brianReisman.com

Why the AIG Bonuses were not wrong.

Brian — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:18:39 GMT

First let me say that I understand that we’re hurting financially and to see what seems to be a company responsible for our plight to be rewarded can raise the ire of a thousand injustices. The problem is that this feeling is devoid of reality.

Put yourself in the position of an AIG employee, wealthy or not, if you worked there it wouldn’t take long for you to be looking for a lifeboat and jump ship as soon as the collapse began. With that in mind, how does AIG fix remedy their financial situation if everyone with the knowledge to help leaves the company. Now as someone in charge at AIG, you receive billions of dollars from the government that has almost no restrictions and in fact actually protects bonuses guaranteed before February. It’s rather simple isn’t it? You need to give the employees incentive to stay and according to testimony before congress the receiver’s of these bonuses had certain requirements to meet in order to qualify for their bonuses. While it is certainly unfair that a company get rewarded for failing, it is absolutely unfair to promise an employee a metric based reward, protect that bonus in legislation, and then when you’re about to give the money to those it is owed to you decide you’re going to punitively tax those people at 90%. That is quite frankly un-American.

The other thing that it seems that no one is addressing… If you believe the “stimulus” plan; you need the private companies to willingly want to work with the government… I would rather my business fail than become what the federal government is forcing on them.

I was never an Obama supporter but i never imagined that he would attack the very tenets that our country was founded on… The original promise of America was guaranteeing its citizens protection from the government a freedom to pursue Life, Liberty, and Property. This is the kind of thing that leads to revolutions and not the electoral kind.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, i could be wrong. (To quote Dennis Miller from back in the day.)

Stimulus Fine Print

Brian — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:31:00 GMT

If you take a look at President Obama’s recovery site you can see the bar graphs showing that the largest portion is going to “Tax Relief”. Notice the asterisk to the left. The fine print reads:

* Tax Relief - includes $15 B for Infrastructure and Science, $61 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $25 B for Education and Training and $22 B for Energy, so total funds are $126 B for Infrastructure and Science, $142 B for Protecting the Vulnerable, $78 B for Education and Training, and $65 B for Energy.

I’ve added bold for emphasis… when applying this transparent attempt to trick casual site visitors the numbers when viewed in a graph look more this graph, which is still not close to being true because the intent of the graph is to show the reader the difference between spending and tax relief, the only fair way to show that comparison is to add up all of the spending with all of the tax relief in a side by side bar graph.

I’m obviously against this so-called stimulus bill; but I am vehemently against anything that the government pushes down our throats. I have a rule that I try to teach my kids and this rule is to stem high pressure sales: If you have to decide right now whether to buy something the answer should always be “No”.

When our government prevents We The People and our representatives from even reading a bill that represents the largest spending bill in the history of our republic... It's not the change I was hoping for.

I’m trying to explain to my 10 year old son why the government would do such a thing and I’m at a loss. Is this the change we were promised? I don’t recall President GW Bush ever demanding or even suggesting that a bill should be passed without even reading it. If this is what the first month of President Obama’s administration looks like, what will happen next?

Altova’s XMLSpy 2009 Released

Brian — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:51:00 GMT

This week Altova released the latest version of its flagship product, XmlSpy. I’ve previously blogged about it being the de facto tool when it comes to working with XML tools. In my opinion the coolest new feature is the auto-completion of XPath expressions. Most of the more technical features are only available in the professional and enterprise versions of XmlSpy (Not included in the standard version). I’d recommend purchasing the MissionKit which bundles several of Altova’s products into an affordable and complete suite of XML and related tools. My suggestion hasn’t changed: if you work with XML, this product, and if possible the full MissionKit, is a must-have. Additional benefits of the suite include other products: StyleVision a graphical stylesheet designer, DiffDog an XML-aware diff merge tool for file, folder, and directory differencing, DatabaseSpy - multi-database tool, SQL editor, query tool, database design tool, and database table comparison tool, UModel - UML tool for software modeling and application development, MapForce – graphical data mapping, conversion, and integration tool, SchemaAgent - Graphical XML Schema, XSLT, and WSDL file management and modeling tool, and more.

WebGuide - Streaming TV, Remote Scheduling and Media Sharing for Windows Vista and Media Center

Brian — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:36:00 GMT

I’ve been looking for a solution for a long time to be able to watch DirecTV when I'm not at home. I’ve tried many things and all with different pros and cons. Having just discovered a free way to host a small little web server from home and still be able to change the channel and stream to any internet connected device; namely my phone and my work pc. It’s still rough around the edges mind you but a wonderful start.

