Oppose Elimination of Federal Thrift Charter

I could say a lot about this subject, all from a semi-informed point of view. What I would like to express is that smaller banks used to play a very beneficial role in the building of neighborhoods in our cities. We have almost completely lost this and I don't think that is a good thing.

I sent this message through the ABA's web site to my congressman and Ohio's senators.

Representative LaTourette
Senator Brown
Senator Voinovich
Message text follows:

Robert Klass
(personal)
Mentor, OH


August 26, 2009

[recipient address was inserted here]


Dear [recipient name was inserted here],

As a constituent, I am writing to express my strong opposition to the
Administration's proposal to eliminate the federal thrift charter.

On the contrary, we should encourage the creation and maintenance of
community banks.

When I was a VP at an S+L in the 1980's I saw how regulators were
responsible for as many problems as they may have prevented. Had we
listened to them, we would have created variable interest rate loans which
would have been unaffordable and possibly unmarketable.

Our company became strong by lending in our area and making sound
underwriting decisions. Underwriting guidelines should be rolled back to
what they were "in the day" - 1980 style. 28% of income for housing, 36%
total debt ratio, etc.

Don't screw up this industry further. Turn back the clock and recognize
the benefits of smaller thrift institutions.

Sincerely,


Bob Klass

Finding a SharePoint Database GUID / Restoration Tips

I needed to run the stsadm command preparetomove with the oldcontentdb switch (at least I thought I did) for a database that I wanted to restore in our testing environment. Running this command is supposed to fix sync issues when moving databases around.

Although there probably is a more efficient way to query the database (maybe a config database?) to get the database GUID, there is an ID parameter on some URL's. So I added the content database in Central Admin. After that you can take the ID from the URL for that database like so:

http://qapt03ms:8800/_admin/oldcntdb.aspx?DatabaseId=%7BF6FD3F98%2D1044%2D4728%2D8C6D%2D2A22140FFC13%7D

%7BF6FD3F98%2D1044%2D4728%2D8C6D%2D2A22140FFC13%7D

F6FD3F98 - 1044 - 4728 - 8C6D - 2A22140FFC13

Then you can run the command:

C:\>stsadm -o preparetomove -contentdb servername:databasename -oldcontentdb F6FD3F98-1044-4728-8C6D-2A22140FFC13

Operation completed successfully.

You can see that a couple characters get stripped from the beginning and end (%7B and %7D) and the "%2D" are the dashes.

I've done restores without cleaning it up this way but I figured it's time to start doing it the right way.

In Place Upgrade from Windows 7 RC to RTM

When I loaded the Windows 7 RC on my studio PC (AKA the litterbox PC) I didn't think I would be able to upgrade to RTM. I thought that I would have to do a clean install. As it turns out, there is a simple procedure to allow an upgrade.

If you try to just upgrade form the RC or a beta, you get a message that you cannot do that, but there also is a little link that will take you to some instructions. Basically, you copy the install media somewhere and edit ..\sources\civersion.ini so that it reads:

[HostBuild]

MinClient=7100.0

MinServer=7100.0

Yesterday morning I dowloaded the RTM DVD from MSDN (it took around an hour - not bad), and in the late afternoon I ran the installation. I received warnings that iTunes should be deactivated (shocker there, that this peria would have a problem) and that there were two driver issues. For the drivers, I disabled the one device (one of the multiple disc controllers on this fancy-schmancy Gigabyte motherboard, and one I am not using) and I just plowed ahead on the other (the Edirol FA-101, about which I was confident things would be OK since I read it in such a fine blog).

Once again, Windows installer had maybe one more click, and then said I should just sit back and watch. It took a bit longer to run than the original amazing install of 20 minutes, and I could only watch the first 15 or 20 minutes because I was doing the whole thing via remote desktop! After the first reboot, it was another 20 minutes or so before I was able to RDP back in, activate Windows, and resume my BitTorrent seeding and whatnot.

Kudos to the many smart people at Microsoft who put together such a solid installation system for an incredibly complex piece of software. My cat thinks it is the most advanced desktop operating system in the world, but what does she know. In a couple weeks they should be releasing R2 for Windows Server 2008 for us MSDN subscribers. This is what I use for my desktop OS at work, and I think IT will be the most advanced desktop operating system in the world.