Tom Printy’s Blog

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.

I just finished watching “The Big Lebowski” on Hulu.  Hulu is the best new site to come out in a while. Were else can I get all this content for free and have it be legal? Sure there are some commercials but I can stand a 30 second interruption every now and then while I watch a free movie. There is also a ton of NBC and FOX network tv shows on the site as well.

As this service get bigger it would be nice if they implemented a recommendation engine but at least for now the movie content is small enough that I can figure out what to watch.

If you are looking for something to watch but don’t want to trek to the video store or wait for your next DVD in the mail you can always watch the content on Hulu.

Beaver books the little facebook application that I helped write finally reached 100 registered users!!!!

Yea!!!!

If you have a facebook account give Beaver Books a try and let me know how you like it.

I attended Pycon this year. This is the definitive conference for all things python. This was a one of the larger geeky conferences that I have been to in a long time. I think that there are a lot of developers starting to migrate to the language. There are a lot of very cool things being done with python. I would venture to say that if you are a software development company that python can almost run your whole organization. I saw tools that will allow you to do everything from managing your systems (http://www.zenoss.com/), keeping track of your accounting (http://www.fivedash.com/) to programming windows based applications and mobile applications. This is truely and amazing ecosystem of software.

The main reason that I attended Pycon was to really nail down id python was something that I wanted to explore more and if Django can really help me put some of my ideas into action. I can say without a doubt that Python is something I need to spend a lot more time on, and Django seems like a very usable environment for creating web apps. I was even more excited when I passed by a booth that showed Python running on a Nokia N95.

So will I dump perl? No I don’t see that happening soon as I must use perl everyday to pay the bills, but I see all my new personal projects moving towards python. Once I start thinking in Python I am sure this will be easier.

Thanks Pycon for showing me the light.

I like to regularly attend the Elgin, IL city council meetings. I thought that I would share my observations of the meeting.

Tonight city council decided decided to spend 4,886,185 dollars for various projects around the city.
1,624,967 for generators at one of the water treatment plants.
2,186,007 for street projects in Country Knoll/Jefferson
1,055,732 For Walnut Avenue Neighborhood
19,479 for new furniture for Fire Station 7

The funniest moment was when Council was voting on rezonig petition 07-08. A joke was made by rep Walters when he ask a member of the audience that if this was approved would there be a Portillo’s put in. The audience member said “maybe yes”. Could this mean that Portillo’s will be opening a store in Randall Rd?

Other that that not a lot happened it was a very short meeting.

For the last couple of month a couple of guys and myself have been playing games during lunch. We started by playing risk and then moved on to poker. Today we tried the card game Fluxx. This is a game without rules. As you play the cards they actually create the rules of the game. It is pretty interesting. The first game we played took 45 minutes and the second game we played took 15. It is a very interesting game to say the leastand you have to really pay attention to the rules and to the cards that the other people have.  This is something I will most likely pick up so I can play with other people in the future.