I’d previously purchased the Hava Titanium HD device, which is a competitor to the Slingbox HD. The Hava has a bunch of really awesome features but its blocker, at least for me, is the inability to connect directly to home Hava device without going through their peer to peer server. Among it’s most notable features:

I’m hopeful that Hava, released by Monsoon Software will update and modify their software even more to enhance its usefulness.

WebGuide - Streaming TV, Remote Scheduling and Media Sharing for Windows Vista and Media Center

Google Chrome: EULA = ayfkm?

Brian — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:15:04 GMT

According to the EULA of the new Chrome browser released by Google this week you basically give Google the right to do whatever they want with "...any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.". The actual pertinent information is much worse than just that though:

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. "

I'm not a lawyer but if I read that correctly that means that they can do whatever they want with any data that is viewed or sent using their browser... More information can be found in the TapTheHive entry This Post Not Made In Chrome; Google's EULA Sucks.

I for one, won't be going near that browser, regardless of how fast it may be.

A powerful sub $500 laptop!

Brian — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:28:13 GMT

Because of my job most of the people i'm friendly with always come to me for advice on what to buy when it comes to a new computer... If you are sending a kid away to college or just want a very inexpensive laptop Wal-Mart is selling one for $498 (Often discounted to $398). I'm planning on submitting a PO to wife for approval straight away.

Altova Xmlspy – the de facto XML tool of choice

Brian — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:33:42 GMT

When it comes time to work with XML the first company that comes to mind is Altova. The Missionkit suite is to XML what Visual Studio is to C#. At the core of this suite: the hands down (imho) best XML IDE Altova’s XMLSpy. I’ve been planning this blog entry for some time now and the reason that I kept putting it off was because I honestly didn’t know where to start. I was going to list my favorite features, one by one, but when I was organizing my thoughts I had a list and didn’t seem to end… So in order to to prevent this from becoming like one of Holden Caulfield’s rants I will cut this short and simply make this statement: If you are working with XML, in any facet, you should be using XmlSpy, if you’re not, your wasting time.

Instapaper

Brian — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:21:00 GMT

A very useful web 2.0 application/service that allows you to mark pages you’ve surfed past to read at a later time. This way from your mobile device or as your browser’s home page you can read the detailed content of the original page right from the instapaper.com page.

By clicking on the text button it will load the content of the page without leaving instapaper.com’s site… in addition you can subscribe to your list using any RSS reader.

del.icio.us Tags: web 2.0,utility,tech,productivity tools

Change we can believe in... for a price.

Brian — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:25:00 GMT

If by change we mean collecting money from special interests as has been done... going back on your word, not answering the touch questions and generally being exactly like the politicians of 'ol. On the other hand we have John McCain who when he makes a mistake he doesn't debate the definition of the word "is", rather he looks at the people in the eye... and apologizes, learns, and moves forward. That is change that I can believe in.

For fun, feel free to check out who is donating to their campaigns... take special attention to the fact that most special interests aren't "in bed" with the McCain campaign; on both sides. He's in it for America... in over 20 years in the senate not a single dollar wasted on earmarks. Obama already has added about 100 million in earmarks and he's only in his first term. Clinton around 300 million and in her second term. That's your money their spending without letting it be voted on out in the open? CLIN-BAMA, doesn't really matter which one wins... it's a loss for all of us.

Customizing the command prompt.

Brian — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:56:00 GMT

Having a meaningful command prompt can be incredibly helpful when working on several machines, remote computers, and using different credentials. So I use the following command prompt on all of my machines... this allows me to easily know who and how I connected to a remote share when I'm using the command line interface (cli).

prompt %userdomain%\%username%$son$s%COMPUTERNAME%$s@$s$t$_[$p]$s$m$_$g$s

You can create your own using the syntax defined here and make it always the use your prompt be defining an autorun command or script for your command prompt for any user who uses this computer or for the current user only by replacing HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE with HKEY_CURRENT_USER:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"AutoRun"="prompt %userdomain%\\%username%$son$s%COMPUTERNAME%$s@$s$t$_[$p]$s$m$_$g$s"

You can save the text above into a text file and save it with the .reg extension and then you can apply it by double clicking on the file.

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