Shoes from China

I have agreed to purchase some shoes from a vendor in China. The check is in the mail, as soon as the bank holiday is over I intend to cash it and the money will be delivered via Western Union. I hope there's nothing illegal about this, it feels somehow scandalous in my experience! Think about cleaning houses...

My favorite house was the one which contained so much dirt beneath the rugs, I was nearly certain that I had begun pulling up foundation from beneath the floorboards! I pulled quite easily 10 bags of hair, dirt and sand from beneath an area rug no bigger than an 10x10' area! The family owned a Dyson if I remember correctly, and the maiden of the house was so happy with her previous purchase that I didn't have the heart to sell her another vacuum cleaner that I knew she wouldn't use anyway.

As I was saying before, when you clean your house, you want to finish at the end of the day and have a clean house! It's not like weeding a garden, especially if you've planted something from seed and you don't know what to expect the sprouts to look like. I have to familiarize myself with the appearance of Zucchini, Lavender, Catnip, Eggplant, Spinach, Tomato, and one other plant whose name escapes me. If I fail, I risk pulling the very seeds I wish to sow! Then what will these animals eat?

More notes on immigration reform soon.

Yours truly,
Kingdon

Some things are Not The Same

Running a Nursing Home is not really anything like Waste Management, and I hope you all know how serious I am about this! Also immigration reform is not like gardening, is not like cleaning a house. It's another issue altogether.

Rather than starting in the middle, lets discuss the area in which I have the most experience. Cleaning a house! Actually I was only in this line of work for one week, but it was a high-paying week! I worked for the Kirby Company going door to door, to see if anyone wanted a free cleaning service and maybe buy a vacuum when I was finished. The only customers I made were my parents and grandmother, who each bought Kirby Cleaning Machines for their homes.

Still I did convince a number of people, at least 4 home owners, to invite me inside of their home and I wish I had kept a diary of my experiences. I met some very interesting characters in a week's time! But certainly nothing like the excitement of Monday morning in China!

Breaking news, I will be with you shortly after the completion of a business deal.

Morning Activities

Today, yoga and the mac. I can sacrifice my second monitor from the office, it's kind of fuzzy anyway and would make a much better TV in the main room.

Lets see if I can hook up the cable modem via USB to the mac, and set it up as a router... yeah, on second thought lets not do that. It could be a good idea. But then I might still might need to hook up another hub or router in lieu of just the Airport Express.

We're going to need a hub one way or another, unless I get another Mac Mini or hook it up with wireless. I do have that spare wireless card at Tuesday Studios...

Next option for something to do is to move Blackruby to the home office, and made it into a server/router combination. I want to make one machine responsible for the VPN, so the rest can just auto configure by means of DHCP and be "on the network" as if connected directly to the main office LAN. The future is hazy with regard to how this is actually going to fall together.

Current location: Home Office
Next stop: Tuesday Studios Main Office

Outbox:

• Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop LiveCD

Inbox:

• Wireless MiniPCI Dell TrueMobile 1150
• 2 More Monitors (from Warsaw: for BlackRuby Primary Head, Notebah x2 Heads)
• Internet Stealing Device (from Waterloo)
• VPN Link (from Home to Tuesday)


• Secure Remote Access

That is all, until later.

Essential Network Services

OK been living without things I once considered to be critical network services for well over a week at this point, now it's time for a state of the network address:

• Revision Control SVN: UP
• RAID5 Samba Shares: DOWN
• LVM Samba Shares: DOWN
• Futuristic Video Portal: UP
• Mac Mini VPN Router: DOWN
  

Called out a raindance on my facebook Posted Items, and I've got my umbrella shared in Google Reader. Thanks for all of the websites!

• RSS Workspace: UP
  
• Rain on Garden: UP

• Headphones: OK

The headphones are actually still chilling in main office with the broken keyboard. I want to get a Chat50 for my home, the headphones are goofy looking.

In the office: three machines are up and running on a production basis: Sheng, Hobo11, and Grandma. Grandma is the new router, and Whiteruby is in pieces scattered across the floor. Blackruby is similarly disconnected, both have no apparent purpose and will make fine workstations. Akhira is not booting for reasons still unknown, and the Indigo2 is chilling in the corner, working just fine but nobody knows the password to see what it's doing.

VMWare Server is still down, on account of the SAMBA breakage has taken out access to all of the Virtual Machine images.

Subversion is back up and running, and we have bypassed LAMP. Hobo11 is the primary Apache Server for now.

Tomorrow, install Ubuntu on Blackruby and see how much space we can muster across a VPN, and how much data we can recover onto reliable disks. Hopefully Wednesday has not lost anything permanently!

Quantum Physics Proofs

OK! We've really done it now! And with nothing more than a standard memory machine!

