09.18.05
Posted in amuse, life at 3:34 pm by mridley
I recently moved into my new place, and I didn’t have a telephone. I have a telephone line, just not a telephone. I use Broadvoice VOIP service for my home phone number. It seems to work pretty well, although I had some dropouts when I used it at my last place but I think that may be due to the fact that broadvoice uses a pretty high bandwidth codec by default and there may have been issues with the shared nature of the cable modem connection I had.
Anyway, when I moved into my new place I didn’t have an actual telephone. My roomate was nice enough to loan me an old phone that he had. It worked fine, but unfortunately the ringer was broken so I couldn’t tell if people were calling me.
I was over at an associate’s place last night drinking, and one of his friends was there who I hadn’t met before. For some reason he had a van full of electronics for sale. I’m not sure why. But it just so happened that he had phones for sale, and I needed one, so I bought a new phone for $10 out of the back of this guy’s van. I’m not sure what kind of phone it is. It doesn’t have a brand on it, but it’s a two-line corded phone with speaker-phone, caller-id, and it looks like it has a built-in calculator although I don’t have batteries for it yet so I don’t know exactly how that works. It does say on the bottom that it was made in China, but I don’t suppose that narrows it down much since most telephones are probably made in China.
I guess not a bad deal for ten bucks. Out of the back of some guy’s van.
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09.16.05
Posted in life at 7:06 pm by mridley
I had a bizzare dream the other day. I had listened to the PodShow jobcast where the PodShow head honchos were talking about the kind of talent they’re looking to hire. I figure there could probably be a role for me there, and I do miss working at a startup, but I don’t think I’m going to be moving back to California until after I make my millions, not before. Still, listening to the podcast got me thinking.
So then I went to bed that night, and had this bizzare dream that I was hanging out with Adam Curry and he was trying to convince me to go work there, since they’re having all these weird infrastructure problems (DNS, etc.) and of course I have experience setting up tech infrastructure for fast growing companies (like, for example, the original Napster).
But yeah..I don’t think I’m moving back to California any time soon, unless it’s for a lot of money. I do miss working for small exciting companies though.
Tags: Podshow, Dreams
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Posted in politics at 6:47 pm by mridley
I was listening to President Bush’s national address last night about plans to rebuild New Orleans. It sounded like a relatively good plan to me, in the abstract. I guess we’ll see how it plays out. If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have picked this president to revive the New Deal and create his own TVA.
I wonder if the liberal Bush opponents recognize that his plan to rebuild the gulf coast is a page out of the playbook of FDR.
Tags: Bush, Katrina
Related:
http://www.katrinaquarters.com/blog/2005/09/president_discusses_hurricane.html
http://www.hayz.ws/blog/index.php?p=1781
http://rncnyc2004.blogspot.com/2005/09/president-addresses-nation-video.html
http://www.fatmixx.com/2005/09/16/newspaper-reaction-to-bush-speech/
http://prestoagitato.typepad.com/presto_agitato/2005/09/media_hell.html
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Posted in tech at 6:31 pm by mridley
There are a lot of great tools, such as Google Desktop Search, helping us manage the glut of information on our computers. One vector of information organization that seems to get less attention is temporal organization. Finding content based on keywords of folder organization is important, of course, but sometimes I want to know all the web sites/files/e-mails I read/wrote/accessed on a certain day, or time, or period of time.
I’d love to see that capability showing up in the personal search and organizations tools.
Tags: Google, Search, Organization
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09.14.05
Posted in tech at 8:49 pm by mridley
I don’t own a Slingbox. Yet. I’m thinking about it though. The device hooks up to your home television and allows you to view television content on a PC running Windows XP which has their software installed. Whether that PC is in your house, or across the world. The reviews I’ve read have all been quite positive.
When I first heard about the device, I didn’t really get the point. But I’m seeing how it could be a handy thing to have. There are some features they could add which would move it from the “maybe” into the “very probably” purchase category.
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Posted in tech at 8:39 pm by mridley
I’ve been watching several IPTV programs lately. I’ve caught the past couple episodes of diggnation and I watched the first episode of Robert X Cringley’s NerdTV as well. I just went to the NerdTV site and noticed episode #2 is out, so I’m downloading that now via bittorrent. I’ve also started watching rocketboom on occaision as well.
