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December 31, 2003
Painful leaving, on to the next year
This year I saw some things go that I wished I didn't. And some I am glad are gone.
DahlinSmithWhite, one of the first ad agencies to focus on the high-tech industry, and one of my first jobs, closed (well, their parent company, EURO RSCG, closed DSW, which was their SLC office). I worked for DSW as an intern (programming FoxPro) in 1991. I loved working there. I got hired back in 1993 full-time (again as a FoxPro programmer, though I never did write another FoxPro program--I brought the Internet with me). Even now, if DSW were to offer me a job, I'd seriously consider it (well, until they closed), because I have such great memories. DSW first exposed me to my weakness for being a workaholic. Just couldn't get enough hours in. It's personally sad to see them go, and a tough break for the state. DSW was an icon in Utah. (Remember "Intel Inside"--that was developed by the W in DSW, and was their first big win--the Intel account).
Governor Leavitt left for the EPA. I've worked with him, in a rather indirect way, since I started at UEN in 2001. But I think the new Governor will be good to work with, and will make Leavitt's absence less-noticeable.
Qwerks, a company I helped start in 1998-ish, was bought this fall by Digital River. This was quite a surprise, since I'd kind of written off any hope of my ownership being worth anything.
We almost got ATM out of the UEN network, shy by only 6 months or so. We sure tried hard. I haven't heard anyone complain yet that they miss it.
I tried really hard to make my life Windows-free, or at least less Windows-dependent. You don't know how much you need something until you try to live without it. That's on the to-do list for next year.
I missed John McQuillan's farewell speech at NGN. Listening to it recorded on CD just isn't the same (especially since I already know it happened).
I'm sure there are more traumatic events that happened this year, but this off-the-cuff list covers the most significant (at least that I can remember now).
The new year has a starting chance already.
Posted by pete at 11:15 AM
December 21, 2003
It's a Christmas blizzard at DQ
Dairy Queen is making this Christmas a special one.
Run, don't walk, to the nearest DQ to get yourself a peppermint blizzard laced with tons of dark chocolate chips. I tried it Saturday, it was awesome.
I hope to make this treat a significant part of this Christmas season. You should, too.
Posted by pete at 3:57 PM | Comments (1)
December 17, 2003
Went to the beach today
It was cold. Very cold. Didn't stop me from getting in the water.
Lots of vintage planes flying overhead in formation to commemorate 100 years since the first powered flight by the Wright brothers.
Posted by pete at 11:32 PM | Comments (1)
December 14, 2003
Neighboorhood sniffing II
Got to Los Angeles this afternoon, after a great night's sleep at the $35/night Casablanca Motor Lodge.
Spent the afternoon with my brother Dave and his family, who moved to Burbank a few months ago. They're on a "temporary" assignment for 6-36 months for his company, working on construction projects in the L.A. area. They decided to go wireless for their home phone, and haven't figured how to get connected to the Internet (Cingular, their phone company, wasn't very helpful in finding a way to use their cell phone for an Internet connection, and at 14.4kb/s, it wouldn't be very productive anyways).
Remembering my residential connection-finding experience from June at another sibling's apartment, I popped open my laptop, and sure enough, the invitation to form a "default" Wi-Fi connection to the Internet came right up. And with 4 out of 5 bars strength. Assigned me a NAT'd DHCP address without even asking (well, I didn't ask, I have no idea what my computer may or may not have done without my prompting).
So we ordered Dave a 802.11b PCI card for his home computer. When that arrives in a week or so, they'll be back on-line courtesy the default neighborhood network.
Dave's comment: wireless is awesome--when more people get connected to the Internet with wireless, more of their neighbors get Internet for free.
Posted by pete at 9:22 PM | Comments (2)
December 13, 2003
Screamin hotel deal in Mesquite
We're driving to Disneyland today. We weren't sure what time we'd be leaving, so we decided to find a hotel on the way. That's always a fun driving activity, but much easier with CDMA Internet access in the car.
Decided to stay in Mesquite, Nevada. Not a ton of hotels there, but I figured I could find something. Biggest drawback is paying normal rates for a hotel but having to stay in a casino hotel.
So I was pleasantly surprised to come across this. One-bedroom apartment-style hotel rooms ("motorlodge" is what they call them), away from the casino (though you still have to go there to register), for only $25-35/night. They are clean, well-maintained, and pretty comfortable. Room for 4 to sleep (2 couples). A full kitchen and living room (with sofa sleeper), and a separate bedroom. A walk-in closet, even.
We'll keep those in mind for future trips where we need to stop overnight on our way south.
Posted by pete at 11:49 PM
December 12, 2003
Oh the (security) irony
The most prominent security event of the year, the World Summit on Information Security. Everyone who's anyone and has an interest in managing information securely.
The process is almost hilarious. Though there was obviously some thought given to ensuring only the right people got into the conference (letter of invitation, registration number), those practices apparently were not adhered to. So with some very basic social engineering (getting the name of a scheduled attendee from the WSIS web site and creating a fake ID from it), registration was a breeze.
