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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Last day

So the year ends, it has been good with work for me, but then I lost it all in the market so I guess in the end I am behind. That dream of owning a house is still some devaluation away, if I get to keep my job, which at the moment isn't that demanding, but I guess that is the nice period when you start to get yourself acquainted with a company.

Today after work I brought home my first couch surfer, a first for me, Mark was a rather pleasant individual that actually hung out with 3 couch surfers today, it worked out that I am close to the airport where I eventually dropped him for his flight to Miami and Brazil.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Vacation planning

There is a cool natural Hot Creek in Apple valley. In looking at it I found a great nature travel blog. I hope to return there some day as I very much enjoyed the area and the people I went with last time.

Movies

I have to say that movies on demand is cool and a fast way to get delivery, although I stuffed my queue on Friday morning, so far it looks like none have shipped, but given the online part, who cares, there are many streaming ones I can see, and if I get mostly the kids movies on Monday that works for me. Meanwhile you can connect to my Netflix. Something I haven't tried out yet. This whole social networking function.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

time

The holidays have for the first time this year given me some time to reflect and do what I want, I had a cold on the 23rd, Festivus, and I ended up going to the FestivusPole website and reading about it, then I saw the episode on Seinfeld, only watched it because I got interested in this phenomenon of coming up with a better way to celebrate the holidays. Apperantly George's dad fought for the last doll in a store and decided that there was a better way, he put up an aluminum pole and the airing of the grievances started it, only to be ended by pinning down the head of household. The holiday for the rest of us, seems pretty easy and inexpensive to setup. Given the economy, I hope I can celebrate Christmas next year as it seems simpler, but hey who knows, something will turn up, like Chinese New Year.

I tried out NetFlix, the streaming works, and you can get lots of content. Seems unlimited, but I can't watch that much. I will have to try out next if I can see 2 movies on 2 different PCs, as in multiple family members. You can with DVDs. It works great on Windows and OS X, both tested with FireFox, but it seems like it might with Linux with Moonlight from the Mono people.

My cold is getting better, I am allowed with the rest of the family again. Big hoopla at work over me asking to telecomute, well lets see if I still have a job on Monday. Other then that all is smooth sailing.

Spent a moment at an design studio here in town asking if they thought the art NetFlix would be a good idea, I thought that I might pitch it at Startup Weekend together with DVDexchange.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

speed

Fast raw internet bandwidth is cool, but so much of it is waisted as it is usually unmetered and so many computers out there are doing things their owners wouldn't approve of if the knew. I once read that a very high percentage of Windows systems were powned. I have even found on occasion that my Windows system had something on it, this uses your CPU, power and bandwidth. In aggregate lots of resources are used by these machines. True that today we all watch movies and video on the internet and that also uses up more bandwidth.

Trying the other connection, not too good today:

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Tonight show fond it on eBay

So today I started bidding on eBay for an unattractive 6EXU690 California license plate just for the hell of it. Thinking this auction should be submitted to some of those eBay watching shows like Leno or G4's Attack of the Show. Story is that his wife wouldn't put this on her car the DMV won't take it back, wow, so if you want it bid on eBay. I kept being outbid.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Cheap data centers

So we can move the heat with water to a evaporation pound with solar panels at the bottom generating electricity to power the servers. Perhaps the servers electronics can be on the other side of the solar pannel so cooling comes from the water directly, cool... turn it all into roofing, man I should write science fiction, and then maybe it will turn into reality someday.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

albaqurquie new mexico

so it seems like we are considering a move to a cheaper state, houses are still expensive here. Wow a place I can't even spell

Albuquerque, NM




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Abort email campain

This morning I had the bright idea of emailing the old building I used to work in and offering Cuban food to them, I would also offer internet access and my consulting services, then pickup the food and deliver it right before my interview, but I got an ice cold shoulder from a friend. So never more.

Internet Brands Cars Direct

I met some people going to the 11th floor and asked, if they needed a sysadmin, they took me to Beth the in house recruiter and I got to talk to Paul the Unix guy, turns out yes they are very interested in me, and geez, it is in the same building I worked in before, seems like getting layed off really opens up opportunities you wouldn't otherwise see.

They are also looking for a Network guy and a manager.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

T3 still slow

For kicks i decided to run another test of the t3 against
DSLReports.com and i got a less then satisfying result, not that it
matters anymore:

DVD Exchange

I worked on a project I didn't complete a while back, it was a DVD
exchange started by the idea that I could pass on my DVDs to the next
person to watch, but this gives me drawing rights on the exchange to
draw a DVD from someone, I then got my idea validated by someone doing
it, but I think that with broader exposure and more objects to
exchange this idea could flourish and am looking for a place to
develop it. I realize that both eBay and Amazon to a certain extent,
as well as CraigsList enable you to do something like this, but I
think I can still make something more of it. The idea is a NetFlix
without a central exchange, peer 2 peer should increase speed and
lower costs, and despite the P2P, it is legal if you mail the media or
manage to pass it forward in person.

I just listened to the video on http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/static.py?page=why-ca-sm.html&sid=gallery
about working in Santa Monica, and it sounds lovely. We are at a
stage where we want to buy a house and find a place to do it, SM is
where I met my wife, were we lived 10 years ago and a good place to
return too. There are plenty of companies that could help make this
come true, but I have to say that Google is the one I find the most
interesting.

I spend many a night at The Tavern on Main here in El Segundo
brainstorming with 2 guys about economy 3.0 and localization, at least
that is what we talk about these days.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Dawn

I got to bed in time last night to get a good night's sleep and wake
up at dawn, cool. I don't like turning on lights at night as I have
figured out that they screw with your natural cycle. Since I have
renounced TV, I am not longer compelled to stay up late to watch
Letterman or Leno. Life is good this way a green way of living,
reduces the need for electrical power and maximizes the use of natural
light, I am trying really hard to be green, separating my trash even
when others in the house hold will not do it. I want to start a
compost heap again, I used to have one when I lived in a house, but
even here in a smaller space there is a planter where I could burry
the stuff, after all even here a nice little yard would be a welcome
improvement, just have to find a shovel at a garage sale, or borrow
from the owner, could be easy to do, might enjoy the results. It
doesn't often rain in this area, but last night a shower, time to wipe
off the car, I have been waiting for this rain to clean it, but it has
been a long time coming, unfortunately the other car isn't parked
outside, it is covered, big mistake, free water today is cool, but
then when it rains it pours so we may have more of it.

Today I am trying to email post this, It would be an easer way to work
with Blogger, I hope to do it more in the future as well.

