Continue reading »]]> Seattle, this city and myself have a little bit of history.  I’ve vacationed in my way young past, and been up here twice else for Job interviews (was declined on one, turned down the other).  But still after being away from a “big” heavily metro city for a while, this place seems well…different…

Anyways my company has brought me up here for a major SharePoint Deployment.  This project has promise as it’s one of the largest deployments I’ve been on to date.  Though it is a 3 month deployment and that annoys me to no end, I will definitely miss my family, hopefully I can get remote access so I don’t have to be here that long.

Anyways on to city life here:

As I exit my hotel and head down to Pike Place Market, I’m accosted by 2 beggars and a hooker (who looked old enough to be my grandma, this would have taken a few bottles of something extremely intoxicated to get even vaguely interested) , witness a drug dealing and a wanton act of vandalism…I’m not taking hotel recommendations from my company again.  Mostly though it’s the hustle and bustle that bother me though, I just don’t feel as safe as I would if it were Loveland again.  Never mind that I’m never accosted by beggars in Loveland and never seen a hooker…have I really been away from the big city environment that long to where I find it repulsive now?

So finally I settle on the one place I find that resembles home for dinner, given that I don’t remember much of the local street environment from my previous travels in Seattle, and that place is Chipotle.  Wherever I travel in the U.S. now I can pretty much be reassured of a good burrito anyways.

So then I just head back to my nice and safe cubicle of a hotel room.  Maybe my next hotel will be out in the burbs somewhere, and I’ll just drive in from Bellevue or something…

Continue reading »]]> Since my first Cell Phone I’ve been a Sprint customer (now about 12 years).  They give me a great phone and piles of bandwidth and I give them money, it’s been a mutually beneficial agreement

Lately I’ve been watching the developments in the cell phone industry, Verizon, AT&T have all gone to limited plans.  T-Mobile isn’t limited yet, but they throttle you at a certain point when you’ve used too much bandwidth.  To date, Sprint has been the only one who still keeps a completely unlimited data plan.  I love it as my bill is predictable despite the fact I maybe use 2-5GB of data a month between 2 phones.

My worry has been that this could lead to a “tragedy of the commons” as people leave their monitored providers such as AT&T and Verizon to Sprint where the pastures would still be green.  This would in effect swamp Sprint as they struggle to honor the promise of all that bandwidth.  But Sprint bandwidth has stayed consistent.  Never mind the fact that the Iphone is now on Sprint too…

How does this happen, if I know anything about the Internet it’s that bandwidth is a finite entity.  It’s used in many respects as “online currency” with providers swapping back and forth with others all the time.  Does Sprint really have the capital to just keep expanding their network?

Well Sprint if you’re reading this, fear not for as long as you remain a solid provider you’ll always be my phone provider.  However I’d love to hear how you do it exactly.

Continue reading »]]> You see a panhandler on the street begging for cash, what provokes you to give or not?

I keep telling myself I’ll never give to a panhandler again, but yet sometimes something about my inner chemistry provokes me to fork over a few dollars yet again despite myself.  I’ve tried to analyze for my sake, and theirs for that matter, what provokes me to fork over money to a panhandler?

Today’s case was a middle-aged female with a sign out in the intersection “Shelters are full, need money for a hotel bed.  God Bless you.”  I think this one, by virtue of the fact that she was a female invoked a sense of inner chivalry, which probably pushed me over the top (I know what you’re thinking, but she wasn’t all that and I get a similar reaction when I see older still females at the panhandling line).  Other things:

• It was cold, nobody should have been out in Denver at night
• It’s been a fairly good day (not my best ever, but…)

What (if anything) can trip you to give to a panhandler?

Continue reading »]]> So I’m perusing my Blog statistics when I spot an interesting visitor today going by the (host) name webcrawler02.kroger.com.  Now all are more than welcome but I’d be curious as to just who this guy is after a search on the Internet revealed little about him other than some more curious forum posters.  My theory is he’s probably out looking for disparaging details about the Kroger Line of products and got drawn in by my posting recently about King Soopers (a Kroger store of course).  Of course my posts meant no harm.

Well all bots are welcome again but please reveal thine self kind bot.  I do like King Soopers and their California Cousin Ralphs though.  Good value for the dollar, k Mr. Nice Bot? It’s ok don’t be shy….

Continue reading »]]> So it seems that the economy is improving now.  The prognosticators that be have marked the unemployment rate lower, my inbox is swarming even more with recruiter emails and my wife is busier than ever on tax returns this year.

But yet…another friend of mine just had his job outsourced and one couple who babysit our kid and have become friends of ours still remain dully unemployed…

Seems like our recovery is a tad uneven.  One friend is part of a never-ending cycle of sending unemployed to India.  Our friends do semi-skilled work that is hard for demand because much of it has been outsourced as well.