The conference hackers were also able to compromise the physical screening system (which included metal detectors, Xrays and military guards) by arriving at the summit two days early, when there was no security and anyone could carry in anything they wanted.
You'd think...
Posted by pete at 10:36 AM
December 11, 2003
UTOPIA: only wishful thinking?
There's been a lot of talk about UTOPIA recently.
There's definitely a lot more interest in the last few weeks, since UTOPIA let member cities know that they would need to underwrite the construction bonds. In the past, UTOPIA had promised cities that they would not be required to guarantee the bonds. Now that cities are being asked to put skin in the game, they are (rightly so) much more interested in kicking the tires and looking under the hood. No word yet on what other cities think, but Salt Lake City doesn't seem very positive about the responsibility. I suspect many other cities are looking at Salt Lake as the deciding vote.
Should be an interesting next couple of months as this issue comes to vote in over a dozen cities around the state. I hope that the dialogue will continue, regardless of how the cities decide to proceed.
Posted by pete at 8:33 PM
December 10, 2003
Zero-sum dinner
Today the kitchen was being painted, so on the way to the gym, we stopped at McDonalds for dinner. A zero-sum dinner. I'm pretty sure I worked off enough to make it equivalent to a normal dinner.
I noticed that the new "white-meat" nuggets have ... white meat. Though I'm curious exactly in what part of the chicken that meat originates. It must be some breed of chicken I've never eaten, because I'm not familiar with that particular kind of white chicken meat. Either that, or the FDA has a more liberal definition of chicken than I do.
Regardless, the only difference I could see is that the brown spongey stuff in the middle has been replaced with (possibly more "healthy") white spongey stuff.
Posted by pete at 9:39 PM
December 9, 2003
Everyone should move once in a while
It's been a hectic week already. We're painting the house this week. More precisely, we're paying someone to paint the house. That only makes the experience more accute in the moving-stuff-around category.
Last night it was reminiscing as I dug through old receipts, about the places we had been when we spent that money. Old business cards from people I still know, who worked at companies that don't exist anymore (including a few of my own).
Tonight we had to move the big furniture. As we did, all of these ideas started popping up of how we could relocate, consolidate, renovate. Could we put the bookshelf downstairs and move that table into the alcove where we could finally plug that light in? How about a hutch with a glass cabinet on top and a desk for writing in the kitchen? Wow, there's really a lot of room with that moved out.
None of these ideas required a major move to see the possibilities. But without being required to change things, we just never had even thought about how things might be different. As soon as things are stirred around, some of the changes just become more obvious, and you're in a mood to think about changing things anyways.
Seems like a good thing to move things from their normal places once in a while, if only to see what happens with the change.
Posted by pete at 11:59 PM
December 6, 2003
What a relief
Today I spent the day (well, 8 hours of it) finishing one of the longest projects I've ever worked on. This was one of those projects that just lingers and takes on a life of it's own. We called it LANout, because at the time it was named (2 years ago), we were doing several other projects called "something"-out.
It's amazing how such an apparently simple project can turn out to be so much work. We were just re-organizing routing within our building network, and adding a new firewall. But that took 6 people nearly 250 man-hours by my calculation. Almost haf of that time was spent planning the project. It only took 8 or so hours to implement, and went well due mostly to all the preparation.
Good to get this out of the way. It had become the project everyone just wanted to get finished, just so we could move on to other things. Finally, we can.
Posted by pete at 6:09 PM
December 3, 2003
Working together ... 2388 miles apart
Mike got his iSight yesterday. Today we tried it out and got excellent full-screen video. Probably helps that we're both on Internet2, though I suspect it'll work about as well from home.
We decided to work together today. Since we live so far apart, we don't get to see each other often (only a couple of times a year), and the time is way too precious to spend on something like working (though we do get some recreational computing time in). We've both worked in the I.T. industry our whole professional careers, but never together. Until today.
It wasn't quite the same as being together in person. But the iSight video is reasonably good enough, and the audio is as good as any high-quality speakerphone I've ever used. After you get over the technology (i.e. talking to your computer screen), it feels pretty close to being in-person.
It was a bit weird, but not much more than if Mike came to work with me in person. After we thoroughly tested iSight, we settled down to our normal work routine, except that we had to introduce anyone that came into our offices. That did cause a few odd stares. But most people seemed to think it was pretty cool.
I look forward to spending more time with Mike, even if it isn't the real thing.
Posted by pete at 4:34 PM
December 1, 2003
Student-supported file-sharing
Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, on a whim I ran a few queries on eDonkey and LimeWire, two of the most popular file-sharing programs. I was searching on popular software titles, searches I've run in the past to see how widely available those packages are (for research purposes).
I noticed that where in the past, these searches had turned up dozens of well-connected machines hosting the download, they returned few or no results on the day before Thanksgiving.
This is by no means scientific, just an anecdotal observation. It would be an interesting study to track file-sharing networks for some popular titles (movies, music, software) and see how availability of those relates to the class schedules of well-connected college campuses.
Posted by pete at 8:25 AM