• http://obstinate.org/computing/full-review-of-postgresql-certfirst-training-course/
• http://obstinate.org/journal/an-update-on-certfirst-the-postgresql-training-company/

Back while I still worked at said company, Certfirst was pretty agressive in trying to get me to take down my blog posting by leveraging a refund contingent on them asking me to take down the above blog postings. I agreed, but after I left said company (ironically I wan’t fired!) I re-posted the above, very useful information about Certfirst. In the interest of full disclosure:

Today COMPNAY received a partial refund from CertFirst for its failed training. Together with this refund, each party agreed to use “reasonable efforts” to protect the reputation of the other. Part of Tone’s “reasonable effort” involves my notifying relevant parties that the agreement includes such a provision, and further urging you to be conscientious in any discussions you have re: CertFirst/SaiFirst with third parties.

Today, I noticed that over the past few months my fairly unnoticed blog has had a flurry of comment activity. Specifically lots of comments on my Certfirst postings! I thought I would share them with you:

Now, you may question the ability of the above person(s) to post in complete sentences, and without caps locks. However, you might not question their ability to use different computers, and to not be SaiFirst / Certfirst Employees:

Wow, they are both the same person! Souchon B, and Alice Martin! Never mind that they posted 4 minutes from one another! It should also be noted that this website has gotten maybe a dozen comments (including these) in the past 4 years.

So if we check out these IP’s that the submissions came from:

#host 24.12.109.172
172.109.12.24.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer c-24-12-109-172.hsd1.il.comcast.net.

#host 173.15.103.142
142.103.15.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 173-15-103-142-Illinois.hfc.comcastbusiness.net.

It is very interesting that both of these supposedly anonymous posters are either duplicates, or from the same region! It is also interesting that both are from the very same region associated with CertFirst!

Certfirst mentions on their website that they are located:

CertFirst
2215 York Road, Suite 108
Oak Brook, IL 60523
PHONE: (877) 724-3477 [USA]
PHONE: 1-(630) 684-0355 [INTERNATIONAL]
FAX: (630) 684-0344

Looking at the whois records for saifirst.com and certfirst.com results that the Administrative contact for both of these domains are:

Soni, Sonia  sonia.soni@comcast.net

This seems to be the Owner / President of Saifirst / Certfirst. She uses Comcast residential cable modem service, she lives in Illinois, and has an extreme interest in trying to discredit me. The bummer for her is that I have no credit to begin with!

A few quick phone calls in the Telecom community would / will result in finding out who owns those IP addresses. Once I get a few moments to do so (luckily for me, I work in the Telecom Industry) I will report back!

Mikey: Hi there, I’d like a wax
Wax Nazi: Yeah okay – yours the white M Roadster parked next to the 911?
Mikey: Yeah
Wax Nazi: When was the last time you had it waxed
Mikey: …
Waz Nazi then pulls out a little device, it looks like an oversized pager, it has a laser shooting out of one side and presses up to the paint on the hood, then shakes his head.
Wax Nazi: I am going to need to clay it… and what is this film all over it, its like a dusting of rubber???
Mikey: …..
Mikey: How much?
Wax Nazi: $75, be done in 3 hours.
Mikey: Here’s $80, Thanks!

mikey: i would tone it down to mitigate stalker status

austie: i’m dying to ask this guy about hurricane katrina.

austie: his job in LA ended right when that hit.

austie: that could be a very touchy subject, better to skip.

austie: maybe his dog died or something.

mikey: or his wife

austie: ha

austie: that would suck

mikey: “NEXT!”

austie: “i’m going to hang up now.”

“Weeeelll.. it’s an Aston Martin Vantage…. With a V12 engine… what do you think it’s going to be like?”

“It is fantastic….. it’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful”

“What it makes me feel though…. is sad.”

“I just cant help thinking, that, thanks to all sorts of things: the environment, the economy, problems in the middle east, the relentless war on speed, that cars like this will be consigned to the history books.”

“I just have this horrible, dreadful feeling that what I am driving here, is an ending.”

“Good night.”

