July 16 2009 I don’t trust anyone’s cloud either. Screw it, I’ll run my own.
These days, pretty much everyone has their entire life online. Between Flickr and YouTube, plus other services like Google Docs and Gmail, everyone assumes there’s no reason to store anything offline anymore. But when some of the major players in the cloud computing space like Amazon S3, Google and Wordpress suffer downtime….more than once, it’s gotta make you wonder if the Internet-addicted public can deal with momentarily losing access to their precious data.
I spend a lot of hours online on a daily basis. Seeing as how I run an Internet Service Provider, it’s somewhat of a requirement I guess. Depsite this, I don’t use Google Docs, Flickr, YouTube or any of their clones to store my data online. I don’t recall ever making a conscious decision to stay away from them but never saw the need as it would mean that I have to login to umpteen different sites to access all of my data. If I keep it all on my workstation, with the magic of Remote Desktop and a broadband Internet connection, I can get to everything from just about anywhere.
But what about sharing the files with other people? Like sharing pictures of my kids with family? What about accessing my documents and Excel files without launching up my RDP client?
Instead of uploading all of my crap to all of these different sites online, I’ve decided to just setup my own dedicated server in our datacenter and run my own cloud. It’s pretty impractical for most people to do this, what with colocation space and server infrastructure being somewhat less of a commodity and all. But screw it….I’m not “most people”.
More to come later. I’ll do some homework on what apps/scripts I can use for Flickr-like functionality on my own server and post the results here for public consumption.
July 13 2009 Why does AT&T suck so badly
Ah, yes…the question of our time. Why does one of the largest and most recognizable brands of our time have the worst possible customer service and policies of anyone out there, and yet we STILL continue to give them our money. I run an Internet Service provider and we pay over $150k per year in service fees to AT&T for a multitude of services and still get treated like shit by all levels of customer service within their company. It’s insane and should be criminal.
Here’s what sparked this rant: I finally got fed-up with the fact that I pay over $50/month for each of my office telephone lines whereas I pay $26/month for the same exact calling plans & features on my home number. I decided to cut some costs and port all but one of our office telephone lines over to Broadvoice SIP trunks and just connect my Asterisk box up to them. The move will save me over $600/year for our company. I had to leave a single POTS line with AT&T so we could still have DSL service into our office for testing modems and for our 24×7 Torrent box.
After all of the lines being moved were ported to Broadvoice, I called to AT&T’s Business Customer service at the telephone number they list on my bill in-case I need to reach them. I was calling to get the additional calling features (Caller ID, Call forward, etc…) dropped since it’s only going to be used for the DSL connection riding on it.
Here’s what happened when I called; keep in-mind that I had my customer number and gave it to each person so it’s not like they don’t know who’s calling:
- The first person couldn’t find my account and said I must have dialed the wrong department so they transferred me somewhere else
- The second person said she found my account but it’s an ‘Industrial Account’ and she’s not authorized to help me, transferred again.
- The third person told me I’ll need to go into an AT&T retail store to make the change (What?! There’s no such thing as an AT&T ‘landline’ retail store)
- The fourth person told me I would need to e-mail my request into them: “I’m sorry sir but we don’t take orders over the phone for those changes.” My response: Are you fucking kidding me?! You’re a PHONE COMPANY!!
I gave up and decided to leave it for another day….or when I can delegate it to an employee to deal with. I wish there were a decent and affordable alternative to AT&T. NOW I see why the FTC (supposedly) trys to prevent monopolys from forming. Fucking christ…
June 06 2009 Leo Laporte, my new idol
What happens when egos get in the way of a productive conversation? This (watch video on YouTube): Mike Arrington had the balls to accuse Leo Laporte of being biased in his opinion of the new Palm Pre smartphone because Leo had a free trial unit and hadn’t paid for it, even though he was only going to have it for 7 days. Leo wasn’t going to take his shit and fired back at him. I’m a fairly new Leo Laporte fan but my guess is that they’ve had some run-ins in the past….the way the conversation/situation quickly exploded seemed to indicate there’s some backstory that I don’t know about. Check out the video at the YouTube link above….awesome.
I’ve always been skeptical about the reliability of product reviews by people whose livelihoods depend on the paid sponsors of their programs or publications but Leo isn’t getting paid to talk about how much he likes the Pre. This is in contrast to something like Kim Komando talking about how awesome Carbonite’s online backup service is during her show and then having a Carbonite commercial play during her breaks. Total crap….but this isn’t at all what Leo was doing with the Pre.
