Bing and the glory days of Detroit

I rediscovered Cranky Geeks today. I actually managed to get away from my job this weekend, the one that goes on for more then 40hours a week, what a time drain. Anyhow I clicked on the Bing article in PC Mag and well written as it is the web version of PC mag with all its ads and ad links is very annoying, however some articles are good so I guess we tolerate it, until we read blogs, where you don't have as much junk. But who am I to complain, I ended up trying ads on my blogs, not that they produce, I have lots to learn. Still haven't fixed the Digg problem with this blog, my best article is still misdirected on Digg, which surely doesn't help me get diggs.

I used to hate writing stuff in school, I guess now that I have spell check and typing 2 things that I wasn't good at are not a problem anymore. However I still lack some more inspiration, but meanwhile I have gotten pretty familiar with the technology and am trying to get my dad to do his memoirs using some form of online distribution because it is free, fast and easy, however he insists on printing them on paper and mailing them, at a big expense. Seems rather silly to me, when you could actually make money blogging, mind you not much, however currently he spends money to print and mail these books out using Word, seems so 90s, this century blogging I was told is so 2006, twitting is in. Yet how do you get them to change their ways? I bet you he would hate it if he had to wait a year for my thing to get printed and mailed to him :P I have to wonder if this upcoming generation is even going to read books, schools may decide that the Kindle or OLPC is more cost effective.

I am reading Ripped this week, on paper, been a long time since I read on paper, other then the crap that fills my mailbox. Most everything is on screen now.

Cool video from the 1939 worlds fair on making a Chrysler.



After watching this video and some of the cool features of a '37 Plymouth, want to test drive one.


Interesting videos from a time when cars were interesting, now they are just a problem for us, we can't get cheap oil anymore and need something new, like maybe 240 Miles range all electric car that Build Your Dreams is making not in Detroit but China.

But these old videos are rather interesting to watch. Streamlining a car from the '30s.

SMS

Digg can difinitly find you cool stuff:
ProviderFormat
Sprint phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon phonenumber@vtext.com
T-Mobile phonenumber@tmomail.com
AT&T phonenumber@txt.att.net
AIM +1phonenumber
Thanks Popular Mechanics for this article. I do find it useful to send SMS from email.

I has been great to have 3 days off, unfortunately some of that was spent on taxes, they don't just cost money, they really do drain lots of time too.

Cartoonist wants work

Alberto is looking for work and asked me about this ad he is sending the ad agencies he is applying at. I keep wanting to start some start up with him, that is probably a good environment for him. Our first idea was DVD Exchange, but we didn't complete that one and 2 competitors sprung up. Anyhow if you need something call him before corporate America snaps him up.

This clock widget caught my eye on MrBagel, seems cool.

Apple tools

I have been using a Mac Book Pro for the past half a year, I thought cool when I got it, these are sure pretty, they don't crash as much as PCs do and are slick, pretty and expensive, so I was so happy when one fell into my lap a few jobs ago.  It has changed my OS and increased my ability to work anywhere.  They open and are ready for you, the are there you can really get hooked on these slick machines.  I got up really early today worried about a tax issue I have to resolve today, no good solution for it, but it does keep me awake to irritate the heck out of me that my time goes into this accounting BS, but I don't have people, I got to find people, people that can help me do things, and hopefully make my time more valuable doing other core functions, like a well paid job.  I did get a job offer today, a day late, but hey who cares, I really don't want to start anytime soon, but June 8 is my start day, I figure I will be taking this job, what do I have to loose.  It is a permanent position with benefits and a 401k, should make the wife happy, I was happy working for the startup doing clouds, but hey, you don't always get what yo want, especially when you enter in partnerships.

Meanwhile had to finished watching Glee, which is a real tear jerker and finally have a moment to myself where I can blog, but honestly, blogging is something I can't afford to do anymore, yet years later, it will be interesting to look back on this, if Google is still around and hasn't deleted my account.  I have ads to help them, I know it hardly helps me to have a blog, the income is still 0, couldn't reach the first $100 to get paid yet and I am not allowed to ask you my loyal readers to click on them, unless you really find them interesting, actually I am really not allowed to talk about this at all. After all, click fraud is a bad thing for Google's advertisers that pay real money for the ads, and me being a shareholder, I guess I do care about the reputation of the company I own, I didn't start this blog to make money on ads, lucky for me, because that model only works if you have some really good content and lots of viewers, which I clearly don't. I am only at 12,062 page impressions.

So I snuck away 2 paragraphs about personal stuff, when I was really trying to talk about Apple, geez.  My motivation when I started this post turned into personal dribble.

5.0 EarthQuake

Sure felt it, shaking with 1 after shock.