So much to talk about and to do today, wish I had more time for this
blogging.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Cable 9.95

So I get this thing in the mail, for digital TV conversion, envelope has nothing to say it is from the cable company, they want to offer me analog cable for 9.95/month, tempting.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

New directions

Seems like GN is taking its sweet time to hire me, meanwhile I may be thinking of getting more involved with the SoCal WiFi project and the meeting with the mayor, whenever that is happening. I just got a call from ServiceMajic about wiring my apartment to the one next to me so we can share the internet with a wired connection, don't get me wrong the wireless is working great so far, but I was interested in what it would cost to do it with copper, seeem like it might be $150, didn't find that web site all that interesting, but it is rather expensive and it does ask for licenses and bonded workers, so I wouldn't want to be on it anyhow.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Bailout

My day has been spent cleaning and boy did I collect some dust bunnies today. Meanwhile the car companies seem to be close to a bailout. That ad really expresses everyones feeling, except for the unions perhaps.

Gosh, I should get some of that cash for my startup, it might fail, but then again, so will the big 3, so what about it? Bail out my startup!

Sunday, November 30, 2008

New hangout

We spent some time at our usual spot Saturday afternoon, but then moved on to The Tavern On Main and had great service, somewhat spotty internet, but they really take care of you, plus they have some pretty cool Halloween pictures on line.

I think that if I can't find a job, I might want to play with some neat flying toys, or maybe if I do as well. These helicopters and Xhell look neat, they are driving distance from here, would be a neat place to work.

Friday, November 28, 2008

HDTV internet for apartments

It seems that the problem I have might be some itch that others want to scratch too. What if I could watch HDTV on my laptop wireless anywhere in the house or on the computer, what if I can record it all to the computer and watch it anywhere any time. I am thinking that perhaps with the on the air HDTV, some kind of tuner could be setup in a shared server PC, and then the building has the ethernet, and WiFi distribute that to the computers in the building. The idea is that this on the air stuff, many don't have the right TVs yet, so put a tuner card in and now the computers can get the signal. Might even be worth putting some kind of cable head end in for the old TVs in the building, who knows if that pays off, but this is something I need, and I think others might as well. I know that Cable TV provides this, however they are expensive. It could be widely deployed, so might be worth looking into. So this could be big, the only thing is getting an internet pipe to a building and an areal antenna to catch the HDTV.

Off to the Black Friday shopping soon, ...

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Primate staffing

Primate Staffing is a cool page that explores the idea of hiring monkeys to do your IT work. We are all trying to save money, seems topical.

Speaking of which you could burn off that gut, powering the Christmas tree. A pedal powered tree, great idea.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Remote Desktop Connection

For the Mac, the best software I found from MS.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Ghost 2003 restore

On Friday I spent 3 frustrating hours trying to restore a Ghost 2003 backup DVD of Windows 2000. Wish I had brought and installed Ubuntu 8.10. The problem was that the CD I was given, the one that boots, wasn't readable, on any machine. I have been trying to restore this for a long time, as I consider the target machine unfixable, it has lots of software problems, maybe hardware as well and when it was created, David thankfully imaged it and now it is time to use that. I also learned that Norton System Works 2002, which we had available only produces bootable floppies, target machine has no floppy drive, grrr.... OK so can I boot an OS like say Win2000 first? No Ghost will only run under DOS, well maybe Win98, no, it can't see the CD drive that ghost is on, but wait, I could copy Ghost to the HD first and then run it from a booted Win98, err, the NTFS file system isn't readable. I was so frustrated with 3 hours of different ideas that I finally gave up and came home. I need better tools in my bag, maybe carry a floppy drive next time, I have lots in toss out machines here that I can install, the would save the day, the other idea a bootable DOS CD.

Last night I went to a SFVLUG meeting, almost fell asleep, they turned the lights out and gave a presentation about a light weight Window manager, configurable in Haskell like I really need another, good for old computers I guess, didn't clutter the screen. I may try it on some old system. Perhaps DSL would be a good one to put on an old system. After the presentation

Ron and Brian entered a really cool talk about cars, new cars, seems like AFS Trinity has a really awsome car, 150 miles/gal sounds impossible, and maybe it isn't real, but something about using electricity seems much cheaper. But here is the cool part, they didn't let them put up a banner that said it does 150miles/gal, so is it that they can't prove it? So they have the demo outside the LA Convetion center, accross the street from the car show, neat an underground car show :) OK so the car isn't really ready to buy today, you have to wait 3 years for them to develop and produce it, right now they really only think they can make this, have a demo model that does something, maybe it didn't fit the standard, but this sounds like it could be very cool.

I also did some wireless hacking today, mostly trying to get a 802.11g Wireless LAN ALFA Network card to work on a Mac, it has a driver I downloaded from, geez, can't really remember so I put it in AWUS036S76C1300683. Anyhow you can ask me if you clueless and download it to your Mac, it did work, a bit strange how it interfaces, but whatever, it works.

66

This isn't my car, but I do hear lots of jet noise, but it has been some years so I guess I am not bothered by it anymore. I hope someday I can move away from this industrial area, would rather be somewhere more rural, quiet healthier then between all this industry. This is a nice town, but it is noisy, it is convenient, I am close to everything, really don't even have to leave town for anything, but there is more of a world out there to explore, I think that there are some places I would like to work that could offer more then this town.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Free M$?

Hmm, this Mad Money Machine Podcast 136 at the about 30 minutes into it talks about a way to search for an item on www.live.com then click to ebay, buy it now and you should get 25% back from Microsoft. Sounds too good to be true, but what is the catch the podcast asks. Terms and conditions from the eBay site.

Sleepy today, need to put my resume in better shape, currently have LinkedIn with new things and a resume with old. I want to apply at Google, FaceBook, Equinix, ...

ZipCar sounds pretty cool, just rent by the hour. They only have 2 locations USC and UCLA around here, so not for me.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

name number and email

gets you lots of info about you, it is interesting how fast a professional PI can get all kinds of info on you.

Work

I got a 4 hour gig yesterday buying keyboards, and setting up some things. I still have to figure out why the Win2000 servers Cals expire in 90 days, seems they have some guys that go out every 90 days and bill them $100 for the service of erasing some file, but geez, I would just as soon move the shop to LTSP, rather then Windows, but hey they are set in their ways, although they do have a RedHat server, which I guess should be replaced with CentOS these days, it is probably very old. Anyhow it was interesting to go back to an old client, now if I would only get that GN interview, that is a cool job.

Meanwhile can't get the D-Link DWL-810+ wireless gateway to work with the linksys :( In googling I found an book that talks about SoCalFreeNet.

I finally upgrade the firmware to 2.1 and manage to get a response from the linksys, wow, that is over WiFi, so next dhclient gets me an IP address, yay, why won't the Polycom connect? Never found out, it finally did work, the ping gives me 442 packets transmitted, 426 received, +12 duplicates, 3% packet loss, time 441013ms so not as good as the NS2.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Cancled cable TV

and here I read that unhappy people watch more TV. Cool, I must be happy then. I have been watching Miro, uTube and Flickr, some people are really out there, like Casey, she has her whole life in pictures. , wow. On the other hand big corporations are asking for handouts, GM wants 25 billion. It is amazing, seems like the time for the big guys to disappear, smaller more efficient companies will buy the assets and life goes on. I am not writing my congress man. The people will find jobs in these smaller companies. I think that we should all cancel our cableTV, move to our own neighborhood internet like SoCalWiFi is suggesting we do, might not be as reliable, but it would be our own.

