Got Twitered

Darn Charles twittered about this before I got a chance, we are on a 4 way conference call with Eric, Charles, Jack and me. This is in preparation for either podcasting or maybe getting remote participants to our LUG meetings.

Warren Buffet

I have been trying to invest for 15 years now. I don't claim to be any good at this, so don't ask me for advice, actually do ask me, but use me as a contrarian indicator if you must. I sometime do that myself. I like buying things that everyone hates, this is usually the time when a market bottoms. There have to be no bulls left, everyone who can sell has sold, some people can't sell a company because of various reasons, like they are long term investors, so they will wait a few years before the look at that particular stock again or they don't want to pay taxes on short term gains, or perhaps they know something the rest of the market is overlooking like the company is really going to do well in the future, something that is the most important thing.

So in the world of investing there is a company in Omaha NE that does really well since, gosh how how long, wiki says 1839 and the stock price is over 100k as of this writing, you can always buy a B share which is 1/30 th of an A share if this is too steep. I bought into them this year, great thing to own. It has done nothing but go up. Berkshire Hathaway is a keeper as far as I am concerned. It is even diversified, has several lines of bussiness in the verious companies that it has purchased over the years. I must go to Omaha NE some day and attend the shareholders meeting. This is a great story. Dream would be for me to move there and work for them, you listening Warren? I really want to bring you into the information age and who knows, I would love to talk stock with you someday, when I am worthy of talking to the Oracle of Omaha. So today I did some searching on the topic, the company is world famous and in a city of .4 million so it should be easy to find land and cheap housing in the area. Being a small town, I would imagine that the quality of life is better then El Segundo CA, not as much noise and perhaps not as worldly, but hey now that I am starting a family, who cares about that anymore? The big problem of course is how do you get someone like this to know you exist and you have skills? This one I will have to think about much longer. Mr Buffet, I would teach you how to blog for free. I bet you can make a pretty penny on advertising too, you are a brand that stands for excellence, more so then a Trump as far as I am concerned. I would sleep on a Warren any day.

Today Charles gave me a link to his very old blog, the one he had to remember his passwd too, lol... So I asked in the comments if he was stupid or something.

The Truman Show and the Matrix are moves that really change your view of the world. Like, is reality real?

Republica Dominicana el Culo del Mundo?

Yakko's World - The most amazing bloopers are here
I get this email from my sister with a PowerPoint file Dominicana-no-es-el-culo.OVIN.pps attached, yuck, I click on look at as HTML on gMail, no can't see, OK slide show works and it does seem to be a neat slide show about why the Dominican Republic isn't the ass hole of the world. In googling this I found an intersting new artist, Arianna Puello, never heard of her before, but she has music on her myspace, maybe even her own music.

2 more blogs, 3d printing

This morning I started yet another blog, I would be interested if anyone can pin it on me. I have some things to say that I don't want associated with me, I want my privacy, but then who knows if you can really have that in this world. It is nothing really bad, but sometimes I want to write more personal details into a post then I can in public. So if you know me, don't ask where it is, if you are a complete stranger, google it, let me know if you can find the blogs in private, please don't post that here. I used to read Tracy's blog many years ago. She was a photographer in Arlington VA and had some very revealing photos, I don't have pictures, if that is what you are thinking, I haven't yet stuped to bing a porn star, no. I was laying awake very early in bed and thinking some very private thoughts that I can't post here, don't want to share with the world. However if you do find it let me know privately. After all it might be possible to share too many details, maybe someone in time can figure it out. Maybe I need to spoof my IP address, or maybe I already did? I am not sure if that can be associated to my blog by anyone but the blog p

Jack called me to talk about the Kindle, it seems like he is excited about epaper, but I am still not going to buy something new at 399, it has to drop before I get interseted, I will be a library customer.

Gizmo4 has Video! I must test this, as it seems like a cool thing. My N95 has Video too, but can I get that call done, probably not, need to find another endpoint, guess I can test it against Gizmo on a computer.

reversal

Today is the second day stocks go up, this breaks a pattern, no end of the day reversal, no 1 up 1 down, wow, I had bought some C@30.1 and am now very happy about it, got to sell some BIDU, and kept some all is up, now have to decide if this is a new trend.

