Ethan\\\’s web log

So some stuff I forgot….

First, the VT mess was a mess. A portion of my circle of closer friends use an instant chat system that dates back many years in the computer world. Many of us \”idle\” there, and when someone throws out a message it\’s instant. The circle of friends includes engineers that have worked on major portions of eBay, facebook, and a huge number of local businesses. Some of those friends are at Virginia Tech, so we pretty much followed the whole thing as it went down, starting before it ever was mentioned on the news. In the end, it makes you realize how much you value your friends, and how it\’s easy to take things for granted until something happens.

Second, BUBBLE. You know it. The world has gone from \”Real estate never goes down\” to soft landings. The charts say the real blood will run in the streets in 3 years, at the peak of the ARM loan resets. That\’s right, it\’s 3 years away. What we are seeing now is just the beginning. I managed to get on the radio today, during the tail end of a sales pitch. It\’s very interesting. Instead of the normal realtor, there were two loan officers. They agreed with me. Lines like, \”This is the worst time to buy ever. Buy low sell high, not buy at the record peak of the last 100 years.\” I also pointed out that buying a house is going to be problematic, because so many people overpaid and won\’t be able to make the needed 40%-50% price cuts to compete with the foreclosures and the properly priced inventory. It\’s very fascinating to have stumbled onto the blogs, and seen how things are playing out. The downside is it\’s impossible to predict the future, and the fed could try to inflate their way out of it. Also, there are very few people that share my point of view … almost no one get\’s it. Or perhaps, it\’s in their interest not to get it.

Forgot about the blog again. Quite a bit has gone on since I last posted.

I started to update my homepage, the HRGeeks site, trying to fix hr-2600, updating hrconnect and a bunch of other project sites. Just cleaning up some mess, and updating some stuff. I wrote this backwards, and plugged in events. So it might flow awkwardly.

Looking at getting some promotional stuff printed to start spreading word about our local geek meets. Also want to work on some projects so I can move forward with existing projects that should be of Make Magazine / HackADay quality. Videotaping of course.

The Skillcrane lives in NinjaGumby\’s garage now. As soon as there is network connectivity out there we are going to tighten things up and www.RockTheSkillCrane.com will relive.

All of the computers from the office have been somewhat scaled down, and live in my spare bedroom in Norfolk. The Cox business cablemodem is alot faster than the old T1 (DS1), which is pretty sad. So far so good, although there is 7 servers I\’m working to retire.

I was planning to go to NotACon, to show some support for what is about the only DemoParty that I know of in the USA. I grew up amazed at various demos from the likes of Renaissance, Future Crew, Cascada, Triton and the like. Unfortunately, I was too late in reserving plane tickets, and the only thing left was flights with really bad times (6AM? Ewww). So instead I am going to meet Patrick and a friend of his @ the Rawlings Quarry and start the summer dive season early. Friday and Saturday I\’m taking the truck out.

I\’m going to Defcon in Vegas.

CarolinaCon fell on the same weekend as the open house at Jefferson Lab. I couldn\’t decide which to go to… so I went to both! I missed most talks @ CarolinaCon. JLAB Open House was cool. I took lots of pictures in the free electron laser and in the actual accelerator, as well as experiment hall C and the MCC. I hope to edit it into a video for youtube/hamptonroads.tv.

I took the truck to CarolinaCon! It got love, although it didn\’t quite love back. It seems if you put the pedal to the metal and run at full bore for 3 hours, eventually the valve cover gasket leaks all the oil out. Oh, don\’t worry hippies. It doesn\’t end up on the ground it seems. It all ends up stuck to the back of the truck and under it. I\’m not sure if I will make a move to correct this, or just sell the truck at the end of the summer. It doesn\’t seem to happen on normal commutes, and I\’m serious when I say full bore for hours. Raleigh/Chapel Hill area has rolling hills, and the truck was having a bit of a hard time going up the hills. The pitch also changed when it was leaking. The motor is in a doghouse, and it looks like a difficult fix for shadetree. Perhaps I will see how much Bob\’s Auto will charge to replace.

Back to CarolinaCon. Arrived at 5pm or so, caught a few talks, hung out with LOTS of COOL people! I was a bit worried about the truck as I knew something was up, so I went ahead and rolled out at 4AM and was back home by 10AM on Sunday. ROUGH weekend, and it threw me off. CarolinaCon was great, and I will definitly go next year. It reminds me of the old days, when it wasn\’t a circus and you could just hang out with geeks and talk about everything from politics and current events to telephone company switching technology upgrades to issues with computing platforms and what not.