Tried to find Eric Welsh on Google, going to be interviewed, but they guy is invisible.

GPS

I was looking into upgrading my Thales Magellan RoadMate 700 again and found that it still costs $79.99 to upgrade it. It really does suck to be the first to buy into a technology, this thing was $1,199 plus tax from Fry's in its day and now is rather cheap on Amazon for $220 used, but even so, the TomTom is so much better and free maps. Perhaps it would be worth listing mine for sale, after all, I have a much better TomTom available to me as well.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Old box

So today I gave away the 19" monitor to a neighbor, so trying to get a computer to go with it. Meanwhile don't have one, other then this server, which has some cool old stuff of mine on it.

And so I am playing with a very old thing again.

Friday, November 14, 2008

LISA

I had a great time at LISA and learned new stuff. We sure sat at the right table for a good discussion about security of credit cards and liability.

I went to the Google BOF and got a Rubik's cube, unfortunatly the faces don't have colors, but icons from Google, so it occurred to me that a program might calculate the shortest solution to the Rubik's cube, of course when I google it I find that someone did it. I also found a LEGO robot and a FisherTechnic robot that solve the cube, interesting.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

carpool to San Diego

Been job hunting, seems that times are tough, however I did book an interview over the phone for Monday at 1:30 yay, then if that works I can come in to GorillaNation and do one in person, so I am still twice removed from working.

Had an interesting call with Howard who has been telling people how to how to save voice mail forever. But the great part is that I am getting linked from his site someday :) Maybe I can finally collect on my adwords, it has taken so long, I have even closed the account it connects too, for lack of funds.

But anyhow, times are tough, but life is good. Going to San Diego today with Dan Kegel of Google, neato, I think I might enjoy that ride down.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

brainstorm

I thought last night would have been a pitch session, but I guess the pitch was lost and ended up a lesson in how to find a good thing to do. I wish I had recored it, as it was really good stuff, and I would no doubt book Ranjit to talk at UUASC or LiLAX on a talk about how to start a company.

You have to find a problem to solve first, something that is broken or you need always makes a good one as at least you have your first user, but mostly you have to decide where you are going to work, what space, then you have to learn the technology to fix the problem, but be sure there is an itch you are scratching you can't change behavior of your usage base to use your product if it isn't something anyone needs. The next thing is how can you get the technology to do this. Usually technology is easier to solve then the fundamental need for something.

So this was mostly a lesson on how to start something that can get funded. There is money out there, I remember being in Germany, where there was also money for people to start businesses. Ycombinator is a possible source of funds once you got a good idea, you have pitched it and you can start coding. I think next time I should take notes as I hear this, rather then trying to remember all of it next day.


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But for my next problem is how to attend LISA when my buddy in San Diego isn't there anymore, then there is also a BarCamp over the weekend.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Next

So Friday I got full use of my time again, I think I will be selling some of it as money is always useful. Does anyone out there need a seasoned IT guy that works on Linux, Windows or Mac? Web backend

I have a Creative SZ1943 P/N: 245-91943-03-29 USB DECT cordless Skype phone, which works great in Windows XP and I would like to use in Linux and on the Mac, but alas on the MacBook Pro the dmesg shows that no driver is there. Guess I may have to find a Windows user to take it, or use Windows because I want a cordless phone. If you came here with the same problem, do leave a comment, hopefully a positive one, like I found the driver here.

USBF: 80704.316 [0x462ca00] The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in. It will keep retrying. (Port 2 of hub @ location: 0x1a000000)
USBF: 80706.990 [0x462ca00] The IOUSBFamily was not able to enumerate a device.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

ahhhh

Halloweenawoken again, seems like this will be a nightly thing, tonight I got away long enough to watch a cool video about a solar powered nework in Africa, cool and I didn't know that iJustine was into the big league promoting a TV show now on the internet, neat. Interesting video, maybe I should do another, the one I did has gotten me business for my Asterisk consulting, not money, only work so far, but some cool stuff lots of leads, one of which I have to follow tomorrow. The pic is from Halloween.

Wow, we can learn our routing for the internet and freeways from ants. It is about communication, but read it, interesting how we can learn for a species that outnumbers us on earth.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Lazy day

Got to work on my resume, but alas, it is the first day in a while that I could relax, nice. No TV, listened to the radio, and followed some great videos on YouTube. The one above was the best I saw today, very interesting what school must be like these days with technology, come to think of it, I didn't have any of it when I was in school.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

T3

Spent a good part of the day learning Cisco and trying to configure a 7204, only to discover that I didn't quite get as much as I hoped for.


To be fair there is a little else going on, download of Ubuntu 8.10 at 41KB/sec and a few phones that are connected, but not talking, should be minimal otherwise, but still this isn't close to 44.2Mb/s.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

BarCampLA6

BarCampLA6 has been pretty cool so far I really liked the MS Surface, because it is a new interface that no one has a use for yet, but yet it shows so much promise. I found Apple seems to be in the surface space too, they have a better idea then MS, inbed the sensors in the LCD.

Amora is a N95 applet that lets you control your Linux system where you can run amorad on Linux. Pretty neat. I could use this for presentations, now it is in Python, maybe can be ported to Windows and Mac.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

iPhone dev

I had a great day at the Apple iPhone dev meeting, but I am under an NDA not to publish pictures or even talk about it. Nothing I signed, and I am sure many may have missed the request in the 9am talk.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Ubiquiti NanoStation2

I got to say that these wireless access points are really cool and work great. The Meraki used to be able to connect me, but then it decided to do a firmware update all on its own, the new firmware doesn't support it leaching off another non-meraki access point, geez, now what good is it to me. Just got my first call on VoIP sounds perfect :)

Friday, October 17, 2008

speed

Recently I upgraded the firmware on my N95, then connected it to Flickr.  I can't believe the speed now, I can take a picture, press one more button, put a comment on it and upload it to Flickr, really fast, really cool.  But I use a Google blog, well, will have to look into this, but I am really enjoying my new N95 firmware, this is awsome!  iPhone users, you don't have a 5 MegaPixel camera.  Now that it is so easy my Flickr should be filling up with pics.  Only thing is I haven't figured out if there is a dataplan on the SIMM, so have to settle for WiFi.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

late night python

So I spent most of the night with 3 guys with startup fever who are starting the next mobile .com, the one really cool thing I did is get my N95 to upload pictures on the WiFi right away, this blogging bug is really taking hold.  I can't stop, more toys to play with. So why do I leave one office to spend time in a pseudo office? Well, for one I guess it is more fun then being in a cube.  air of something that seems crazy and is just starting, is kind of a strange idea.  Could we really make something of this little idea? Big companies do the same thing, can we survive? Will this be the birth place of the next google? Yea right, most fail, but I guess like playing the lottery, this one might win.

still no T3

I don't have much bandwidth in my mind and at times I have to blog about things that are IMed to me like Wubi, the Windows Ubuntu installer.  Seems like I have used it before, when I installed 8.04 on the CEO's Dell, not that he knows it is there, but I digress.

