Geno's Cheesesteaks Rules!

From Fox News, HERE:

PHILADELPHIA — A Philadelphia agency has ruled that English-only signs at a famous cheesesteak shop are not discriminatory. The Commission on Human Relations says in its Wednesday ruling that the sign at Geno's Steaks does not violate the city's Fair Practices Ordinance. Joe Vento posted the signs at his shop in October 2005. They read "This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING 'PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH."' Critics allege the policy discourages customers of certain backgrounds from eating there. They say the signs discourage non-English speakers from going to the shop. Vento says he has never refused service to anyone because they couldn't speak English.

Commentary: I guess the "Commission on Human Relations" listened to the various comments that the citizenry made, and decided that "English" is indeed the language of the land...

Arthur C. Clarke

Author and visionary Arthur C. Clarke has died.

There were two giants of Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century - Clarke and Heinlein.

Renowned for 2001:A Space Odyssey, a better look at his story-telling would be a collection of short stories: Tales from the White Hart, of which my favorite would be "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch".

We'll miss you, Mr. Clarke. Perhaps you can continue your conversations with Mr. Heinlein now...

Friday Exhaustion

Since my last post HERE, we have completed the Great Server and Workstation Move, mostly.

There have been little bumps and excursions along the way, but nothing major came to a screeching halt. Except for the external email that didn't work for two days, that is.

On the Tuesday, all the Really Big Stuff worked. Our depositors never noticed a thing. Their money was there when they wanted it, our website was up and running with their account information, it just flaming-well worked.

Our email system runs on Microsoft Exchange, and it worked just fine - as long as you were working within the Small Financial Institution. But from the outside? Nada, zip, zero, bupkis and nothing.

As it turns out, our firewall didn't want to know about a change in IP addresses for email. Everything else was OK, the firewall just had a snit about SMTP from the outside.

Grrrr.....

After much heartburn, and an outside and very expensive consultant who really did earn every dime of his outrageous hourly fee, email came back up on Thursday. And we didn't lose a single email message. Because of Proper Prior Planning, we didn't lose ANYTHING. Not permanently anyway, it was just delayed a bit.

If this all sounds a little vague, that's my intent. I am NOT giving out any further info - and not for CYA, just for basic security.

I've been very busy for the last 3 weeks, and I am one tired puppy.

"So, OWW, why are you up at this late/early hour?"

Glad you asked! It seems that our Voice Response system decided to pick tonight to be a PITA about it's backup routines.

CP&C (Crap Pee and Corruption).

It's fixed - but now I'm REALLY tired.

G'night....