A bit of awesome news

I just wanted to share with everyone that I’m actually going to be a dad.

It’s a little hard for me to believe that it’s true, but the doctor claims it to be the case… and who am I to argue with the person waving the magic ultrasound wand.

Provided everything progresses normally, we should be celebrating a birthday around the first of August.

Chargers sign Norv Turner to a 3 year contract extension

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/01/17/the-right-to-link/

Diet Begins Today

My diet officially begins again today. I should be getting my twitter scale today as well, so I’ll be doing my first official weigh-in soon. If you wish, you can keep up with my progress at http://twitter.com/JasonsDiet

For the record, the day’s not even half over and I’m starved…  But more because I’ve been too busy to eat than being limited by what I can eat.

Someone really has it in for the new Animal Hospital

My Diet - again

So if you’ve known me for any length of time, you know my weight fluctuates nearly as much as Oprah’s…  and I recently noticed an odd correlation to my charted weight with the 5 year NASDAQ chart.

So it’s time again for me to take the financial sector to it’s knees with another diet.

Last year about this time I started a diet and managed to lose 65 pounds.  I did it using a diet comprising of extremely bland food in exactly measured quantities with little exercise.  It worked great for 6 months, but as soon as I got sick of the crappy food, I started regaining weight.  I’m still netting 20 pounds less this New Years than last New Years, but all those clothes I bought at my low no longer fit.

So time to get back on the wagon.  I really think I need to get back to the gym, so I’m going to start doing this with good exercise regimen.  Also, I’m going to try to do it with a little less effort on measuring what I eat.  I’ll just stay away from the bad stuff and stick to more of the good stuff.  We’ll see how it goes.

The biggest diet change though that I’m going to make this year though is that I’m going to do this in public.  I’ve created a new twitter account http://twitter.com/jasonsdiet where you will be able to track my progress.  I’ll be tweeting from there throughout the diet, but more importantly my daily weigh-ins will be automatically tweeted from my new twitter enabled scale.  I won’t be able to lie about it, even if I wanted to.

I’m calling out to my friends and family who are out there reading this.  Please help keep me accountable.  Diet starts Saturday and tweets should start rolling through on Tuesday.

The Evil of the Left

Rush Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital today with chest pains while vacationing in Hawaii.  I learned about it while working when someone I follow mentioned it on twitter.  Twitter, and other new and social media is a terrific way to learn about news before other traditional sources have picked up the story… but since it’s a medium very close to the person telling the story, it also exposes a lot about the people behind the information.

While watching this story develop on Google’s realtime search, many tweets made their way through, most of which were extremely disturbing…

@randomscreenname: Dear Rush Limbaugh, please die. Sincerely, The People of America.

@billpalmer: come on God, I don’t ask you for much, and I very rarely ask you to smite anyone. but please kill Rush Limbaugh tonight.

@LONGBRDSK8R #RUSH LIMBAUGH IF IT COMES DOWN TO THE POWER OF PRAYER YOU AIN’T GOT A SNOWBALLS CHANCE OF GETTING THROUGH THE NIGHT GOOD RIDDANCE PIG

@epik_fail I’m not as good or decent of a person as the rest of you, so I’ll just say it outright: I hope Rush Limbaugh fucking dies.

@Skullbuggy Please let Rush Limbaugh die. Please let Rush Limbaugh die. Please let Rush Limbaugh die.

@billionbucks Rush Limbaugh in a hospital? Maybe our health care system will fail enough to remove him from this world he bitches about everyday. #byebye

These are joined with literally thousands of other vile hatred filled tweets. When Kennedy was nearing the end, I don’t recall the right ever expressing a death wish for the man.  Sure I disagreed with Kennedy and believed him to be bad for this country, but I never once tweeted wishing for his demise.

I do pray that Rush is ok and I really believe that we need to start praying for our country and our world.  When you surround yourself with mostly good, honest and moral people you tend to forget just how evil the rest of the world can be.

SQL Server Pricing

I find SQL Server pricing to be very disturbing.

SQL Server Express is free for databases up to 4GB in size.  That’s fine and all, but think about this…  If you have a database that will grow to 24GB in size, it is actually cheaper to split your data in 4GB chunks across 6 rackmount servers (including purchasing new hardware) than it is to upgrade to a version of SQL Server than can handle the data.

Hey Microsoft, how about a version of SQL Server that is within range of us small business and hobbyist coders out here?  And is database size really the differentiator that you should be using to force people to upgrade?

I understand limiting the amount of RAM in use by SQL Server and even the number of cores that will be used by the free version, but it’s pretty easy to pass 4GB of data. In fact, I think the limitation is darn near unreasonable.

I thought I had found a great solution to the problem.  Microsoft’s website explains a product called SQL Server Web Edition which is priced at $15 per proc per month.  Unfortunately, a call to Microsoft clarified that since I own the server, that price is not available to me.  It can only be purchased as part of a hosting plan from a qualified web hosting service.  Seriously Microsoft?  Seriously???

I’d be happy to pay something reasonable on a subscription plan if it removed the restrictions and provided some sort of SLA with it.  Unfortunately, MS doesn’t want my money unless they get a whole bunch of it.

Guess it’s time to upgrade to MySQL, PostgreSQL or Firebird.