Windows Dell, SBUX

So I get a call from someone around 3PM saying that George, the barber told them I was good with computers, OK. "I was using msconfig and now don't have network access" Geez, that is a shame, yes you can come over and I will look at it, after suggesting that he undo the restore point. So I look at his msconfig, he has undone the restore point and seems pretty good about doing updates, maintenance, hmmm.... what tripped him up? Seems like the Norton Anti-virus ran out a year ago, 4 users on that system, all administrators, I suspect malware, but don't really see a smoking gun. Anyhow I end up typing the service tag into Dell's website and ask for the live assist. Rajiv_123456 comes on line and gets the Device Manager poplulated with devices again by running services.msi and turning Plug and Play to Automatic and starting it. Device Manager is populated again and I am on the net. I was running through a Linux machine and did a tcpdump -w/tmp/t to have the network traffic logged, I suspect that this machine is compromised, or at least I want to be paranoid. I see that there is lots of unnecessary traffic going on, I create a new user and log in as it, traffic is gone. However the Dell guy can't login remotely after trying about 6 times Rajiv says that we should reinstall Windows, and pasts a procedure to do so, something about backing up and then Cntl-F11 to reach a convenient reinstall menu. Oh well, at this point we have burned 6 hours in doing this plus the backup and Edgar leaves afriad his wife will kill him, it is 9PM, I offered to keep the laptop to do this for him, but he wanted to return again, probably won't see the guy again and this will be yet another zombie on the internet. Don't you love windows? Perhaps it is time to snort the t file, see what was going on.

So reading my email another message from Charles saying that I should join yet another mainling list, BarCamp has good stuff on it, but it is 5:26 AM now and I still haven't researched why I need to sell SBUX, ouch Cramer trashed the stock yesterday by reading a buy recommendation, which didn't sound that great and a sell recommendation that he endorsed. I guess I got a tax loss stock here. I have been ignoring my bad stocks for a long time, I hate selling in a really bad down market like November has been. But this one is a dog, can it redeem itself? Probably not, big companies are not able to grow, there is no more space for more Starbucks, who wants it, MacDonalds, DunkinDounuts, etc... cheaper, probably a big attraction now that the dollar is worthless.

RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINES competition

So this morning I wake up early again, seems to be a new thing, but then it gets dark before 5PM now, so might as well experience some of the dark in the morning as well. Yesterday we got 4 phone calls from Zhan in China, didn't answer any of them, not because we don't like him, mainly because we didn't feel like answering the phone, I guess I better route his calls to my business number, the only one I often answer. Not that I knew who was calling. Also heard my office phone read out a phone number I didn't recognize while I was in the bathroom, a quick google let me know that the number belonged to John, through some Green Party contact info on some webpage. I hope the Sunday call wasn't political, but I know the guy so whatever. Seems he again has a cellphone, had broken his old handset. So I left a message this morning. The things I do to save time now that I am blogging?

This morning I get an email from Charles asking of we should do the RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINES filming, I think this could be very fun if we can get into this. Even being on a team or a show with heather vescent could be a really neat thing. I saw a Half Life 2 engine (Cheating, I think, since the physics are 100% accurately repeatable!): http://youtube.com/watch?v=dNHj0gPtpJE that has lots of explostions, probably right up Heather's ally, she could make this for real, or something easier.

Jack recomended Miro to me on Sunday, haven't tried it yet, but probably worth looking at once I have a bigger Windows machine, seems it only supports that. My current XP Home is only 10 Gigs and I have to fix the old install, the one that doesn't login. Haven't used Joost in a while either, but it too was really neat, recommended for all of you that don't have cable TV, it is a great alternative.

up early

Today I woke up really early so turned on my Keen.com and an old episode of Bonanza on KTLA5. Shame I slept in on Black Friday, didn't get a single great deal, heard the Apple store had discounts. It is about time I upgrade my PC, still running on an AMD1700 with 512 Meg RAM. Dual booting XP and Ubuntu 7.10. As I have mentioned in the past, Ubuntu is really becoming usable, considering it is free, perhaps my next PC shouldn't have Windows on it, why spend the money, Ubuntu is a solution for most my needs, and I still have this machine with an XP license to run Quicken, TurboTax or any apps that might need Windows. Or perhaps it is time to load GNUCash on Ubuntu again, haven't tried that in a while.

