Soccer, DataGrid Girl, and Microsucks

Stardate 57092.1 (9-21-2003) 

Rachel's soccer team put in an excellent showing this weekend and the weekend before. The weekend before was a hard game for both teams, and proof of this was the game ended in a 2-2 tie. Rachel came close to scoring another goal. She was right in front of the goal when time ran out. I was very proud of the girls, every one of them played as hard as they could. The game this weekend was a breeze. It started with one of the forwards getting the ball, running it down to the goal and scoring. The whole first quarter was an endless repeat of that. I think the other team scored one goal. AYSO doesn't keep score or standings, but I think we have one of the best teams in the age group. Another St. Joe's coach wants to do some scrimmage between his team and mine. I think mine would dominate. 

 Patrick's game the week before came with it's own surprise. One of the kids we carpool to school with signed up, and I put him in the last open slot on the team. He played for the first time with no practice. He went in the second quarter and scored twice on fast breaks. His older brother plays, so I think he learned quite a bit there. He did the same this week. Patrick had some trouble early on with fast breaks by the other team. I explained that he needed to get in front of the other player. He did this, and the result was the other team scored less. I did notice that the new kid is thin and wiry, so he is fast. Patrick is not quite so fast, but he is strong. He plants his foot in front of the ball to stop it, and the other kid goes tumbling. 

Patrick has been having trouble at practice with fits of anger. I now think doing both the girls and the boys on the same day is just too hard on both Rachel and Patrick. By 7 o'clock both are whining badly. I am going to have to move Patrick's practice to Thursdays. 

Work has been busy. They decided to update from Oracle 8i to 9i. The server program wouldn't run because of what appears to be an incompatibility. I recompiled the Windows version under 9i, and it works. I tried the UNIX version, but 9i is 64-bit only. So this will take a little more work. IT also put service pack 4 on all the machines. A day later on of the DBA's came over and reported the install program quits without doing anything. Another incompatibility. Combine this with numerous client issues and I have not had time to do the programming I wanted to get done. Part of this is my fault. I changed permissions on my login to check the install, and could not change them back. This prevented me from doing the normal setup for the new cycle for a few days. 

The URL I sent around last week that stated Microsoft replaced their Windows DNS servers with Lindex got some return fire this week. One of my coworkers sent another article that said Linux has three times the number of attacks Windows does. This make me wonder how may firewalls and DNS servers are running Linux versus Windows. The article didn't say. Maybe the number is 3 to 1.

Someone needs to tell DataGrid Girl that Microsuck.com has been around a long time. She complained that what's bad about Microsoft had incorrect and outdated information. When some the info was put together, it was correct. The attitude at Microsoft is slowly changing, at least according to some the the developer blogs. They used to dump new features into products without thinking to much about them. One manager now thinks some of these should never have been implemented.

Rachel is having problems with math in school. She really doesn't like math now, but I think a lot of that comes from the problems. The school is making the students do 30 problems (2 + 4, 5 + 3, etc) in two minutes. I'm not sure I agree with pressuring the kids like that, but I could be wrong. 

 The captain made a quick mention of my reviews at the last activity. I haven't checked yet to see if anyone else has read them, but if not, oh well. I enjoy going to watch them with the regulars at his house every Wednesday. I miss Ray Meyer being there, since he has moved to Boston (or Leominister, pronounced LEM-inster). I did appreciate the captain's comments at the senior officers meeting about my keeping the ship website up to date. 

 No humorous end to the entry again this week. I just have not had the time to find anything. 

End of Entry