My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on December 16, 2015

The relatively flat year for stocks reflects the sentiment of many Americans who instinctively know the long and slow economic recovery has been unnecessarily hindered by politicians. The United States is certainly capable of stronger grow overall and in my opinion the blame lands heavily on the burdensome regulation, high corporate taxes and bloated government within certain states and in Washington DC.

We need to wake up and call out those who leech off the backs of the entrepreneurs and hard working laborers in this country. America once embraced hard work and financial engine of capitalism which has proven to be the model for lifting societies. Unfortunately I’m not encouraged listening to the squabbling at the GOP debates and have little confidence that a Hillary Clinton presidency will drastically change the progressive agenda advanced by the Democrats and 7 years of President Obama. Perhaps those on Wall Street are just reflecting the political trend and see little reason to invest optimistically?

Category: Financial, Politics | 1 Comment »
Tags: economy, finances, investing, opinion, Politics, s&p 500 index, stocks

Posted By RichC on December 16, 2015

When you begin to depend on prompt order fulfillment and reasonable delivery times from online retail stores, it feels like we’ve gone back a decade or two?

On Cyber Monday, November 30th, I placed an order with Target thinking there was plenty of time before last minute Christmas ordering. I entered both my email address and text number so as to be updated on the status after reading the note that they had been overwhelmed with orders due to their 15% on everything sale.

A few days later without notification, no emails, phone calls or text messages, I logged in only to notice my order had been canceled. After a lengthy hold period on the phone on December 3rd, a very polite customer service representative apologized and reentered my order and adjusted the price according to the original “sale” price. I was satisfied that they handled poor execution with an appropriate response. My order was in the system and on its way … correct?

Well, a week later on December 10th I started to get concerned again. So I logged back on to the Target.com website to see that my order had shipped and was on it’s way with the reputable FedEx as the carrier. Hm … time to track?

The tracking information was showing a “Weather delay” but listed it in Grove City, Ohio. I look out the windows and the weather was a very mild 60 degrees and dry in Ohio? I called FedEx to check my tracking number and entered my email into “their” system so not only Target should be updating me, but also FedEx. In the meantime, the FedEx agent mention that this was shipped using their SmartPost service and that the final delivery would be made by the U.S. Postal service … hm, sound like one more step in handling if you ask me? Nevertheless, I accept their answer and figured my package would soon be here.

On Monday afternoon, I received notification from FedEx that my package was delivered. Finally right … on December 14th my package was here … but not so fast. I stop at the office to pick up the order and no package was delivered.

Ugh … after yet another series of phone calls to:

1. Target – who said to call FedEx
2. FedEx – who show it handed to USPS
3. USPS – who show it delivered at 11:09 Monday
4. The local post office who shows the GPS logged and scanned
5. Calle the office – it’s not there, but USPS says it didn’t need to be signed for. Great … now what?

Follow up: Well the package did arrive and is available for pick-up. Whew, crisis over.

Category: Holiday, Misc, Personal, Shopping | No Comments »
Tags: fedex, Holiday, rant, shipping, target, usps

Posted By RichC on December 15, 2015

No this is not our BMW X5 35d … but it is my wife’s biggest fear.

She has had several items fall off trucks or get kicked up from the road in front of her over the years. Usually it’s a cracked windshield or “thunk-thunk” as she bounces over lumber or whatever (alignment issues perhaps?)

According to news reports this past weekend, “Luck was on the side of a SUV driver in San Jose, California, who walked away from his vehicle on Friday with just a scratch after a metal ramp crashed through the windshield.

The huge piece of metal fell off of a truck traveling on Interstate 280 southbound, San Jose Firefighters told CNN affiliate KRON. It hit the road and bounced in the air before crashing through the windshield of the BMW X5 SUV.

The driver was able to pull off to the side of the road safely.”

Category: Automotive, BMW, News, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: beam, BMW, california, cnn, debris, fear, road

Posted By RichC on December 15, 2015

One of the issues we found when replacing our roof last month was a wobbly chimney chase for the fireplace in the house. The original fireplace has a stainless steel chimney that extends from the first floor through the second floor, the trusses and then the “chimney chase” on the roof. The builder must not have secured the chase solidly to the trusses and the movement has caused the original brick veneer (matches the house) to come loose. It doesn’t seem to be repairable so we are going to take it down, replace the chase, then veneer with stone to “semi” match our backporch stone fireplace and top with a custom stainless steel cap.

It’s probably not the time of the year to begin this project, but we need to get the chimney box properly flashed before any heavy blowing rains — Monday may have been a test?

Follow up EDIT: This was a Blogsy test post after installing WordPress on the new tiny Digital Ocean cloud server. There are limitations preventing me from adding images via sFTP or another more open FTP server as I do with Microsoft’s LiveWriter. The only working option currently available is to send the image and link through Google or Flickr (this post is Flickr). I’m going to write the Blogsy team and see if there is something they can do?

