I went to a store the other day. I was only in there for maybe five minutes, and when I came out, there was a cop writing up a parking ticket. So I went up to him and said, 'Come on buddy, how about giving a guy a break?'

He ignored me and continued writing out the ticket. So I — no doubt, with great wisdom — called him a stupid idiot. He simply glared at me and then started writing up yet another ticket for having bald tires, no less!!

At that point, I got really angry with him. He finished that second ticket and put it on the windshield along with the first one. And then he had the gaul to start writing up a third ticket!! Yes, a third traffic ticket!!

This went on for about 20 minutes, certainly more time than my brief visit to the store. The more that I fumed and objected, the more tickets the officer wrote up. Clearly that police officer was just a bit hot under the collar!!!

In the end, though, the proverbial "High Road" won out and I simply walked away. Was I concerned about those many tickets? Nope! My car was parked around the corner!!!

One day, Mary and Tom went to a restaurant for dinner. As soon as the waiter brought two orders of steak au poivre to the table, Mary quickly picked out the bigger steak for herself.

Tom wasn't happy about that: "When are you going to learn to be polite?"

Mary: "If you had the chance to pick first, which one would you pick?"

Tom: "The smaller piece, of course."

Mary: "What are you whining about then? The smaller piece is what you want, right?"

Happy St. Patrick's Day to my many Irish friends! Boston has long been associated with Irish immigrants so the picture to the left is one of Benjamin Franklin as viewed from the Freedom Trail in front of Old Boston City Hall.

Rather than dress today with the color green, I instead am listening to Irish music. As I write this, the music by an Irish studio group Secret Garden is playing in the background. I recommend their music highly, in particular their albums Dreamcatcher, White Stones, Dawn of a New Century and Earthsongs. I only discovered their most recent albumn Winter Poem yesterday so that too is sure to be on today's playlist as well.

This afternoon I planned on getting much done on the content side of the LT website. Instead, I ended up creating a long blog post about the public resignation of Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs and my own experience upon resigning from Lehman Brothers. It was good to get those thoughts down on paper so to speak. Hence, I also started this separate post about some of my other thoughts. I suspect that I will find it useful to refer back to this and other such writing in the future.

While noting the date of this rumination, I was reminded that today is the day before the Irish holiday of St. Patrick's Day. I find it fascinating how we have seemingly random associations with certain dates. Sometimes it becuase of a life event such as the birth, marriage, or death of immediate family members or those with whom we share some affection. On other dates, it is because of link to a person or affiliation that one had at one point during the journey of life. Yet others are for specific events in time, like what one was doing when the second plane crashed into New York City's World Trace Center.

Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I had many classmates who were of Irish descent. Hence, St. Patrick's Day was a day well celebrated, particularly by those of the Catholic faith who were at the end of Lent. More recently, I had about a year-long affair with a married woman supposedly in the midst of getting a divorce. Mary had both Irish and Norweigan ancestry so she too was a celebrant of St. Patrick's Day. It has always been a bit ironic that the last time she and I spoke directly was the day before St. Patrick's Day, a day of celebration. Hence, this date has been paricularly poignant because on it she expressed her desire to have no further contact whatsoever.

As I was writing the long post about Greg Smith, Goldman Sachs and my own resignation from Lehman Brothers, I turned on my current favorite source for music, Spotify. Somewhere I have previously commented how much I like their free desktop application that combines the music stored on my hard drive with other music that I do not own or have not yet heard. They have a service called 'Playlists' that allows one to listen to lists of music put together by others, whether they be friends, performers, musical composers or the general public. It is an excellent feature and a great way to discover new music that one might enjoy. One can also compose one's own playlist(s).

One of my playlists is entitled Relaxing and contains some songs from a long-time favorite group called Secret Garden, which ironicly is an Irish studio group. I was introduced to this group shortly after my divorce by another woman of Irish descent, Pam Hoyt. In that period, I was working for Munich Re which involved driving back and forth from Connecticut to Princeton, New Jersey on most weekdays. Depending on traffic, particularly in the stretch from New Rochelle across the George Washington Bridge to the Meadowlands, the trip in each direction could take anywhere from 70 minutes to double that. Pam thoughtfully suggested that I could use some relaxing music, particularly for the drive home. Hence, Pam created a cassette tape for me of various relaxing songs with some Irish connection, including two songs by Secret Garden.

My good friend and business colleauge Aldon Hynes has been faithfully writing almost daily for many years at Orient Lodge. As a regular reader of his posts, I often wonder with interest what subjects Aldon might be addressing that day. Aldon has frequently encouraged me to similarly record some of my thoughts in a daily post that he and others too could read. I have remained reluctant to do so since writing well has often been akin to pulling teeth. I have also wondered who would want to read about my random thoughts, musings, observations, ruminations and wonders. However, the events of the past week are causing me to reconsider.

