Ya Just Can’t Count On…

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In real life my business provides I.T. and web support. HarperCo is the “offsite” I.T. administrator for a number of businesses and is the site developer and host for a growing list of clients. (As an aside, we got here by accident. I’m a mechanical engineer, for heaven’s sake — I spend the rest of my time designing widgets and telling companies how to run their businesses. But you teach just one computer course, see …)

So.

This weekend proved the old adage that when things can go wrong, they will. I probably should have titled this You Can Always Count On…

Subtitled, A Cautionary Tale.

I hope Bad Things really come in Threes.

First up, my new UPS. That’s Uninterruptible Power Supply, not the nice guy in the brown shorts (I still want to race the truck, but that’s another story). We had a little power outage Friday. Then we had another. And another. The battery symbol my new UPS went from fully charged to empty and the Battery Charge indicator bar flashed about a minute after the power went out the first time. It happened faster after that. I took it back to the store for an exchange.

Nice store clerk: “We have a 14 day return policy.”

Moi: “No, the receipt says returns can be brought in through today.”

NCC: “Oh. Well, we can’t take it back without a box.”

Moi: [Uh oh. That means it’ll go back on the shelf] “But we have a box. You exchange this one for one that works, I put this one in the new box and give you that box.”

A five minute task took twenty-five minutes, partly because it took a few for me to find the one remaining replacement in the store. The new UPS box looked like it had been opened but the packaging inside seemed mostly untouched so I’m cautiously optimistic. (And I took as much of the wrapping as I could so the returned item doesn’t look “new” on the shelf.) The charge indicator indicated a full charge almost immediately and reports about 36 minutes uptime with the current load which should be about right. I’ll test it when I’m not on deadline pressure.

Next comes Windows Vista™. My friend Missy arrived next door for the winter. Brought her Vista™ equipped laptop and her wireless router (“WiFi”). I had worked some magic last year and it worked with no problem. This year Windows connects to the router but in local mode only, meaning Missy gets no Internet access on her couch. She can connect fine on her network up north. And the problem persists whether wired or wireless through the router. We tied a string directly to the cable modem and the Internoodle snapped right in.

Sounds like a router problem, doesn’t it?

Well, no.

She has the same problem connecting to my router next door even as other computers run through it.

Hacking the Registry™ didn’t work. Apparently it’s a fairly well known issue in Vista™.

I love computers.

Meanwhile, number 3, out on the Innert00b. One of my clients gave me the go-ahead to change web hosts. This is not a huge site — it has about 3,000 files and requires around 25MB of storage — but it is mission critical for the agency that owns it.

Changing registrars and hosts is pretty automated. Get an AUTH-CODE from the losing registrar. (All registrars have a bot to deliver that. Happens all the time.) Click a button at the gaining registrar to pull the domain name. (All registrars have a bot to do that. Happens all the time.) Wait for the losing registrar to approve the transfer. (All registrars have a way to do that. Happens all the time.) The whole process generally takes 5-7 days.

We’re now in day 11.

It took five days just to get the AUTH-CODE from the losing registrar. (our-old-host-dot-com has a bot to deliver that.) Got it. I clicked the button at the gaining registrar to pull the domain name and waited for the losing registrar to approve the transfer. (our-old-host-dot-com should have a way to do that. Happens all the time.) So we waited. And waited. And waited.

By about the fourth time we asked our-old-host-dot-com to comply, my blood was pumping well. Good that my Blowout Preventer was operational.

Turns out that the contact address for the domain name was not set to one of our addresses but to sales@our-old-host-dot-com. They also listed their own phone number, a number that is no longer in service. I wonder how that happened, since our-old-host-dot-com registered the domain for the site owner.

“Not our fault,” they said.

Really good that my Blowout Preventer was operational.

I kept waiting.

I was finally able to sneak in the back door and change the contact address to one monitored by a human. OK, monitored by me, but I was watching it. Got the gaining registrar to resend the approval form. I approved it and Bob’s your uncle, right?

Well, Bob’s not my uncle.

The site was dark this morning. Actually, the site had a big Your website has been suspended banner this morning.

The our-old-host-dot-com customer service manager and I have gone back and forth most of this morning. The good news is that I’ve cancelled the transfer with the gaining registrar and the customer service manager has added time to the current plan “to ensure it does not go offline during this transition period.” The bad news is that this simple, automated process was fouled by a simple bad call more than five years ago. Our-old-host-dot-com used bad contact info in a legal record.

There must be a moral in this morality play.

And there is: Don’t step on the sand burs. They hurt.

Rats. The moral is simple. My mom was right. Your plan never survives first contact with the enemy but human intervention usually fixes the problem. You can count on that.

Premte Peeves

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380 million dollars.

I’ve never met anyone with 380 million dollars. In fact, most of us never will.

Interest rates are low so the “annuitized” cash value was $240 Million. A ticket sold in Idaho and in Washington both won the jackpot and will split the prize. If they take the cash (the smart choice), each receives $120 million.

Or not.

The IRS requires a minimum 25% withholding on gambling wins in excess of $5000. Except the real rate is 35% on the income over $372,950 plus $108,216. And state and local taxes grab another chunk (although the Washington state winner lives in a state with no income tax).

So our 380 million dollar winner is actually two 190 million dollar winners who each get half of 240 million dollars and take home less than 80 million.

That’s still a lot of money and nothing to be peeved about.

