Long Weekend

So Monday is a holiday, not soon enough, this is finally the time to relax, go to the beach and Disney. Looking forward to it. I see 30c on my thermometer pretty much every day now, I should enjoy it while it lasts, soon it will be cold again and the beach needs to be visited.

Charles was trying to get me to use Twitter, but I think I will follow Leo LaPorte to Jaiku . So much you can do on the internet to let others know what you are up too. I have had looks at Friendster, Hi5, SMS.ac(really bad site, they spam your friends in your name), MySpace, enough, I am sticking with Jaiku, not even looking at Twitter.

Dawn

It is the dawn of a new day here in my lair, a great time of the day, a time when you hope this day will be better then the rest. Markets hopefully will go up again and besides, we have a 3 day weekend to look forward too. I was just chatting with the 'rents, seems they use MSN rather then Skype which is what I am normally logged into. Odly I usually login MSN from Linux with Gaim, cant stand all the ads on the Live messanger on XP so I do not run it. Of course we all know that soon there will probably be an ad supported gPhone, but then that will be that way from day one I guess. The rumor is that for $100 you can get a pretty neat phone with what I hope are very relavent ads, that always makes it easier to swallow them. Some advertizing is not intrusive and not boring. On TV there are some ads that are better then the programming I hope the same can be done on the gPhone, but Google has a good track record, I guess if anyone can pull an ad supported phone off, it is them.

I have to work on a shopping cart, Katmandu wants a web store and I might just make it for them. Don't blame me for the current website, but given what they gave me to work with mine wouldn't be any better either. It is time I build up that site, it is probably pulling down my PageRank by linking to a crappy site.

Skype at UUASC

I better put a plug in here for my Skype talk at UUASC since it seems like I am getting way more page views per day then I used too.

I am thinking that doing a SkypeCast would be an interesting idea for those of you who don't live in the area and can't attend, but are interested in Skype and other VoIP solutions. I will be talking about how I got my communication problems solved using free and inexpensive long distance provisioned over the internet. One hour talk on Sept. 6 @ 7PM, but the real Skype content will about 20 min later, meanwhile you can listen the UnixRabbi our fearless leader talk about the group and introduce newbies.

If you are interested, send me an email to bobo92 at hotmail dot com to express intereste with the subject: SkypeCast, important as this email address is very spam intensive. I will try to answer you with the details of how to join.

justin.tv

OK so this 24/7 camera on your life site got to get a plug for the biggest time waister since I got on IRC so many years ago, but I can't take my eyes off it. Now it is IRC with live video and sound, you get to see many people in live video, it is kind of silly, but wow what numbers of viewers they are getting. Watch the AlphaGeek on justin.tv
I wonder where is the business model, since they seem to be only playing right now it is worth checking out before it is littered with advertising, like my blog.

So I tonight I found a new cast member on there, crazy dude with his belt around his neck, must be hot in Detroit, anyhow after calling it turns out that he is a Linux user as well and tech geek, probably the case with many of the Justin.tv people. Was a good phone call. But the biggest draw is still iJustine, she has the best looks and I am sure that attracts an audience, she is also very web savy and probably has a group of people drooling after her. I had the feeling that justing.tv was more wild tonight, but then maybe it is just the time of day, after midnight. It would be great if I could get iJustine to record some of our LUG meetings here, or for that matter any of them. I bet live video would increase our audience and spread the word further about all the great FOSS apps out there.

I am going to have to revise this post in the morning, who knows what junk I wrote. I am past sleepy now so maybe not that bad.

Dive

This week my portfolio went down 3.35% this week, scary. Like the bottom is going to fall out. Meanwhile this whole investing idea seems stupid when you can come up with a very silly product like the Pet Rock and make millions, I can't believe what good marketing can do, why would 5 million people buy a rock for 3.95 back in 1975, are they nuts, I got to find the commercial somewhere, because it must be some great commercial.

Lunar Eclipse

I actually woke up at 3AM and took a look at the eclipse. My pictures of the total eclipse didn't work, then later I grabbed the old Sony Mavica and snapped this picture, it has higher quality then the new Cybershot, go figure. Would have been nice to have a telescope and more darkness, but I didn't go down to the beach either.

Calling Skype from a phone

Mobivox lets you call Skype users from a cellphone or land line. Ask me for an invite, you need a Skype account, then you call one of the local access numbers and it asks for your contact with a voice menu. You can also get presence information from the voice menu for your contacts. Below is an offer from them for long distance. This is the first service I have used to call a Skype user from a regular telephone, I have it on my cellphone in case I don't have access to Skype.

5 ways to get a free phone number, if you have an internet connection

If you have an Internet connection you can get free phone numbers sometimes you can even do free phone calls.

1. GizmoProject 775 area gives you a number in Northern Nevada that is free, you have to give up a credit card number and not forward calls to your cellphone for $2/call if you want this to work. Gizmo has a great Windows, Linux or OS X client that does IM and is really very nicely done. You can even register a second SIP account to it from say your office. It works with SIP phones as well, I have tested the GrandStream GPX-2000, phone and found it to work, although still trying to get the conferencing worked out, some configuration problem no doubt. If you are using Linux will find that the Ekiga that ships with Ubuntu and Solaris works with Gizmo as well. SIPphone is a platform under all of this, it is a great platform, it has been very reliable for me.

2. VoipUser can get you 2 UK phone numbers for free, and you can call out free as well, as long as you get enough calls to your number. It bills the caller at different rates from 3 to 50 pents per minute depending on the number. Feel free to test my UK number at +44(0)7031971255 and yes this is the 50 pents one if I got this right. It gives me calling out credits when I get the calls. From the UK it works at 07031971255 otherwise the rest of the wold it is either 00447031971255 or 011447031971255 for the USA. Not all carriers will let you call a number that is premium rate in the UK. However you can also get a 3 pents/min number from them that works well and is more callable from other places.

3. Google GrandCentral is in Beta, you can get a phone number from then in pretty much the areacode of your choice, haven't tested international and this is a pretty neat service that allows you to give out a single point of contact number that someone can reach you with at home, office, cell or SIPphone. I am mostly interested here in the SIPphone options through Gizmo as that is another way for me to get a free phone number in my area code, now this will be free for a time, I am sure they will charge something someday, but it is a good service.

4. IPKall.com can get you a Washington state 360 area code number for nothing that you can forward to your GizmoProject SIPphone account. It is simple, just give them an email address, you get a phone number and give them a SIP account it works. Used it for over a year without problems, except when they don't get enough minutes called to the number you will loose it as you are not making use of it and they can give it out to another user.

5. SipBroker.com gives you a list of phone numbers, look under PSTN, all over the world where people cal call your SIP phone. Just find a number close to you, then dial the Gizmo style 17475555555 number and it works! press # at the end for faster service.

So this is 5 ways to get a free PSTN phone number. Comments welcome.

Call me if you need help.

I am testing a DiggIt button on my site. Please DiggMe if you like my writing, it encourages me to keep writing more.

PS a 6th way seems to be available at freedigits.com

PS I mentioned this post last night at a UUASC meeting and have struck out some of the ways that no longer work, but there are at least 5 ways still available from the feedback I got from the audience, SIPgate is the only one I remember, but I bet however that you can find more on VOiP-info.

Search, blogging

I have been busy with search this morning. Looking at some interesting up and coming search engines. Mahalo(beta) is a human sorted search engine where someone tweaks all results to be better and give you a better search, in case they don't have enough they default to Google free and paid links. They also said they would give away 100 iPhones at some podcast to the best results, so there is some incentive. I have it as my home page right now as I am kind of intrigued by it. So this morning I was told about Search Wikia which seems to be based on the same human intervention. We have come full circle in this, Yahoo used to be human sorted, then they copied Google and went automated now we are trying to get more relevant results, not more and are back to human sorted search. Both seem to have Ad Sense on them, the biggest, although I am told that there are 10 other options, some pay 85%. I wonder what Ad Sense pays? I will be testing one of them on another bogging platform, one that I am unfamiliar with and want to test, Tumblr. As I mentioned before now that advertising is an option for my blog, I will be updating much more frequently. I am even considering turning a Skype call I have with a friend into a podcast. We are thinking of using GizmoProject since it has its built in record function. Most other TWIT podcasts that I listen to use Skype, which is a more widely available platform, more people have it, in fact I heard on Aug 17 on NPR, in the context of the outage that happend that Thursday Aug 16, that there are now 240 million accounts, I know of people who have duplicate Skype accounts and others who don't use theirs, but I think that Skype could become a verb, like googling already is, according to Wikitionary, not that my FireFox recognizes google as a valid word, it got underlined as an error, but then it didn't even have Firefox in teh dictionary until I added it.

