Ribbit

So I got my first call on Ribbit, it took voice mail and also emailed me a speech to text, very cool, inaccurate, but cool:

Well hi thought i'd call your numbers even worked. And I guess personnel set.

Not exactly what the voice mail said, but I do kind of like the idea, even if the implementation is only 70% accurate on a native English speaker. I wonder if it will train on caller ID over time, nah, I won't get that many calls.

Maybe I should try out the chalk phone next. Regardless, this is pretty cool, another of a large stream of apps on that run VoIP on computers. I think I might even miss the old analog phone lines some day, but right now I want to cancel service, as for $17/month I only get 12 mile calling and no caller ID. The only thing it does for me is 911 calling, and I have never used that. No call waiting, all these free or really cheap internet serivices have many cool features that I don't get with the other phone, even cellphones are cheap enough now and you get that extra mobility. I think the analog line is going to disappear.

Today I went to the swap meet at TRW, now Norththrop Grumman. Lots of stuff for sale, cool, but I really need to sell there, rather then buy, need to get rid of stuff. I put my Grandstream up for sale on Amazon, maybe I will move on to a higher quality phone since this VoIP stuff is here to stay. Perhaps I should get an ATA to power the old analog, it could pay for itself in 2 months.

Weekend posting

As much as I am trying to keep up with this blog, work has been wearing me down. Trying to find the best supplier for bandwidth for a new office, so far Cogent is in the lead. Color Broadband Wireless, does have some nice offerings and boy do they try hard. Had a great open house at Alchemy darn, no pictures. So I currently have 11 phone numbers you could reach me at home/work, yes I just counted them, 11, so here is yet another phone number I got from Ribbit: 209-340-0777, which is currently on an iPhone like looking Air app on my laptop, kind of cool looking, but not really functional yet. So call if you like, whoever is first tests it for me. It is early Saturday, don't expect it to stay up too long. Anyhow I wrote an articule called 5 ways to get a free phone number in August, I guess I can top that now, but seriously, I am up to 12 phone numbers, 3 are paid for, but only 1 by me, even though I didn't sign up for it. I don't really pay for any phone numbers, need to get rid of a few for sanity, but as some of you know I have even more email addresses, it is confusing and cool that the internet age has cheapened things to the point where every homeless person in amarica should have a cellphone under the highway underpass, because it is just that cheap. This in a time where inflation is going crazy, commedities are way up and the dollar is worthless. Which brings me to a stock I want to buy sometime this summer, HOG, yes Harley-Davidson, Inc. should outperform with expensive gas, but still looking for another name that will work with expensive gas, seems like it is here to stay. Solar, wind...

Hotel California

So getting up drowsy as usual, trying to monitor websites and figure out how to fix a feed, some app that does aggregation of content isn't feeding something, far too technical for me. I look at the markets, they are calm before a Fed day, general expectation is no change. I get this old song from the Eagles in my head, wonder if they are talking about prison, anyhow, YouTube is great, they have a video for Hotel California. Who knows if it should be there, but will you enjoy it or be shocked at the violation? When does the copyright end; the Mouse says never. Anyhow what a great song, blast from the past.

Last night the IEEE talk was a commercial, at least there was pizza, whatever the guy was talking about was rather boring and I wasn't that interested in the cert, to cover all certs. I just don't believe in the time wasted in certs. Now listening to the Bob Marley version of Hotel California. Family taking off to China this summer, stuck here working, earning dollars that don't buy much around the world anymore, heck they don't even buy much in California, have you seen the price of gas, $4.7 a gallon at some places, and I get the cheap gas and only get it quarterly, thank God, but if I wanted to drive to Yosemite, or something this summer it would cost us. Anyhow reducing the price, isn't the solution, you have to reduce consumption, motorcycles are probably a great investement and a good stock to invest in. Monday's IBD meetup was pretty good. I do have some ideas of what to rotate the portfolio into. Wow, she is hot, she can stay in my hotel anytime, from Barcelona I am guessing, her website has a .cat ext. wow, 3 letter country? Well, maybe it isn't her site, but she is the top hit. Seems like a great site to learn how to play the guitar. OK, wikipedia is great, .CAT is a Catalan domain, a language between France and Spain, so it sounds a bit like both, I can understand most of it. Great site though. I bet they al smoke like packs a day, that is what I remember when I was in Barcelona.