Except it turns out corporate dividends are not the only kind of income twice taxed or triple or even quintuple taxed. Every dollar that went into that jackpot was already “after tax” income. Taxpayers (even the very poor who have no tax liability) bought every one of the 300-ish million tickets sold.

So the governments got income tax on the money coming in, then they took a cut off the top of the lottery prize (for the education fund, doncha know). And now they take another tax on the “winnings.”

A tax on peope who can’t do math.

That’s a lot of money and it is something to be peeved about.

What a Disaster!

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Policemen police. Runners run. Writers write. And we all look over our own shoulders now and then.

This week I write about what I missed. And what I didn’t.

I cherish a few beliefs about myownself. This blog isn’t about me. These columns are what Faux News calls fair and balanced. And I AM™ never w-r-r-rong.

OK. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Last month, in writing about millionaires, I admitted that I’d rather be a millionaire than not. I’m not going to increase my personal wealth much by putting a Paypal button on this site. The week before that, I confessed that I now understand why liberals don’t geddit. And just two weeks before, I told the story of my mom at the corner of High and Gay.

This is my 333 entry since I started blogging in 2008. 220 of them have been in the op-ed category I call Random Access. Many of those (151) fell in the Politics and News category. I imagine you can figure out what topics I covered.

“Politics is like the weather,” I wrote in 2008. “Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the weather. Or change it.”

The pieces that had more impact were more personal. 2010 was a busy year. Liz Arden sent me a family picture of herself with her parents and I riffed that into a story about my mom as an elderly woman who could have been slain by a taxi. We learned that “full” in a small town parking lot is different than “full” in Miami or New York. gekko and I wrote an ongoing series together.

My family didn’t have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. We had a boat but not a lot of cash. My dad’s job was the typical junior exec and we shared the homestead with my grandfather; we all had to work for what we did have. I came out of that feeling depraved but not deprived.

Rufus missed [bleep]ing Asbestos Dust back in May. He was amazed. The rest of us about died. A week earlier, I had written that “Kids aren’t allowed to eat dirt.” Number One daughter had been banned from classes because she wore a t-shirt to school.

I did spend some time wondering why my friend Swampy Swamtek, with all his brainpower, with all his education, with all his belief in conservation, can’t remember to turn out the lights when he leaves a room. I remembered that, since the heady days of Apollo 13 forty years ago, no man has had to walk twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot. Both ways. According to this president’s plan no American man ever will again.

And I took some time off from worrying about the claim that women’s hot flashes are responsible for Global Warming to reminisce about my sports car races in the 70s.

I somehow missed the fact that the Mets did not make the World Series. I didn’t once write about the United/Continental airline’s merger that brought together 700 planes, dropped employment from 88,000 to 77,000, and shared 7 bags of 2003 peanuts among us. Airlines put fares up $20 across the board. I never once mentioned Christine O’Donnell’s Rhodes Scholarship in comedy which is at least as credible as her candidacy turned out to be.

I’ll keep hammering the small town politicians who want you to believe that paying twice as much for half as many police officers in your town is a way to save you (tax) money. And when Congress acts on H.R.6907, a measure to ban further activity at Eyjafjallajökull, you’ll hear about it here first. Most important, in the spirit of WikiLeaks, pretty much everything personal rattling around between my ears will sooner or later fall out on these pages.

Politics is like the climate. Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the climate. Or change it.

BE IT Resolved…

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I grew up (professionally) in the Dark Ages1 when employees set their own performance goals for the year and enshrined them in a “P.D.P.”

Liz Arden and I talked about that a little this morning. “I don’t make resolutions,” she said.

Neither do I. It struck me as odd since both of us are hardwired to achieve goals. We Floridians did make a few resolutions for next year, though:

  • Make sure the body you bury at sea doesn’t walk ashore.
  • Do not eat giant African snail mucus.
  • Do not wear an underwire bra to a federal detention center.
  • Learn CPR. And carry a sidearm.

A Tampa alligator snatched a Jack Russell terrier from its owner. The man shot at the gator which let go of the dog. The catatonic pet wasn’t breathing until the man revived it with CPR. Hope he had some extra pooper scooper bags. Resolved: teach Cardio Pet Resuscitation.

A Miami attorney was stopped from visiting her client because the underwire set off the metal detector. Guards wouldn’t let her in after she took it off because she was braless! Resolved: find a better class of jailers.

A Hialeah man convinced his followers to drink the juices of smuggled African snails as part of a religious “healing” ceremony. Several became ill, lost weight, and develop lumpy bellies. Resolved: find a new weight loss ceremony.

A couple who paid $8 for a box of bones at a yard sale found their Halloween decoration was a real dead guy. And a family buried a deceased relative at sea; the body resurfaced at a Fort Lauderdale beach. Broward Sheriff’s deputies are conferring with the Coast Guard to figure out what charges they can bring. Resolved: pass a new law about cutting the feet off relatives and selling them in garage sales.

“In business we fill out the form at the beginning of the period and file it,” Liz said. “Spend the year doing our jobs. At review time, we sit down, pull out the form, and look for all the ways what we really did met the stuff we wrote down.”

And that’s why resolutions don’t work.

288 years ago, more than 100 years after 102 English reprobates and separatists set foot in the New World, Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards prescribed reading his 70 resolutions at least once each and every week. I hope he was able to do so; it’s the right prescription for keeping them.

Happy New Year, everyone!

1 “Management by Objectives is a process of defining objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization…

“The essence of MBO is participative goal setting, choosing course of actions and decision making. An important part of the MBO is the measurement and the comparison of the employee’s actual performance with the standards set.”