Category: Archive, Misc, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: blogsy, chimney, fireplace, flickr, home, house, project, repair, roof

Posted By RichC on December 14, 2015

“Tis the season” that many of us are franticly shopping, decorating, cooking and finalizing all the trimmings associated with December and weeks leading up to Christmas. Perhaps we should be a little be more focused on  the reason we celebrate rather than all the trimmings — Christ’s birth!  It is easy to get lost in all the preparations than remembering what is really important. I know, easier said than done.

For us, part of the Christmas preparation is sending Christmas cards and our annual Christmas letter to our family and friends, even in the age of social networks and digital communication. It’s probably unnecessary, but spending a little time thinking about what to write, gives one time to reflect on the year. A lot happens.

So if you’re not on our Christmas card list, here’s wishing you a Merry Christmas 2015 and a Happy New Year — click image below for our 2015 Corbett Christmas Letter.

Category: Archive, Holiday, Personal | No Comments »
Tags: archive, brenda, Corbett Christmas Letter, drew, family, katelyn, pdf, rich, taylor, tootsie

Posted By RichC on December 13, 2015

Looking at this sunrise photo at the Grand Canyon on a small screen does not do it justice, so click so it’s full-size; that’s a great photo from Drew’s new Nexus 6 smartphone.

Perhaps its not just the amazing view or stunning sunrise photo … but the fact that my “crazy daughter” (as Drew titled his email) is sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon taking in this view in person. I recall being in Arizona 40 years ago, but do not remember the views being quite this spectacular. This is one place we didn’t travel to with the kids when they were younger … still no regrets, since they can go for a first time now. I wonder if Katelyn has an appreciation for this kind of natural beauty from our family trips and hiking we did when she was younger?  I’m so glad they are enjoying themselves — Oh … and before I forget … Happy Birthday Drew!

Category: Nature, Personal, Photos, Travel | No Comments »
Tags: beauty, drew, family, grand canyon, katelyn, nature, nexus6

Posted By RichC on December 12, 2015

As I was getting the paper this morning … in a tee-shirt in December … I noticed one branch of our struggling Lilac was confused as to the season. Hard to believe we’re getting ready for Christmas when temperatures are in the 60s.

Category: Nature, Weather | 1 Comment »
Tags: animated, gif, lilac, weather

Posted By RichC on December 12, 2015

 Well I really am working on getting ready for Christmas this weekend, but wanted to post an updated photo as the dry-stack brick project in the poolhouse/ garage. As mentioned previously, the floor leveling was the biggest pain in order to level the top of the “walls.” I used an aluminum angle to hold a sand base before placing and cutting the bricks that line the floor. The 3 rear walls are tied to the wall with anchors and eventually the mantle/top will get wrapped with some extra airplane 6061 aluminum — kind of a waste?

With the warm weather we’ve been having I’m not overly excited about  finishing up just yet … but at least the insulated chimney is in and I’m almost ready to place the woodstove on the bricks.

Category: Misc, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: brick, heat, poolhouse, projects, shop, woodstove

Posted By RichC on December 11, 2015

Stocks have been in decline as investors wait for the Fed to either “move” or get off the pot this month. Adding to the misery for those who are thinking they are in long “safe” dividend paying stocks, like those in energy, they are nervous too.  While the economy is not particularly bad, the deflationary pressure from about every commodity (including oil) is being felt around the globe. Markets are taking a hit and right back where they started the year.  Who would have figured that with all the easing from central banks around the globe, the printing of money and political unrest  … that oil would be so cheap? As someone who rotated into energy stocks this past year, I can comfortably quote President Clinton in saying, “I feel your pain.”

Updated Dec. 11, 2015 12:49 p.m. ET

U.S. stocks headed for their biggest weekly decline in nearly a month as the price of U.S. crude oil fell below $36 a barrel.

Turbulence in the energy market picked up this week, with the price of oil falling to nearly seven-year lows. Investors have broadly sold shares of energy-related companies as the price of commodities tumbled.

More at the WSJ on the decline in stocks and commodity deflation

Category: Energy, Financial | 1 Comment »
Tags: commodities, energy, investing, oil, stocks, wsj

Posted By Admin on December 10, 2015

I move my WordPress  blog to Digital Ocean‘s smallest cloud based Linux server and the move is now complete, I think.  Everything seems to be working as it should, although I’ve experienced a couple snags.

All posts have been consolidated (except this one) under the RichC user_id and I’ve updated to WordPress to 4.4. The Linux “swap” as been set on the DO “micro” cloud server to allocate an additional 3GB (or maybe it was 4GB?) of disk RAM which will hopefully prevent “out of memory” errors. Others have had issues when running WordPress on the smallest cloud servers so we’ll see if this helps before upgrading to a bigger (and more expensive) cloud server.  Tweaking has been fun … as those tech-types who like to “learn by doing” can attest.

Most images (except the WordPress uploaded media), PDFs, AV and larger content have been moved to independent servers (some on Amazon S3 instance and about 10GBs of archives on one of my company’s servers).

I used both phpMyAdmin to correct user_id, URLs and links from old posts, although I’m sure there are still broken links in the over 5000 past posts and pages.

Screenshot of the “hopefully” stable blog as of December 10, 2015.

Category: Blogs | 2 Comments »
Tags: apache, database, digital ocean, host, server, update, upgrade, wordpress