Hmm, lost my cursor, it turned into a dot, wonder if it is a bug on theblog. No wait, the dot was a period I was carrying in front of the now invisible cursor. After the IEEE meeting we moved on to Drupal, walked into a very good group, Chris does a really great job of organizing and leading the group, need to take John there for training. Cristal Williams is organizing the LA Drupalcamp, she has done a few BarCamps and has a chance of getting AOL, great venue, keep tuned, or get involved, she needs help with sponsorship, venue, and helpers. I learned lots of stuff that can be applied to work, great meeting.

So on my street there is a car with a very sensitive alarm, and when a HOG or my neighbors Mustang drives by the honking alarm goes off, very annoying, makes you want to shoot the battery. However HOG should be a better stock with expensive gas.

Pingdom is pretty cool, but probably using Nagios or Zenoss in the end, after the 30 day demo.

More events.

One of the great things about living in a large city, or even a small one next to many cities is that there is always some event close to you. I could go every night of the week to something, here is an idea for Wednesday. But Orange is a little far for me, time to sleep. I am already writing this on FireFox3, and think it is great. Some plug-ins were left behind, but on the whole, great. Anyhow, download it if you need it, or attend the event, a map and RSVP.

3 Meetings after work

Gosh I will have to get my family to read my blog, I am going to be busy this week after work too. First 2 days of the week, 3 meetings. Monday an investor meetup in Torrance, and Tuesday IEEE and LADrupal. I will be leaving point A if anyone wants to carpool around 5:35, GoogleMaps are really cool. Testing PingDom this month for monitoring.

View Larger Map

Today Al Hernandez of HelpUsell gives me 2 options for houses, I might be interested in. Sorry Al, but RedFin has an awsome interface, and no need to login, so here they are west of the 405 and east, $400k to 450k, wow, this is what houses are in this area, actually this is much cheaper area, we would rather live further west, like where we are now, but wow, even more pricey.

hot summer day

So Friday, the start of summer, really made itself noticed, right on time, it really is the start of summer like it says on my Chinese calendar. So I am sitting here surfing in my u.... like the internet was meant to be used. The temp. shows 88 with 54% humidity, but probably this high because of the humidifier, other then that feel bone dry, my fish probably died from heat exhaustion. Maybe I will wait for fall before putting another in the tank, besides the novelty of it had worn out already. The water is probably very good for the plant next to it.

I am still working on LiLAX.net stuff, geez... John O'connor, when will you step in to update stuff?

Another long talk with Charles today. Seems I don't like to type as much as talk sometimes I can type an talk or read, time, so little.

SCRUM, backups, rebuilds

My internet access sucks, got dropped from SCRUM many times today, and disconnected from my servers. Maybe it is finally time I call ATT and get a cheaper better service with less bandwidth and perhaps get my work to pay for it. This morning I had to restore some data from an empty directory, our backups didn't have it, the rsyncs didn't have it, but there was an old copy laying around somewhere. Backups are useless, unless you attach some intelligence to them. We are probably backing upTBs of crap, and missing the gems.

OK, so have a Fedora 8 box and I want to route IP through it to a subnet. It works, now why doesn't it work on the real one? The one with all the complicated stuff on it? I don't know.

Spent some time this week trying to get a building connected to the internet, but meanwhile Charles says he is going to become a CLEC.

Mahalo web dev meetup

This June meetup was fun and educational, free food schwag and networking, glad I went, found out about it this afternoon and jumped on it. Not that I really got the presentations, well the first one was cool stuff for making web pages in javascript work with some one framework, nice, but I don't really do this much, so oh well, maybe I can play with FlowJS, but nah, busy. The second talk was even cooler OpenCroquet is definitly something you want in schools, I booked this guy for LiLAX.

LiLAX

Despite the fact that I didn't want to lead the group anymore, I hosted an outdoor LiLAX meeting on Saturday and ended up with a couch. We had WiFi and some interesting discussions, but I really couldn't read the computer screen.
Anyone want a couch?

New space

This morning I was again pushed out of the house by lack of space and noise restrictions, so I decided to walk, on the way asked my new neighbor Gary at 439, what he paid for his house, and wow, still over a million but far less then asking, to work via our new offices. I went to 999 first and in the 909 building the receptionist sent me back to 999 580, funny thing is I open the door for Sara who turns out to be from the leasing office. I took some pictures and got the name Tony as the contact to find out about bandwidth. Be advised that this is only a shaky cellphone video and the pictures are of the big area when you walk in and of course the kitchen/server room. I will definitly miss all the space we have now.

