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.