Category: Just Saying …

Things are starting to change at our place.

Budget problem ($50 million deficit) at the office is requiring some massive cutbacks. The IT department has to cut back 35%, which means that there will be less bodies around here. One of those ‘less bodies’ appears to be mine, at the moment.

There is a possibility that some labor contract changes might help a bit, but that it not certain. Although things haven’t finalized yet, it looks like next fiscal year (starts in July) will be the start of a job change for me.

I’ve got 23 years here, and there is a buyout if I leave voluntarily. So, after much consideration, it looks like retirement is upcoming. Financially, we’ll be OK (even though I am ‘only’ 57), especially if we make some other changes.

So, the house is on the market, even though not the best time to sell. Our realtor (family friend) is optimistic, though, since there is some buying action in our area. It may be that we can find a buyer in about two months, and time the closing to be near the end of June.

Our plan is to move to Utah. Both of our daughters will be there by then. Christine has been there with her family for a couple of years, and Stacy is taking a job at the Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. I’ve got a sister in SLC and one in Denver area, so that is also an advantage.

With our house sold, we can downsize our monthly house payment and still have a nice place to live with an acceptable income. And we will be closer to our children (and grandchildren). It looks to be an exciting change possibility.

Even though I will retire from this position, I am looking for a position in the network administration and web page development / site management area in SLC. (I’ve set up a virtual resume at http://www.rickhellewell.com .) Don’t think I am ready to stay at home all day. Although Pam is looking forward to full-time scrapbooking and grandchildren-spoiling.

So, changes are in the wind.

Just an alert … March 14th is “Pi Day” (no, that’s spelled correctly). Take your favorite physicist to lunch. More info about it is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_day .

And did you know that Albert Einstein was born on a Pi Day? Which may not have an relevance, but it is another fascinating factoid you can cite on that day.

I’m just giving you a head start on your celebration plans. And to note that my favorite is Boysenberry Pi. Although I do like Pizza Pi (we had that for dinner last night, and I had some slices for lunch today).

Now, aren’t you glad you stopped by?

Spent most of this week staying at home helping Pam with her two broken “wings”. She ended up with a half-cast on her right hand (for the broken bone in her hand) and a sling for her broken left elbow. That pretty much limits her ability to move easily, so it was my job (as the dutiful and caring husband) to help her out as needed.

The involves food and drink and drugs and laundry and dishes, although there hasn’t been extensive cooking involved (we’re surrounded by fast food choices). And I was able to work from home during the week (when not wandering to the doctor’s). Actually was quite productive from home, if I say so myself.

In the middle of all that, Stacy got back from her visit to her sister in Utah on Tuesday night. She picked up a flu bug on the airplane (even though she had a flu shot) along with a cold, so made trips to her house on Wed and Thurs to help out with doctor visits and food/drug runs. She got some really good news today, but I will let her blog about it (when she gets better).

Pam was feeling good enough this morning to let me go to work today. Got quite a bit done in preparation for a three-day weekend. No big plans for this weekend that I know of. We’ll see how much trouble I can stay out of.

Pam went off to Texas to visit her sister and mother yesterday. While there, she misjudged a step on their front porch and took a header. That resulted in a trip to the ER, where they found a broken left elbow and a broken right hand.

The result is wraps on both arms, since they didn’t want to do a cast yet. She’s coming home early to get to the orthopedic doctor on Monday. Since both arms are essentially unusable, not to mention the Vicodin fuzzing up things, looks like I’ll be on nurse duty for a while when she gets back. Luckily, I can work from home when needed, although not sure how long she will be unable to work.

The “FileHurl” place (www.filehurl.com , free unlimited file transfers) is slowly getting some traction. There are now over 300 people that have ‘hurled’ a file, with over 600GB of files hurled so far. And I got a nice treat last weekend – my first donation to help cover the expenses of running the place.

A few changes in store there: I’ve started a blog page (courtesy of Blogger). Noticed that the site ‘favicon’ was changed, though. I need to work on the paid advertising links to automate them a bit … the links are hard coded, and are just mine. The plan is for affiliate-type links, but I want to ensure that the links are to products I have used or can recommend.

And the dishwasher at home has decided to take a vacation. Some troubleshooting of that is on the weekend agenda.

Although I am not a big sports fan, I did watch the Super Bowl yesterday. Good game.

But did anyone see what I saw on that last touchdown? The replays, especially the one from ground level, seemed to show that Holme’s feet never both touched the ground after he caught the ball.

I saw the left foot on the ground, and the right foot in back of the left foot and off the ground by about an inch. And the left foot did keep in contact, but I never saw the right foot contact the ground after the ball was caught and before he went out of bounds.

I did a rewind on my DVR with a bit of stop action on that replay angle, and I never saw the right foot contact the ground. It seemed very clear to me, but there was no mention of that anywhere.

Again, not a big football fan. And I didn’t have any preference on who won. But it seemed to me that that call’s review was not correct.

So…where is your data? And what is your backup plan? Is it like Ma.gnolias (a free site to store your web browsing bookmarks)? Who apparently didn’t have a backup plan, as the entire site was hosed by some unknown error (I suspect that their database got corrupted, and backups weren’t’ available). One place for the story here http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/magnolia-suffer.html .

Or, in these uncertain economic times, do you have a procedure that disables access when your network administrator is let go? Or are you like the folks at “Fannie Mae” (US govt housing mortgage agency), who told a contractor he was fired, but didn’t revoke his access? Seems that he was a bit miffed at the whole thing, so he put a logic bomb on their servers that would have deleted all their data on all servers. See here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/29/fannie_mae_sabotage_averted/ ).

If your company may start downsizing, do you have proper access controls on your data? If you gave an employee two weeks’ notice, could they start deleting files? Or changing some spreadsheet formulas?

Something to think about for your personal data … and your company’s data. Could your company survive a disgruntled employee’s nefarious action on your data?

We had a nice visit from the Christine and Jared and the five grandkids (8 and under) last week. They were here for the funeral of Jared’s mother, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for several years.

Their visit resulted in bit more noise than we normally have. They are all quite well-behaved, but there is an inherent ‘joyful noise’ when they are around. They were able to spend a lot of time with Jared’s family (lots of cousins in that family) who live in the area. I got to stay with the two youngest during the funeral day, which was not as hard as I let on. I did change a few ‘dirty duds’, but was stoic during the whole process.

We watched lots of “Sprout”, and I usually had at least two on my lap at all times (and, unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of room on my particular lap). Our other daughter Stacy brought along her Wii, along with her new Wii Fit, so the kids had fun playing the games and using the Wii Fit. I declined, however, since I really don’t want to know my BMI. I did play a few racing games with them. I am not a game player, due to minimal coordination skills, but I did manage to win a few of the races.

Their family is also pretty good about cleaning up toys and stuff, and left the house in pretty good shape. They left yesterday, so when I got home from work it was much quieter than usual.

At least I think it was. Hard to tell with all this leftover ringing in my ears.

I did manage to do a bit of minor improvements in my free File Transfer site (www.filehurl.com ) . I got a comment on my “Security Dawg” site recommending another ‘free’ site. But that place was not really free, and it certainly has limitations, although it might be a bit prettier. I replied in the post on Security Dawg comparing that ‘free’ site with the FileHurl site.

There are a few people using the FileHurl place. Right now, I think that it just needs a bit more publicity. Although I could do some self-publicity by posting to other sites such as Digg or Lifehacker, I’d rather (at the moment) let actual users do that. But the site works well (and easily), so give it a try if you need to transfer any size file to someone else.