The Real Ramblings

I ran across this article on CFO.com: “The True Meaning of Service”. Something really stood out to me. In the article, Timothy Chou asserts Amazon is not in the business of sales, but in service. As someone who has had poor service interactions with Amazon, and read of the many people who have had bad to horrible experiences with Amazon’s “service department”, I was taken aback. But what really struck me was the reasoning and evidence offered.

Yesterday I ran across this article at CFO.com. As someone who started in this industry nearly two decades ago and planted firmly in the cloud, I’ve a few observations and admonitions. On Question One: Yes, by all means compare TCO. But be sure to compare it accurately. This will mean learning more about what your IT group so they can answer the questions you need to ask them. The article makes a critical mistake in assuming and asserting that the cloud makes it easier to know what your cost is because you get a bill.

ON his Blog recently, Jimmy Zuma had this to say: So yes, Mr. Romney is right to say that we need to work on reducing the national debt. And he is right to say that we can do it. But none of the ways we *can* do it are ones that he – or any other Republican – will consider. I would offer the following counterpoint: So yes, Mr.

Unemployment has the desired intent of acting as a safety net for people who lose their jobs suddenly and unexpectedly. So how can this be bad? It can be bad for several reasons. First it is biased against those who make decent money. How? Consider this scenario: A worker makes a net of say 2500/month for a family of four. Not rich in America, and likely not middle class. What do you think that family’s disposable monthly income is?

For the vast majority of Americans, the answer is no. Here is the breakdown on why. First, Most voters will vote for a Republican or a Democrat. Second, most Americans voting for on of the above is not a a so-called “swing state”. If you are in a a red state and vote Democrat, you already likely feel your vote is wasted because your state is going Red anyway. If you are a Republican in a blue state, the same applies.

In a recent post I made the assertion savings are important. I’d like to expand on that a bit. We all think we understand it, but I posit we don’t fully grasp it. I am sure we all agree that having money in savings is good, despite that fact so few of us do it. What we don’t likely realize is why. Now, you may be thinking “yeah, so I can buy something better, or buy it w/o credit” - a valid thought.

Forest fires suck. Once upon a time, we thought if we protected our forests from forest fires the forests, and we, would be better off. It took a long time, but eventually it became clear this was a bad policy. So we have, slowly, begun to realize it is better to focus on being able to recover from a fire, and able to minimize property and personal damage from fires than to take the naive and reckless position of preventing them in the first place.

Really, calling the campaign stops “Presidential Candidate Debates” is more than just a misnomer, it’s a disservice. These aren’t debates. They are simply soap boxes for each candidate to say various non-committal non-responses that are really nothing more than puff position statements. To paraphrase what was once said in an actual election debate: “Would-be next presidents, I’ve been in debates. I’ve competed in debate. These, sirs, are no debates”. For those who don’t understand a debate is really a structured argument.

[caption id=“” align=“alignnone” width=“300”][][] A Shot from the deck door of my new home office.[/caption] No more garage office! There are a few things to finish off, such as the water cooler and mini-fridge, not to mention decorating. However, my new home office is ready for business. I have plenty of windows providing a bounty of natural daylight from the second story of the new house. I think I’ll be placing the mini-fridge just to the right of the monitor in the picture.

CloudFront Log Importer is a set of python scripts that upon proper configuration will retrieve your CloudFront access logs, order them, and store them locally. It also improves upon the formatting of the file by adjusting some fields and making it a tab delineated file. It is designed to run via cron and can be found at the cflogimporter repo