Bad net

One of the great things about using VoIP is that you realize how bad your internet connection is very quickly. I have been dropping calls and also have problems on the web. ATT isn't any better then TWC was, so could I get an IP address that was routed through both? I know I can't easily, but could I convince the other company to announce that route, not really, they don't own the IP and I am getting a DHCP issued IP address anyhow.

Lets build our own network for neighborhoods ask for a block of IPs and then be free of these providers. I don't see how this would be free, however my fair city is pulling fiber rightnow and going to offer WiFi soon, I hope.... Can't make any claims about what they will do with it yet. Can we run our own network? We being the general public. Who can you trust with your data? How do you do your banking when your neighbor is the man in the middle and can sniff all your packets? How much privacy do you loose when he sees all your JPEGs? Not that he should be seeing your traffic, but he could if he operates a router you are attached too. So can a tech in the NOC, however they have so much traffic that who cares, they don't have time to see your needle in a haystack.

A pretty compeling articule about FourSquare that made me want to try it out, will do so.

iPhone OS on Palm Pre

I am listening to Leo Laporte - The Tech Guy 571 and he is saying that the Pre and the iPhone 3Gs have the same exact chip set and processor. Wonder if you can put the software of one on the other, but wait the screens are different sizes, 3.1 vs. 3.5 and the Pre has a physical keyboard, guess there are differences and the OS would have to be modified to take the differences into account, but with all the Dell Mini 9's running OS X, I wonder if we will see Pri running iPhone OS on it? Maybe someday, would be a cool hack. The iPhone is more expensive, since the 2 year contract is more then Sprint, but you get a better network on ATT, however the Pre could run on Verizon, hmmm, more hacking. iPhone OS on Pre running on Verizon's network.

The Old Town Music Hall

The Old Town Music Hall is a hidden gem in El Segundo. An unusual old music hall, theater and it isn't over run so very nice night. Feel like going back with a good camera and taking some pictures.

Last LAMPsig meeting

I have decided I am at my last LAMPsig meeting today. No WiFi,
Solomon is about the only speaker to the group lately and I really
don't care about computer security or anything computer related as I
used too. I for the first time introduced myself as someone who used
to use computers and is now into childcare, given that I am on the
computer all the time still, and learning all kinds of new things,
because I do want to go back to work in October, I see less value
these days in physically networking with people as I did when I was
new to the area and not as used to SoCal. I am also much more pressed
for time these days, yet today I have been pretty busy blogging :)
Right now only because there is no WiFi :(

The talk is actually interesting though, getting the full Nessus feed
took Solomon 15 min. at the datacenter and seeing all the exploits in
one place is rather interesting. We had a pretty good discussion
afterwards about capture the flag and legal issues.

Spent some time at the Blue Butterfly talking about tech and Havanas
talking with the owner about a friend who is out of tech and not being
able to get in easily. I feel like I am risking the same thing by
spending time with the family, hope I can find a job in October,
really want an IT Dir job at Mattel.

Google Voice Slow on Saturday

Don't get me wrong, Google Voice is a great service that allows you to manage your phone calls in a web browser and gives you very granular control over where your calls go, but this weekend it is taking up to a few minutes to place a call on it, outgoing, I assume receiving hasn't been slowed yet, which is OK. I don't much use it for outgoing.

School writing assignments

I used to hate coming back from summer vacation to that inevitable assignment to write about your vacation, I never liked writing and my adsense only at $75.82 after posts spanning back to February 2007 confirm that the internet and the computer have made writing much easier abundant spelling and grammar checked, however there are still very few good writers, sadly I am not one of them. But this is kind of easy and I rather like doing this as I go along rather then after I retire like my dad did and found just as few readers as I did, so should we forget and not record our history? Maybe these are notes of things that I would like to remember, and believe me, this blog has suppressed memories, things I won't write about, but would rather forget.

$20 Per Gallon

How the Inevitalbe Rise in the price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better (Hardcover) is a pretty interesting book, I am currently reading, one of those from the library's new book rack, where I often find things that catch my attention, usually can't finish them, because something new will come up, who has time to read, now that I have DTV and lots of family obligations. I found the part about SUV buyers being insecure, vain, nervous about their marriages, unconforable about having become parents, little confidence in thier driving ability self-absorbed and narcissistic with little interest in thier communities and neighbors coming out of Detroit's carmackers expensive market research, wow. However the book does have a good premise and spins the rise of oil to all its positive asspects, and I guess that they do exist in that pollution and globalization will deminish. The main premise of consumption expanding and production getting more expesive is very convincing, so $20 is really going to happen, probably pretty soon as it also looks like we may have inflation helping at some point.
"Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization" and "A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World" are some other books on this issue of global change, the new economy will use more and more telecom, less moving of people and materials.

Lawn Mowers

It seems like every time I am on the phone there is a lawn mower in my ear here is the schedule so far:

Friday 12:20PM
Saturday 8:00AM
Monday 8:00AM

However there are many more.

Zune looses to DVDs

It is interesting that a rather cool sounding Zune didn't sell out for 24 hours on Woot, whereas I look less then half a day after the new Woot came out, 30 DVDs and they are sold! But I don't know how many Zunes they had, maybe an infinite number.

