torand.org

What can I say, our blog is out dated! I’m sitting outside on our patio enjoying this beautiful 4th of July with the family. We were talking about weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries that are coming up in the family. My in-laws just celebrated their 60th anniversary yesterday. What a milestone! It’s going to be so rare for people in our generation to reach that many years.

Well let me tell you what’s been going on in the life of our family.
There’s been a few changes. Scotty started a new job with a company called Bantu about two month ago. He is no longer with AOL. He is still adjusting to the civilian/military world again and the bureaucracy that goes along with it. His commute is now about 10 miles shorter which will save on gas.

Erika spent this week here with us. She goes back tomorrow. She is on the hunt for a full-time teaching job so she can begin to enjoy her after-college life.

Amanda is beginning her sophmore year in college. She is transferring to Liberty this upcoming semester where she plans to pursue a Marketing/Business Bachelor’s Degree.

Nothing much is going on in my life. I still enjoy my job very much. Summer is my favorite time of the year. I love to sit outdoors and enjoy the weather. I know some of you are thinking that I’m probably nuts, but what can I say. I absolutely, hate too much cold weather. I think I’m allergic to winter.

Hope everyone has an enjoyable 4th of July.

Last week, I found out about this website www.geni.com which you can list your geneology and have the family continue posting their information to it. It is really cool. I started adding my relatives and as I’m entering the information, I realized that there are a lot of relatives that I have not seen or heard of in years. I’m hoping that we can continue to update so that I can see the rest of the family, and also find out my ancestry line as far back as I can. The web site is cool, guarantee you’ll love it.

We went car shopping this weekend. We were looking to purchase a new car for one of our daughters. What attracted me to this dealership was a TV advertisement that we saw prior to leaving the house. They were advertising 2008 cars for under $10K. I knew it was too hard to believe because when looking at the value of those cars, they were listed for twice that price. When I got to the dealership, I told them that I wanted to buy one of those cars they had advertised for under $10K. They told me that it was a lease car for 3 years–because that’s when the $10K is up on the car. Not necessarily a lie but certainly very misleading, but I guess that’s how they get you to come to them.

My daughter and I went to several dealerships. I think that the sales people thought, as they see two females approaching that we would be an easy sell and that they can push us around. They tried all the tricks that they must teach them in sales school to try to get you to take the car home that day. I was shopping for a car, but I told them several times that I was not going to take a car home with me that day. First of all, I didn’t have my husband with me. I told him that I needed to go home and discuss it with my husband. Second of all, I did not want to rush into buying a car. I wanted to shop around and see what my best offer would be. So I said to them, if you want me to come back, you better make me the best deal possible to make me return.

At one of the dealership, the sales person comes back and brings back a piece of paper and offers me a payment schedule scenario. I asked him, what the payment scenario was based on. So he tries to explain, and I said to him that I don’t want you to show me the payment scenarios, that will get worked out when it’s time, but I wanted to see the bottom line number on the price of the car. Basically what they do is they try to show you the payments based on the deposits that you are going to make, but they don’t knock down the price of the car at all. We went on rounds and rounds of discussion saying the same thing. Finally, when I talked to the manager, about 2 1/2 hours later, I reiterated what I had told the sales person–I want to see the bottom line and then I would decide whether I want to come back or not. When he came back, I was shown a pretty good number, and I will most likely go back and purchase a car.

For the record, I hate car shopping, because it certainly kills your entire day, but if you have nothing else to do, well then it’s certainly entertaining.

It has been a long time since I posted anything as one of my friends keeps telling me. Ok, so for him here it is… get off my back.

Well so many things have changed in the past few months, let me try to fill in the highlights.

• I left mail storage and moved over to portal services, the division that run most of the web services at AOL.
• I am now on my third new manager in less than six months.
• I was caught in the latest reorg at AOL, hence the third manager and I am getting all new projects at AOL.
• Bought a new Mac Book Pro laptop - I love it!!!!
• Erika graduated from Liberty in December, she will walk on May 10th.

Those are the highlights. Since the last reorg I am still waiting for my new projects. It looks like I will get AOL Latino, and AOL Games. I have not talked to the transition admins yet.

Other than that things are moving along. My parents wrecked their car last month, my dad at 88 decided to give up his driving license. Not a bad decision, when he drove it made mom crazy.