Steve Wozniak spoke locally as part of some Virginia Beach Forum thing. He skipped the Jamestown theme (yay). Most of what he spoke about ran parallel to the presentation at HOPE, however, some of the funnier stuff was left out for the local audience. They cut him off early, as they have to adhere to a time schedule as they rent the space from the schools. It was still mesmerising to see him talk, and I\’m not sure why. Locals represented very poorly, asking what I would consider to be some really frigging LAME questions. So I tried to save the spot, following up someone else\’s good question about software patents with Steve\’s take on the outsourcing of tech jobs… what is his opinion of Americas future. I was in line, and next. Some dude of Indian descent walked right in front of me and took the mic with ANOTHER lame question about robotic arms for people or something. And they cut off Q&A after him for book signing. Adam was laughing, given the nature of my question and the situation. After the talk & Q&A session, Woz was out front signing copies of his book. I brought the cover to my IIGS, and Woz turned it into a Woz signature edition (Only mine has revision 3 ROMs). Very cool. I also picked up his book, it will go good with my copy of Carlton\’s Apple.

Shmoocon was fun! Didn\’t take any projects, and I feel bad about that. But it was nice being able to relax and kick back without the truck trip or any projects to deal with. More ideas flowed, and someone else did a Simon game for the hacker arcade. Too cool! I really, really want to present an idea next year. I think it would be a killer presentation if I could pull it off like I envision. Revolutionary for a con. The problem I\’m having is, if it worked, it would set the expectation for all future presentations to be that good… and it could be tough to beat.

WHQ is no more! Everything is moved to storage or disposed of. I plan to cut a video about it for HamptonRoads.TV/YouTube/GoogleVideo… I just need to come up with an audio track for it. With this done, alot of weight off of my shoulders. Glad it\’s gone. The new WHQ fell thru, and I\’m not so sure that is a bad thing. It would be fun, but saving money is more fun.

I\’m on a roll tonite!

So a few weeks ago I went to some japanese resturant with my friends Mary and Adam. It\’s one of those hibatchi grill things where others sit around your table. There was two ladies at the end, whom were school teachers. During the conversation, they questioned where we went to college. It was their big thing. College. In their eyes, it appeared to be the only way to judge someone. Not on accompishments. Not on goals, or views. It was where you went to school.

It\’s a bit of a peeve of mine, because some of my brightest friends never went. Some of my other brightest friends did go. But in our American society, many seem so quick to judge. In general, it seems that the college degree is most people\’s credential. They have little real accomplishments to show, so they lean on where they went to school. Do they do anything cool with their college skills? No. I can\’t count how many people I meet people with electrical engineering and other high end degrees that don\’t seem to remember any of it. You look at the high paid people with all these financial degrees, and few are calling out all the issues with the current markets. Other high paid business people are doing everything they can to rapidly ensure the future failure of our country, for short term profits.

While I\’m not saying that college is a waste, there are definitly things to learn. Heck, some college professor (of economics) lives downstairs, and I had the opportunity to ask him some questions. A bit of a verification to check his opinions versus the \”crazy internet conspiracy blogs\” about the housing and credit markets I read. Not only did he agree with pretty much everything I asked about, he said it\’s worse! Great. It was actually very relaxing to hear this from an authoratative figure, especially considering all of the garbage that came out of ODU in the state of the region report.

Employers dig them. One of mine (I won\’t say who) told me they could never give me a pay raise, simply because I didn\’t have a degree. Meanwhile, a friend of mine working for the same company at another site finished his CS degree from a respected local college, and told me he got zilch for it. The other non-degree guy in the office worked very hard, was VERY smart… and ended up eventually leaving for lots more money. I\’m sure there was a negative impact on the project, and who knows if they could even find a replacement in the Hampton Roads market. So much for the degree. Just remember, the non-degree workers get there by prooving themselves.

The degree thing definitly seems to be an east coast thing. From what I\’ve heard, many of the west coast companies take skills into higher consideration over degree. I\’ve been cut down by degreed people here on the east coast that wouldn\’t last a second in the environments that my non-degreed friends work at on the west coast.

In the end, the actions of the lady at the hibachi place reminded me that I never really cared that much about a college degree. In most situations, if I had a degree I would be right where I am now. Just more debt, and a higher risk that someone might accept me for where I paid to go and not what I know. Somene could counter with, \”But it would unlock opportunities.\” If I was brave enough to really unlock opportunities, I\’d start by leaving Hampton Roads.

