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Wow, yesterday was stressful. It did not help that I was not feeling well due to bad Labor Day BBQ. I tossed my cookies once at work yesterday and ended up leaving a couple hours early. I feel great right now however.

I like taking more responsibility at work to not just do my tasks and get my work done but to be a part of the team and look at things in a new perspective. Pushing some of the decision making down to the level where expertise exists but may not be utilized allows management to manage rather than make decisions that the experts on the team can make themselves.

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I sent a rather large email today at work explaining my concerns about the project I am involved with. I got positive feedback from two people with one wondering why I did not include solutions to the issues.

it is important for teams to work out issues that are brought up by members. One of the last sentences in my email was an indicator that we need to discuss it to make a decision. The team members’ thoughts and ideas are important.

My senior VP wants the senior personnel on each project to be able to make technical decisions. But overall flow and scope of a project must remain with management (program/product and otherwise) with input from the team. Simple (at least I think it is).

Lets see how our next meeting goes…

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I always wondered “Is any one ever truly 100% right?”. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? And I am not talking about religion.

A large project at work took me from my regular job to being dedicated to the project work at hand. Not being a grand vision person and hating small details required to manage a project, it has been extremely difficult for me. There are personnel involved in the project that seem to think they know exact requirements for groups they have never managed (nor the type of group for that matter).

The situation frustrates me. How far can I go in pushing the envelope complaining about the overall scope and its implementation? I guess I’ll find out soon. My plan is to start escalating my concerns through my management and then ultimately to the team and possibly beyond.

The project affects our customers and we are not implementing the project with future expansion and work load in mind. If you are going to do a project, do it right, do it completely (within reason), and never negatively impact income streams from the people and orginizations buying your products and services. Remember that.

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I was looking at my statistics and noticed a lot of hits from my old blog on my last hoster. Sorry everyone but the information is not here any longer (at least yet). I will be putting up some of the technical information again once I get a chance.

I boo-booed and did not keep an online copy of the old blog so I could not import.

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I was in the US Navy for 7 years. They teach firefighting skills and for good reason. When you are at sea there isn’t a fire department you can call to but out a blaze. The crew is the fire department.

Using fire extinguishers can be very difficult. There is one over all rule: Aim at the base of the fire because you need to extinquish the fuel and not the flames. Once the fuel is out, the flames go away! The second most important rule is to make sure the fire extinquisher is the correct type for the fire. There are classes of fires and each has its own best practice for fighting such a fire.

The concept extinguisher dvice.com is good redesign. I think it may be harder to use than a standard because it fires projectiles instead of the extinguishing agent. You can read more at dvice.com.

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I was notified yesterday via email that my domain registration has been moved from my previous registrar to Dreamhost. Yay!

In case this helps anyone out there, here is what I had to do to get the registration moved.

1. Login to the control panel for your registrar. This might be at your hosting company or with the specialist that handled the registration.
2. Make sure the domain to be transferred is not locked.
3. Disable domain privacy.
4. Make sure the Administrator (also called admin or Admin) email goes to an email address to which you have control.
5. Log in to the control panel of the new registrar or their agent (such as you hoster).
6. Use their tools to request a domain registration transfer.
7. You should receive an email from them for confirmation. Follow the instructions included in that email.
8. You should later receive a confirmation from the old registrar or their agent. Follow the instructions in that email.
9. In 5-7 days, your domain registration should be moved.

All the clues on how to do this were in the help pages for my old hosting company, my new hosting company, and both registrars and their agents. It just was not abundantly clear the exact steps that should have been followed so it took longer than I wished.

Well, it is now done and I am very happy with Dreamhost. They have a lot of nice features and most importantly of all, fast, fast, fast servers. Wordpress at my old hosting company was dog slow. So slow that the few visitors I had regularly complained.

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Have you ever felt like the picture here? Dark, grey, cold, alone.

Work and life in general has been troublesome. I should have been posting but just did not feel like it. Coming home from work mentally drained. Posts should be more regular but I can not gaurentee until this project at work is done — which looks like October.

My health has been off also, which is the biggest reason I am having issues with not feeling like posting. There was child abuse in my family when I was very young and it only just came out (after my mothers death). I stay away from most of my side of the family because they are so dysfunctional. I would rather hang out with my wife’s side of the family.

Travel is difficult for me so I don’t go anywhere on vacation meaning I don’t get any real relaxation time.

Oh well! My am struggling forward and making progress so there is light at the end of the tunnel.

I have a few movie reviews to do. Hopefully I’ll finish those this week. Plus I have a few tech related items I want to post.

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The Place Promised in Our Early Days DVD cover shot

WARNING: Potential spoilers!

Anime is one of my favorite movie genres. The cinematic methods used in anime can be breath taking and usually the storylines are execellant.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days is an alternative history/universe plot line. Two young men and one young woman in high school live in American occupied southern Japan. The government struggles with the northern Japanese union who are experimenting with parallel worlds.

A mysterious tower looms in the distance on the Union side in what was once called Hokkaido. The young woman dreams about it and finally falls into a coma where the two young men lose contact with her for three years.

The tower turns out to be used to bind alternative universes and worlds together. The young woman has a link to the tower that is resolved at the culmination of the movie.

Relationships are center to the story with the sci-fi aspects used to punctuate the plot.

I have one criticisms with the English translation. The voice acting is superb. However, there are parts of the movie where the characters are talking but there is no voice. This missing dialog does not affect the plot and story lines but does leave me puzzled on what the characters were discussing.

On a bright note, the translators included respectfully placed English text overlays on signs and other printed material that are important to the story.

The movie overall is good. There are no major translation problems that detract from the movie. However, the movie itself, while having a decent plot line, does not have enough meat to fill in. I would not consider it a waste of my 1.5 hour time, it is not an award winning movie.

Rating: ♦♦♦◊◊ (I liked it.)
Director: Makoto Shinkai
Writer: Makoto Shinkai
IMDB: The Place Promised in Our Early Days
Parents Guide:

PG (US)

Some mild gore (one person shot but not killed, blood splatter on windshield of a plane), mild and infrequent profanity, two scenes where guns are pointed at people

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My blog was languishing on the previous hosting company due to several factors — the site was so slow, it made viewing and writing painful; I was just too busy (or so I thought).

Today marks the relaunch of my site. Excuse the dust as things are likely to change a bit.

I want to thank DreamHost for the quick setup and lightning fast servers.

Now if I can just get the registrar moved from Tucows to DreamHost. The process so far has been painful. To perform the transfer, a special link is used in the DreamHost admin panel. This sends an email to the admin and technical contacts assigned to the WhoIs record. That email is supposed to end up in my registered email box so I can click the link and approve. So far, no email.

I resubmitted also to no avail. At least I found the Tucows panel to change the name servers so that my domain is pointing to DreamHost rather than my old hosting company.

I’ll write more as the drama unfolds.