So I also took a video of the office,

And the outside area, down to the street.

Open Solaris

I am writing this in the OpenSolaris live CD from 2008/5 which seems to work without a problem on this Dell Inspiron 6000. I got the WiFi working without fuss. It all looks so much like Ubuntu that I hardly notice that I am on Solaris, brilliant. I think I might play with it a bit more, been fun so far, there are differences that I have noticed in the ifconfig command, it doesn't by default show you all your working interfaces, instead gives you help, not gotten the wired internet up yet, but probably all just a matter of time. It even has an install icon on the desktop as does Ubuntu. Very cool, thanks Matt.

Groovy

Quarterly meeting at work today, got a new boss and a mention at the meeting, feels good to get praise :)

I went to the LAJUG.org after that to Groovy on Grails, which in the spirt if Ruby on rails speeds up development, it filled the room about 40 people and AWS provided sushi, great meeting, not that I am a Java programmer, but it is good to keep up to date with lots of things around what I am now doing, SysAdmin, IT manager, and purchaser for tech, geez, now all those.

iPhone, keyboard

I wonder if I will buy the iPhone again at release, like I did last June, then I bought another and cracked it and currently have the N95 which works OK, and does all I need, but the 3G iPhone sure looks cool. Endgadget actually mentioned my phone in the article, cool.

So today I finally took the keyboard off an old Vaio and put it under the tap, ran lots of hot water through it and wiped the keys clean, drying it as we speak on the power fans of some cluster machines, ready source of hot air. Anyhow, the replacement keyboard is $70 from Sony, so what the heck, couldn't do anything with this one anyhow.

No lights, simple life, Skype phone

In the past few years I have had a dry spell working, I was lucky to get a house sitting gig living in a house way to big for me and it was a great experience. I had to do lots of yard work and was beat at the end of the day, didn't turn on any lights, saved electricity that way, but also got adjusted to the natural cycle of sleeping at night and maximizing the sun light. Learned how to use Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP in those times. I ran a Linux server all time time for Russbo.com, a site on the Shaolin Temple that needed some scripts for the Bulletin boards. Today I noticed that I am getting good reviews on Keen.com on my Linux experience. Last weekend I heard I was getting a glowing review from a caller, so when I checked, he didn't lie, he indeed gave me a glowing review, I felt so flattered when I saw that I had a few of them. I do need the money from these calls, but also having a good review is very important for future business.

Today I was doing a search on one of my pet peeves, I can't use my Creative Skype Internet DECT Model: SZ1943 phone on Linux. This has been pretty annoying since I service Linux machines in a cage at a colo and would love to be able to plug what is a USB sound card with some telephony fuctions into on of these machines and have a telephone for only $3/month Skype charges for unlimited long distance. It would be a great deal if it worked, but having to install Windows on one of these systems to run a phone wouldn't be possible. I wish someone would write a driver. I found an interesting drop shipping site I didn't know about, Doba. Might be a good place to get items, but they want a credit card just to start browsing, I don't think so.

So as I pasted this from OpenOffice into the web browser it came in with all kinds of HTML that Blogger puked on, oh well, not the way to do it.

Salinas

I used to go windsurfing in Salinas every weekend, and for a time even on Wednesday, yea sometimes 3 times a week. It was a great time and it did me lots of good, I was once in shape. Great times, was talking to Alberto today about going to Long Beach again some time, although it isn't as nice as Salinas was. Maybe we should go down to Mexico and explore there. Funny reading a forum about a place I used to go so often, and haven't in years no. Found a pretty good tourist guide about the Dominican Republic as well. Seems these days more and more books in print start appearing on Google searches.

Old Silicon Mechanics Memory

Memory is so specialized that you end up with lots of it taken out of machines: 4 sticks of SiMech 11061, ATP 512 MB and it is PC2100 ECC Reg, 16 x 1 GB DDR2 400 registered ECC single rank. 6 other notebook sticks, time to clean that room of this and all the other junk that accumulates over the years.

Yesterday I got another plee from my barber for an add in Craigslist and I used Kijiji seems no one is available in El Segundo to work for him, maybe they just all opened their own barber shops.

mystory solved

So we had a strange cable in a cage that I guess now we know goes nowhere, we are trying to get redundancy with 2 connections to our upstream provider. I ordered the memory again, ah, so many details to keep track of, the 10K RPM SCSI drive is dead in a RAID, got to price one of those and still taking care of family and friends, I got up at 5am today.