So I\’m on month 2 or 3 of the new job. It\’s not bad, and it\’s definitly a very interesting environment given the high level physics stuff going on. I can\’t say it\’s great though. It totally feels like I went backwards. I feel like I should be excited about the opportunity, but I\’m not. The opportunity I was supposed to enter at Wasabi was very exciting, in line with my experience and knowledge, and I liked being able to offer that. Sure, things didn\’t work out with Wasabi, but it was exciting in the beginning. It was a let down in the end, and I wasn\’t happy there, but in the beginning I thought I was finally somewhere. I was skeptical, because Hampton Roads has a bad record for tech startups. On the flip side, I\’m happy to be employed. I\’m pretty confident that my job will survive some of the downturns I think are coming to the region. JFCOM just had a round of layoffs, which isn\’t good. If you examine our region, many of the high paying jobs are gov\’t, which isn\’t promising considering how much debt our gov\’t is racking up. I think overall the cost of living compared to salary puts a huge dampner on my enthusiasm for the job.

On the flip side, I\’ve had even more great ideas that I think would be viable businesses, but motivation is pretty dead. I\’m burned out over the whole 757tech thing, and the commute eats a ton of time. I\’m quickly trying to ditch as many expenses as possible, because I\’m no longer getting paid thru my company (I was contracting thru my company before). I will soon be getting rid fo the T1 line, which is a huge headache due to the number of DNS registrations made against the netblock. I will probably look to use outside DNS service so I can easily move in the future. I\’ve got a business cablemodem at the apartment, but haven\’t had time to build a router. Soon all of the systems I plan to keep will be moving to my apartment. With the T1 gone, and the power usage gone at the office, my monthy expenses will fit inside of my paycheck. Which is pretty fucking sad.

The cost of rent is crazy high. I still maintain the office, which I\’ve thought about getting rid of. The issue is, projects are all I really care about and want to do (If only I could get paid to be inventive, and creative, and smart?) so getting rid of the office would suck. On the flip side, it\’s so expensive to maintain both rents. The money would be better spent buying something, except everything is so overpriced that isn\’t a reality. The ironic part is, the office rent is way cheaper than the apartment rent. It would actually be possible to rent a way larger space cheap, and perhaps illegally live there, and come out ahead. Landlords (what a funny term) are able to jack the rents up on apartments for living, but the commercial market is totally weak. A company I know of actually pays less per square foot in a high rise in a downtown Norfolk office building overlooking some of the prime waterfront than general people pay for a common apartment in suburbia!

There is good news tho. The housing bubble, which is really a bad term… the CREDIT bubble is bursting! There is TONS of news pouring in of home prices and stagnant markets. Much of the sales price declines are hidden right now because the builders of homes are throwing in lots of extra \”freebies\” to artificially maintain the home price values. It\’s starting, and there is a long way to go.

I\’ve been active on the housing forfront. I\’ve landed on the air on local real estate talk radio shows, throwing off the sales pitches. It\’s so crazy, the fraud is so evident all across the real estate industry, yet no one cares as long as the party goes on. Years ago I said \”Why would property be worth more now than before? Salaries havent\’ gone up. Let me google this.\” What I learned from the blogs was amazing. It\’s so amazing, I can\’t believe so many other people are so stupid. I can pretty much see thru any mainstream media report. I think I could battle any realtor or industry person. I tried to take on the head economists from ODU on their points of view, but they would never reply. Then a year later their news went a little bit south, but not as much as it should be. After looking into who funds the department at the college, it appears to have major ties to … guess who … local reators. Just like the garbage that came out of Harvard.

The future will be interesting, but short term it\’s a bit rough.

It\’s been too long since I updated this. Lots of stuff has happened.

First, the truck article is published! Page 151 of Make Magazine #08. Hooray!

Second, the skill crane. I put it online, and it made hackaday. Quickly after that, people started to add it to Digg.com. It rapidly rose in popularity. It was totally amusing to watch the crane machine go nuts . It went so nuts, it died. I won\’t have time to troubleshoot it until the weekend, but I\’m fairly certain it will get popular again. People say it\’s addictive. I loved the attention it got. Every night I would go over to the office and try to fix whatever broke. Being mechanical, it does fail under insane loads.