These days we have been waiting for Cogent to get our T3 up, they have apologized for the delay and given me a hit of us getting a free month to offset the delay, not that I care, we are doing splendidly with a DSL connection from AT&T to the point that I don't care anymore if we ever get 44.2Mbps, not!  I do want the bandwidth to do what I don't know yet, but hey I could stream all kind of content, put cameras everywhere do so many things I can't do from home, I canceled all forms of internet there. So there is the Verizon 3G card with these setup instructions for MacBookPro that would let me have it everywhere, would be cool to get one of those for the office. 

I have to say that although my AdSense sucks, I am still only half way to the prize of $100 for doing all this, worst paid job in the internet, my SEO has been going up, I am more influential on the internet that I used to be as measured by search engines, you just can't monetize it. So then what is the point of putting ads on my pages?  I might as well do this for free. Unlike my job, where I hate to document, but must to get paid.  Speaking of which, I haven't found TunnelBlick easy to install, so I am going to try Viscosity next, but the current version .7 expires on 10/31, might as well wait until after halloween.

Spent most of the day talking to several Cogent people to get the circuit up and running, I feel bad about all the time it is taking me.  Maybe AT&T would have been a better bet, but they were so expensive, I wanted to get something more affordable, AT&T was also very reluctant to even price the circuit which made them seem to unresponsive to a small company like us, perhaps they are too busy chasing the Fortune 500 to pay attention to this little .com, who cares, they are really bad to deal with too, in general all big companies are a pain to get something done.  

After work I am again at Havana Sandwitch, great place to start a .com, it has WiFi. I think I will start getting LiLAX to meet here at times, maybe a weekly lunch or something.  Or even UUASC. Seems they are happy to have us, even if it means they will go home late, they are great here :)

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

headache

Got rid of the fish tank yesterday, give it to George, he was happy to have it, but called me last night for help, yea right, I was in Irvine, worst called me on the old cellphone, the one ending in 9750, not mine anymore. Still have to get rid of more stuff, this place needs to be clear soon, have another person moving in and it is amazing how much space little people talk. So how do you et rid of stuff is again in my plate, I hate to toss this all in the trash, it works, and recycling is hard, but who needs a DiskMan or DSL filters?  USB cord, phone cords? 26VAC, .25A power brick with out a connector, the devices were shipped to China.
This morning I have tried to short and buy AAPL, none filled, but while I am waiting for the cable guy to come take CNBC away from me and internet access, what a headache I have, trying to settle things before I go off the grid.  I heard that we get our office T3 on Wednesday, end of business, finally Cogent has been slow, but I guess being in an off network building as they call it we don't get the advantage of being lit fast.  I think however they are willing to come into our building with a T3 as they will probably simply use it if we don't pay for it to sell it to other tenants or divide it in several bits and sell it to others to hold clients until they can bring fiber in, and I suspect that our 2 buildings have enough tenants to make a great target to get new clients.  They tell me they need $5000 in business to light up a building.  I really like the idea they have of bringing in a fiber and then distributing it via ethernet to the tenants so they can sell $6/megabit, but so far we are paying 10 times that, as we don't have the building lit yet, too bad, maybe someday.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

the machine is using us

Some weekends I end up on ch 6 on TWC and there is a great feed from CSUDH which has classes broadcast on TV. Very educational, today I am seeing some kind of psychology class which is into the web and modern times how we get influenced by things, very interesting, I really enjoyed a great video about the web which I wanted to share with you:

This is very much the sites I use every day, give to me fast and furious.  Nice.  This weekend I missed going to MerbCamp and yet I ended up staying home to please someone important to me, went to a very large baby stuff store, and 2 supermarkets, we have too much food at home, oh well, maybe this is the week that the economy falls apart and we have to start hording before money is meaningless.  Perhaps we will trade in goods in the future again.  So I get a Skype from Charles ringing on my phone, but lucky I got to call back, he is on his Blackberry finally using his EDGE on the computer.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Clear that room!

So my office is becoming a nursery eventually, seems that my 19" monitor is in the way too, just get rid of all your stuff, every married guy probably has the problem of having someone nag you and get all your stuff in order, but if you are single, then you got to do that yourself.  Amazing, she keeps buying new stuff, I have to make money and get rid of all the old stuff.  Life goes on, the economy is bad, so no good market for my stuff.  I have been listing things on Amazon, and at first sold very well, but then nothing, seems like it is tough to do any business lately.  I guess I really have to lower my prices on everything, just as my stocks also became much cheaper, wish I had waited a year to by everything I have, some I could have waited much longer, I should have been a bear much longer.  Today sold my AAPL and even shorted some as a bye bye, I give up, I capitulate, it is time to let the stocks drop, I can't buy now.  Soon, but not now.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Walked home

Geez, they don't like us parking at work overnight, so I drove my car to Maple and Maryland and parked there, walked home, street cleaning in my street is on Tuesday and Wednesday, but what a headache, work would have been easy to leave a car there at the old office, rats... Now to walk again tomorrow and drive it in the hostile building.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

F150 Top Gear, Self-Healing Disk Arrays at UUASC

I had lunch at Havana again. Yesterday at lunch work we discussed how Top Gear said during this video that Americans are mostly doing incest, you have to watch it, it was funny, although insulting. Spent some time at the LOPSA meeting and UUASC right after, it, afermeeting isn't as interesting, better get home, oh no car... anyhow it was pretty interesting about storage, although was a commercial talk, about 20 people showed.Self-Healing Disk Arrays is how it was advertised and that does sure sound like marketing, but cool if it is true. Reliable storage is surely important.

4am rate limit

Wow fast early in the day, but the market isn't going up yet, maybe after the house approves the bailout, thinking of buying some BIDU at a low price today or soon, I have been selling it on a 2% stop loss and making a little money each time, but I missed the big one, don't have margin and been trading it too much. It seems like day trading is a better strategy these days then long term, boy have I been wiped out in my core positions. Got up really early today, had not done that in a while, I should probably telecomute today, will fall asleep if I go to the office.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

GnuDailer

I am starting a weekend project of building a GnuDialer box with Aserisk and the old CentOS server in the kitchen, Guess I have enough bandwdith, might even get my cable bill paid, by this. Wow, it is cool to run a seismograph on your Mac
Heard Charles is looking for a job, perhaps my GnuDialer call help him contact recruiters, or not, who wants to be tele-marketed. Anyhow if you need a SysAdmin, post a comment here, he is in the 818 area code, good with Linux and Cisco. Go to his blog for a brief description of tonight's talk at the IEEE, dinner is always free, meeting :) and if you are looking to hire, here is the rather old resume I found.