Apex AD-600A

Today I spent some time goofing off looking at all the hacking going on with DVD player Time magazine reports it was a mistake, but I am interested in this player because it is region less and someone was offering to sell it used. However I will probably pass on buying this used, would rather make my own with an old PC and Gentoo, I am mostly done with this, just got a power supply to put in there from Stephen during his moving out give away. It is a rather tall tower, with a bad processor, but if I am to leave this monster running 24/7, maybe not so bad it is not the fastest most power hungry machine out there. After all it can add $10/month to my electric bill not to turn a modern computer off, there is wake on Ethernet, but I have not played with that, I used to run a PII all the time at home as a mail server, and I am guessing that I could try that again. Gmail failed the other day, but not really the issue for me, just haven't played with my own server in a while. I am getting a TV tuner card, so that would be another reason to leave a computer on all the time so it can record shows at certain times and then play them back to me.

I have been thinking of building a media center/email PC for a while, only time keeps me from not doing it, now back to taxes. Amazon has one for a ridiculous price.

DSL sucks

So far I am not happy with the ATT DSL, seems it fails every so often, maybe more then the cable modem did, I may just return this during the first 30 days, I think they at least have a money back guarantee. I may however be enticed to keep the lower speed at $10/month, who cares if it fails sometimes, at that low speed, it doesn't matter I guess, but then again, maybe these days are just bad, I haven't called to ask about outages. I have to say that at the office it was 99.9% reliable, pretty good there, but at home, not.

I should setup a ping to find out exactly how often my service fails.
Raw bandwidth is usually OK, but it keeps failing for minutes at a time. However at

Connection Speed:
• Incoming: 3008 kbps
• Outgoing: 512 kbps

raw bandwidth is also less then advertised, I am possibly quitting, in the first 30 days.

To kill a mocking bird

I have been up since 3, not so much by the mockingbird, but by the noise it otherwise generated at home, I can ignore a bird singing, even if it is a loud song. I have been considering strapping the baby monitor to the tree. It is a little device that plays a heartbeat when it hears the baby cry, hope the mocking bird sound triggers it, however it may have some sort of voice recognition and ignore that sound.

Finally invoiced my last client, I am now going to work on personal projects. However may consider engagements closer to home. Commuting 2 hours a day is out.

Time at last

I am going to take some time to spend with family :)

Movies on my HD

Today Blockbuster offers me to download movies to my hard drive, sounds tempting but I shutter to think of the DRM and how it restricts me. DRM is too complicated and there is so much content out there without it, that why bother, costs Blockbuster to implement and me to use, wish we didn't have it. However I like the idea better then streaming how Netflix does it as I often got stuck in the middle of a movie. I just don't see it winning over the convenience of free content out there, encombered content is so much less usefull.

Top of the week

I can't believe how busy I have become lately, trying to juggle my job with staying home and telecommuting, have lost touch with friends that I used to dream about doing a startup with, then came a death threat and advice that I shouldn't be mixing with someone who was that competitive, oh well, TWIT 192 had Jason on, from Mahalo, wow, what a great episode, would make me want to do a startup now, he is great about sharing.

Yesterday BarCampLA7 was nice, to meet lots of people, didn't spend much time in the talks, however the command line talk, was about typing to the GUI, bad name, however learned about Launchy for XP which allows me to do something that Mac has on Apple-Space, Spotlight on Windows, great, SpotLight is great, but missing in Windows. Quicksilver which came before Spotlight was of course mentioned and I would like to use it on Gnome as well and Beagle (GNOME) does that too. The talk about the iPhone was great in that he was showing how to find the hidden APIs, says that you pretty much need them to make any cool apps.

I have been itching to put some stuff on a wiki that I can't reach, funny so what the heck, I can post everything here first. I have been working on cloud computing these days, EC2 is what we are targeting, however I will spend time as well looking at other clouds like Mosso, RackSpace, GoGrid, and Eucalyptus. Eric Hammond didn't think the last one fit the first ones, but I think they are all in the same space, just a question of how much work you do yourself and what you pay someone to do for you. Eucalyptus is probably cheaper and you can save money, but have to do much more work. I also am listening as I write this to FLOSS Weekly 67: Xen, which is at the core of many of these cloud computing platforms. Yesterday I want to TV's "cloud" talk, which he started out by saying that he didn't believe in clouds, that it was all hype, but clouds go beyond virtualization, it is Xen+Eucalyptus if you need some open source implementaitons to show you that there is more too it then VMware.

Got my own DSL now and loving it, since I haven't paid the first bill yet, I wanted to get work to pay for it, but haven't told them yet, oh well, at least as a telecommuter it is a tax deduction. So far this morning managed to stay away from family, and got to post a blogpost, but sun is up now and getting hungry.

CNBC on air

I got one of those coupon converter boxes, and am really pleased with the results, many more channels some of them are actually neat, then what I was getting on analog. I hate having another box taking space and using electricity 24/7, although sometimes I will cut power to all that area to protect the little fingers from exploring the wires in the area.

I sometimes watch Mad Money on iTunes, but it occurs to me that GE should put it on the air, since cable companies, that they have no skin in are universally hated in this area. Not sure why, anyhow, I bet lots of people would watch it and invest, which would help turn the market. They would get more advertising revenue since more would watch. Probably time to work on building out our own network, and kick TWC out of town, I just got DSL, since I can't get the cable company to give me a stable signal.

Yesterday my neighbor moved out, far away, kind of sad to say goodbye.

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