Stories

Figure I would rant about Citibank while I am on hold. First of all CitiRetail is the only credit card service I have that I cannot pay digitally. Get with the times. So I saw on my bill where I could pay digitally from a citibank account. So I sign up....transfer some money. Call them to see how I do this....they say the only way is using BillPay. Ok...well I have that on my regular bank account. Thanks for nothing. So I have this account with checks....I think well n...

I figured I had better posting something technology related or my blog is gonna start looking like some sort of consumer report or rant and raves blog. Seems like the more I talk about and use Amazon Web Services the more questions and people I get wanting to talk about it. Get random people using the GTalk chad module on my blog, and people through my company who have business acquaintances that want to learn from our experience and our pains. The push to learn what A...

I have not had much time to do performance testing on our recent Amazon EC2 environment. We got our entire company migrated and stabilized in a completely Amazon Web Services based environment. And so far I love it.. So I am very thankful I came across this performance testing of...

As Web 2.0 was being discovered and coming to a head one thing that came to mind was that eventual acquisition and consolidation was going to be necessary because there are so many applications and companies.

I have been noticing more and more web services either going down or having severe latency because they are overloaded.

I just finished a big migration to Amazon Web Services for my company. I am using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 mainly for everything. We ...

Google Gears or the Offline Settings is what had screwed up my Gmail (Google Apps) left hand menu bar. I just turned offline off for Gmail and my menu went back to normal.

I have been using my company outlook for the day because for some reason my left hand menu in Gmail (Apps for my Domain) takes up 3/4 of the screen? I can't figure out why, anyways it gives me a headache.

In the last year or so of my marriage I signed up for Trendswest vacation resort. We went to their resort in St George Utah and went Zion and Bryce canyon. It was nice. Then Trendswest got bought by Worldmark. I have never been good at taking vacations so I thought this would be a great way to force myself into taking vacations around some beautiful places. They give you a book with the 80 plus locations as well as the worldwid...

So Google has release offline access for Google Calendar to all users. Now I have offline access enabled for my key Google Apps. Google Mail (Gmail) Google Docs Google Calendars Google Reader This allows me to use all these applications while I am not connected to the Internet on the road or otherwise. It is pretty exciting because it makes my Google Office Suite much more like Microsoft Office. I think it is a...

I have always preferred developing web applications that are simple. So many times a project gets blown out in scope and gets way too complicated. I remember specifying a site one time that I gave a 40K bid for. Got the project....then 6 months later through scope creep it was done and the budget was 250K. Then 6 months after launch it was abandoned because it was to complex to use. So I am always advocating a simple tool or web ap...

We are using SQL Server 2008 as our primary database currently. We do a lot of replication and other SQL server advanced features. At first the management studio really frustrated me, its clunky and pop ups and warns you about everything. The more I use it, the more I get it though. I need to replicate sets of stored procedure and make a few changes and re-run to create a new set. The management script as -> Create To option is very nice.

I just answered a question on LinkedIn...shortly thereafter I received a connection request from the QA thread.

Don't get me wrong...I love Amazon Web Services and EC2, it has changed the way I do business. I rocks. So tonight I was doing some server maintenance and backing up many server instances as AMI. This gives me a image snapshot of that production server to use while scaling and / or restoring in the event of failure. Any other time the EC2 services are awesome but tonight my 2 complaints are evident: 1) Only 1 IP Address per instance. PLease give me multiple IP Addresse...

I remember back in 2001 right after my daughter was born I was building a house in Southern Oregon and decided to spend part of the summer traveling around Oregon. So I setup my laptop as a server so I could still work while I was travelling. Then I had a dial-up modem for my laptop. I would get 9-18k. After building the house in Southern Oregon and the crash was well under way I had to move back to Eugene and find a job. I was crashing in my VW bus around Eugene and tapping Internet ...

As part of my 3rd party service development plan for my company I make recommendations for external systems that my company should be using for its operations. We don't buy or develop everything internally. There are some amazing 3rd party applications. A couple notable ones are: Gmail / Google Apps for Your Domain Google Docs Google Calendar Email Center Pro (ECP) These are appl...

I just did my taxes and broke down my spending for last year. I was newly divorced last year so I didn't have any restraing on my social spending budget. I won't give numbers on what I spent, but I was blown away what I spent wining and dining business customers as well as exploring the singles dating and partying scene. Well now that I am living way out in the woods I am putting myself on a forced money saving program. I don't eat out...or go out drinking. Period. Well this p...

What is the deal with Gmail today? Both my free gmail and google apps for my domain are total resource hogs.