I have gotten the sense over the past year or so that this was coming, that Top Gear had slowly been losing it’s soul. With each season a bit of the sparkle had gone. With whatever has been happening behind the scenes it looks like there might be a final nail in the coffin. If Top Gear did come back for Season 14, and I think that really is a big if, that it would be souless and thoughtless that it might not even be worth watching.

I want my Season 10 & 11 back.

I am not big on birthdays, I don’t make it an excuse to drink my face off for an entire week straight. However, I do appreciate affection from my loved ones just like the next person, but I am sort of over the ritual of it all. I don’t do gifts – I am sure that I will get a few best buy gift certificates and maybe a card mailed to me full of $25 cash. Really? I think all of that is a bit unnecessary. I don’t subscribe to that, the specific issue is that if I want something that is $25 – I already own it. That isn’t to say I haven’t received really excellent gifts, I have. Almost none of them had material value – or the material value was not important. What makes a gift great is the thought that went into it, and the delivery value. A last minute trip to radio shack is insulting, really. I would rather just have a “Happy Birthday, dude!” than a $25 gift certificate to Frys.

Anyways, in a discussion about such things with my bestest’s I defended my stance on this – and I was reminded “Mike, think of all that has happened to you in the past year”. I started to think about it, and I was genuinely taken aback. A whole lot has happened to me in the last year. I learned to hate, I learned to forget, I learned to love again – I learned what it is to be more (?) humble. I am on my 3rd job in a year, working on my moving to my 3rd city (wherever that may be). I have been on vacations, all of which were nearly spontaneous, made lots of new friends and ditched a lot of lousy ones.

Despite this, I think that everyone who knows me will still agree that despite the changes in my life, and the mixture of spices in my personality – I am still Mike. The delight, tragedy, drama and wonder that has happened to me in the past year has made me a better person as a whole. That is worth celebrating, and I will – I am not quite sure how, why, or when I will celebrate, but I am sure I will figure it out in the next few months. No need to be tied town to a particular day in order to celebrate mental, scratch that – monumental milestones in your life. I hereby declare the next year a celebration.

Anyways, as far as I have come in the past year, which I might regard in the long run as more significant as any other year in my life, has given me more to be thankful for. It is with irony that is as thick as a Sequoia,  that last year, when I was given nothing for my birthday (and loathed it) – that I was actually given something so intangibly valuable that it cascaded into something that has ultimately made me a better person. This year, I don’t want anything. Not because I have everything I want, but because I am on the path to being there.

Anyways, I went down the the Carmax dealership that had this particular car to go for a test drive. Lucily for me, the person I was set up with was under the impression that this was  “5 Series BMW”. A few days earlier I had test drove a brand new 2010 M5 at a proper BMW dealership and they neutered the car with only 400hp. I had no problems putting the car into sport mode and then use all 500 hp.

Now after I explained to the sales woman that I was going to drive this car aggressively and that if she had any issue with this that she could politely ask me to slow down, she agreed and I nailed it and left 2 black stripes 1st gear long.

It was a good test drive, only there was a problem. You see, I have had this image in my head of the M5 – an piece of insanity wrapped into two pieces of bread. I imagined that flooring the throttle of the 500hp would feel like setting off a bomb and riding a wave of noise into the sunset while trying to escape an army of banshees screaming at you full tilt. It was, but it felt like I was sitting in a holodeck instead of actually racing up Dante’s Peak.

If I can liken a car to a woman; the Z4M is a hot, awesome, nice woman that used to be insane but through years of therapy has come out on the other side for the better. Even though, you are never really going to relax knowing that there is only years of training between you and certain death. And as soon as you say the wrong thing, poof – you have climbed a tree in your little hottie and filling out an insurance form.

These imperfections give the car character – it’s the make-out session at a dive bar once a year, the last minute trip Burma for no reason, and the surprise lingerie sleepover party with all of her friends.

The M5 is perfect, it is so fast, and so capable and so wonderful that it a monumental achievement of everything human ingenuity can accomplish. The most amazing thing is that it is fast, sporty, precise AND it is a giant comfortable luxury car. So for the sake of argument, this is a car shows up with all of the same ingredients as the Z4M. She is gorgeous, awesome, nice, and great fun but unlike the Z4 – she is well adjusted, has a good family and went to finishing school. Oh sure, the M5 will play the insane game and go sideways and leave great big clouds of smoke all day long just like the Z4M, but you can tell that she thinks that it is all a bit juvenile. However, because she loves you she will go with you to Pamplona and run with you, and would never mention that she thinks that you are an idiot. That is your M5. It is a better car than the Z4M in every way, it just isn’t as much fun somehow. I was let down, not by the end result capabilities – but how it was delivered.