Decided to test bandwidth on the DSL at work, and surprise we have more then the 512K up that the modem reports, interesting.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Richmond Street fair

Today El Segundo has a street fair on Richmond and Grand.


These flat bottles are really cool to run into, but wow, where did they find such a hot place, this probably started as a drunk idea, cool, look the empty bottle is flat :)

Friday, September 26, 2008

Planes

Last night I was looking out the window for CA983 to land, and then the airport pickup. Had a radio, but only got to hear ground crew, too bad, would have been a good channel to listen too know when the gate is reached, I was at the airport way to early, resulting in parking :( But then I went early to drop Gareth off, so I guess it works out. So again it was a rather claudy morning, but I guess that is normal, perhaps soon it might even rain ;) This video upload has taken over an hour, don't know if there is a bug, because I also uploaded the other 2 pictures after starting the video upload.



This morning we went to the beach and I found Andrew from GoodNight Mattress flying his WWI like Red Baron single wing plane, but must have been based on a biplane, amazing how great today's batteries are, this thing has enough power to fly straight up and can go for 30 min. Seems the LiOn battery is really good, and the electric motor really cool too. I left my phone at home to finish uploading, but disappointed to see it didn't. So I used YouTube, and here it worked

Thursday, September 25, 2008

old blogs

I was looking at Twitter today saw something about a bun in the oven and followed the @ to Sara Lane, she has a blog. In it she talks about blogging since 2003, made me realize that I need to put some sort of headline in this blog to invite you people in. I have actually been blogging since 1994 when I started a GeoCities account TheTropics/1174 if I remember correctly, that later became Yahoo and they then summarily deleted as I wasn't updating it for a while, until I started this blog, I was out of it. I kind of think I may have a backup on ZIP100 or maybe one of those Gig. ZIP disks, perhaps on CD of that blog, who knows, I haven't been into my old media for a long time, but it sure would be interesting to go back to my old stuff someday, when I have time. Unfortunatly Archive, didn't do it, but since this is information that was openly sitting on the internet, who knows, it may be cashed somewhere. There could be backup tapes at Yahoo or simply lost.

Anyhow staying home longer today and then an airport pickup, I have been on my own for so long, this will be something new.

Monday, September 22, 2008

sick

I feel like I am getting sicker today so I didn't go to the office, however having a house guest, I might pollute the east coast with my bug, I have been biologically powned.  Anyhow will probably have lunch from Havana Sandwich.  But keep your distance, maybe I will go shopping, might be longer lasting in case I get worst.  I have to say thought that lunch did lift my spirits. Fight on antibodies.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Hacking

Drove to SFVlug for the first time.  It is an interesting group meets across from the sex shop at a Dennys in the Valley, they rule this back room, have all kinds of gear plugged in, desktops and routers.  Some of them dumpster dive really neat stuff and others have an amazing nack to buy cheap equipment.  All will be geekier when they leave and questions can be answered, lightning presentations where about iPython and screen, internet access by Sprint and the raspberry ice tea is very nice.  Feel free to join if you like, someday a real company might spawn from this grass roots effort to learn from each other. Long drive back though, must carpool next time. 

Today yet another session of BizzBuzz, perhaps some day I will describe what this is, but meanwhile we are working on something.

BarCampLA6 is coming around :)  Ah, yet another telemarketing call, I want to record something on the answering machine along the lines of: "Hi                 I won't come to the phone right now because chances are you are trying to sell me something. BEEP"

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Olympic medals cool sites

On Friday our CTO showed me these really cool things to put on our product, one of them I sent to my dad as he is a big Olympic buff, but I thought it was a really good way to present information visuallly. This Olympic visualization takes the medal count and shows it as geo-circles. What a great way. So on searching I found an Excel spreadsheet that does the same, it won't open very well on OpenOffice, so really haven't played with it yet :( And I uninstalled 2007 from the other partition on this Dell, grrrr... almost regreted that right away. So there it is my finds of the week.

Today thinking of going to LAMPsig as I need to learn more svn for work and following flight AA263, have a friend landing at 16:30, so may do an airport pickup and as I hear on SCRUM every day, "that will be my day."

Friday, September 19, 2008

WiFi on Main St.

[5:36:59 PM] Stephen - El Segundo says: ah, success. Havana sandwich ordering DSL connection. Should be in by Wednesday.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Python Piggies

After going to the Internet Telephony Expo at the Convention Center, I found that if you turn North right form Pico and left before the 110, there is a great little street for parking, so I got to the floor in time to toss my bingo card in for the Prius, but alas Wayne from Hermosa Beach won it, I took his card as he is starting some kind of a VoIP business, who knows, I could need his help for a company sometime.  I thought I had a good talk with someone from CyLogitics. seems they could have a billing and PBX solution worth looking into, both hosted and sold.

So Python Piggies didn't allow cameras, too bad, that was a great meeting, nice food and great company. Pythoscope seem like something we can use. The second presentation was "How we use Python in Toontown", from Joe Shochet - lead game designer and programmer on Disney's Toontown Online. Very entertaining and well done, but probably more of a Python is great and we use it testimonial, where we some some impressive properties: Panda3d a tool they use looks cool, nice story of Disney open sourcing it and everyone looking at them in disbelief. Some games they made: ToonTown and Pirates of the Carribean. Would have been nice to get pictures of the meeting, but hey Disney gets to ask for none, I guess.

Monday, September 15, 2008

bash

I don't do bash very often, and got to say that this very simple, httpd restart, where you actually stop and start, would take me a bit to write, however, I guess I will try to get Dallas to help.

service httpd stop&&service httpd start
Might acutally work, tempting. I seem to be at a point where I am learning and trying to avoid it, so I can get things done. Then there is Python, might be a better option for me right now, as it is a far more useful language or Ruby, so much to do, so little time.