The Libertarian in me says this is just part of a cycle, let everyone retrain to more in-demand skills.  I’d wonder about telling both of these people to head to nursing school, is this the best we have nowadays? I guess you have to find a marketable skill nowadays.  I’m just grateful I still have one.

Locally here in Loveland as well, it seems things are moving well (except for my one couple, they live in Loveland).  But I see a constant stream of stuff in the Reporter Herald nowadays.

I dunno, I see only a small subset of the economy, but it tells 2 tales in my eyes, some move ahead, some have issues…

Continue reading »]]> So up until recently I was a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, I remember 7 years ago thinking that the online journal was a great price at $104/year.  However today at $207/year I just can’t have the same thought.  So I recently canceled.

Reasons? 

1) Value for the dollar, I just don’t read that many WSJ articles no matter how I try and force myself.

2) Similar to 1, their articles seem to be going more and more downhill.  Can’t put a finger on it but they’ve gotten less technical and more popular over the years.  I can get the same quality in the local newspaper for a fraction of the price, and get it both print and online.

How did inflation get so bad though, that they feel the need to charge double their rate 7 years ago?  It just smells of greed…

Continue reading »]]> The biggest news in our little town of Loveland is probably the ACE Project.  The Reporter Herald does a pretty awesome job of keeping up with this project.  It’s been 1.5 years since I first heard of this project and the old HP Site is still mostly vacant, but I’m sure any day now…

On the one hand that’ll mean more traffic on Taft Ave, a key throughfare for me to the I-25 , Eisenhower Ave and downtown Loveland, but it’s 7,000 jobs and housing values are likely to go up.  So if I ever decide to sell mine it’ll hopefully mean a few more bucks.  Also if it does give my wife that full-time job she wants so much, great; right now she’s a seasonal employee at Jackson Hewitt doing taxes, but anyone want to hire an Accountant/Financial Planner? 

I hope it matures into so much more in Loveland though.  We have a lot of things that high-tech industry could use, such as:

1. Low utility rates, want to build a big ol’ electricity sucking datacenter?  I’d propose right here
2. Lots of cheap, open land
3. Educated workplace, between CSU Fort Collins and CU Boulder we are served well
4. Low taxes, Colorado Taxes are a flat 4.63%, try and beat that back in California.  Loveland adds a nominal amount for sales tax (if you plan on selling something).
5. Low property taxes, my lil’ house just got assessed for $860 on a quarter acre lot…I’ve known people get hit for far worse.

So what are you waiting for people, move on up!

Continue reading »]]> Time to admit it developers, many of us are lousy at Software Testing, me included…

Many of us might be familiar with the “Agile” methodology, amongst which advocates that testers write code and developers test code. In my experience I’ve seen many a tester write some code, often in the endeavor of fixing a problem. But what’s our problem developers? Other than write a few unit tests, we don’t do much else. Where’s the continuous integration in our work? Our continuous test driven development?

Developers seem to still be in the habit of handing code off to testers rather than testing software themselves. Lucky testers… I’m sure this varies by organization but it still seems to be my observation that this is the case.

SharePoint in particular is tricky. Most testing involves continuous integration with a deployed solution. Unit testing is hardly enough as SharePoint is too large and complex to just throw a unit tested solution in the real world without some workup in a staging environment, you’ll almost certainly crash and burn.

One thing I’ll have to resolve to do in short, learn more Software testing   every other developer out there should likewise consider this.  We are all on the same team in the path to continuously improving our software, and in the end watch, it’ll take less time to release in the end if testing is started earlier.  Just trust me on this one.  Look at Test Driven Development in Agile if you’re curious about learning more.

Continue reading »]]> Let me introduce you all to a friend of mine, Cowboy Jim.  Since we moved into my new home in Loveland he’s done all the handiwork around the place that I just can’t do (I’m really more a Tim Taylor than a Bob Vila, give me a hammer and I’m dangerous).  For example, today I wanted to change out the overhead Flourescent bulb in my kitchen and wound up breaking not only the new bulbs I bought but the light fixture itself *le sigh*.  Time to call the handyman again…

We get to talking on the phone and he was complaining about how business was slow and he could be over “anytime!” I had to wait to get some feedback on overhead lights from Bevin so I couldn’t jump into it right away, but I asked him why business was so down and he said “well Craigslist was rejecting a bunch of my posts, don’t know why.”  My thinking is we gotta move him away from Craigslist and onto his own site.  Especially since starting up his new site cost me only $17 for a new domain at http://www.cowboy-jim.com.  Five minutes to buy a new domain, and 5 minutes to install WordPress and start a new theme, and blammo, a friend is helped out.   Note this page is still under heavy construction.  Stay tuned

It’s amazing how cheap a website can be these days, even free if you don’t mind advertising.  WordPress makes it too damn easy too.  Now the better trick, SEO or getting the search engines to find him for handymen in Loveland, CO.  But hey if you’re reading this in Northern Colorado and need some work done, feel free to give him a ring at cowboyjimhandyman@gmail.com.