked about webcal (ability to color code, ability to share with others, and largely i-cal compatible).  So I didn’t get into what kinds of things needed to be done there to make that work, but I know it had little support the last few years – so probably full of security holes of not updated lately.

Anyway, the long and short of these is that major changes in at least two of the three platforms that were being ran in a very short period caused no small amount of consternation.  Guess know what I know about technology and how rapidly it changes I should not be suprised and I should have tried to stay more top of the game.  Anway, here is to cleaning up/out the rest of database garbage and moving PHPBB3 to the root sometime soon.

PS – if you had a user ID there at eligius you still have it, due to the nature of possibly encrypted passwords though you may have to request a reset on it – your mileage may vary on that issue though.

Let me begin by setting the scene for you.  I drove home from work a little bit ago.  I stopped along the way at a boarding barn that I had been meaning to check out.  Turns out they have room for two horses and will likely pay me during the summer and fall for one of the borders if they can use her in lessons – for which she will be well suited having done similar before (too bad that they don’t need a horse for super advanced idiots that want a thrill ride – could get the same deal on Mad Jack that way).  Anyway, it is right on a corner I drive by usually at least four days a week, sometimes more and there is 1500 acres of open farm land to ride on behind the place.  Sound lucky so far right?

High class is that I unwinding over a glass of wine.  White wine with a French name.  Redneck, as it is a California white with a French name.  At least I am pretty sure Menage a Trois is French.    It gets more redneck, I am drinking said wine, not in my fine crystal wine glasses with gold rims (which i have multiples sets of in storage), but rather out of my bourbon high ball glass labeled for one my favorites, Four Roses.

Back to luck – I have dabbled with handicapping a bit.  For those less high class then me (I am sure there are very few, but I reminded of the fellows at the office who didn’t know what masochistic means – for real).  Anyway, handicapping is betting on the ponies with an aim to actually come out ahead of the curve.  Now, first, you have to understand, while it is gambling and the house gets it share, you are really betting against everyone else who is betting – unlike the casino where the house is always going to win more then you over the long haul, if you find a good bet you are taking the money from those that made poor bets.

So, I am in the contest, well one of a couple, where you pick a race of the day.  Actually no money on that race in the contest, but you are given the proverbial payout as if you had placed a $2.00 win bet.  A month or so back when I got real serious I came out in the top 50 for the week.  Since then I have been two busy and have only managed a selection ever day or two.  So, I decided this week I was going to make all seven picks and get back in the top 50.  And, as I had placed $2.00 wagers on a couple of favorite horses of mine over the weekend, I was up a bit (Curlin, Mint Lane, Unbridled Belle, First Defense all won over the weekend, along with a few losers).

Given that I was up, I decided I would take $2.00 win bet on my picks this week as well.  So the first race this week is in Prairie Meadows?  Where is that?  Oh, Iowa – 2nd runner up to almost known for race horses as opposed to my locale where we have five cities/towns that all have Horse Capital of the World on their water towers.  It gets worse then not knowing anything about the horses running, but this particular race was for Iowa bred fillies only.  So I did what anyone would do without investing in anything and picked based on name (Painted Jewel) and the fact it was a breeder who had retained ownership (something I personally like to see).  Granted she was part of a pair racing, but she must have went off at a little worse then the morning line.   As when she won, she paid $11.00 on the $2.00 bet.

Back now – just poured another glass of wine.  Oh, forgot to mention as a celebration, I having a cream horn.  I am pretty sure that is French too.  A sinfully flaking pastry with a full inch of cream filling.   So that is the last glass of wine, Bitzer is getting the next cream horn, we are both getting bored and fat, so short of finding a long-shot to bet on, I think we are going to go bet on us walking the 1.8 miles to the end of the road and back in under 30 minutes and enjoy the cows and sunshine for a bit.

An aside to begin with – the spell checker actually has the word farrier in it and accepts it as a spelled correctly word. You realize I have been using that word in various documents since at least around 2000, maybe slightly longer and none, not even the Microsoft Word dictionary, has contained that word. So my hats off to the folks doing this open source dictionary that I am using.

What I really wanted to touch base on was my weekend this past. It was hot. Saying that is such an understatement, using only three words and eight characters. It should have something like thirty characters to really emphasis just how hot it was. Anyway, I digress. I spent Saturday morning early AM doing a bit of tidying around the house, before heading over to mow my Grandmothers yard. It is a small yard and that was a nice thing done. I then headed over to my Mom’s, where I have the horses.