Drupal, learned lots and yet, don't have time to implement any of it.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

DrupalCampLA08

So I finally made it to yet another camp, this one is totally focused on Drupal and isn't an unconference, as much as the past events I have been going have been, in fact other then the free location, the City of LA, 9th district donated the rooms at the Convention center, and other then the fact that it seems there will be no food, too bad, it does seem to be a good event to learn Drupal and it is rather well organized and the speaker track was avaiilable before starting out. Sitting next to another blogger from NorthWind, guess the power brings us together, need to keep the Mac battery charged, in track 3, where the room is smaller, but the speakers are better.  I did walk out of the Building a static, corporate site from the ground up - Steven Chan (Resonance Visuals) talk as other then installing Drupal, the filling out the forms seems to be obvious.  The best question at the beginning was about MAMP, to get your Mac running LAMP fast and effortless.  However to cool things in the room, I as able to project the LISA08 after the opening talk, sweet, and the get Steven to put LiLAX.net as the example in his Drupal intro.  Sweet.  But installing Drupal is pretty easy, and I figure that a quick google would yeld a way to do it, or I can simply ask Stephen. So I went to the expo room, although they called it chill, guess they don't have that much to show, and it is nice to have a room to chill out, food would be nice, didn't eat breakfest today, thinking I could get out earlier, but hey whatever, neighbor had me wait 30 min, but I got to use the carpool lane so it is all good, even washed a car while waiting, and if you saw it, it hardly looks clean, baked on grime, didn't come off, I have to soak the car next time before applying the water, to soften backed on dirt.  Since I now drive 2 cars on alternate days, I have gotten a bit behind. But again, who cares about my personal stuff, uilding APIs for Modules- Adam Kalsey of WorkHabit sounded much more interesting, but being the advanced track, must be over my head, and since I am blogging, I guess I spent my time getting the power.

Check out the schedule at DrupalCamp08. I am now listening to Dreamweaver & Drupal - XTND.US (Chris Charlton) who is a pretty good organizer for this event and does an amazing job at LADrupal as well, but I must be on the wrong track, as I don't use DreamWeaver anymore, it is a free download, but then you have to pay after 30 days.  I used to use it and it was great, but I am more on Linux lately and perhaps I can now revisit it and setup this XTND.US and play with it, because after hearing someone talk about it, you have to think it is useful, even if you are only half paying attention as you blog. I got to say that after talking to a prominent security guy, I decided to hang out in the front of the Camp to get more of the hall talk, since I don't really do Drupal, and we are a Django shop anyhow.

Friday, September 12, 2008

darkness

So I wake up at 6am, it is now dark at that time, fall is here, it feels cold in the morning and at night. I woke up this morning as if I had a 6th sense and right as I sat at the computer get a phone call from the other side of the world, support for our night shift, a very apologetic voice on the other side asks me about some of our recent changes, and I knew the answer, wow, high availability, I just happened to be up, cool. I remember years ago getting that 4am call from somebody clueless as to what area code they were calling me in, geez. This is why Skype is cool, it lets you know if I am really on the computer or forwarded, that is definitely a good feature. But I will have to test if strangers get to use the forward feature, or if you have to be authorized, haven't got a forwarded SPAM call yet, but who knows.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

work is boring, meetings are cool, but tomorrow back to work

Went to the EC2/S3 event at UCLA, was pretty good and the neworking had great catering. Hadoop was the most mentioned piece of software in conjunction with the use of distributed instances, so will have to learn about that. I then went to a Terracotta talk, again about scalling to bigger clouds.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Quiet weekend

Crashed, turned on the TV and watched some movies.  I didn't even go to a sfvlug hacking session where they might tell me how someone broke into our server.  I don't know how to get more done right now, but I sure have lots of demands on me these days. I took a look at how close I am to collecting on the ads, bu still at $48.50, I truely have to think i am blogging for myself, there isn't money in this, but on the bright side I get a free place to do it, and that is a good thing. I had written a bit more, but I guess this doesn't autosave in Safari or the suspend of the laptop somehow got in the way.

The missing part was about positive things statements make you happy. I was watching this program about achieving happiness and they cited a study where people wrote 3 things they were thankful for in a journal every day. Interesting idea. Lets see, I got a good job, wife and kid :)

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Moving sucks

I have been busy trying to restore services like internet, phones and just finding things in boxes after moving, not very productive, just busy work. Now I have to figure out how to connect to an AdTran with a RS-232 serial port so that we can use our T3, the only cool thing to come of the move.

Yesterday coming back from lunch there was a Channel 9 helicopter hovering over El Segundo, seems an American Airlines 737 blew a tire on takeoff and had to return to the airport.

Also playing with a MacBook Pro, love the lit keyboard, sleek elegance, nice laptop, hear it is the best performer for Vista too.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Moving

On my way to work Saturday I found a car show on main St. Yearly event, and since I am still kind of spent from moving, I decided to walk along the street and look at what they have done with all these old cars, they are in immaculate condition, wow, the oldest one I saw from 1933, for sale, it is kind of cool to see so many survive the years and show us what old technology was like, always enjoy looking at them.
rough
Everyone knows that moving is expensive, time consuming and mostly pointless, at least our move seems to be that way. We are trying to save money, by spending lots of it, we end up with a smaller office with less cubes in a lower rent, nicer building. However the old building is pretty damn convenient has lots of entertainment value right in the halls as people are trying to get their licenses back after drinking or age made a policeman think they needed to be pulled off the road, the funny thing about those halls is that they are usually in inhabited by lawyers talking to these clients, but I digress, we are moved now and I am trying to deal with a host of issues, one of them is we have downsized and ended up with tons of ewaste, well not really, it is all useful stuff, but I am not allowed to sell it, give it away or will it do any good at the new office, since it can't be stored there, it would get in the way. So the only real solution that is easy for me to do is store it. Now in the past this solution has been a way to get rid of some money and in the end create trash, I was trying to get another out, but I am resisted by those who can write off that inventory, they won't release it. I heard a story of us paying though our taxes for the same waste in goverment, a fire proof safe that gets moved each time because there is no way to write it out of inventory, it costs $350 each time to move this beast, and no one uses it and we the people pay for this, stunning how you hear about this, I guess in a sense in a company we the employees also in a way pay for the money wasted, it does affect the bottom line and gives them less money to pay us with, but it is all diluted into a bigger picture so it isn't like a home where there are fewer interested parties, but even there, we have lots of stuff in the closets that will never see the light of day, until that garage sale blows it all out and the space is recovered. It just seems a shame that we can't make use of Amazon, eBay and Craigslist to get this stuff out of storage and eventually the landfill which is what I forsee happening.

Meanwhile I got to connect the old space to the internet and setup some machines, the movers did a good job of taking our boxes to the right cubes, and building the cubes, but we are not done, this still doesn't have ethernet, internet or phones, that is sitll working at the old office, funny.

So this week we have to empty the old space.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Yay weekend, good times

I actually managed to run out the door when the noise started, mowers wake me every Saturday morning, maybe I should tell them to scram, after all they use our driveway I feel like getting on the repo tour: http://www.repohometour.biz a house must be less noisy.

data loss

I guess I started this blog in '94 on GeoCities, which was then bought by Yahoo and they one day, when I wasn't watching, or updating my web log decided to delete all the content, I wish I could get it back and add it to this blog, heck, wish I could just read it, but I didn't count on that move by them. It wasn't even much storage, this is why I will backup this little warning on my Google blog, thinking that it might survive there longer, since I figure they are less likely to go out of business any time soon, Yahoo must have been pretty desperate for money to kill my blog. I guess someday I will try to find the old Zip disks that may or not have an old backup of my data, but it does seem like a part of my life, that is documented, that may be gone forever, better hurry too, magnetic media is only good for 5 years.