I first heard of Leo Laporte a few weeks ago when I happened to catch one of his terrestrial radio broadcasts that’s syndicated by a local station. Since then I’ve been listening to his podcasts from TWiT; the first I downloaded was with Dan Bricklin, the inventor of Visicalc as well as John C Dvorak (another of my idols). If you’ve never listened to TWiT, I’d recommend subscribing (www.twit.tv) or at least checking out his site for tons of good, unbiased info and industry news. I’ve worked in tech for almost 7 years but somehow completely missed TechTV and his previous shows.
Prior to stumbling across Leo Laporte’s broadcast I had previously thought that Kim Kommando Radio Program was the only significant syndicated tech-related show on terrestrial radio. I’m one of those people that absolutely can’t stand her show….thank god there’s Leo Laporte and his many guests to keep me informed of what’s going on in the industry.
Tags: Leo Laporte
June 06 2009 Finally, another ‘verb’ search engine
As you probably haven’t already heard, Microsoft announced a new product this week called ‘Bing‘ (www.bing.com) to compete with other services like Google search and Yahoo search. They’re not calling it a “search engine” per-se, they’re calling it a “decision engine”. While the concept seems like it’s on the right track, time will tell if it catches on with mainstream use.
On to my point though….
Everyone’s used the term “I’ll Google it” at some point in their lives but you rarely hear someone claim “I’ll Yahoo it” or “I’ll Live Search it.” I’ve always wondered why none of Google’s competitors ever caught on to the fact that the names of their search engines were all nouns and not verbs. Now-I’m not saying that Google’s insane level of success in dominating the search market is due to the fact that their name can be used as a verb. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that it doesn’t suck as badly as Yahoo and Live Search do.
Saying “I’ll Bing it” doesn’t seem to have the same catchy flow as saying “I’ll Google it” has. Chew on these examples and see if you agree:
I’m interviewing a potential employee and want to do some due-diligence: “I’ll Google Him” or “I’ll Bing Him” ….a little creepy sounding right?
“I know everything about horses, I Bing’d them”
May 28 2009 How to change the RDP Listening port in WinXP/2003
1. Start Registry Editor.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TerminalServer\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber
3. On the Edit menu, click Modify, and then click Decimal.
4. Type the new port number, and then click OK.
5. Quit Registry Editor.
March 31 2009 It’s April 1st and Where’s Conficker?
This new ‘Conficker’ worm is begging to be put into perspective, so here goes: It’s a hoax.
For the last few days I’ve been subjected to hearing just about every customer, talk-radio personality, tech blogger, and news anchor talking about it and expressing concern over it.
I’m betting there’s a doomsday-scenario freak somewhere at whatever tech security firm discovered the supposed ‘worm’ that blew the whole idea of this virus out of proportion and now everyone is paying the price for his paranioa.
Then again-I’ll gladly scan your computer for viruses (for a fee) and install antivirus software (for a fee) and even install security updates for your operating system (for a fee).
Maybe I shouldn’t complain…those ‘doomsday freaks’ are who keep geeks like me in a job.
Godspeed.
March 31 2009 Incompetent Sales Staff at Tech Stores
So, I was at my local office supply store today; I won’t name-names but it rhymes with ’shmaples’. I was casually strolling through the aisles looking for deals on some gadgets when I overheard the dialogue between a sales-staffer and a customer interested in buying a laptop.
The customer was asking the usual stuff like ‘Does this one have enough memory to stream videos on YouPorn’ and whatnot….you know, the usual. Then he asked another basic question: “Does this one have Bluetooth?”.
Simple, right? Everyone that has a cel-phone has at least a faint idea of what Bluetooth is…..right?! Especially for those of us who live in California.
NO-apparently the staffer (who had a prominently displayed ‘EasyTech Expert’ tag on her shirt) had no idea. Her answer? – “I’ve actually never seen a Bluetooth port before so I’m not sure what they look like. It’s got a monitor hook-up though.”
Now-in situations like these, I always try to not get involved…both for my own sanity and for the sake of embarrassing the salesperson (Side-note: My employees and I have been asked to leave this particular ‘office supply store’ a few times in the past because we were answering tech questions for their customers…ironic). In this case I couldn’t bear to let this poor guy continue the conversation with the salesperson without at least pointing out to her the obvious: “You know that Bluetooth is a wireless technology, so…by definition it doesn’t actually have a port.” Her answer: “Right”
Seriously – if you’re not qualified to give competent sales advice, get out of the computer aisle and go stack boxes of paper.
Tags: stupidity