Now to blogging, I will be evaluating WordPress, and Tumblr against Google's Blogger which I am using right now and it is great! Very happy with it. Just found another interesting discussion.

Fast Cars

I was impressed with this page of a salt bed racing place the cars are made out of old drop tanks that carried the fuel in WWII. The internet is endless after all. IowaHawk is a pretty good blogger in general, recommended. This is the stuff that people do in fly over country.

AdSense, job4me

OK, so now I am officially looking for a job. I would love it to be with Google, but really I am mostly looking for something close to El Segundo CA. I have international experience to offer, fluent in 4 languages, and learning Chinese. I am also a long time geek into computers and electronics. Have been a database programmer, sysadmin, and independent consultant. Worked in the health, construction, finance, telecom, distribution, and probably some more industries that I have since forgotten.

Meanwhile I am experimenting with Google Ad Sense for the first time, could be useful experience as well. And BTW, the Netflix ad that may be at the bottom, I have used the service before and do like it. However I must admit that I am using Blockbuster right now as they are closer to me in the physical world and the in store swapping is really a great deal. Haven't yet tried the Netflix live download, but that sounds like a good idea too.

Great day

Saturday was a really neat day here. I went to the car show on Main St. Neat little '61 MGA on the left is going for 20K, if I had the money, gosh would be a sweet drive, but then I don't drive much anyhow.

More pictures from 2005, 01, 00. Discovered that is website is run by my neighbor who used to be my ISP back when I didn't spend much time in El Segundo and didn't mind using his open access point. He got an email from me and we met.

iPhone unlocked

I am impressed, this 17 year old kid unlocked it and blogged about the procedure in 10 steps. It requires a sodering iron, and he spent 500 hours getting this procedure figured out, he estimates as it stands now that you would spend 12 hours following the procedure, his eBay auction was canceld, actually he retracted it because he got some really wild bids all the way up to 99999999, which is 99million, yea right, now way are those real bids.

iBill

Wow, check out the iBill: http://www.tastyblogsnack.com/live, I know iJustine.tv is connected, but this month she killed a tree, use eBill on your iPhone.

What a great day in the market so far. AAPL is up up up, so is T, dispitte the weekend iBill video that cost $7 to ship via USPS, amazing.

Preparing my Skype talk, wow you can make Skype calls on an iPhone, but is website, callback. Not really that great.

SurfReal

So Alberto calls me again about his website, I test the PayPal by buying some postcards from SurfReal I can help him out this way, I guess. I feel that he is talented and should be promoted. So click on the postcard if you like his art. He is not a starving artist, however he would love to quite is day job. He is trying out eBay as a way to get some exposure.

SPAM

No it doesn't keep me awake, too much, but it does waste so much of my time. Maybe there are too many ways to get in touch with me. I currently have 1 mailing address, 6 phone numbers, and more then 10 email addresses that I have been accumulating over the years. Some email addresses have been gotten rid of others I don't pay for so they don't bother me, however some of them are so over flowing with SPAM I might as well abandon them. I was thinking that since they are free addresses and I can get rid of all the legitimate traffic, I could give the rest to a company to use it as a way to study SPAM. In other words, after I remove all the real email and answer with a new address, the rest is what, pure SPAM, it can help in identifying other SPAM.

sleepless out of town

I can't disclose where I was this weekend, however I learned so much and had fun, but not enough sleep, man don't take the red eye out of town, it will ruin your day.

Charles wants me to work with him in opening a hacker space in LA and I found this very interesting organization that recycles computers and helps people out, FreeGeek is has an awesome video describing the organization. I am now interested in having LiLAX open a local chapter the only problem is finding a storefront.

Mad Money

Today I worked over Skype with a model of how to think about a company. If I started a company with $100k and invested it in my own company, paid myself 30/hour to work in it so that I don't give my time away and got earnings of 5K 10 20 40 80 in the first 5 years, what would the financial indicators that I look at on stocks show me?

Well the first year I would have a PE of 20 and if I prognosticated earnings growth of 50% the forward PE would be 10. This is a great story and would probably raise the stock price from 100 to 150.

Meanwhile I am not paying attention to my stocks and ETFC just got really dragged down to the point I need to figure out if it is time to cut loose, or buy more.