Aldon enjoys telling clients of why he has choosen to work with me over more than two decades at Lehman Brothers, Smith Barney, UBS and Toomre Capital Markets LLC. Apparently he has been continually surprised by how I quickly associate "Thought A" with seemingly random "Thought Z". As he tells the tale, it is almost as if one is pulling a random strand of spaghetti from a bowl of pasta and observing what less than obvious gems of thought cling to that strand.

Although Aldon and I have not spoken directly in the past couple of days, I am sure that he (and others) are wondering what my thoughts are about Goldman Sachs and a certain Greg Smith. For those not intimately familiar with the world of finance, this past Wednesday, Mr. Smith very publicly resigned from Goldman Sachs through an opion piece published in the Op-Ed pages of the the New York Times. His method of resignation and some of his assertions caused considerable uproar and discussion throughout the Wall Street community.

Mr. Smith's basic assertion was that the culture of Goldman Sachs had dramatically changed during the twelve years that he was employed there. Apparently, the senior managers were more concerned about generating profits at the expense of the firm's "clients" than they were about an implied fudiciary duty to "do right" for those same trading counter-parties. "It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off," Mr. Smith wrote.

On this Valentine's Day evening, I have been using the music service Spotify to play some romantic music. Selections included some Chopin piano music, some soothing works from Secret Garden, other classical music, and the sound track from Phantom of the Opera. Spotify seems to be much better and easier to use than my former favorite player iTunes. It is well worth trying out if you have not done so already!

As the song "Think of Me" began to play, I reflected that it already has been two plus years since I last saw a live performance of Phantom of the Opera. That night was intended to be a romantic evening with Mary. However, she arrived late and was quite distracted by some bad news regarding her then primary client. We went out for dinner afterwards at a nearby French bistro, but the conversation was just flat there as well. She headed home with the promise that with some sleep, she no doubt would feel better. She felt so much better on the following day that she canceled at the last minute a much anticipated night out, which is why I remember my last visit to see Phantom of the Opera so!!

The Chopin piano music was 'Chopin: Noctures Nos 1 – 11' performed by Elisabeth Leonskaja. The recording of these pieces is quite good and highly recommended as quiet soothing music to relax and read to. In one of the comments about what was the most sensual classical music piece, someone wrote about Nocture No 1, which caused me to listen to this whole collection again. That piece is good, but I personally would rank Rachmanioff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor Opus 18, or Ravel's Bolero as being more sensuous. Another enjoyable suggestion that I would not otherwise have considered was Mahler's Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp Minor: Adagietto. Enjoy some romantic music on this supposedly most romantic night of the year!!

Mastin Kipp, the founder of of The Daily Love website, also produces a daily newsletter. In this year's Martin Luther King Jr. edition, his focus was on the issue of trust in relationships.

He posses the questions, "Can you express your truth in your relationships? Do people make you feel wrong for doing that? Do you link up anger/sadness with being abandoned? Do you avoid telling the truth because you are afraid that your relationship is going to fall apart if you do? And do you have the courage to let the truth out anyways, knowing that when you do, you will either come closer together, or split — because of the TRUTH!?

Happy New Year to you and yours and best wishes for a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2012. In particular, I wish Kyra Toomre much success as she embarks on the next phase of her life journey — college!!

A brand-new year... to live; to believe; to give; to receive; to fall in love; to share a smile; to walk an inch; to run a mile; to dive into sunsets; to forgive; to forget; to love where you’re going; to embrace where you’ve been; to take a deep breath, close your eyes... and begin. May the new year be filled with love, adventure, and dreams come true.

This cartoon from Clay Bennett summarizes well the day after Christmas in today's commercialized world.

Here is a cartoon that should make the reader smile. This is from the New Yorker magazine and is entitled,

I need something that says, "I'm sorry about that thing I said that caused you to totally overreact."

In this holiday season with many parties and more evening dinners out, this New Yorker cartoon might well make one smile as one goes to make the next reservation. The caption to the cartoon reads, "This place is famous for its short fiction about food."

Recently my ex-wife, Eugenia Middleton (aka "Nina"), informed me that our daughter, Kyra Toomre, has received her first college acceptance letter. Supposedly, the university to which Kyra was accepted has "a good environmental policy program and an excellent theater program." Nina was pleased for Kyra and assumed that I would be too.

This is indeed good news. I am sure that Kyra feels much better that at least some college wants her to be a part of their student body. It should be noted that this latter point is conjecture as Kyra for whatever reason(s) has repeatedly and adamantly refused to have any communication whatsoever with her father and the rest of the paternal side of her family since April 2005.