It is a long weekend, come to think about it, we needed to plan some outing, time to play. Perhaps I will go play tennis or soccer this weekend. Missed my Wednesday game because of the dentist filling a tooth, didn't feel up to it after that.

I think we are getting close to the heating season, I never called the gas company this year to light the heater. We are close to the ocean and usually we only heat here for a few days a year, not a big deal.

Often on weekends I now listen to MacBreak Weekly, Mad Money Machine, RizWords(not every day), Security Now, this WEEK in TECH, FLOSS Weekly and the Apple Quarterly Earnings Call on iTunes. I don't actually have an iPod anymore, I returned the last unreliable Nano, it didn't always boot and I got tired of figuring out the iPod reboot procedure, sold my iPhone, and now sometimes move MP3s on the N95, but mostly I listen right on the computer, right now MacBreak is going on in the background as I type this. I often read and listen to something at the same time, I am often only scanning, not interested in everything they talk about. Today they mentioned GTD, which when I looked it up in Google pointed me to the Wiki articule, that Charles had pointed me to before. Something for me to reread. I also heard him Leo talking on TWIT about Toynbee, A Study of History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world history, something that seems interesting to me as well, but at 12 volumes, I better read the 2 volume short version, or maybe just that Wiki articule, after all who has the time.

PBX in a Flash

This comes from Charles at a time I am considering installing Asterisk for a client, although the guy has his own PBX supplier in the UK. But reading about PBX in a Flash gives me an alternative to TrixBox that according to the NerdVittles article seems very complete. Very similar to others it is CentOS based download as an ISO, burn, install, it wipes the HD clean, before installing.

I am looking through my browser history to find some worthwhile things I might have surfed in the past and find Apple iPhone and end up sharing my iPhone story.

On June 29 I went to the Apple store, not to stand in line, but to get help with xCode, and observe what Apple was doing with the launch, I wanted to learn more about development, but I knew that this iPhone was a really cool product. I do get kicked out of the store and sucked into the line, call a friend who hangs out with me. We move to the store and get in after waiting for hours and having the Islands people bring us food and Apple came by with water. What excitement, I buy a phone, I wasn't planning on owning, end up figuring out that geez, I am not nearly out enough to need a fancy cellphone, even one as cool as this one, I decide to take an offer from someone who desperately wanted it and sell it, get some profit for the trouble and keep on my extremely old LG330 on the 15/month contract. Last weekend I passed that one on to a friend who had no phone, he wanted to take over my contract, to his surprise Verizon took him on as a client. He doesn't have a job right now so even this small sum is a hard thing for him to pay, my hope is that if he is more reachable he can better find a job. Besides the ability to call out is also useful many times it can help save time. Anyhow 3 weeks ago we entered a contest and all won N95 phones, really cool, they are full featured, unlocked and open, 2 things the iPhone wasn't. But if the iPhone is ever unlocked and open, what a force it will be, the user interface and big screen are truely the best out there. This phone holds a very big promise. Great product. So I take someone to the store to see the iPhone, guess what Leopard is coming out and there again is a long line, leave for an hour and come back, line is longer, but I take a spot in it and we make it to the store, show him the phone, but alas, he had to pay extra to have it cracked and translated to his language. DRM and locking are so annoying, but keep up the good work Apple your products hold very much promise, too bad they are locked.

On Thursday's I often walk out to Main St. and the farmer's market, then go on the library. I usually read some news papers and magazines. I like the opportunity to be out of my office and in a bigger room with other people, not reading off of a 19" flat panel as I usually do, while listening to CNBC and talking on Skype, so much information. While leaving I usually look at the new book section and then go home, except for the time I found the Google Story and this time I saw "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and I had heard about this book on NPR, so I had to check it out, even though I didn't have my library card w

Justin.tv used to be PG, now it is more like R rated, but Nekomimi_Lisa is getting dressed in the morning, maybe X during the night when presumibly she is undressing, I had not been watching for a long time, but sex sells, and this was quite predictable.

It just dawned on me that Google should have created MyFace instead of Open Social, after all if you could combine the 2 biggest sites, that would be huge, worth another 100 points on the stock.