I have been trying to light a building in El Segundo with Cogent. Light buildings have $6/Mb/s pricing, which seems much better then the $2746 they are proposing to charge us. So a wrote the following email to my neighbor:
What a crazy idea, I called Cogent asked about ethernet again, T3 router is pretty expensive, $1900, and only does 36Mbs, I thought I should have a router that supports the whole bandwidth, but that is $6700, wow, mind you this is all used Cisco, new was very expensive.

So, I called the Cogent deployment person, and they came back with a price of $4250/month for 100Mb/s ethernet, nice, no router, would be good if we don't end up keeping the T3 for a long time, it would actually work out better. But geez, I am sorry I ever said yes to the T3, it is not great to buy this router, not had much luck with PCI cards either. HSSI PCI cards exist, but I am not sure if I can make it work, I found one for $24.99 on eBay, thought great, then was told by the VP Eng, that it was only 20 Mb/s max, great, plus Cogent has to contract our T3 for 12 months with their upstream provider, which probably means we are stuck with that for 12 months.

I feel like getting Cogent to get the T3 router and put it in their closet, give service to 3 companies in the building, shared T3, nice, cheaper for us. You want to partake?

I really am a penny pincher, want cheap bandwidth and feel that we got a bum deal with the T3, install costs: 2500+1900+2000 install, yes that riser company is a trip, our move is costing 30K+, the CFO will have a problem with that, but the bottom line is we are trying to save costs with this move, yea right, stupid idea to move to save costs, we should have sublet, that would have saved money by increasing revenue.
I always have liked the idea of sharing bandwidth, and with so much to share, should be really doable.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Cable Amplified

Called the cable company again, they amplified my signal, power comes from my end down the coax and the picture on the TV is less prone to disruption, but still not perfect. I decided to check the bandwidth, not much different from before the amp.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

YouTube, VoIP

In watching a great video about trading, I got the idea of putting it on my N95, so I searched and right away found a way to do it, cool, you can put this button on your task bar and on pressing it makes a download MP4 link on the YouTube page, really slick. I have been looking at some cool videos like Virus Alert, Don't Download this song, and this very well done warning to anyone trading, a parody of another cool song by Carrie Underwood - Before He Cheats. I even found a neat way to move them to my N95 as MP4s, which gave me a button on my Firefox 3. I spent some time reading the eBay annual report for information on Skype, turns out I want to use it as our companies phones, but can't get these people to get off something more phone looking, like a SIP VoIP phone, oh well. Too bad, they would have saved tons of money, and as for me I plan to use it anyhow, not the VoIP Junction or whatever VoIP that they settled on. My second choice was VoxLineSystems, but that wouldn't be either.

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Blender

We had a cool Blender talk at LiLAX today, I recorded it and if you goto meetings, and find Aug9, you will see the video. Blender is something I want to play with, it just seems so cool to manipulate a world and create all these objects in 3D. Then you can even animate it or make games, cool stuff. I also found another cool Blender teaching video on Youtube, it is amazing how many Blender produced videos you can find there.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

WingWoman

Stephen is outraged at planned parenthood, I thought it was rather funny. Last night we got cards from a WingWoman, this is something my wife would probably not like me spending good money on, but then agian, maybe it could make some of our nerds more marketable in the office and bar scene. Last might we were mostly attracted by each others company at an even wtih free food, although I have yet to figure if Rubicon hosted it to find talent, or if there are other reasons to invite 100+ strangers to your office, give them talks about verious things, and feed them, buy more beer then they will drink, but not enough bottled water the last the night, should have kept the empty bottle.

August

I can't believe I still haven't worked on this picture of the ATT CO on the curb, that I posted the earlier picture on, time flies by, like an arrow and I am getting behind on blogging, lazy summer days, might actually be best spent on vacation since we are not really that productive in Auguest anyhow, I find myself often simply staring into the screen trying to collect my thoughts, maybe it is time to fly to China and spend some time there. Anyhow can't wait to have it lit, maybe I will start by canceling the old provider, I want to try the new one. No more crappy pictures or interpretable internet, I hope.

Last night's WebDevMeetup was a blast, good food lots of interesting people and EC2S3 talk about poolparty. I met an old CEO that I did some work for, found out he sold his company around the time I finally got paid, very interesting timing. I have to say that the office was very frustrating, bad internet, no phones, it was really on the cheap and makes me think about our move and what we should pay for, how we choose our suppliers and all that. Our current office is very reasonable, I am trying to get some things to work great in the new office too.
So this was all on the set of 24, since this is a Fox property, that Rubicon is working out of. They have catered food and it is a pretty amazing meeting place. Having all the same Ikea desks that we have in our back room, geez, we should try selling ours to them, they would match current furniture, lol... CraigsList would work too, I bet I should put some up here for sale, if you know me you can contact me kind of thing, geez, if I will be doing that might as well get people to ask for furniture in the El Segundo area at bobo92 at hotmail and be done with that, or hand out one of my 13 phone numbers?

Saturday, August 2, 2008

hax

Hacking our boxes, has been keeping me up lately, we need to spend more time in unproductive things like hardening our network. Makes me think I need to lockout the neighbors on WiFi, last night around 23:?? someone leased an IP address from my open router, well, makes you wonder if they are doing good or bad things on my IP address. I used a neighbors internet for 3 years, and he still has a welcome SSID, with no protection, but there are some bad people out in the world that will take advantage of this for thier own nefarios purposes.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

LA Drupal

Last Tuesday of the month is LA Drupal in Venice California, which I have been going to every meeting, since it is such a dynamic group. Charles Charton, does an excellent job of exciting the group about Drupal being a product like RedHat, getting the crowd to contribute, but the meeting is free as will be Drupal Camp, but still it would be more then welcome if someone were to contribute to a panel they need, if they don’t have time to write it themselves, Drupal 6 has some panels that need to be finished and if you need it for your project, why not encourage the developer, remember how the beer prizes worked? Money is probably just as good. So September 13th Drupal Camp starts and next spring might be Drupal Con in LA. The speaker works at Fox and designed the site for remhq.com, a rock band, pretty cool stuff, with aggregated Twitter messages, videos and blogs, so the home page aggregates all the data. All the tour dates are taxonomy terms, each of the videos, tweets and blogs are nodes. People can upload the content to all of the websites they already use like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and tag it with the concert, that way it will be on the right date. Great presentation, from Blake, but the networking break was great, I am trying to get Charles Charlton to talk with John O’connor our LiLAX president to figure out what to do on September 13, which is in contention right now as to what to do at LiLAX. After the intro of the REM web page, we got a whole overview of how to make our own website, cool stuff.


I also saw that Lion YouTube on NBC this morning, very touching, watch it, if you want to get all weepy.


