Last Tuesday of the month is LA Drupal in I also saw that Lion YouTube on NBC this morning, very touching, watch it, if you want to get all weepy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
fixes a mac mouse scroll, which I assume was full of dead skin or dust as it is also known.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Last nights SEO meetup wasn't very well attended, but the loft it was in had a stunning view of Los Angeles, up on the 12 floor of the American Concentrate building, a pretty cool place, right on McArthor park by Korea town. Not the most gentle neighbor hood, but our car was still there with 4 wheels when we left around 9:30, it was also a pretty good talk of how to get your website up in the ratings. I learned that I have an average page rank in Google, 3, that SEOquake gives you all kinds of info on your page, heard about backlinks and thier importance in getting your website up in the ratings. I heard about some paid ways in getting your website up again, we went into an adwords account and looked at an example of hydrolics repair San Diego, and discussed that adwords are not purly paid. It was a pretty good night, plus 2 cats would run around and make provide entertainment in a visually stunning place, one very large room with windows looking East and South, amazing penthouse, probably has a waiting list. Anyhow thanks Alex for organizing.
I actually have no idea what the fireworks in l Segundo were like, I spent the time trying to get 2 computers working in Redondo beach, 2 days of training and getting data backed up and working again. On one computer I went for Ubuntu 8.04, something that seems to be easier to do every day, rather then fix Windows 2000, on the other I replaced Norton AV with Avast which is a new one for me, but I shall try it out on my own computer as well, since I can get a free download, for personal use :) It is amazing how many companies are engaged in the problem of solving Windows vulnarabilites. Seems to me that changing to a more obscure OS is an easy solution, but then, you can't run as much software, tradeoffs. So a Skype call and a cool tech support video, time to work on the next blog I guess, so much to do.
Anthony Bourdain is a genius of TV hosting with his Travel Channel program No Reservations. I have been watching him for a year, and he gets better with time. I really enjoyed Namibia, Indonesia and the boarder with Mexico, looking forward to Shanghai this afternoon, when I can get some more time with company to watch it. There is a trip to China in my future, could be this summer, if I can get the time off and the airlines are desperate for passengers, so far the prices I have seen are astronomical, and what would I expect for the Olympics and summer when oil is at record prices. Actually, maybe I will just look forward to spending the summer alone and for once sleep, not that this is a quiet neighborhood with the airplanes taking off every minutes, sometimes we have neighbors drunk, and other times there is the Harley setting off the car alarm, ahhhh.... I wish I had a countryside house for this weekend.
