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.

View Larger Map