Aside from the fact that I know you are all fascinated by my media consumption habits, I mention this because it seems to me that IPTV is finally moving from “alpha” to “beta” stage.
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09.12.05
Posted in life, tech at 7:59 pm by mridley
As I have written, I have Speakeasy DSL service at home. It’s somewhat faster than the competing DSL offerings from Verizon, etc. but fairly pricey at the same time. I chose Speakeasy not so much for the added speed (at some point it doesn’t make all that much difference), but more for their reputation as being a more technically savvy ISP and I liked the static IPs and lack of port filtering.
Since my DSL was activated about a month or 6 weeks ago, I have had pretty flakey connectivity. When my DSL was working, it was great- super speedy. But for some reason it was dropping out a lot. I had opened a ticket online with Speakeasy and they checked the DSLAM port but couldn’t find any problems, so they suggested I call in when I was experiencing trouble and they’d be better able to troubleshoot the problem. I put off doing that cuz…well, I’m a procrastinator. But finally it became unbearable, so Friday night I called Speakeasy tech support.
I was a little frustrated that I am paying a fairly substantial amount of money for Internet service that isn’t..well..working. But, my tech support call experience reminded me why I am paying the extra money. Fantastic support. It’s so refreshing to speak to tech support personnel who actually know what they’re talking about and have access to tools to actually fix things. It turns out that my house is a little farther from the CO than their database provided by the ILEC had indicated and so there were a lot of errors on the line. The tech support person was able to set my line into “safe mode” which apparently increases the latency on the line and reduces errors. Sure enough, once he had set the line to “safe mode” it came back up and has been quite stable for the past several days.
The downside is that the download speed is decreased, so I’m getting about 3.3 Mbps down now, but really that’s fine. As long as it’s stable I’m happy with 3.3 Mbps. Anyway the point of this is just that there are so many gripes about tech support, I thought it would be nice to recognize good quality tech support when you get it. And I definitely did with Speakeasy.
Tags: Speakeasy, DSL
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09.10.05
Posted in life at 7:07 pm by mridley
In case anyone has any burning desire to send me super secret documents or e-mail, I have posted my public key. I now expect a deluge of secret and intriguing encrypted discourse. Problably not.
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09.08.05
Posted in life, tech at 1:42 pm by mridley
Back in the 1980’s and up until the late 1990’s I used to read a fair number of tech/computing magazines. Some of my favorites were Byte, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and for lighter reading PC Magazine. As the commercial web took over, I have stopped reading so many paper tech magazines becuase I get a lot of my news and information from web sites. Aside from the fact that most web content is free, it’s also far more timely than waiting for a paper edition to come out.
That doesn’t mean I don’t read magazines, however. I read a ton of magazines. Last night I was over at the super market looking at the magazines they had because I wanted some light reading to take over to Starbucks to relax for a little while. I ended up picking up Laptop Magazine. I’ve never read this periodical before, but I was attracted to it because the cover story was a review of several smartphones and I want to learn more about smartphones. I didn’t have high expectations for the magazine beyond that.
It won me over, however. Two thumbs up! While the title of the magazine is “Laptop”, they actually cover a range of mobile computing and technology subjects from portable XM satellite radios to GPS devices to..yes..laptops. I’m actually thinking about subscribing. Sure, you can get all their content online, but sometimes it’s nice to have a stack of paper to take to Starbucks.
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Posted in politics at 1:22 pm by mridley
I was listening to a news report today and one US congressman made the statement that he’d like to see a “czar” appointed to lead the investigation into the problems surrounding government response to hurricane Katrina. That got me thinking- where did this use of the word “czar” come from? I know we’ve had it for some time. We call the head of anti-drug enforcement the “drug czar”. But why? We are a democratic federal republic, not a czarist monoarchy.
And what about the heads of federal programs who don’t get to be czars? I would think they’d feel left out. Are we going to see a press release by the head of the FDA informing us that he is now the “Emperor of Food”? Ponderous.
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