You might think that all of that excitement I describe with the Z4M  is something you really want a lot of, and you think that you would want to buy an old Countash, and that would fit the bill perfectly. Wrong, the older Lamborghini’s are the supermodels – all style whilst sacrificing everywhere else. I was recently driving through Palm Springs, and I saw a purple Lamborghini Diablo SV pulling left out into a 4 lane road it was gorgeous and sounded great. As he got into the middle merge lane he had to stick his head out of the sunroof to turn around and make sure he wasn’t going to crash into an oncoming SUV. I am not joking, as soon as he asked for the smallest concession she just folded her arms and made him stick his head out of the sunroof. I couldn’t deal with that sort of high maintenance. I don’t care how good she is in the sack, it is just not worth that sort of leg work to get to the grocery store.

Ultimately, I will have an M5 in my life. I logically know that there is no topping it in any possible way. But I have still never been to Burma.

As you may have read prior here. I attended a training seminar hosted by Certfirst / SaiFirst – a company that among other things, trains in PostgreSQL. I posted a full, and accurate review of the course prior on my site, which can be located here:

http://obstinate.org/computing/full-review-of-postgresql-certfirst-training-course/
http://obstinate.org/technology/certfirst-postgresql-training-course-avoid-at-all-costs/

The company I was working for was in negotiations with Certfirst in order to organize a refund. Certfirst located my original posting and demanded that what I had said was libelous and insisted on me removing my posting of my personal opinion, on my personal website, in order for them to agree to a refund on a failure to deliver services.

Certfirst and the company I was working for agreed, and asked me politely to take down my posting. In the effort of avoiding drama. I did such that.

However, I no longer work at said company and I am no longer obligated to keep my opinions off of the internets. As such – let this be a reminder to avoid the usage of Certfirst in any engagement at all costs. They failed to deliver on expectations set. So again, avoid doing business with them at all costs!

What does the right thing mean? Well – I think that is different for every person, and tragically enough, what one person justifies as the right thing can end up hurting others, a lot. I think that generally, in the end, we all understand right and wrong. It is just that some people choose to ignore these basic facts of humanity and continue on a selfish and destructive course, and to hell with the consequences. It is amazing to observe people justify actions in their mind. Are they thinking? Who knows.

Basic evolutionary psychology dictates that humans need to be jerks in order to survive. It is a tragedy that we didn’t all turn out that way and have an insufferable ability to put up with it, and to dish it out in-like.

I propose that a more valiant objective should embraced, we should all strive to increase the general happiness of the world. Everyone deserves to be happy, but instead, everyone seems to be miserable. Some people even lavish in it, roll up in unhappiness like a blanket. Or to make a more appropriate metaphor: a pig in filth. Only that is not enough, in order to satisfy their filth everyone else needs to be filthy also!

Life is a set of encounters that we have for 72.5 years until we die. Why not make the best of it, cherish it? Because greed gets the better of everyone – nearly always. Darwin was right: sex prevails. Sadly, today I am a cynic. Tomorrow is always another day.

So, I happen to take this philosophy toward the rest of my life. If I decide I am going to diet, that’s it – 100% no 70% or 80% – that’s it, 100%. If I decide give up something, sugar, video games, TV, people, whatever – that’s it. What’s the point with half way? 90% might as well be 0%. In consulting with friends this happens to be the way with “some people” (jerks?). As an example, my brain is literally rewired when I commit to something. If I decide that I am committed to a relationship – THAT_IS_IT. All women are then sub par, on every level to the one I am committed toward.

Anyways, someone way smarter than me once told me that life is just a long series of “waking up at 6am”. The implication is this – nothing will ever be harder than waking up at 6am – the simple act of doing what you know you need to do. I happen to think this is true, not many things in my life have been harder than getting out of bed, only there is no “snooze” button on life, if you snooze on life, you fail.