Where I’m at now
My parents’ health issues didn’t work out as I hoped, and my parents wound up dying 53 hours apart. I’m dealing with the aftermath, and expect that to continue pretty much until Thanksgiving. Thus, for a while I’ve stopped taking briefings, writing my usual kind of blog posts, and all that stuff. I’ve been responding to quick client inquiries, but that’s about it.
Naturally, when I get back to work, there will be a massive backlog. Highlights include:
- My quarterly trip to California, in this case to see clients both old and new.
- Catch-up blogging.
- A white paper/webinar project.
- Monash Advantage renewals.
To make things simple, 2011 Monash Advantage terms and conditions will be completely unchanged from 2010. That’s never been the case before; if nothing else, I’ve raised prices every year. But even if I’d had more time on my hands, I might have made only minor tweaks this time around, as the current version seems to be working well for vendor (that would be me) and clients alike. If I find the time, I’ll edit the contracts for typos and so on.* But what you get and what you pay will be exactly as they have been this year, except to the extent I can persuade you to make better use of what’s always been on offer to you.
*First two on the hit list: “Action, MA” should be “Acton, MA”, and some people dislike the actually sensible reference to the year 2019.
Obviously, various schedules I was trying to work to are no longer operative. But I really, really want to move forward promptly on the Privacy 3.0 project I mentioned to some of you. All the other stuff — post-print journalism and so on — can happen when it happens.
| Categories: About this blog | 12 Comments |
With luck the Monash Research RSS feed is now fixed
Our integrated RSS feed went out. Melissa Bradshaw has now replaced Feedjumbler with Yahoo Pipes, so the feed should be working again.
Is it?
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I understand the Monash Research RSS feed isn’t working
I gather from a few folks (who use at least two different RSS readers) that the last post to come through our integrated RSS feed was a Monash Report post from September 29. Is this everybody’s experience? And how are our blog-specific feeds going?
Thanks!
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Further thoughts on previous posts
One thing I love about DBMS 2 is the really smart comments a number of readers — that would be you guys — make. However, not all the smart comments are made in the first 5 minutes a post is up, so some readers (unless you circle back) might miss great points other readers make. Well, here are some pointers to some of what you might have missed, along with other follow-up comments to old posts while I’m at it. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Calpont, IBM and DB2, Netezza, Oracle, SAS Institute | Leave a Comment |
Where I’m at
It would be an exaggeration to say that my family health issues are “under control.” My father still isn’t fully alert. He also has tubes surgically implanted in his throat and belly, and will not be able to speak during a months-long rehab. (He will HATE that; he’s the kind of guy who always charms or at least entertains his caretakers.) In one of my better pieces of writing, I explained all that in a long note to my partly-senile mother, who seems to be handling it; but of course she remains a concern. Linda’s leg is still broken.
One moral in all this is that it is a VERY good idea for the elderly to live in the same metropolitan area as their children. When I’m with my father, I can rein in his overconfidence about muddling through episodes of weakness. When I’m not, bad things happen.
Still, things are moving forward. A long, slow rehab will be very unpleasant for my parents, but at least there’s good hope we won’t have too many more near-term urgent crises. Communication and coordination among my parents’ support structure is better, even in the case of Friendship Village. And Linda seems sufficiently able to fend for herself that I’ll keep my plans to go to the SF Bay area the week of October 4, albeit being very careful to stock the house with food beforehand.
I’ve kept up client service through all this, cutting relatively few corners, and that won’t change. Read more
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Some of my travails
Two weeks ago tonight, my 86 year old father was taken unresponsive from his home at Friendship Village of Dublin (Ohio) to Riverside Methodist Hospital. He remains unresponsive, and his doctors and the Riverside Hospital nurses are trying to puzzle out how to bring him around. Riverside Hospital does not know what happened at Friendship Village of Dublin the night he wound up collapsing, so naturally I asked Friendship Village for the information, that I may relay it to Riverside Hospital, so that they may help him recover from his “critically stable” condition. Two weeks after the event, they are still refusing it to me.
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How I’m planning to package user services
On the Monash Research business website right now, you could find multiple pages explaining and extolling our vendor consulting services. We even have posted standard contracts that:
- Are concise.
- Are priced in terms units of work, yet do not require me to meter services at precise hourly or daily rates.
- Have a minimum scope that allows me to feel comfortable I’m spending enough time with a client to do good work.
- Extend over time, mimicking the subscription model of analyst services.*
- Do not contain any concept of “work for hire,” transfer of intellectual property, or “we own your brain.”
- Don’t have any other features that are stunningly inappropriate for our business.
By way of contrast, the user services portion of our site is only a few lines long, and that’s beginning to hurt. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehousing | 6 Comments |
Research agenda for 2010
As you may have noticed, I’ve been posting less research/analysis in November and December than during some other periods. In no particular order, reasons have included: Read more
Comments on a fabricated press release quote
My clients at Kickfire put out a press release last week quoting me as saying things I neither said nor believe. The press release is about a “Queen For A Day” kind of contest announced way back in April, in which users were invited to submit stories of their data warehouse problems, with the biggest sob stories winning free Kickfire appliances. The fabricated “quote” reads: Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share and customer counts, Sybase | 3 Comments |
Availability nightmares continue
We’re having a lot of outages on our blogs. Downtown Host tells me that huge numbers of MySQL processes are being spawned. I have trouble understanding why, as WP-SuperCache (Edit: Actually, just WP-Cache) is enabled, robots.txt has a crawl delay, and so on.
As of yesterday, we were getting 1 1/2 megabytes/hour of “MySQL database has gone away” errors. After Downtown Host declined to discuss that subject with us, Melissa Bradshaw implemented — at least for this blog — a workaround to change the MySQL wait_delay settings ourselves. Clever idea, and seemed to work for half a day — but now the problems have returned.
Downtown Host isn’t saying much more than “Look at these logs. Your blogs are experiencing a lot of queries and spawning dozens upon dozens of MySQL processes. The main offender is DBMS2.” I don’t know when we’ll get this sorted out. I fly to Europe tomorrow. I have a cough. I’m exhausted. I’m sorry.
| Categories: About this blog, MySQL | 4 Comments |