So I discovered that the crap in this post came from using Word, when I wasn't connected to the internet, decided to type it into something with spelling checking, so Notepad wouldn't work.

Sunday, July 27, 2008

dreams

So I go to the TRW swap meet, on the last Saturday of the month, it goes 7-11:30 am, but you better leave early as the sun will burn you, still feel my neck peeling skin, not something I should subject myself too, skin cancer is definitely a risk for me, my dad got it. But there are so many booths and the offerings and prices are very compelling. I don't think the vendors get much for their efforts, but the space the gain by selling out. I was on the look for a DS3 router with a HSSI card, but I guess T1 is about the best that I could do at this venue. Instead I bought things I didn't need, that end up stealling time from me like a passwd protected 1 GigB USB thumb drive, $7 and a SouthWing SH315, which won't work with the laptops for Skype, the reason I bought it, but might with the N95, not too confortable to wear, thouhg, $15, anyone want it? So there goes my dream of buying a DS3 router for cheap for the new office. And who knows if these laptops have bluetooth, they both seem to have a symbol on the, but I can't find support for it.
I was rather intregued by some older technology, like the telegraph. When you think about the simplicity of running one strand of cable, perhaps grounding the other and managing to send a signal between towns, this must have been quite a revolution in the 1800s. Seems that smoke signals and even the internet are now considered to be telegraph, or the long-distance transmission of written messages without physical transport of letters. But I think of it being that key with morse code, which could easily be done with smoke or light as well, but the key to the left works with electricity. I almost felt like buying a key, it is just such a simple signal generator. I wonder if someone could actually transmit ASCII binary on it at some slow baud rate? Might be a Defcon challenge.

I was really impressed with the great condition of this 1957 record cutting machine with a radio and a mic. So you could cut your record off the air, AM radio or from a live band, kind of amazing technology. I have to say that the sound quality of the recordings was first rate, perhaps better then some current technology, wonder if I can hear the limits of digital and transistors. It had a quality I haven't heard in a while. Not a bad deal for $250, but alas, what would I do with this?

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Socal Python Piggies

Long carpool from work brought Abhi, Stephen and me to the lovely town of Pasadina, where we found street parking right across the street from Caltek, and proceeded to walk a short distance to room 101 in K...?? whatever, the meeting was great, there was talk about some software that finds duplicates really fast using NginX connected to Quixote.

Clint Bidlack: "Using Nginx with multiple Quixote servers via WSGI"; Grig Gheorghiu: "Encrypted backups to Amazon S3 using boto and duplicity"

Socal Python Piggies was worth the long carpool.

LAX

Our new office will have an airport view, if you really get in the right corner of the right office, not mine though. The building next to it is the one with the stunning views, we just get a little place that makes for a cool vista.

aging changes

BT is tearing up its parking lot. Could they be installing those solar panels they have signs for everywhere?
Another year has gone by and my office bought me a cake, I still have a square of it in the fridge at home.

We are measuring and moving soon. Too much to do.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Uverse?

So ATT puts up a new cabinet on the curb, I am guessing we might have Uverse soon? ATT, as far as I know brings fiber to the curb, and then cooper to the home, unlike Verizon FiOS which is all fiber, to the home.

Compressed air

fixes a mac mouse scroll, which I assume was full of dead skin or dust as it is also known.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Follow up later

there is too much on the internet, I have to leave some great sites that I learn about for later. On CNBC a great interview with T Boone Pickens gives me a site to explore about his solution for the oil price. Jack tells me about a great new app that runs on his iPhone and my N95 that lets you call on WiFi, all great stuff, but alas, only time to blog it and when do I actually read about all this as I race off to the office? I need to take the bus, would give me another 10 min to read things that are left on the laptop. So sometimes I blog things that matter to me and I need to come back to later, or will tell others about, least I forget.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

too much stuff

Sorry if I don't blog, but we have been on Skype conferences, thinking about Open for Biz, Linux OPen taps, take the order once you have the attention of the user and if my post makes now sense, sorry... still sleepless.

Friday, July 18, 2008

LampSig.org

Solomon gave us another great talk at LampSIG.org about MaatKit this time. Solves many of the problems that MySQL should, some of that extra admin stuff they don't have a solution for.

JibJab

I always enjoy an email from JibJab, but this time they outdid themselves.
Send a JibJab Sendables® eCard Today!

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

walked to work today

Like every summer the sky is falling in the stock market. But this one it is worst, we are in a pain we have never felt, got to admit that it sucks being long and that the sky is truly falling, so get it over with and sell everything.

Monday, July 14, 2008

VoIP phones, Windows dependancies.

After using many VoIP solutions over the years I have some ideas about what features I want in my VoIP: easy to use, reliable, works from anywhere, behind any NAT, has critical mass so you that you can find many other users on it, free calls between users, presence, IM, video nice, but not really needed in most cases, interoperates with the other solutions out there so you don't all have to be on the same provider. It would also be very nice if it was an open system where anyone could participate, but that sometimes does create quality problems.

Seems to me that Skype is the one closest to filling all of these features. The ones they don't fill are

I have also been thinking about the things that I can only do in Windows: my Nokia N95 software and the Skype USB cordless phone, I wish I had drivers for those 2, they are one of the few things I can't do in Ubuntu these days.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

iMadness

I was there last year in that long line waiting to get my hands on an iphone, the line went all around Macy's, just as this year, but I didn't take part. It was fun, Apple would come around and give you water bottles, Islands Resturant would take orders from the line and deliver food. We ate at an Italian place on Rosecrans instead, pretty good food, nice ambiance, moderately expensive.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

will it blend

I bet you the SEO on this company is through the roof, I have been aware of them for a while. This will it blend campian is really brilliant and they are right there in line getting one of the first iPhones and blended it right away. Free buzz, cheap advertising, cool. Maybe filming Todd at the datacenter in a gorilla suit isn't such a bad idea.

Friday, July 11, 2008

moving sucks

getting nothing done, pretty much working on a move, what a waste of time, doesn't get more forward.

Internet at T3 speeds

So we have T3 speeds for the new office, but the install date may be a month late, oh well, they need 3 months to install a T3 and 4.5 for a 100Mb ethernet delivered service, quite frankly we should have moved to the other side of the airport where we could get a $100 cross connect for $4/Mb bandwidth, sweet. Cheaper rent too. I went to the Alchemy data center again to check out an IAX2 phone. Seemed better quality then GrandStream, you can reconfigure SIP accounts or IAX2 accounts without rebooting and they are really rather cool. I would totally buy a 12 of them for the office, but will have to talk to our VP of tech. I am ready to setup service with Voxlinesystems, been trying them out for a year now, seems to be decent service, not oversubscribed.

Frantic call from Steve sent me a picture of the Doc house in Vegas, little faucet in the bathroom ruined the house 100K in damage estimated, interesting, glad it isn't my house. I used to house sit for someone, not a bad deal for them, this kind of stuff can happen and will happen.