Randy R Jackson

From My Conservative Wife - Enjoy!

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn`t buy one.

If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn`t eat meat.

If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy. 

A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.

If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.

If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a black man or Hispanic are conservative, they see themselves as independently successful.

Their liberal counterparts see themselves as victims in need of government protection.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.

A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.

Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.

A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it’s a foreign religion, of course!)

If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.

A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a conservative slips and falls in a store, he gets up, laughs and is embarrassed.

If a liberal slips and falls, he grabs his neck, moans like he's in labor and then sues.

If a conservative reads this, he'll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.

A liberal will delete it because he's "offended".

Current

I work for myself and own a small software company, ComWorks Group, based south of Atlanta, GA.

 I work with an international group of companies that focus on resolving communications issues.  My contribution is software, data transformation and solution architecture.  I like my work and spend most of my time ferreting out and resolving the bullshit thrown at my clients by product marketing strategies and/or malignant management policies.

Lately my clients have primarily been DOD and I have a high regard for the job they do despite interference from the robot clone types.  Does this sound cynical?  Well you’re right, I’m bored to tears with greed, pissing contests and self indulgent con artists.  I am not very popular in some circles but they keep coming back.

I’ve traveled around the world and am grateful to live in the USA. 

I enjoy family, friends, business, communication technology, computer tech, honesty, integrity, story writing,  music, physics and math,  humor.  I read science fiction, Physics,  eh... most of the literary disciplines, sci-fi  doesn't seem so science fiction these days.

I have been writing an X-Box/computer game based on a decision engine I developed for the software industry.  The program records the player’s decisions and creates new environments based on the player’s decision history.  This project began as an interactive computer program inspired by Professor John English, PhD’s  doctorate thesis.  Dr. English and I worked closely on many projects for years in the education arena.  The interactive game began as a confrontation resolution exorcise for students many years ago.  With the evolution of technology traveling at the speed of science fiction I’ve had to constantly revise my reality modeling architecture.  The ethics engine alone is many millions of lines of code.  That’s not really a big deal these days, development tools have improved.  But a real life comparison would be a program I wrote for the military that manages the transition of our defense assets into a posture of (cue ominous music)”war all the time everywhere” and be prepared for the next natural disaster.  That was only a couple million lines of code.

My days are normal.  I take care of the house, yard and woods.  Try to be the kind of friend , neighbor and colleague I would like to have.  Life is good when I recognize that it is good.

 By and large I enjoy the company of people who know who I am and I know who they are, respect one another and share one another's values.

Firestorm

AP- WASHINGTON  D.C. - In a move certain to fuel the debate over Obama's qualifications for the presidency, the group Americans for Freedom of Information has Released copies of President Obama's college transcripts from Occidental College Released today, the transcript indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia as an undergraduate at the school. The transcript was released by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by the group in the Superior Court of California. The transcript shows that Obama (Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program.  To qualify, for the scholarship, a student must claim foreign citizenship. This document would seem to provide the smoking gun that many of Obama's detractors have been seeking.

Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya and there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship, this is looking pretty grim.  The news has created a firestorm at the White House as the release casts increasing doubt about Obama's legitimacy and qualification to serve as president.

When reached for comment in London,where he has been in meetings with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Obama smiled but refused comment on the issue. Britain 's Daily Mail also carried the story in a front page article titled, "Obama Eligibility Questioned", leading some to speculate that the story may overshadow economic issues on Obama's first official visit to  the U.K. In a related matter, under growing pressure from several  groups, Justice Antonin Scalia announced that the Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear arguments concerning Obama's legal eligibility to serve as President in a case brought by Leo Donofrio of New Jersey .

This lawsuit claims Obama's dual citizenship disqualified him from serving as president. Donofrio's case is just one of 18 suits brought by citizens demanding proof of Obama's citizenship or qualification to serve as president.

Gary Kreep of the United States Justice  Foundation has released the results of their investigation of Obama's campaign spending. This study estimates that Obama has spent upwards of $950,000 in campaign funds in the past year with eleven law firms in  12 states for legal resources to block disclosure of any of his personal records. Mr. Kreep indicated that the investigation is still ongoing but that the final report will be provided to the U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder. Mr. Holder has refused to comment on the matter.

Hero

My family has known that our father is a hero for a long time.  He survived the Ardennes Forest at the Battle of the Bulge in WWII.  He and my mother raised four children and we are all doing well. 

I took many years for the United States to finally send the medals awarded to him for his service, two of which are the Bronze Star and a Purple Heard.  I remember as a child asking him what he did in the Army.  He told me that he had trained as message Center Chief and Bugler.  He found himself firing a Browning Automatic Rifle when the BAR man in his unit was killed.  I must have been enthusiastic about that at a young age because he added that the enemy tended to aim at the one with the biggest gun.   I believe that he got pretty good at it because his company prevented the Germans from advancing for three days giving Allied Forces in the area time to recover from the surprise attack.  He and the remaining men in his company were captured when they ran out of ammunition and the Germans brought up a tank.  His unit was awarded commendations for the thousands of Allied lives saved for their efforts.

He became a POW and was marched 100s of miles across Germany, lived on one piece of bread per day and gathered lumber for the Germans when not marching.  He was liberated 101 days later by  advancing allied forces.   Liberated  two days after his 20^th birthday he managed to keep his nearly frozen feet after seven months of rehabilitation. 

He wrote a manuscript in 1949-1950 while the memories were fresh.  He self published the book in 1995 only after he determined that he needed to preserve those experiences for history.  The book's name is “Kriegie: Prisoner of War”.  The title stems from Kriegsgefangen, the German word for prisoner of war.

Dad is 84 years on this earth now and he is to be awarded France’s highest civilian honor, Knight of the Legion of Honor or Chevalier on July 30^th by Jean-Baptiste Main de Boissiere, the consul general of France posted in Chicago. 

It’s about time.

The Cost of Static

Offshore application development has its merits, but sometimes, as one dev team found, it's just not worth it.

·         By Alex Papadimoulis

·         07/01/2009

·         Ripped from Visual Studio Magazine

 

Steve's development team was meeting with the CTO to discuss the benefits of offshore application development. Specifically, how the company would be piloting it in their group.

"Well, of course you get what you pay for," the CTO agreed, "but in this case, we're paying for the same thing. An hour in this country has just as many minutes as an hour overseas."

Aside from the CTO and some other higher-ups, no one liked the idea of offshoring, but they agreed to try it out. Besides, it was only for one small project.

Fast forward a few months and the "small project" had ballooned into a 10,000-manhour rewrite of the document management subsystem, which was a major module in their flagship, employee performance management application. Not that it mattered, though. Offshore development was very inexpensive.

 

Of course, a project with such a wide scope required an extensive amount of testing. Steve's group, however, simply didn't have the resources to create test cases, set up test plans and execute the thousands of necessary test scripts. Not that it mattered, though. As it turned out, offshore testing was very inexpensive, too.

After deploying the latest release to their customers, Steve's group ran into another resource problem. With the vast number of changes to the document management subsystem, there were a lot of confused users who needed help with the new software. Steve's group simply couldn't keep up. Not that it mattered, though. Offshore support was also very inexpensive.

 

Offshore Debugging

Despite the resources available overseas, there were two bugs that plagued countless companies that used the app. First, when users would save a document, sometimes the changes wouldn't "stick." The offshore support team attributed this to "user error" and resolved it by reminding users how to save correctly.

The other issue was that some documents would have "mixed" data. Employees would have strange performance appraisals tacked on to their records from managers in entirely different departments. The support team attributed these problems to "random data anomalies" and fixed them by manually correcting the database.

While most users just learned to deal with the bugs, their largest customer threatened to switch to a new vendor. Steve's team was notified about the issue.

 

Working in parallel with another developer, Steve stumbled across a rather troublingly named file: globals.cs. After digging through hundreds of poorly implemented "helper" functions, Steve discovered the root of the problem:
 

public static string UserID;

...

public static int DocumentID;
 

The "static" keyword ensured that the user- and document-identifier were always available, without ever needing to create an instance of an object. In a multi-user, Web-based system, having these globally defined variables didn't work out so well.

If two different documents were worked on at the same time, the first's modifications would be saved to the second's and the second's would be lost. The same thing happened with user names.

Steve looked through the customers' data files and noticed that the problem had been occurring since the rollout, causing nearly six months of data to be incorrect.

But, because users generally don't double-check everything they enter, only a handful of bad data was ever noticed by the customers.

Steve's finding didn't go over so well with their largest customer, or, really, any of their customers. Quite a few left immediately, and many more demanded refunds.

 

So, while the company saved a tremendous amount of money through offshore application development, after all was said and done the cost of the statically defined variables was estimated in the millions-in lost revenue, troubleshooting and court costs.

 

Free SharePoint Project Management Template - A Real Winner!

The Free SharePoint Template for Project Management has been posted!

I watched the videos, downloaded and installed this template posted by Linc Williams VP at i3solutions .  I am impressed with the features included in the template.  After a smooth installation on a MOSS test box I found myself wishing I had had this template for all of my DoD projects.  It offers an elegant presentation of complex data in a comfortable manner.  Very nice to have when explaining project status in a bureaucracy.  All your supporting information is right there in one place.

Mr Williams' BLOG offers some screen shots and there are videos available at the download link.

You can download the template by registering at SharePoint Project Management Group on LinkedIn. 

Linc Williams "This template is not meant to be the end all - be all PM site. My intention was to show some of the things that you can do with SharePoint and Project Management. It is a good starting point for most organizations that are just getting started."

8 Things

8 Things You Need to Know About Using ECM for Regulatory Compliance &
8 Things You Need To Know About Information Risk

This is an excellent series from various authors.  The authors have stated in understandable terms key points for project strategies, planning and implementation.  I picked up some great ideas!

8 Things

Who’s life is it anyway?

This following is a remark I made regarding an article posted on a friend’s site: Is America a Christian Nation?

Duality in any higher thought process appears in some humans to be corrosive and limiting if applied in a compulsive obsessive manner.  Good/bad, right/wrong, life/death, who can live sanely for long with that battle running it’s unending loop in one’s mind?  There’s a word for it, schizophrenia.

On the other hand, ha ha, an idiom the teaches humans social behavior is desirable.  After all we are all born so ridiculously helpless and self serving.  Government or religion can never coerce anyone for very long without a reaction.  What annoys many of us is the  ‘do whatever it takes to get my way’ strategy.  I personally found the results of that approach distasteful.  I am the result of my genetic heritage, my environment, my imagination, and the results of my efforts.   I stay within the law, a good suggestion, but who’s law?  And just how much mistrust do I need to nurture to keep other people’s hands off what isn’t theirs to touch without my permission?

Multicore Programming at MIT

I received some e-mail today congratulating me from  MIT, yes that’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology.I applied last week for a short course in Multicore Programming at MIT.  This is a real big deal for me.  If you’ve ever applied to one these fine institutions before you know how humbling the application process can be.  Anyway the invoice came for the course. Expensive week.

Good day today

I’m being recruited by a government agency.  The interviewers were by far the most brightest gentlemen I’ve run across in years with in the context.  God knows I’ve spoken to perhaps 20 folks a month average in the last 8 years.  I don’t know.  It was refreshing.  Generally the hunters are robot clones reading from a list.  Any in-depth or articulate answer not on the list is a point of emotional disturbance.   I feel their pain.  I have moments where I have to dig too deep to articulate an answer or I just know the answer.  Designing and programming business class computer applications is daunting.  And when it goes right I find it irresistible.

This is a good day.  Wish you one as well!