This college news also raises some concerns, which other parents might also share. First, this particular university has a reputation among some as a "party school" and for hard drinking and such. Perhaps the reality of this university is different than one of its popular caricatures which might be summarized as "a Southern party school for upper middle-class kids from the Northeast." One does not know yet whether that caricature is an accurate portrayal or not.

Further, the university is located near an area with an abnormally high crime rate, which naturally worries any parent about the safety of their child. Finally, what was most disconcerting about this news was there had been absolutely no prior communication that Kyra was even considering this college, let alone going to apply for an early decision. In short, there simply had been no need to become even somewhat educated about this college's relative strengths and weaknesses before her application.

The current situation with Kyra is hardly a surprise, though. As has been the case for nearly the last seven years, there has been extremely limited direct communication between Kyra's father and both Kyra and her mother. Very sadly, such circumstances are often the end result when one parent is thought to suffer from a condition commonly referred to as Parental Alienation Syndrome ("PAS").

For those less informed, Lars Toomre has previously written about PAS here, here and here. PAS can be characterized as a continuing condition where the selfish, vindictive and malicious actions (including systematic denigration) by one parent, most of frequently the mother, are intended to alienate the child against the child's other parent, typically the non-residential father. Such highly manipulative, malicious behavior is considered by many to be a form of child abuse. Sadly, it frequently manifests itself in cases of contested divorce, especially those where one parent subconsciously uses the child almost as a weapon in custody and child rearing disputes.

As was described in Start of Journey to A Performant Web Server, recently the Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") web server started periodically going into constant paging mode after a Ubuntu upgrade. An initial review of the configuration files did not highlight any variables that obviously were amiss. In fact, nothing it seems had changed at all from what was used on a stable Ubuntu 8.4 version.

It is going to require some time to investigate the myriad of options that may need to be changed to provide a configuration for a stable and performant server environment. In the meantime, Lars Toomre could not babysit the malfunctioning server, restarting the Apache2 and MySQL services whenever the server went into high paging mode.

This is the start of what will be a series of posts about performance tuning an Ubuntu web server for a typical small business. This post starts with the background behind a journey from fickle web server instability to what (hopefully!!) will be a stable and performant Ubuntu server environment. It concludes with what is likely to be an evolving list of possible next steps to investigate while moving toward this performant web server goal.

Background

Lawyers never should ask a Mississippi grandma a question if they aren't prepared for the answer

In a trial, a small Southern small-town attorney called his first witness, a grandmotherly, elderly woman to the stand. He approached her and asked, 'Mrs. Jones, do you know me?' She responded, 'Why yes, I do know you, Mr. Williams. I've known since you were a boy, and quite frankly, you've been a big disappointment to me. You lie, you cheat on your wife, and you manipulate people and talk about them behind their backs. You think you are a big shot when you haven't the brains to realize you'll never amount to anything more than a two-bit paper pusher. Yes I know you.'

The lawyer was stunned. Not knowing what else to do, he pointed across the room and asked, 'Mrs. Jones, do you know the defense attorney?'

She again replied, 'Why yes, I do. I've known Mr. Bradley since he was a a youngster, too. He's lazy, bigoted, and he has a drinking problem. He can't build a normal relationship with anyone, and his law practice is one of the worst in the state. Not to mention he cheated on his wife with three different women. One of them was your wife. Yes, I know him.'

The defense attorney nearly died.

The judge asked both counselors to approach the bench and, in a very quiet voice, said,

'If either of you idiots ask her if she knows me, I'll send you both to the electric chair.'

The long-awaited and much-anticipated version 7 of Drupal ("D7") was formally released this week. This open-source software package is known as a Content Management System ("CMS") and has been used to run this and other websites hosted by Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") for much of the past six years. We have known that this code was under a long development cycle for quite some time and have tested various components along the way. It appears to be quite promising and should enable the TCM team to do even more with this great software.

Hence, late last week we decided to bite the proverbial bullet and start the rather involved upgrade process of bringing "everything" current. As a result, this website, its sibling websites and the supporting servers all currently are under-going a massive maintenance upgrade. This means that the performance and availability of the website will be more spotty has been the case recently. (In particular, the image software is not working as desired.)

This upgrade includes finally switching the Ubuntu flavor of Linux software on the server from what was 8.04 (Hardy) to 10.4 (Lucid Lynx). Ubuntu 10.4 is the most current Long-Term Support (LTS) release and should be stable for the next several years (like Hardy has been). As is the case with practically any server upgrade, there are numerous packages that also either need to be or can be upgraded to work with the more current version of the software. We currently are in the midst of checking, confirming and installing the associated package changes.

