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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.