Tom Printy’s Blog

I just wanted to thank to members of the city council for comments that they made during last night’s meeting

First I would like to thank councilman John Walters for keeping pressure on city staff to fix Edison Ave after the sewer work that was done on the street over the winter.  With his help this maybe this nice street will return to the very nice street that it used to be.

Secondly I would like to thank and encourage  councilman Michael Powers to bring back Public Access television to Elgin. We have a channel that airs some city announcements but it would be great if we could fill that dead air with some interesting content produced by the citizens of Elgin.

Lastly Congrats to Councilman Rober Gilliam for 35 years or service on city council. WOW!

I was happily sleeping this morning when I was woken up by the a strange sensation. I thought to myself wow this feels like an earthquake. It appears that I was right. There was an earthquake. Here is the map image from the USGS.

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UPDATE:

The following is a release by the United States Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center: An earthquake occurred 35 km (20 miles) SW of Vincennes, Indiana and 205 km (125 miles) SW of INDIANAPOLIS, Indiana at 3:36 AM MDT, Apr 18, 2008 (4:36 AM CDT in Illinois). The magnitude and location may be revised when additional data and further analysis results are available. There have been no reports of damage.

This large region borders the much more seismically active New Madrid seismic zone on the seismic zone’s north and west. The Illinois basin – Ozark dome region covers parts of Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas and stretches from Indianapolis and St. Louis to Memphis. Moderately frequent earthquakes occur at irregular intervals throughout the region. The largest historical earthquake in the region (magnitude 5.4) damaged southern Illinois in 1968. Moderately damaging earthquakes strike somewhere in the region each decade or two, and smaller earthquakes are felt about once or twice a year. In addition, geologists have found evidence of eight or more prehistoric earthquakes over the last 25,000 years that were much larger than any observed historically in the region.

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S., although less frequent than in the western U.S., are typically felt over a much broader region. East of the Rockies, an earthquake can be felt over an area as much as ten times larger than a similar magnitude earthquake on the west coast. A magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 100 km (60 mi) from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 500 km (300 mi) from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 40 km (25 mi).

The short answer is yes, you can make money taking surveys online. You won’t make a ton of money, but you might make enough to buy yourself lunch. I use these surveys as part of my mutiple streams of income approach. Let me review the two survey companies that I have had the most luck with.

Pine Cone Research: This was the first survey company that I actually joined. I learned about it on another website and decided to give it a try. They generally pay you 3.00 per survey. You end up filling out a lot of qualification surveys but once you are qualified you are directed to a more in depth survey. Survies generally take between 10 to 20 mins.

MySurvey.com: This was second survey company that I have joined. They don’t pay you per survey but instead award you points per survey that you take surveys range from 10 points for qualifying surveys to several hundred for a full survey. Surveys take anywhere from 10 mins to 45 minutes to complete. I have learned about some interesting new products on this site. As a bonus they also offer a monthly prize of $10,000 just for logging into the site and checking to see if you have any surveys. Sign up and try it out!

So while it isn’t going to make you rich I think it is a fun little thing that you can do in your spare time.

UPDATE: You can signup for Pine Cone research at  http://www.pineconeresearch.com/signup/ds500Referral1.asp

On the B-List I was refered to a meme for top used commands here are mine:

history|awk ‘{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%\n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
191 ssh
74 sudo
38 ls
27 ping
23 exit
22 cd
19 vi
15 ps
13 kill
11 ./slttest.py

This year I made a new year’s resolution to start one new website a month. Well Seeing as this is April I am 4 websites behind. Last week I decided to take action. I wanted to see if I could start a new webiste working only 20 minutes a day.   I had the idea already so that was already done. The hard part was putting it all together.  The tools I used where Wordpress, MySQL , and some perl code that I threw together. By Sunday afternoon I released my new site www.learn2strum.com on the world. The site is for video guitar lessons.  I picked this niche since I have been watching a lot of these videos lately.  This is a big step for me. It proves that I can produce something kinda cool in a couple of hours. If you do check out the site let me know what you think?

About two weeks ago I worked a booth at recent Chicago Dice Career fair. There were may 15 other companies with booths there. This fair was devoted towards job seekers who considered themselves technical or software development related. This fair was interesting to me because it gave a real sense about where the economy is and what types of people are looking for jobs and what types of people are not looking for a job. The good news is (based on my observations) is that if you are a good solid software developer you are employed and not looking. Te bad news is that if you are a Project Manager (PM) you are out there looking for new gig and you are not alone.  I must have had at least 80 people in a 4 hour period ask if my employer was looking for a Project Manager.  I would tell them that we are looking for developers or sysadmins and they would frown. I guess they were hearing that a lot.

What does this say about the economy? To me it says that we are in the very early stages of a slow down or  recession. It seems that companies are just starting to trim the fat (Project Management) and have decided to keep the meat (developers).  This also means that there possible could be more fat trimming and even meat trimming in  the near future, and that we haven’t even started to see the effects of this recession or coming recession.

As always keep your resume polished and ears to the ground.