One of the biggest packages that changed with the Ubuntu 10.4 was the programming language PHP. It switched from version 5.2 to version 5.3. Normally that would not be very much of a change. However, the Drupal 6 software was written prior to some of the changes that were introduced with 5.3. In particular, PHP 5.3 is much more strict about the issue of how it passes variables and also has some deprecated functions that were used quite a bit in the Drupal 6 core. Drupal 7 supposedly clears up these particular issues, but may well introduce others that need to be tested for before the final switch to Drupal 7 is completed.

Where we are at the moment is running the most current version of Drupal 6 and Ubuntu 10.4. In the log files, there are a number of errors being posted about problems with pass variable by value instead of by reference. These need to be corrected one by one to get Drupal, Ubuntu and our custom software all peacefully co-existing with one another. We are aware that hidden in this mess is the something that is preventing the correct display of images with their associated content. We are not sure where exactly the problem is, but hope to have the issue eradicated shortly this weekend.

Thanks for bearing with us!

One of the better pin-up artists in the 1940's and 1950's was an artist by the name of Gil Elvgren. Over those years, he complete something close to two hundred oil paintings that subsequently were used on calendars, published in magazines and/or distributed on other printed material. Naturally, when a company put together a page per day calendar focused on paintings of pin-up girls, many of his works were included and reproduced.

About three weeks ago, Lars Toomre wrote about experimenting with adding images to the posts on his personal website. That was followed by a post about initial impressions based on Google Image Search 'snap shots'. Little else has been publicly written since then. In the interim, Lars has continued to add images to most, if not all, of the existing quote postings on the Lars Toomre website as well as creating a significant number of additional quote postings.

As a result, the number of images referenced has climbed from about five hundred to more than eleven hundred. Along the way, Lars discovered that a number of existing images had incomplete or invalid image attribute tags. Wherever discovered, such tag attribute(s) were corrected. Currently, it takes about twelve minutes to create each LT quote with fully-qualified image, quote author and free form tags. Put another way, creating the additional quotes with images involved more than 120 hours of work. (Some free weekends and a long Thanksgiving break provided much of the time for this task.)

This has been quite a time investment. The initial results (as measured by the Google Analytics statistics), though, have been equally as impressive. Bear in mind that the stated purpose of the LT website is for some personal thoughts, observations and trivia. As originally conceived, it never was intended to be a high-traffic website. Here are selected website visitor statistics (covering the trailing month period) for each of the last five weeks:

During that period, the top five searches have migrated from:

Earlier today, I cross-posted a blog entry entitled Initial Discussions about Sample Summary of Google Image Search Results. In that post, I tried to summarize some of the comments that had occurred about what was showing up in Google Image Search and possible next steps to take in order to gain a better understanding how Google (as an example search engine) is categorizing various image content. The hope is to gain a better understanding of this general search categorization process before beginning to add images to the main Toomre Capital Markets LLC website.

Among the many comments was the suggestion that we fairly promptly automate the process of taking an array of results and transforming those results into an HTML webpage much like this one. With the experience gained from coding the HTML table the first time by hand, it was fairly easy to create a function that automated the HTML tagging work. I have still yet to dig into the specific CSS mark-up language that might improve the appearance of the resulting HTML text.

This HTML text includes links that takes one to Google Image Search with the parameters set for that particular cell. One can easily note down the total images near the top of the resulting Google Images page. The current number may well vary from what is displayed below since the Google Image indices are truly real-time and the data below is a somewhat inconsistent snapshot (gathered over approximately an hour as each cell was queried in turn). This suggestion about embedding links was a good one. It makes it feasible to continue to take additional 'snap shots' over the coming days to gain more preliminary insight on what might be going on with these dynamic search indices.

I will post more as I have a chance to spot examine and cross-reference the data that Google has with that stored in the innards of the Drupal CMS system. Anybody notice yet how the total results tied to the domain larstoomre.toomre.com are going down. Any speculation about why that might be occurring?

This is being cross-posted to both the Toomre Capital Markets website and to Lars Toomre's personal website.

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Earlier this week, Lars Toomre broke up an LT post about Adding Images to Lars Toomre Website. Previously, buried at the bottom of that post, there was a hand-crafted HTML table summarizing what information currently was in Google Image Search for various combinations of site domain restrictions, safe search parameters and some typical search terms. That table is now presented in the LT post Sample Summary of Google Image Search Results and repeated here for easier reference.

The public presentation of these search results has already resulted in several stimulating conversations heading off in numerous different directions. Let me try to summarize some of the issues that have been raised thus far and the broad categories that they might be grouped into. Each of these categories probably will receive additional attention in the coming days. They include: