csummers.org

Today was my last day working for Eastern Michigan University. I had a nice send off from everyone in the office, and I'll always appreciate the time I spent at Eastern. It is the close of a chapter in my life and the beginning of a new one.

iPod Nano — Another iPod model? Geez. Looks cool, though.

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've been pretty busy on all fronts. Here's a quick update:

• Took the family to Chicago to see my sister and her husband. We went to the Lincoln Park Zoo–which little Abby enjoyed. It was good to see my sister and catch up with what they're up to. As far as big cities go, Chicago is nice, but I don't think I'd like to live there.
• Still learning and hacking around with Ruby. I wrote a script to look at some of my Apache logs and do reverse DNS lookups. Turns out there's a bug in Ruby's resolve library using Resolve::DNS.getresources if a DNS lookup fails. A quick bug fix solved my problems, though.
• Work has been super busy: rolled some warehouse views out to a selected few; responded to state auditor data requests with millions of records (fun!); convinced Apache on CentOS to pay attention to the ORACLE_HOME environment variable for the PHP oci8 module (I'll document this in a later blog entry); further work on my PHP application framework to create a multiple-authentication scheme depending on the resources requested; and on, and on…
• I led worship again yesterday. It went well.
• My parents have been to China and back since my last post. This was my mother's first (and possibly her last) trip to China. I went to China with my father several years ago, and it's an eye-opening experience: the world is a lot larger than you'd think.
• Crystal and I have been doing a little bit of nesting in preparation for the new baby girl coming soon. I shuffled some furniture and Abby's toys around to make some room for the bassinet in the living room. Crystal and Abby got out all of the tiny baby clothes and washed them. Was Abby ever really that small?

Like a good son, I bought my dad a Father's Day present from Amazon.com last week. A couple days after ordering I received the shipment confirmation email and proceded to login to my account to track the package–except there's no record of this order in the "Where's My Stuff?" section. It's gone. A previous order shows up from several months ago, but not my most recent one. So, I chalk it up to a backend system error, and figure I'll come back later and maybe it will be there.

I login today and the order is still not showing up. Funny thing is, though, using the tracking number from the shipment confirmation email, I can track the package from the USPS site–just not from within my Amazon account. Oh great–this means I have to contact customer support.

A few canned-response customer support emails later and I'm completely dumbfounded. Apparently I have two Amazon accounts with orders in each. The real kicker, though, is that both accounts have the exact same login email address. The only thing that distinguishes the two accounts is the password! I'm not sure how this happened or why Amazon even allows it to happen, but it's terribly frustrating. And, they will not merge the two accounts into one because of "security concerns." Argh!

I finally got around to putting up a new website. When I shut down my old site several months ago, I had vowed not to blog again. But WordPress makes this sort of thing too easy, so here I go again!

Whereas my old blog had very lengthy posts, this time around should be less verbose. I'll post links to items I find of interest and any pithy comments, but not too many long essays. One thing I am committed to, however, is sharing how I use technology at home and work.

It's ridiculously cold up here (yahoo weather):