When you place an online order that is… I’ve gotten three shipping confirmations over the last year or so, all going to the same Jeremy Phillips in California. How Jeremy in California could mistake my e-mail address (jeremy at phillfam.com) for theirs is something I don’t know. It’s pretty funny though.
**** This is a post-only message. Please do not respond. ****
Dear JEREMY PHILLIPS,
This ship notification is being sent to you by the U.S. Postal Service® at the request of UNCUT MOUNTAIN SUPPLY. If the “Shipped To” address information is not correct, please contact the Shipper.
A package with a Click-N-Ship® label created on usps.com containing the following information is scheduled to be shipped on 08/14/2009.
From:
Shipped to:
UNCUT MOUNTAIN SUPPLY
UNCUT MOUNTAIN SUPPLY
1518 W 13TH ST
THE DALLES OR 97058-3708
JEREMY PHILLIPS Address Removed
PMB #Removed City Removed CA Zip Removed
Type of Service: Delivery Confirmation™
Label Number: Removed
To check on the delivery status of your package, please go to Track and Confirm at www.usps.com.
Thank you,
United States Postal Service®
**Please do not respond to this email. Any reply will not be received by the USPS or the shipper. This email was sent to you at the shipper’s request to notify you that the information above has been electronically sent to the USPS.
First I must say that this blog entry is not in line with the tone of the rest of this site. I generally try to stay out of the political arena and most of my entries are either generally pleasant or technology related. This is mainly because my true political views are in far left field compared to almost everyone I know and I’m tired of arguing, most especially with strangers. However I feel the need to express my opinion and think this is an excellent forum to do so. If you don’t like this please feel free to stop reading. :)
Lately, I have been dedicating a large amount of my free time to thinking about the future of America. I’ve recently had a number of conversations on this subject, mostly centering around health care reform. Today, I finally dropped out of a discussion on health care reform when I was essentially told that I was only thinking about myself and that I was not respecting the opinions of others in the conversation. I’ll get around to what my opinion is in a little while, but first I want to state that even if I don’t agree with your opinion, I still respect it. I would ask that you do the same for mine. Mutual respect and the ability for two individuals to have a polite discussion about a subject on which they fundamentally disagree is one of the aspects that a productive society is built on, and I think the decline of it is just another sign of our society beginning to fall apart.
I found this quote last night while browsing through lagesse.org and it pretty much sets the tone for this post.
“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”
~~~~ Dr. Adrian Rogers, 1931
Today I read article in The Wall Street Journal, authored by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. It’s title is “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare” and in addition to being very well written it also mirrors a good number of my ideas. What it doesn’t do is spell out what I believe the root of the health care problem is in this country: a lack of personal responsibility. Some who know me are probably, with good reason, rolling their eyes and asking what right I have to speak of personal responsibility. Well, see, I am well aware of the effect my choices have on my life and I am 100% willing to personally accept the consequences. I believe that is what personal responsibility boils down to – accepting the consequences of your own actions (or lack thereof).
When I look around at my generation and those younger than me I am continually startled by the attitude of entitlement. It’s incredibly prevalent in our society and while I am smart enough to know that I don’t know when it started or where it comes from I can give an example; When I was working at my last real job I interviewed a large number of people – I think at the high point I was doing 60+ phone interviews weekly. What did I find while talking to all these people? I found people who expect to make $50,000 a year right out of college, without any real world experience, while working 40 hours a week. I found people who want big houses, expensive cars and all the fun toys that life can possibly provide. I found people who had more questions about what the benefits of the position was than about what I was expecting them to do. What I didn’t find a great number of are people who are willing to actually work to obtain these things.
This leads me to my opinion; any form of national health care can do no good for this country. While I have most definitely not talked to everyone who is a proponent of national health care reform I’ve found similar ideas prevalent in everyone I have spoken to so far. They truly believe that their fellow citizens should pay for their health care. They say that health insurance is too expensive, they don’t make enough money to pay for it themselves, the insurance companies are greedy profiteering bastards and that I am most definitely wrong in everything I think. That’s OK, everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, I would really like to see some of these people go ask their neighbors for a contribution to their health care fund. That is what they are essentially a proponent of after all – asking their neighbors to pay for their health care.
This might be news to some people but most insurance companies are for-profit corporations. If you pay them $6,000 in premiums one year and it costs them $8,300 to cover your medical expenses, what do you think your premiums are going to be next year? They’re sure going to be more than $6,000.
If you truly want to be healthier then eat better, exercise more and stop doing all the things your parents told you not to do. Establish a Health Savings Account to cover the day to day health care expenses and sign up for some high deductible health insurance to cover major incidents. Don’t just stand by and let your neighbors pay. I don’t want to pay for my neighbor’s health care and I’m sure they don’t want to pay for mine. Yes, this approach requires you to actually put some thought into it and requires quite a bit of work to keep going but is definitely better than the alternative in my opinion.
If you have a better idea drop it in the comments, I’m all for a pleasant discussion.
So the Palm Pre is finally available to order online and I am in need of a new phone finally. Navigating through Sprint’s site I find and click Select, thinking it will let me buy the phone.
Nope, that would be too easy. Evidently my current plan – Everything Data Share 1500 – is not on the list. Now I get to call Sprint and get them to change my plan to one with the same features at the same price – but with a different name – so I can purchase a new phone. This bites.
Edit: Yep, surely enough the only difference is the plan name. This is the plan I’ll have to change to.
Currently, all my sites are hosted by Dreamhost. For the most part this has been a pleasant experience but I’ve noticed a number of issues in the last couple weeks and have finally decided to move all my sites back to my own server. I really don’t want to do this as it’s somewhat bothersome having to maintain my own server for a few sites that don’t really do much, but at the same time I’ll at least have a bit more control over what’s happening and if it breaks I’ll have nobody to blame but myself. :)
What made me decide to do this?
Last week I tried to make some DNS changes and noticed that it took hours for my changes to completely replicate. While investigating I noticed some strange happenings in their DNS servers as well; they were shooting back different zone serials when queried. This in and of itself is not abnormal as Dreamhost uses three DNS servers, right? Well, the strange part is that the same DNS server returned different serials upon subsequent queries. An example would be if I queried ns1.dreamhost.com; first it would bring back serial 3, then serial 7, then serial 4 again. They probably have load balanced clusters or something fancy like that. No big deal, issues like this are inherent in highly scaled systems, but enough to encourage me to move DNS somewhere else. I’ve been using rollernet.us off and on for the last couple years and they are once again doing a fantastic job serving DNS for my domains.
Earlier today I tweeted about some difficulties I was having, primarily that this site was encounteringthe dreaded “500 Internal Server Error”. Now, one thing I will give Dreamhost is that I’ve always had fantastic customer service from them. Evidently one of their managers noticed my tweet and decided to proactively address the issue. They discovered that my WordPress theme (Vigilance) was causing some issues so they turned the default theme back on. They also noted that my site was using a good amount of memory and recommended that I visit this very informative wiki page to figure out why. Very proactive.
One thing I will never deny about Dreamhost is that their support is better than any other shared hosting provider I’ve ever used. While writing this post I just got another e-mail from support stating that they noticed FastCGI was disabled, recommended I enable it and then turned my Vigilance theme back on. Impressive that they will go to those lengths to help me out, especially considering I never contacted support in the first place.
I know this post may seem like a slam against Dreamhost but it’s really not intended that way. For probably 99.9% of their customers they provide quality service at a very reasonable price. They just don’t do everything I desire so I shall happily move on.
In December of 2007 I was feeling burned out and decided to leave the consulting world to get a Real JobTM. It didn’t take me long to find a contract at Microsoft as a Partner Technical Consultant but I only lasted four months there before I left to accept a position at Azaleos, a Managed Service Provider located in Seattle. I started the position as a Sr. Messaging Engineer and by January of 2009 I had been promoted twice and ended up as Director of Operations with 22 direct reports.
However I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just not cut out to work for someone else so effective Monday April 20th I will be offering my services through Cohesive Logic LLC, a technical services firm focused on Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint & Office Communications Server. It’s been a great run and I’ll be leaving behind some very smart people that I have really enjoyed working with. Can’t say I’ll miss working in a cube though…
As I’ll be traveling again I will have much more time to update this blog so I plan on increasing my writing skills (a.k.a. learning to write all over again) by posting here more frequently. I’ll also be reinstating View From Here, which is something I greatly enjoyed.
I’ll try to keep the content fresh and interesting, so do me a favor and subscribe to my feed and keep me company on my travels by leaving comments! :)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I occasionally change to new quotes in the header. I’ve decided to put the old quotes into a post when I change to a new one, as they all mean something to me and I don’t keep track of them anywhere else.
“Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” – Shakespeare, Twelfth Night – Act Two, Scene Five