We've had quantum principles demonstrated, including superposition, heisenberg's uncertainty principle, at least three partial entanglements and a fully valid prediction of one other complete entanglement.

With both willing and unwilling suspensions of belief and disbelief, I wonder if it's alright I skip breakfast today? Commencement ceremonies for graduation of the Golisano College Computer Science Class of 2007 kick off at 12:00 in the RIT Field House today! And also three spots at breakfast have been reserved at The Radisson on Jefferson in my name, which I may not attend if I still have my own free will after last night.

This information should be helpful to anyone who is starving. I do have another valid ID for you if it comes down to that.

Language Learning Resources

Looks like language learners with internet connections who are nearly ready to sever ties with their universities are in luck this week! There are a plethora of language learning resources online. Here is a brief overview of the services I am currently aware of, with an emphasis on services providing syndicated, iPod formatted content.

• ChinesePod - Mandarin Chinese on Your Terms (Praxis Language)
  
• SpanishSense - Spanish Lessons also from the Praxis Team
• On Demand English - Business English updated Daily
  
• JapanesePod101 - Free Daily Podcasts
  
• ArabicPod - New Episodes about weekly
  
• LearnItalianPod
• Brazilian Portuguese Podcast
• FrenchPodClass
• MyDailyPhrase - German
  

Unfortunately I don't have the mental capacity to study all of these languages at once. If anyone has used these services, please feel free to contribute a review. In my experience I have found ChinesePod to have the most advanced framework for any language learning podcast.

I had an idea for a daily feature on my blog, where I sit down and explore the web with an emphasis on a particular language. I could fill a week worth of time easily just searching for audio and video content and content providers, and general information about podcasting and iPod-type devices, in a new language every day. It would certainly be helpful to language program coordinators to have an idea of what kind of valuable free content is available to the students of each language. To be specific, I'm trying to improve this page:

• Foreign Language Technology Center at RIT

However, that's going to be a lot of work, and I'm not sure I fit into the budget, nor do I have access to the source code. In the mean time I'll just focus on ArabicPod. So far I like the Praxis suite and ChinesePod content the best, and in lieu of building some kind of direct partnership between Praxis and ArabicPod, I think the best thing that I can do with my skills is to start using ArabicPod, try to contribute something of value on the podcast forums, and to help add new features as opportunities present themselves.

English Vocabulary Lesson

Computer scientists talk about scripting, where computer scientists and film afficionados both are responsible for producing, reviewing and handling scripts. A film maker is like a programmer. I wonder what else we can do with a script?

• conscription - involuntary labor demanded by some established authority.
• orders - something a conscript or conscripted person would receive from the authorities.
• transcription - something written, especially copied from one medium to another, as a typewritten version of dictation.
• prescription - instruction or direction delivered before, as authoritative rules, codes, or orders.
• proscribe - to prohibit, condemn, forbid, command against.

Most cultures proscribe stealing. Some people equate piracy with theft. Some laws and practices place a value on things with no unique identity as an object. Calculus is required to quantify value in such a situation and logically explain this phenomenon.

Outer Space Wedding

I think it would be nice to be married in outer space. That is to say, if I was getting married tomorrow, I would prefer it to be in outer space. The ceremony. And I suspect that only one man can truly understand what I've just gone through. FYI I would bet that his name is probably not Takeshi Kitano. If I was a gambling man. Still.

Now can I Wordpress? I mean, now can I pleeeease Wordpress?

• Word
• Yes

1. What now?

Recipe for Disaster or A Chicken Allergy?

So I've either derived the official Recipe for Disaster, or perhaps I've developed some sort of allergic reaction to Chicken? Anyone who was at the last Wednesday Eve should be able to vouch for me here. It's actually not very good, when you do it backwards like that!

So far my ability to consume Beef has not been affected.

Here's the thing. I like cows, and I wouldn't want to see anything bad happen to one of them... so the unasked question that appears before me, is it really fair to eat the meat of an animal if I would have chosen not to watch the slaughter?

I suppose that life isn't really fair all of the time. But we can always pretend together, yes?

Why I Quit AIMing

Hello Grandma!

I heard you won't be up for graduation this weekend! It's just as well for me that way, I'd rather have you come visit some time this summer when everything is well. We can go to Korean House to celebrate, it's a very nice restaurant only two minutes from my home.

I've been meaning to call you but your phone is very busy. The internet really simplifies communication so much I can't imagine how anyone would maintain a business using a phone with only one line. In fact I don't think I have much need for a phone at all these days!

Only a handful of people left who are nostalgic enough to contact me in this way :) I have been speaking with a girl from Argentina and a fellow from Taiwan both using MSN Messenger. Or typing back and forth with webcams anyway... I find it's much more enriching to have a conversation with a live face, regardless of the other linguistic media that you may have in play.

