Tom Printy’s Blog

I was researching the Chicago fireworks that will take place downtown tommorrow and found the songs that they will be using. Not one of them is what I would call patriotic, instead it is composed of the garbage you hear on FM radio. This is just sad!  Here is the list of songs that will compose the musical portion of the fireworks display:

Intro (Before fireworks launch)
KAYNE WEST - Homecoming
CHRIS MARTIN
Fireworks
BON JOVI - Living on a Prayer
LENNY KRAVITZ - American Woman
RIHANNA - Don’t Stop the Music
PRINCE - Let’s Go Crazy
KILLERS - Mr. Brightside
SARA BAREILLES - Love Song
COLDPLAY - Clocks
GWEN STEFANI - The Sweet Escape
GOOD CHARLOTTE - I Don’t Wanna Be In Love
KAYNE WEST - Stronger
K. T. TUNSTALL - Black Horse and the Cherry Tree
MATCHBOX TWENTY - How Far We’ve Come

Ok so there are some local artists there and the is ok. But these songs do not even mention the very reason why we celebrate the 4th of July.  For those who forget here is why this day is special

 In the United States, Independence Day (commonly known as the Fourth of July) is a federal holiday commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

A much more fitting song selection would be some of the following

Air Force Anthem (Off We Go!)
America (My Country Tis of Thee)
America the Beautiful
Army Anthem (Caissons)
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Marine Hymn (From the Halls…)
Navy Anthem (Anchors Aweigh)
Navy Hymn (Eternal Father)
Stars and Stripes
Star Spangled Banner
When Johnny Comes Marching Home
Yankee Doodle

So while you are watching the fireworks this weekend I hope that you feel proud about our country and at least have something patriotic playing in your head and heart.

There are so few pleasures in life that haven’t been tainted by nanny-state legislation, threats of terrorism, or other forms of fear-based knee-jerkism, or just by people being people: you know how people now are just rude, unpleasant, and unreasonable? I thought dining out was one of those last, lingering pleasures that one could partake in without being hassled, or otherwise jerked around. I was wrong.

Last night, the Mrs. and I went to one of our favorite restaurants, the Prairie Rock Brewing Company in Elgin Il. It had been a hard day at work for both of us and we needed a hump-day-hurdle mini-celebration. We decided on Prairie Rock because we had this coupon for one free entree and while we wouldn’t normally have spent so much money on dinner during the weekday, we thought the coupon would even things out a little. The wife had the salad bar and I had a mini-pizza. About a 1/3 of the way through dinner, this constipated-looking man, who must’ve been the restaurant manager, came over to inform us that our coupon was not valid for the salad bar. He quickly walked away as fast as he’d come, as if
he had been the B-52 bomber who had dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. We were immediately suspicious, so we looked the coupon over and saw nothing that excluded the salad bar from the coupon. In fact, the only exclusions were appetizers and desserts. We protested to the waitress but she pulled the I-just-work-here routine.

After some discussion, the wife and I decided that the restaurant manager had seen us coming. We look like chumps. We look like we can easily be taken in and fooled, and his initial assessment was right, since what kind of people, but the elderly or the cheap, protest the unwritten exclusions of a coupon? Mostly though, we were tired after a long, hard day at work, and didn’t want to be messed with, nor did we want to argue.

Today, however, I’m calling the Prairie Rock out. I get it. You’re probably in some financial trouble right? After all, the Prairie Rock in Schaumburg was closed down. So all the more reason not to infuriate your regulars. Actually, we were your regulars. We’re not anymore. Your treatment of us was beyond inappropriate and just plain rude. Moreover, we can’t help but get the feeling like we were swindled. Like that wasn’t really the deal with the coupon but you made it so because you summed us up based on appearances and decided we looked like schmucks who you could pull that on. Indeed, we can’t help but feel like the coupon was a scam: lure them in with the coupon on a weekday when your numbers might be a little low and then tell them for whatever reason that the coupon is void. I think they call that a bait and switch, which I believe is illegal.