Google Index removal, Long Distance WiFi for Costa Rica

It is hard to find time to post, even harder to think what is something I can release that won't be bad for me in the future or lead to someone pwning me. Some people won't even use their name on the internet for fear that something they write could someday be used against them. On that subject I got a call yesterday from an old friend about removing his wife's name from Google, seems like she was associated to the Orange Team in some post at UT SW that got blogged and I have no idea why this was so bad, but so far he managed to get the blogger to remove the name, but Google had not crawled the page again yet, the last time they did was June, and since it is July he was getting very antsy about it. So after an hour of googling I found how to do it, Webpage removal request tool.

I also got a call from Costa Rica about getting satillite internet, seems lame so I asked how far from wired internet, 4 Km, hmmm... NanoStation2 was my answer to that one. I then went to look for my content in http://socalwifi.net/ and found it down :( Seems there are attacks on the server and the admin is trying to resolve the DOS. Intel has an interesting claim of more then 60 miles on WiFi. But a Loco is probably enough for 4 miles, so why keep looking.

So I skype this all back to Mark, but he has been MIA since I tried to get this info back to him, geez:
This guys are pretty awsome: http://www.wlanparts.com/ they used to have monthly meetings about WiFi.

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/MUM_2006_USA/Long_range

We're going to try something new tonight, and plan on streaming this
presentation live. Thanks to Israel's kind offer to attempt this
previously unheard of technological feat, if you really can't make it
to OC you should be able to watch this presentation on
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/uuasc . Since this is our first attempt
at this, you should probably attend in person if possible. If you
watch it on the stream, please post some feedback to the mailing list,
especially if you'd like to see us continue to do this.


Tonight's meeting in Orange County will feature two individuals from
Engineers Without Borders: Orange County Professionals (EWB-OC);
Israel Lopez & Chris Healy will be speaking to us about their recent
trip to Honduras where they are setting up a wireless network for an
educational system called "Olancho Aid". They will give an overview of
the project and explain how they will be using 802.11a/g to distribute
the internet access to two other schools, how Linux is involved in the
management of the network, and how Linux might be used on the student
desktop. Also, they have implemented a small Asterisk server to save
the school communication costs between buildings, a real savings of
over $200 USD a month, where the average salary is $400 USD.

They intend to use their experience with Olancho Aid as a sustainable
technology model that can be 'copied-and-pasted' to other education
systems in Honduras. Once a successful implementation is in place,
they hope to build up the local community's technology skill-set as a
way to uplift the community out of poverty.

Israel Lopez owns a small webhosting business; Sandbox IT Solutions
LLC, he also is the Vice President of Internal Affairs for EWB-OC, and
is the Technology Lead for the Honduras project.
RalfX
Pending
I didn't make it to the talk but http://vimeo.com/5587796
RalfX
Pending
Thank you for attending the meeting tonight online & in person. I have to apologize for the online broadcast, the technology & setup was there, the bandwidth was not. So we could use some more suggestions on how to get better bandwidth & UUASC-OC next time. We hope to continue these broadcasts, as we will be getting better and better at putting them on.

As promised tonight the slides are available here: http://ilopez.com/temp/UUASC-Talk.pdf
Including a video short summary that was missed in the presentation: http://vimeo.com/5587796. I will have the whole presentation uploaded to Vimeo soon, it is being transcoded from AVCHD into WMV HD (720p). Hope to get that converted successfully and uploaded soon.

I hope everyone had a great time, hope to give you guys an update after we get back in December!

Again our website is http://ewb-oc.org/olancho and if you have any questions feel free to email me directly.

up all night

I got awoken a bit late last night and been up since. I guess not having dinner, late lunch made me restless, or is it the heat? Had some video conferences with a chap I met in Dublin, and he sends me a night camera link, lol. I could have turned on the light, but was playing with Stikcam which is pretty cool, albeit very slow, but hey maybe there were just many of me up all night.

Was looking at moving to Costa Rica, the happiest country on earth according to the Happy Planet Index. US way at the bottom, geez, what a mistake to move here. However reading the fine print shows us that

The nations that top the Index aren’t the happiest places in the world, but the nations that score well show that achieving, long, happy lives without over-stretching the planet’s resources is possible.

So maybe this place is just over-stretching the planet's resources. Which I guess will get corrected in this depression. So perhaps this isn't hell after all, just the center of global warming, but if oil can be expensive enough, maybe it can freeze over. Anyhow I have been looking at alternatives to all the mindless consumption here, last night I tried to turn off all electronic equipment, but that didn't last very long. I did however write on paper for the first time in a long time, my handwriting sucks. Trying very hard to get an IT Manager job at Mattel 2 miles from home, which would be great for my time and pollution. Been trying to cut down on diapers and stuff at home, so I don't need a bigger place. I even used to separate trash and compost when it made sense, but here I can't use the green stuff.

Yet I live in this industrial complex that may kill us all, the refinery just released loads of ammonia gas and the airport and sewage plant can't be good for my health either. I really am thinking of moving somewhere else.

Follow me, MythTV, COS

So I now follow my own blog, funny, but I wanted to see how this works and maybe not have 0 followers, I can remove myself someday, meanwhile you can follow me on the left, just like on Twitter. Not sure what it gets you, but I am following some blogs myself and decided to see if I got followers.

So I also setup Mythbuntu with a pcHDTV HD-3000 to watch ATSC TV on my computer, well, I have a 42" screen that I want to have a tuner for and a PVR would be great as well. It works, after weeks of tweeking, it works, but is still unwatchable, now I need a faster PC to use this on.

So every time Google does something that encroaches on the Windows turf, people get excited that some major company might finally bring Linux to the desktop, or the netbook. A Google NetBook would serve them well, and we don't need to pay the MS tax to get online :)