It was too hot to do much that afternoon, especially with the lack of shade short of the shed, where there is little breeze. So I lounged a bit in a the pool. Yes, I was lazy bum. The important thing to note during all of the day on Saturday is I spent maybe 15 minutes late in the day checking my personal email and nothing more.

Sunday I awoke fairly early (though not as early as I usually do) after spending the night there. I immediately got my tools and went to field and started with feet trimming – or farrier work.

For those not aware, horses hooves grow and are very similar to humans finger nails, except of course they are much thicker. Horses in the wild tend to keep the hoof wore down, but they move a lot more then a domestic horse, so we have to help them out and give them a trim on occasion. The basic process is nip off with a tool that is about eighteen long and looks a little like pliers with a cutting edge, file smooth on the flat and shape the outside of the hoof. Oh and I left out dig out dirt, manure, and muck from the rest of sole and take down the flat with a hoof knife.

It is probably the hardest job on the farm, and especially as jobs relating to horses go. I would ten times over rather put up hay all day then trim two or three horses feet. During the process a well trained perfect horse will stand there, lifting each foot almost before you ask (and some actually do), holding it until you are done. Even with a well trained horse though it is time spent bent over, knees bent against themselves, and in motion the entire time on your part.

Now the reality is younger, less trained horses tend to want to dance around a bit and see just what they can get away with. Older horses get lazy and instead of holding up the foot for you, lean 1/4 or more of their weight over on your already bent over form. And one horse I have likes to nibble at your back, hair, or shoulders whenever she can – and if she is luck she will grab something like a tool or apron strap and pull it out or loose.

It gets worse though. If you recall I have 7 miniature horses that needed to be trimmed. Good news – They have much smaller feet so much less trimming to be done. Bad news – They only stand on average 29 inches tall hence their feet can’t come up nearly as much off the ground, so you have to bend down even more to work with them. Even worse – three of these little guys are young or just have not been handled that much and they throw a fit when you getting a trim done.

So, if I am making it sound bad – well it was hard sweating honest work, that was very tiring. It left my shoulders, neck, knees, thighs, back, and arms tired and sore through even today (Tuesday). In just over four hours I trimmed eight horses feet, some of which were just rank.

So the rambling here leads to this thought. It was so incredibly nice to be out in the hot sun doing such work. Living and breathing horses for the time. No cell phone and no computer email and nothing that was otherwise interfering with the task at hand. My pure enjoyment of working with my hands, and while utilizing my brain, it was on a subject that was much lower caliber and enjoyable. It was just a breath of freedom that was much enjoyed and much needed.

I am looking forward to the next bit of time I will get to spend time out like that with the horses with no computers around for a short time.

I am sure if you are alive, eat anything from the grocery store or from a food establishment that prepares it for you, unless you are currently under a rock you have heard about the the suspected tomato salmonella scare. Just in case you have not a brief bit of background. There were a bunch of cases of salmonella, over the weekend I believe. The FDA (though I believe the CDC was involved too) released warnings and recommendations to not consume certain kinds of tomatoes, specifically beef stake and roma or plum types. Since then the tomatoes have disappeared from fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and others, as well from the shelves at Wal-Mart, Winn-Dixie, Kroger, and so on. Today at some point the recommendation has been determined that it is safe now to eat tomatoes from 19 states of origin but you should still hold off from other states.

Now a little review. Salmonella does not come from salmon the fish. It is a bacteria that is usually transmitted initially through contact with feces. Hence why it is so easy to it happening in the more common culprit – chicken. Tomatoes another story – but perhaps water in irrigation or washing was contaminated. Regardless, if you tomato was not grown in one the 19 approved states or something you grew yourself or from a reputable local farmer you better be safe and throw it out.

Why is this new here? First is that if you grew it yourself – your fine. No need to really worry. You pretty much know if you exposed your tomato crop to human feces or not. Beyond that, you could get them from a reputable local farmer. Now realistically in our climate we are still a few weeks away from the earliest tomatoes in our region – if they didn’t grow them in a greenhouse they still came from a truck out of state.