Third, Craigslist. I\’ve been hocking off some things I don\’t use, and finding some good deals on craigslist. I scored 3 pinball machines, and a very nice lighting console.The first pinball is Black Hole, which appears to have issues with indexing of switches. It didn\’t have this originally. It does need some work, but I haven\’t had much time to put towards it. Second is Gorgar, which appears to have had a CPU lock up, resulting in coil / driver frying. I\’ve already got the new connector in hand to replace this, and a new rubber kit. I also got an electromechanical pinball named Out of Sight. This machine is close to working. I\’ve already replaced almost all rubber parts, but still need to clean up the stepper units inside. Mechanical parts are still getting hung up, and the start function doesn\’t seem to work right. It\’s always \”tilt\” … so more to go on that. At the same time I\’m working to fix both of my existing machines. I got the 3 new ones cheap, and won\’t reveal sources. The odd thing is, I\’m getting a number of people asking about pinball repair… so it looks like I might be able to help pay for parts by practicing on other people\’s machines.

The lighting console is awesome. A 48 channel Colortran board which talks DMX-512, which is the protocol I was using with my LED wash lights, laser stuff and strobe. I used to use it with the intellabeams, but I sold them all. The board is serious, and seriously nice. It directly outputs to a VGA monitor for additional display, and is made of very high quality. There is just one issue that nags me, and that is I\’m used to \”disco\” style controllers. The colortran board allows you to set effects which are chase sequences and such, but as far as I can tell the time has to be set in the sequence. I really like the \”tap to sync\” type controllers…. One solution I may go for is to use an external midi sequencer to trigger presets. Hopefully a sequencer with a tap to sync function. I looked down this road some time ago, and found that most of the hardware sequencers that were popular such as the Roland and Alesis had a manual tempo setup, not a jam the button. My Yamaha RM1X has a tap to sync function and is a sequencer, but not the unit I want to use with the board. More to come on this later.

1st, I am going back to work. It has been a while since I left Wasabi Systems. The new job seems decent, although it\’s a pretty long drive. It\’s going to put a large amount of miles on my car, and cost quite a bit in terms of time. We will see how it works out. It is a bit past NASA, where I used to work. The difference is I lived closer to the interstate at the time. Supercomputing clusters, 10 gig network connectivity, and lots of scientific data. Seems like it should be fun.

Back to making history. This weekend, a new experiment was attempted with success. The video postal truck was parked on Granby Street, 3 to 4 blocks away from Relative Theory Records. At Relative Theory Records, Sean and I setup a camera feeding a Linux host (with a hardware video encoder), which in turn routed thru my notebook running Windows 2000. The notebook forwarded the video data down the street to the truck, where it was shown live! 4 bands played, and their performace was simulcast to the truck, whcih you couldn\’t see from the record store. I will post pictures and video as soon as I dump it from the camera. There were some glitches, mainly the fact that the antenna on the truck was in the cab and some traffic obstructed the wireless data link. I was surprised that it worked so well, considering the amount of wireless access points on Granby Street.

Passerby\’s either commented that it was cool, or were confused. Those that knew what Relative Theory was understood it. Those that didn\’t, couldn\’t figure it out. I was using the character generator on the camera just to make things work. Video Lan Client supports some mode of text and graphics overlay. I have a character generator that a friend gave me some time ago, but it is composite video and I was using s-video from the camera to the encoding computer. Perhaps I can pick up a cheap Videoonics unit from years past that does 2 camera fade/wipes and character generation from a script. Props to David, Josh and Jamie @ Relative Theory for letting me test on them, and to the 4 bands that played. I can\’t stop listening to New London Fire\’s \”Different\” track (http://www.purevolume.com/newlondonfire). Stay tuned for the link to pictures/video.

Oops, forgot about this thing. What\’s new?

First, if your a Windows 2000/XP user and need to playback Quicktime or Real Player content you _have_ to check out the free packages called \”Quicktime Alternative\” and \”Real Player Alternative.\” They allow you to play back Quicktime content without having to install Quicktime Player (which is garbage, and now bundled with iTunes which is nearly as bad). Same with Real Player Alternative. They are just codecs, and don\’t leave utilities running in the background to nag you with updates, or try to upsell you on commercial content. Be aware, that trying to install iTunes will force you to move to Quicktime though (No, I don\’t use iTunes).

I sold the battery backup system from WHQ. The batteries were getting older, and there is no way I could afford to replace them as the total cost would run over $5000. Now I\’m left with the old batteries, and they seem to have some life left in them. I\’ve connected them to the smaller UPSes which I had lying around from a long time ago, and figure each one can run 8 servers or so for a few hours. Not bad.