Juozas is back at home in Lithuania, living with his girlfriend Akvile. I don't know to what degree they have "merged stuff," so to speak, but from the looks of things they are very happy together! He's got a nice apartment and it is clean and well-decorated. We're moving up in the world, no longer do we need newspapers to cover up our messes!

I think I will have a hard time convincing him to move back to Rochester, really I think he's served his time at Microsoft and is again back in touch by means of the web, and it might stay that way. I meant to leave a webcam with you last time we visited, but I think it has migrated back to my office at RIT. I'm afraid I might not be a very good Internet salesman, these things are really not very complicated if you don't make it so.

It's one thing to use the Internet as a tool to maintain contact, but remember that I've grown up in the brave new world where you can actually meet for the first time and initiate a relationship that way! I am a big fan of this and for anyone who hasn't had the experience I think that you are missing the boat entirely!

In case you want to try out some of these tools on your own, there are two major services that are any good for this sort of chat that you should definitely know about. One is called Skype, and the other is MSN or Windows Live Messenger. This is truly a market with lots of competition but nothing else is so outstanding that I would recommend it to a new user.

People on Skype tend to be more outgoing than MSN; I filled out a basic profile and I have had a number of "hits," meeting and speaking for the first time with people from anywhere in the world like I just bumped into them on the street. Windows Live is another service altogether; this is a more cohesive service with better software in my opinion than Skype, but in the words of Clement Chan, "White people don't use MSN." Which is great for me, the compulsive language learner!

To contrast I have not made one single new contact by directly using MSN in spite of filling out a profile. However I have met a number of people on Skype that prompted me to shift our communications to MSN, on account of it being a better service and more convenient to use. Not good news for the Skype team I'm afraid! But both services are far superior to AOL Instant Messenger. Now how will I convince my friends to switch :)

There's something to be said here about how we maintain a contact list and developing isolated bubbles of friends that effectively can't contact each other directly... to make a long story short mostly everyone in America who decided to participate in the Instant Messaging revolution joined up with AOL Instant Messenger when it first came out.

Today we've all got our accounts and our screen names, and many people use this service as a direct substitute for in-person contact with their closest friends, in spite of it's being easily the worst software on the market!

Compare to your cell phone address book, but then imagine that you wish to change providers. You can only contact these people through AIM because their screen name is a part of the AOL service. Want to get a new provider? Sorry, you'll need new friends also. Those Verizon Wireless commercials just took on a whole new dimension of weird for me and my friends!

Anywho Skype is the competitor in perfect position to repeat the same scheme on a global scale, with a team of smart developers and a great product that is constantly one step ahead of Microsoft. That would be the hot stock to watch today, if it were being publicly traded.

In the mean time, I'll have to be sure you know how to use one of these packages before I can go to Egypt! Skype is truly a much better deal for this purpose than anything the phone or cable companies are selling today.

Spiderman 3

I just saw Spiderman 3 in the theater by Walmart, and I don't think I'll ever be quite the same!

Three Thumbs Up!

No Pants Friday!

OK, this friday is No Pants Day and also the cable guy is coming to juice me up. I'm having a No-Pants Party at my place, from morning until night (depending on the timing of the cable guy) to celebrate the installation of the Internet. More news will follow as I know more; RSVP while you can!

Rest assured this still fits into my "don't trust a computer" philosophy; I see a future where we are heavily dependent on social networking sites to organize and communicate, which paints a pretty grim picture for security professionals in small business! Nobody seems to get the group administration thing quite right; Facebook has it down pretty well, but the utility of a facebook group is heavily dependent on the personality of the members. Every groupware system should be as flexible to administer as an IRC channel, and no more complicated to manipulate than an Explorer or Finder window.

I would say the next runner up behind Facebook is Google Groups and Google's beta Domain Hosting services. This is certainly more focused on providing infrastructure for an organization as opposed to informal or ad-hoc groups. Either way, I like nailing things down; the goal for Friday is a multi-point no pants video conference that you can visit through a simple web interface. It would be nice to integrate a jabber server so we can keep notes (?) but any sort of text chat interface will be plenty good for the purposes I have in mind.

Working with Windows machines and TinCam software (~$30), and so far not having very much luck. TinCam sends an .html and a .wvx file over ftp to my web server no problem. The website is accessible at http://nerdland.org/~kingdon/cam/webcam.html, but so far no dice receiving from the two computers I'm using to test. I've left this up streaming and I'm going to go grab my laptop, maybe I'll have more luck working on a machine with a publicly addressible IP. If the webcam works for you or if you have experience with what I'm trying to do, please do leave a note.

Tchues for now!