I will try to update a little more regularly, later.

So my manager was laid off along with 749 other people last month. It has taken almost a full month for my tech director to decide how to split up the team. My thoughts, as with many, is that myself and the other web technology guy would go to the Portal team and the other 4 on the team would go to another messaging team.

Everything worked out with just one hitch that has most of us scratching our heads. I was moved to Mail Storage. Me, the guy on our team with the most web technology experience is working with storage arrays. I have zero experience with storage, but over 13 years experience with web technology. Yeah that is a good fit.

When I met with my tech manager and he told me what he was going to do, he seemed genuinely shocked that I was not happy about this move. “Not happy” does not truly get across what I feel about this move, “Mad enough to spit nails” come closer, “Mad enough to look for a new job” is closer still. This is a move backward for me, I have been trying to move into more visible projects. To get myself visible outside of my division. This move goes in the opposite direction, storage is a back end process within mail. From what I see I get nothing from this move but my tech manager can say that he has fixed a problem area in our division.

I need to resolve this, it is keeping me up at night, literally check out the timestamp on this post. That is 3 AM not PM.

This is stupidity in action. Tax law: Are you eating those pumpkins? - Yahoo News. If I were to purchase a pumpkins in Iowa to make pies, and I do make my pumpkin pies from fresh pumpkins, I need to fill out a form to get a tax exemption from the Iowa Department of Revenue.

They need to be careful, or else it will create an underground industry of pumpkin smugglers or bootleggers. Women will be recruited to be mules to smuggle pumpkins into the state pretending to be pregnant.

Today was the beginning of a huge layoffs at AOL. It was a very sad day to be at work. I watched as my friends and coworkers packed up their cubes and left the building. Even my manager was among the approximatly 750 people that are laid off. Most of everyone I have talked to can’t understand the capriciousness of the lay offs. Some of the groups in the company were completely laid off. One of the Network Operation Centers (NOC) in Columbus Ohio was dismantled. A NOC that we relied on to monitor our systems.

There was little work done today at the Dulles campus. By mid afternoon most people had left for the day or were rambling around the campus still numb from the sheer number and severity of the layoffs.

It’s been a while since my last post, but I just wanted to share an exiting event that I went to on Sunday. I went to a Billy Ray Cyrus mini-concert. This is the first time that I have seen a real celebrity in person. Billy was there to promote Toys for Tots’ 60th Anniversary and Tonka. He only sang four songs, one of them was his most popular and my most favorite–Achy Breaky Heart. We had VIP seating so we sat four rows from center stage. It was well attended and to my surprise, many kids showed up to see Hannah Montana’s dad. I think they were hoping to see Hannah.

We picked up our new puppy Friday. The breeder, Five Gems Keeshonden, was located up in Grantsville Maryland. My boss let me off early so I went up with my wife and daughter to pick up Dakota. The breeders live on a dairy farm and they also breed Norwegian Elkhounds. When we got there, the yard was full of dogs, both adults and puppies. Dakota was freshly bathed when we got there. From talking to Marla, another family was traveling from New York to pick up their puppy this weekend as well.Dakota is settling in fine in her crate. It is taking less time than I expected for her to acclimate to her crate. The first night she whined for a while then fell asleep. Sometimes when she was whining, Bear would growl at her as if to day Be Quiet!, kinda funny actually. Bear is still very skittish around the puppy, we expect the will change soon. Well come back, I expect more pictures of the new puppy…

I finally got to Colorado Springs, arrived around 11 pm yesterday… 10 hours after I should have. Graduation was awesome. I was glad to be there to see my brothers son graduate from one of the exclusive universities in the nation. The graduation was filled with tradition, military ceremony, and proud moments for an uncle. To see the cadets march into the stadium in perfect form, was just inspiring. To see some of the “celebrations” was quite funny. Then to hear the thunderbirds flying overhead just as the cadets tossed their caps in the air surprised me… And the timing of the flyover was incredible. Which took me by complete surprise.

I was so glad to be there to see the graduation of my nephew. The memory of my brother Doug was very heavy there for me. He would have been so proud of his son, I know Tammie was beaming to see her son graduate, I just wish Mom and Dad could have been there. Dad was admitted to the hospital Sunday for a heart problem. But other than that, it was good to be there, even though it took 18 hours of travel time from the time I left my house to the time I got to the hotel….

