Randomness
Opinion DisclaimerComing to the end of 2010
As we come to the end of 2010 I say, “Thank Goodness!” 2010 has been a very eventful year, and not necessarily in the best way for many of those events. 2011 is going to be different. I am making a commitment to post at least one blog posting a week on my blog. Heck, I might even post from my phone to keep them short and sweet occasionally. 2011 is going to be a great year and I’d like to share as much of it with you as I can.
See you in the new year, or maybe earlier 
A respite from blog posts
Recently, I got offered a position at Merscom Games to be a flash developer for social media games. Everything is happening quite quickly and it made me realize a couple things.
- I have a lot to get done to move to another city so I’m going to have to take a break from blogging.
- I have been blogging too frequently to put the quality in I would like.
So, for the next couple weeks I’m going to take a break from my scheduled blogging times. When I come back I’m reducing the amount of scheduled posts to 2 a week. I will do this by staggering the posts. So one week I will do a Just Another Magic Monday post along with a Flash Friday post. The following week will consist of a Sunday Funnies post and a Wednesday Warrior post.
Hopefully this change will allow for me to put more time into my blog posts. At the same time, it should help me to continue to post even when certain major events occur.
So, until I am settled – adieu.
Fanatical Support Creates Fanatical Customers
The past few months have been somewhat of a whirlwind at work. The person who was handling IT and server issues is no longer here so much of that duty has fallen to me. While I have some basic knowledge of how things work, I’m a much better programmer than server admin. Also, we starting publishing stuff to the cloud – The Rackspace Cloud. Then we began moving our clients mail services off of their servers and started using Mail Trust and all this while migrating every domain off of an old server to a newer server. All I have to say is thank goodness for Rackspace and their fanatical support.
In learning how to best manage our servers, I’ve learned to rely on Rackspace and their expertise, rather than attempting to teach myself the necessary skills. Plus, they are always doing their best to handle requests for things they are not even required to do. Then when the cloud came there were many unknowns for us, but the benefits were to great to pass up. Once again, Rackspace – having bought the Mosso cloud – has made the transition fairly easy. As for email, our clients were very worried at first – and rightly so. Email is the communication pipeline of many businesses. Now our clients are singing the praises of a much better email system and Rackspace makes it much easier to support. Finally, in regards to server migration. Well, server migration sucks anyway because there is so much time involved but moving SSL certificates and Unique IPs was a breeze ( for me anyway ) thanks to Rackspace. In fact, the migration was finished ahead of schedule.
Rackspace and their fanatical support reminds me of a book I read once – Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. There fanatical support makes them worth every penny we spend with them.
Perversion of a classic?
Movie poster for The Musketeer
Tonight I decided to watch a movie I hadn’t seen in a while, The Musketeer. This is the movie my wife and I were watching when we chose D’Artagnan as the name of our first child. Having such a fondness for my french heritage, I loved the name. Unfortunately, I had only seen D’Artagnan as portrayed in The Musketeer, The Man in The Iron Mask and Disney’s version starring Charlie Sheen, Keifer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Chris O’Donnel and a host of other big names. Since then I have also seen a cartoon made in Australia based on the novel and a year ago I finally started reading the books.
Reading the books, quickly made the movies a disappointment. They each take so much liberty with the story that it isn’t the same story at all. In fact, the one that keeps closest to the original is the Australian cartoon version that is barely 30 minutes long.
Who can blame the movie companies though? The Three Musketeers is a long book with enough sub plots to make 3 or more full length movies easily. The second book in the D’Artagnan romances doesn’t even start until 20 years after the first ends so there probably aren’t plans for a sequel. Finally, if they kept precisely to the book(s), people of today would not understand the culture of gentlemanly honor – something that makes D’Artagnan and company ( especially Athos ) much more interesting. In fact, I would say it defines their characters and the time period.
So, when I first started watching The Musketeer I quickly became annoyed. It just wasn’t as good now that I had read the book. Especially since “The Musketeer” is the least similar to the actual story in the book. So I started to think about why a movie could still be about The 3 Musketeers. As I thought through the different version, I noticed something. The major concepts, if not plot points, are there but just modernized and presented in a differing fashion.
For instance, The Disney version portrays the bonding brotherhood between D’Artagnan and the 3 Musketeers quite well. The Man in the Iron Mask shows how so much has changed since the Musketeers were young and yet as they come together much of their youthful vigor is returned. The Musketeer… well at least that movie has Planchet in it ( sort of ) and Cardinal Richelieu isn’t pure evil. And of course, it was marketed as The 3 Musketeers like you’ve never seen them before.
So in much the same way as most people call facial tissue the brand name of Kleenex, any movie with D’Artagnan ( and possibly Porthos, Aramis and Athos ) is somehow The Three Musketeers. The names, locales and even the story may change but it all goes into the same cultural mythos of musketeers. I guess that’s not really a bad thing, considering the stories are works of fiction anyway. Perhaps all the rest are just Musketeer fan fiction – with a budget.
That reminds me, I really should try to find episodes of Young Blades.
Moved Servers
Ducharme.cc has moved servers so I decided to start all over with this site and just turn it into a word press blog. This way, I can centralize my blog postings and actually have content at ducharme.cc.
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