Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus

  • All right, so it’s been over a month …

    All right, so it’s been over a month since I last posted. I’ve been busy at work and, well, I must say nothing has pissed me off enough to blog. Still, I care about having a personal blog and keeping it active. The question then becomes: what to say when you are (temporarily) speechless. Writing…

  • American Express to customers: Forget do-not-call; we’ll call you anytime we like

    When you get a credit card statement, do you ever read all the legalese on the back of the pages with the I-owe-a-fortune-amounts? I’ll bet many people don’t, despite the imploring of many consumer advocates. Consumer Reports, in particular, practically harangues readers to be aware of the ability of credit card companies to change terms…

  • Are you feeling like you’ve been screwed, but can’t quite figure out how?

    Maybe it’s your health care insurer manipulating your out-of-network health care claim reimbursements to increase their profits. Remember last fall when you signed up for the significantly more expensive plan that lets you choose a doctor out-of-network? You thought you were being smart. Instead, it turns out you’re being screwed. Your extra premiums are finding…

  • A whale of a demagogue

    I was channel surfing recently (no mean feat on a Verizon FIOS system), and paused briefly on Animal Planet’s Whale Wars. I was instantly riveted…but not because of what the show is ostensibly about. Briefly, it’s a cinema verité recounting of the struggle between environmental radicals and the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean. The…

  • My daughter, the poet

    It is with great pleasure and pride that I turn over my blog, temporarily, to my daughter Rebecca so she can publish her humorous poem, The Germ Soldier. If you’ve ever seen a middle-schooler with a runny nose, you’ll relate to her art. The Germ Soldier By Becca Neihaus They spread like throwing sand, Since…

  • Quick bytes from turkey weekend

    Really quickly: I’m eatin’ turkey — a lot of turkey I’ve updated to WP 2.6.5 and still can’t get the blog to work with podPress 8.8 despite all the posts about how to do so and the “no revisions” plugin. Damn, this is tiresome. When will Automattic realize they are killing bloggers with these incompatibilities.…

  • Vieux Boulogne or Durian: Can a French Software Company Blog?

    This is one of those posts where I had so many metaphors going through my head as I wrote it that I’m gonna list ’em for you before I write the post because even I can’t keep ’em straight. And who wants to miss a good metaphor? Vieux Boulogne is the world’s stinkiest cheese Durian…

  • Vinyl records aren’t staging a comeback so don’t look for social media wisdom from analysts

    This morning, I was searching for blog posts about Gartner research and came across this one from David Scott really tucking it to Gartner for their lack of authenticity in social networking. It’s no big surprise that David thinks they’re inept. If there’s a firm on the planet that has fewer bona fides in social networking…

  • Politics is to beer as poverty is to Wi-Fi

    I’ve been way too busy to blog. But today, while my kid was drilling analogies in preparation for the SSAT, the blog muse struck. It’s Sunday, and I’ve just reviewed my retirement account statements from September 30. That was bad enough. But with the miracle of Quicken, I was able to see specifically the carnage…

  • Listen to Randy Newman’s Harps and Angels before it’s too late

    I’ve been a rabid Randy Newman fan since I was in college. When I was a student producer in the mid-1970’s at WBUR, I tried desperately (and unsuccessfully) to get Newman to interview on a show I produced called Around the Hub. It wasn’t so much that I thought Newman was of interest to the…

  • I finally get some security religion and discover how easy it really is

    With all the news lately about the fundamental flaws in DNS and the fact that my digital life is on my laptop, I decided to take a few hours today to reconfigure my router to use OpenDNS and to encrypt the whole drive in my laptop using TrueCrypt. After months of listening to Leo and…

  • Consumer Reports is the Church Lady

    I’ve been reading Consumer Reports since I was a teenager.  Without a doubt, they the most authoritative consumer product testers. And they know it. I’ve always been amused by their combination of geeky testing regimens and their 1930’s-derived Socalist practices (purchasing a subscritption to the magazine makes you a “member” of Consumer’s Union and eligble…