I am sitting at BWI waiting on standby because some moron can’t drive and got in a wreck, and every idiot has to look as they drive by on I-95. So I was able to squeeze one hour of driving into two hours and I missed my flight by about 20 minutes, so I get to spend the next 5 hours waiting for the next flight. I hate flying. At least I can get wireless via Boingo.

If I miss standy no real sense in going to Colorado Springs. I would just be there with enough time to get my luggage say Hi/Bye and jump back on a plane. This really sucks.

The day that we’ve all been waiting for a long time is here. I finally graduated. I walked and received my Bachelor’s degree in Business/Accounting from Liberty University. With the passing of our Chancellor, Dr. Jerry Falwell just days before graduation made graduation even more memorable; one we’ll never forget. There was laughing and crying as they showed a video clip of Jerry’s life. While this graduation is over, I’m certainly looking forward to Amanda’s High School graduation in a few weeks and Erika’s college graduation the year after. I’m looking forward to utilizing my degree with my current employer. However, the most exciting thing that I’m looking forward to is to be able to read my novels instead of textboks. The stack was getting pretty high. Pictures of the graduation are available online.

If this article from the Scripps Howard News Service is how Democrats debate those that do not agree with them, then this country is in deep trouble. I feel sorry for those poor people who had to endure these ad hominem attacks.

It is attitudes like what is portrayed in that article, that make me vote for anyone that is not a Democrat or have a political left leaning. Hate is hate no matter what, and the Gore supporters are showing that they can hate with the best of them.

My wife and I wanted to build out our basements last year. We contacted a few contractors and asked for bids on the project. The bids ranged from upwards of $20K to under $10K. Being cheap, we took the bid under $10K. First mistake.

We checked the guy’s references, and even visited one of the remodels that he did. My first thought was, and it was later to be proved correct, that he does not give much attention to detail. But I brushed that aside since the room that we saw looked fine, no glaring defects, and we hired the guy. He started In October of 2006 and made great progress… for a few weeks. Then he stopped showing up. No phone calls, nothing. We called him and asked, “Um… where are you?” He had injured his leg shortly before he started on the basement and the doctor told him to take it easy. Ok fine.. the guy has a bum leg.. give him some slack. After about two weeks we called again, he said that he would have his son finish the drywall and that he was still on track to finish by Christmas.

His son arrived around Thanksgiving and did the majority of the drywall… Alright now fast forward to about a week before Christmas. With nothing done since Thanksgiving, we asked for a face to face and inquired about the basement. We were going to be out for Christmas we asked for the house keys back. Well we did not get a face to face but did get the keys back. We should have gotten another contractor but we were concerned that no one would come in after this guy to finish the job.

We contacted him after we got back in town, and gave him back the keys. He insisted that his leg was ok and he was going to finish the basement in short order. Well to make a long story short, he did not restart on the job until almost the end of February, after we called him and said we wanted to talk about whether he was going to finish the job. Almost full month and a half after christmas.
He did not have an eye for finishing details. For example, he did not use any electrical outlet boxes in the builtin entertainment center to manage the 6 speaker wires, two ethernet cables, the cable for the TV and all the wires needed for the subwoofer. Instead he cut two holes in the back and pulled all the wires through. He was going to leave it like that until I pressed him on that issue.

Our basement is finished, but we will never use that contractor again. There are many other items that we were less that pleased with, and in the end we wanted him to finish and hire someone else to “clean up the mess”. We still do not have carpet down, but we hired someone to do that. We also hired another contractor to redo the fireplace. And this contractor did a fantastic job on that. Him we are going to rehire for other odd jobs we need.

From now on I will only hire someone who has a personal recommendation from someone we know, or follow my initial hunch on the work he has completed in the past.

This week seemed to drag on. It all started when I woke up Sunday morning and began throwing up. It then followed with diarrhea and fever. By Tuesday, everyone in the household had it. It just didn’t seem to go away. It dragged ALL week long. Today, I finally went to the Doctor and he said that everything is going to be fine. I just have to let it run it’s course. I figure after a week, it should be over by now, but I guess not. I sure hope that no one has to experience what I have this week. Let me tell you it is a nasty stomach virus.