This how things leads me to a couple of issues I have had for a few years. Our food is so much better when acquired in its proper season. After all, those things they call tomatoes during the winter are hard and tasteless. Further, when we are touch with where our food came from, especially locally, we can feel better about it. Especially if we know the care and concern that a farmer may have put into making it happen instead of some industrial farmer that is about minimizing cost and hence maximizing profits. Of course the flip side of this is, we have to expect that there is some possible losses due to lack large scale process and hence there will be some increase in the price of such food. A small price to pay for knowing reasonably well that your food is bursting with the best of flavor and its peak and most likely the safest of foods you have been exposed too in a long time.

Anyway, this thought then leads to a concept called Slow Food. The basic ideas are that we slow down and enjoy food for what it is. We also slow down and have food in season. And lastly – and this is the big one that I am such a strong advocate of – we move our food a lot less – after all the food less traveled has a lot less chance of exposure to things such as salmonella.

I could go on about how food traveling less would help our current crunch on fossil fuels or how I think that incidents like this (of which we have had more of with vegetables then meats) points to the need to have better identification on fruits and vegetables or how the concept of NAID for animals is really the wrong place to be looking (and for the record – I am vehemently opposed to NAID). But I will instead save those for later upcoming blogs.

Instead, just thinking eating slow moving food that travels small distances and let that be some food for thought. If that is not enough, think about, when tomatoes come into season in a few more weeks no need to worry about salmonella from the local ones – give that some thought instead.

Another big change to the look of the blog in less then four days? What is up with that? No, I am not a woman. I really did have my mind made up on that last one and was pleased with the over all look and feel of it, except that one small green smudge, which I was willing to live with until I got around to altering it.

However, I realized that it wasn’t that everyone had abandoned reading my blog or that it was too nice a weekend to be in front of a computer (after all it was HOT here and A/C or a fan felt good with a cold drink). It was indeed the theme that was causing a problem with the WordPress statistics tool. Despite whatever hits may have occurred to the blog – the WordPress statistics tool was reporting zero. After going on four days I got suspicious and checked the actual web flow and while it could have all been me, I don’t think so – as I was outside working and playing most of the weekend.

So, I did a little test this morning, not logged in, and sure enough nothing on the stats increased – still a big zero. So, I changed back to an old theme – granted it was messed up due to being two columns – but sure enough I got a hit on the stats as soon as I went to the page not logged in.

Rather then trying to figure out the problem or waiting on the designer (French I believe) to fix something they may not care about, I search out some other themes. Fully tested the stats on this one and believe it looks pretty good. Also the black darkened wood reminds me of the tobacco, hay, and livestock barns of central Kentucky where I spent so much of my younger years. I have another in the wings just in case, but I think this one is going to stick around for awhile unless it develops some issue or another then I have not though through to this point.

Now that I have that little worry out of the way, it is back to blogging… Coming soon a rant about the tomato scare and local food, another about fuel prices, truckers, and going green, and maybe something about the death bell tolling for internet auctions.

PS: I also decided that I am too on the fence about the MORE tag. So I have for the time being removed those and instead limited the front page to showing 5 blogs to combat scrolling forever. This is one that I am being a bit non-committal toward and may change back to again later.

I didn’t really intend to do it this soon. I had been thinking for sometime that the colors on the previous page sometimes lent themselves to being hard to read. Further, I was really wanting to move to a 3 column layout, so that I could have the subjects, links to other blogs, calendar and such all show up reasonably near the top area of the overall page and still keep the search and sponsor/advertising links up near the top of the page on the other side.

This morning I was looking at something, from an email and I decided to just give it a try. It ended up, to find the one that I liked the best I just had to pick one that I had experimented with a bit before. I really want to utilize most the real estate on the screen (in the window) and so many don’t, leaving a good 1/3 (sometimes more) of the space in the window to just empty space. This new one does just that.

I think it makes things very easy to read with the brighter colors on the darker backgrounds. It has a couple of extra features that I really like a lot as well, that are built into it with my having to add widgets or similar things. One thing I did notice and I am going to maybe try and drop it out – the ick green background color swirl beneath the links at the bottom of each post really doesn’t look that great to me.

One additional thing I have already started with the new theme – with the font size and the layout, the blog entries seem to go way down the page. In the future, I am going to post new blogs so they will show in full on the front page. However, as a few days go by and I post new entries, I will insert a More>> tag, so the entry will show the first two paragraphs and then you, dear user, can click to see the remainder of it. I think that it personally makes for a nicer looking page over all with out going on forever, but then again, based on what I see on facebook.com suggest that maybe that is not such a big deal. However, if it bugs me, I have the right to fix it – so I did. And to that end, the last ten post have already had such a tag added to them.