Reading my junkmail bobo92 address I see "Greetings to you from China, my names are Seng Cheong working with Shanghai commercial bank and I have a very good business proposition for you..." I guess they moved from Nigeria to Shanghai. Wouldn't it be cool to create some scripts to answer all these emails? Automate the process of making them send you embarrassing pictures.

SIP

Had my SIP setup behind the NAT with STUN, today I changed it to DMZ then decided to try forwarding the SIP ports and RTP only, it works :) I am no longer dependent on a STUN server, I also setup Use NAT IP to the outside IP address. I bet if this address changes someday I will be unreachable as it will be sending out the wrong thing. Also since I made all these changes I can't just take this phone to another place without reconfiguring it. Oh well, tradeoffs, but I think that I am lowering bandwidth a little by not sending the keep alive. While at it did some dusting, washing and all the usual stuff you have to do to keep your home working. My YouTube ad gave me another partnership with someone who needs help with Asterisk. Mike seems to be very much into reliability. He is into buying the best equipment, using a reliable software provider, the best SIP phones. I on the other hand am into costs, happy to use GrandStream, no Asterisk server, instead rely on SIP providers that are free and give me good service.

marrige

In listening to TWIT I just realized that it is pretty easy to become a minister at the Universal Life Church. I wasn't really that happy with the judge who married us, perhaps I could have found one of those 20 million ministers.

surfing

In finding some old Newton commercials, I found one about Linux that is a nice spoof. Today I read that MySpace IM now calls Skype users, cool, I signed up for a MySpace account and as the dire warning said, I can never change it! Geez, will you let off, I can always register another free MySpace account.

Flckr

I got my first Flickr account today. I bet artistic pictures like these attract attention, I shall use it more. Could it be time to create a new business for sysadmins who want to telecomute, call it nakedsysadmins, and having seen some of them at meetings, it might be an incentive for employers to leave them telecomuting which makes everyone win, except for big oil. Time to upload the BarCampSD2 pictures I took.

I thought I wrote about freegans on a previous post, but I must have dreamed it up, since I can't find the references to it. Someone asked me about it in a chat, said it originated in California, yet I had never heard of them. They are low impact on the environment people that live on the fringes of the economy, the name is made from Free and Vegan.

input

I listened to lots of people talk over the weekend at BarCampSD, turned on the TV this morning and took in some CNBC, NBC, and surfed some other morning shows. Rizzn.com talks about Mashable, Blogative, PaperPost. I really ought to blog at the next BarCamp, but it would take time away from attending. Many intresting talks, wish I had blogged it in place. EmpowerThySelf is about finding what youre ingerested in and doing something to make it happen. There were lots of talks about hardware gizmos, software and web stuff. The people that atteneded were actually a pretty neat group, some slept at the place and some were still sleeping the second day, naptime was on the schedule after lunch.

San Diego

Had lunch with Uncle, he showed me his freshly cracked and translated iPhone, pretty cool, translated into Chinese, I bet Apple will soon open a store in Beijing before the Olympics.

So we drove down Friday and ate dinner at Crazy buffet, next to BarCampSD, stayed at the Motel 6 off 805, which is so close to the freeway someone ran over the sign, no doubt a spinout from turning right too soon. I got to figure out how to move pictures from the N95 to the Blog.

dirty laundry

Having lots of problems today, doing laundry, watching market go down, obviously I should have cashed out a week ago when I was on top of the world, a lunch and a trip to BarCampSD. Why the hell am I blogging? I guess to put it all out there for myself and whoever else gives a damn. Charles got flamed in the UUASC list this morning, it wasn't pretty, but I guess I can't complain about what they did. He might want to not ask so many questions at meetings, he really becomes a lighting rod there. I have piles of stuff here to get rid of, see previous post, John might pickup some of it, perhaps my working Verizon phone as he broke his. I did offer the thing to Dallas, but he didn't seem interested, so what the heck. Then there is that lunch with Uncle. I am still sore from Wednesdays soccer game, hadn't played since HS so it was a bit too much, plus it was pretty cool that night too, I wonder if that makes you even more sore?