But how dumb was that? For the cost of a soup and salad bar (what was it $6.95?) you lost two regulars for life! Moreover, you may have lost customers who read this post and decided they don’t want to be treated so poorly and will dine elsewhere. And yes, that is the reason for this post: to let the public know how shabbily the Prairie Rock treats their customers.

So, for all those Elginites looking for a better place to eat, may I recommend Cafe Magdalena on 13 Douglas Avenue. These folks are incredibly nice, incredibly attentive, and make some of the best Italian food outside of Italy. Or, there’s always South Elgin. If, however, you think being treated rudely is novel, try Ed Debevic’s downtown. You’ll at least get a souvenir out of it.

Having to go 30 minutes to the data center at 4:00am in the rain to reboot a server. UGH! I really need to look into an IP based KVM solution. Something like the StarTech 16 Port KVM over IP  switch.

Last night I discovered by reading the forums over on DSLReports that Sunrocket my VOIP service provider of choice was shutting down by COB yesterday. I wondered if this was really the case since my phone was still working and I could get to thier website. However since this was all over the internets today I guess it is confirmed, they are shutting down and will be no more. Right now my phone service is working. I am able to make and receive calls however I am not able to access my voicemail.

All is not lost though according to a email the DSL reports received it looks like they are in negotiations for the customer base to be acquired. They should act fast as a lot of customers are bailing and Vonage is even making a nice deal for customers to switch ( I will never go back to Vonage). In any event something needs to happen by Friday since that is when the Gizmo (VOIP and analog phone interface) needs to get its next software download. If it does not receive the download the whole kit stops working.

This is really disappointing as I bailed Vonage and signed up with Sunrocket back in December. I got the one year plan and was having no problems what so ever. Then this!!!!!

Leassons I have learned:

Don’t prepay for service in advance.

Make sure the company can provide you service for what they are charging.

Run your own Asterisk Box and get dialtone from multiple vendors. I will be enacting this later this year

The Only question I have now is what provider should I go with? A lot of the Sunrocket users are bailing to Viatalk or packet8 ?

Dear Internets:

Now that everyone has their iPhone and they are for sale on eBay can we stop talking about it? There are better phone out there!!!

Thank You

Tom Printy

Melissadata is a data service provider that provides zip code data among other things. I recently had the opportunity to work with their ZIPdata. They provide thier data in downloadable .zip file. These files consist of (I assume) MSSQL dumps of thier database. Since work id not a Microsoft shop but rather and open source shop I had the pleasure of creating a Perl script that would take this data and make it appropriate to be loaded into a postres database. Now Melissadata was nice enough to separate the table creation from the data but in at least one instance the table create did not match the data. So I have some suggestions for the Melissadata team so they can offer everyone a better product

1. The *.sql files (the files with the create tables in them) should have at the minimum a standard SQL version that is appropriate for creating basic tables in MySQL PostgresSQL and Oracle.

2. The *.dat files should be exported in tab delimited format. This makes importation of this data into the chosen database really simple. This way I don’t have to parse each line based upon some string length to parse out the fields.

3. Double check that the fields that you are providing in the data files match the number of fields that are being created in the .sql file. (Hint the census.sql is missing the 62-64 age column). This broke my script because trusted that your .sql files were accurate and inline with your published users guide.

4. Your file names should match the names of the tables that the data or table create is associated with. Any standard dump (mysql_dump pg_dump) will do this for you.

Now that I have written this script I would be happy to write another one for Melissadata or anyone else who would like to import this data into their database. If you would like me to write you one let me know.

Since when did looking like Lt. Uhura from the Original Star Trek series become chic. It seems that everywhere I go these days I see people walking around with thier little bluetooth headset on. Now I do own a headset but it stays in my car, and I only use it when I am actually talking on the phone. Everytime I see a person just walking around not talking and wearing one of these headsets I giggle to myself and think of Star Trek. So thank you Gene Roddenberry for giving me something to laugh at on an almost daily basis.