LA Drupal

Last Tuesday of the month is LA Drupal in Venice California, which I have been going to every meeting, since it is such a dynamic group. Charles Charton, does an excellent job of exciting the group about Drupal being a product like RedHat, getting the crowd to contribute, but the meeting is free as will be Drupal Camp, but still it would be more then welcome if someone were to contribute to a panel they need, if they don’t have time to write it themselves, Drupal 6 has some panels that need to be finished and if you need it for your project, why not encourage the developer, remember how the beer prizes worked? Money is probably just as good. So September 13^th Drupal Camp starts and next spring might be Drupal Con in LA. The speaker works at Fox and designed the site for remhq.com, a rock band, pretty cool stuff, with aggregated Twitter messages, videos and blogs, so the home page aggregates all the data. All the tour dates are taxonomy terms, each of the videos, tweets and blogs are nodes. People can upload the content to all of the websites they already use like Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and tag it with the concert, that way it will be on the right date. Great presentation, from Blake, but the networking break was great, I am trying to get Charles Charlton to talk with John O’connor our LiLAX president to figure out what to do on September 13, which is in contention right now as to what to do at LiLAX. After the intro of the REM web page, we got a whole overview of how to make our own website, cool stuff.

I also saw that Lion YouTube on NBC this morning, very touching, watch it, if you want to get all weepy.

So I discovered that the crap in this post came from using Word, when I wasn't connected to the internet, decided to type it into something with spelling checking, so Notepad wouldn't work.

dreams

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.

I was really impressed with the great condition of this 1957 record cutting machine with a radio and a mic. So you could cut your record off the air, AM radio or from a live band, kind of amazing technology. I have to say that the sound quality of the recordings was first rate, perhaps better then some current technology, wonder if I can hear the limits of digital and transistors. It had a quality I haven't heard in a while. Not a bad deal for $250, but alas, what would I do with this?

Socal Python Piggies

Long carpool from work brought Abhi, Stephen and me to the lovely town of Pasadina, where we found street parking right across the street from Caltek, and proceeded to walk a short distance to room 101 in K...?? whatever, the meeting was great, there was talk about some software that finds duplicates really fast using NginX connected to Quixote.

Clint Bidlack: "Using Nginx with multiple Quixote servers via WSGI"; Grig Gheorghiu: "Encrypted backups to Amazon S3 using boto and duplicity"

Socal Python Piggies was worth the long carpool.

LAX

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.

aging changes

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.

We are measuring and moving soon. Too much to do.

Uverse?

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.

Compressed air

fixes a mac mouse scroll, which I assume was full of dead skin or dust as it is also known.