Today I tried to update the N95 software for my phone. It really seems like the iPhone is better, I am sorry to say this, but the N95 takes too much time. It took time to get the Gizmo working, it takes time to evaluate the other carriers and I am not even sure why I would want this thing, my current Verizon phone does the job, it isn't cool, but it mostly works, crappy coverage at home, but then again, I can get my phone calls here with my GrandCentral number that rings my work phone over SIPphone/Gizmo and my home phone. One number to reach me everywhere. I might want to wait to do anything with my Verizon phone though after all Google partnered with them and this Android thing might turn out to be interesting. Should have a LiLAX talk on it, problem is where do we find a speaker? Anyhow download it Nov12, it is probably a great idea, give it time, might be on many cellphones. Who knows if it eventually works into a WiFi Network like Meraki or Fon. Peter claims Skype runs on iPhone, but my research only shows that it puts the voice on a normal billable call, it is a good thing, but not unlimited Skype to Skype calling.

Time to take the laundry out.

Another View of the World

This blog is now being aggregated by the folks over at SoCalLugs Planet. Check it out! :)

sell sell sell

It was a really bad day in the market, in some hours I will see what the damage was to my portfolio. While watching CNBC I got the idea of perhaps chanceling all comunications services, to save money, then I would have time to be more spiritual, like my brother suggested. So I got to the computer to report on this, get a Skype from Christopher, a mad chemist I met in Dublin, some years back. He shared the internet with me back then, had a week pass at EasyCafe and was leaving town, so I got it. Since I didn't have internet back then I really appreciated it. He does seem like a rather lonely guy, talks about his father at times.

"Hi Ralf, just read about the massive pile up in Fresno near Bakersfield. Sounds bad like that fire in the tunnel some weeks back. You seem safe in El Segundo!" he asks, but what the heck do I know about this, I only watch CNBC, SlashDot, WSJ and a little goldfish on my desk.

I still have piles of stuff to get rid of: N95, damn this thing is cool, but time consuming,

Twit

I think it is time I start a podcast. I talk with people about technology on Skype all the time, I just have to record it and get someone to make show notes. I was listening to Twit MacBreak, one of the many podcasts Leo LaPorte does. Good stuff. I can't wait until the show notes are written, I want to find that site with the googlefoo finding the webcams, sounds interesting.

Last night I was at LAJUG and won IntelliJ a IDE, maybe I will program again. I could use something easier then VIM. Maybe I should have grabbed a book, but I didn't feel all that interested in GlassFish or J2EE. I guess I should learn all of these things. Seems I can download and evaluate this product even before I get the email. They even have a license for open source for Free, comercial is 499, personal 249. Who knows if it is the best, but I haven't used Eclipse that much so don't know it that well, but from what I have used it, works great, written in Java so portable.

Misdirection

So now Uncle thinks I sent him to the bad part of town, I was driving and putting our home address in his GPS, then I suspected it was wrong, asked JJ to fix, she refused to touch technology she wasn't trained on (lazy) and he ended up driving 40 miles to the bad part of town, funny comedy of errors. I guess through cultural differences and my joking about him sending all his junk mail to me today when he called asking for our address has made him mad at me, I am told. This is what I have been spending my day with, it is so time consuming I ended hanging up the phone and putting a message on the answering machine saying that I can be reached at work. So I had to finally put that one to rest here, I didn't mean to put the wrong city in the GPS, I was driving the car while typing, mostly paying attention to driving, not to typing. I got a green light and the city was wrong, similar spelling had a similar street on it, but not where we live.

My brother calls me today, first time in a while, now that he is on Gizmo and he can use megabytes to reach me he is far more willing to make calls. I was rather faltered until I realized that he really mostly wants to talk with Eric and is afraid to use a credit card on the internet. Get some guts and pay off, his landline is 25 Euros, he seems to have no problem paying them. Its like everything web has to be free for people to use it.

BarCampLA4

Saturday I spent at BarCampLA4 which was a great meeting of minds in an unconfernece, people put up postits on a schedule and talk about topics they find interesting, similarly minded people listen and comment. It was a great event, or is going on for one more day.

Chad Vader

Chad Vader is a spoof on the Lord Vader character from Star Wars.

Soo many things, so little time

I guess the more interesting your life is the less time you have to blog. Tonight I am going to UUASC.org, there is a PHP meeting in Santa Monica at the same time, and BarCamplA this weekend, San Diego next....