Working on cleaning up the truck. I need to remove and repaint the border on the plexiglass, and going to use spray adhesive to bond the bedsheet to the plexi after resealing the plexi so it doesn\’t leak. Plastic like that of kitchen garbage bag would be more ideal, but I don\’t know where to source uninterrupted 4\’ x 6\’ piece of the stuff.

One other odd thing happened. The backglass in the twilight zone pinball machine shattered. Straight up, out of the blue just let go. Really odd. Taking the advice of people on rec.games.pinball, I picked up two thin sheets of plexi and sandwitched the translite (translite is a somewhat transparent piece of plastic with the graphics on it) between the two plexiglass sheets. Worked like a champ, and I\’m almost done stepping on pieces of safety glass.

It\’s fascinating. The local paper runs an article about how the job situation in our region is so great, and the comments are of those who are struggling to afford housing in the region on the salaries. I started a blog related to the housing bust in Hampton Roads (http://hrhousingbust.blogspot.com) and at least one person replied that the Navy housing allowances helps keep the housing unaffordable for the non-military working class.

One particular apartment building just tried to up my friends rent 10% after his first year. What justifies these types of increases? The salaries have been stagnant since 2001 on average when adjusted for inflation for the region.

The warped thing is many of the wealthy that own the properties demanding high rents are also those who help keep the salaries low.

I read today that 20% of all home loans are going to adjust rates over the next two years. If this statistic is accurate, then that should open up a good amount of housing inventory and drive down prices.

HOPE in NYC is done! Another one down. Overall our stuff went prety well, although setup took much longer than I expected. We had to wait on the network and arrival of Cat5. Movie playback didn\’t work so hot, but the streaming rocked and the LED signs did their thing. Movie playback worked, but the xboxes were tripping up on a file or two. I didn\’t have time or energy to finish the scheduling stuff.

Got to hang out with Bart and other friends, that was good. Got to ride Segway, and being in the loop I got to ride it red-keyed. As much as I ever made fun of segway riders, I have to admit. They rock. Totally. If I had one I could cruise around downtown Norfolk on the really hot days. That would rock. Except they still fetch $3k or so on feeBay.

I missed the majority of the talks, but will catch up on them soon enough.

With HOPE over, I\’d say the vacation is done and I have to find a job.

Man, what a weekend!

Still working on the HOPE stuff. It turns out that \”small little PC\” I bought off of AlrocFox some time ago is faster than my main desktop. Good thing, because it appears the motherboard went bad in my main desktop that has all of my audio/video tools on it. I think I\’m doing pretty good when it comes to encoding all of the video for HOPE. I\’m rapidly becoming the definitive resource of computer history and industry video. The rest of the scripts for the system are coming along as well. The LED signboards are working in terms of schedules, and I think I see how I can use the API to handle scheduling movie playback. I found out more locals that are going, so I must say I\’m excited. We tested the streaming video tonite and it worked like a champ. There isn\’t going to be much time for troubleshooting, but hey that is what Thursday is for.

I still can\’t stop thinking about the whole Wasabi ordeal. It really bugs me. I\’ve never been thru a layoff, but I can\’t imagine they are generally handled in a similiar manner. I didn\’t realize my other coworker had been laid off as well. Pretty wild. I\’m sure the rest of the company heard via rumors and chatter, and probably have no idea what is going on.

Bad joke:
Q: What do tech startups in Hampton Roads have in common?
A: Failure.

On the subject of tech in Hampton Roads, I think the two just don\’t go together. Hampton Roads just doesn\’t get it. The tech groups (not user groups, but the larger business groups) send out busted emails to announce events, loaded with garbage. You go to the tech happy hours and people don\’t seem to talk about technology stuff. The presentations are sometimes interesting, but they are never recorded for netcasting or any other sign of technological prowess.

Oh well. I\’ve got lots of leads on jobs, which is good. It will be nice to get back into a job where I get to learn again. I feel like it\’s been a year and 9 months since I have done anything that really did anything for my skills. Outside of my personal projects, of course. (I don\’t consider Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 skills. I really dislike that crap. Seriously. Give me a UNIX mail server any day).

Other cool things? Met a guy who is interested in collaborating on producing a television show. He ran across some info I had posted regarding public access television. Sounds cool!

Had two new huge awesome big ideas last week. One I think could be a multi-million dollar website, but the problem getting market on a budget without being a spamming asshole or mucking with google. Google is already wasted enough without me adding to it.

Also check out the new Sage Francis album, if you like intelligent hip hop. He takes on politics and religion, pokes fun at guns and other pop culture. Youtube has some cool live performance videos as well.