Blogging from the couch

Blogging from the couch
Originally uploaded by sloppynet

Watching elvis costello's tv show, blogging a bit, uploading pics to smugmug, enjoying the quiiet and the tunes if that makes any sense.

If you have kids, you will know what I mean.

Sent from my Treo™ Pro smartphone.

Imagine having 686,782 people following you on twitter

The simple press of 100 keys and over half a million people are contacted.

Well, maybe cause when you send a tweet there is no guarantee that the sound in the forest is heard.

This seems like an improbable situation

This seems like an improbable situation
Originally uploaded by sloppynet

But it has happened. Except it was the otherway around. Bronco went down in the wrong elevator. Lucky for him and the building's cleaning staff, he had a harness on (not a collar) and the leash broke easily.

Sent from my Treo™ Pro smartphone.

My cellphone is faster than my highspeed internet

My cellphone is faster than my highspeed internet
Originally uploaded by sloppynet

And it hurts so bad

Sent from my Treo™ Pro smartphone.

Are we ready to navigate ?

I'm ready to upload pictures from soccer last night. My pc was slow
sorting and editing the pics. Picasa does not deal with Nikon raw files
that quickly. Finished cropping and sharpening this evening.

BUT .....


















My fricken high speed internet is giving me 3mb/s download
speed and 7kb/s upload. If even that. My speed test can't even
complete on the upload phase.

I guess my road to smugmug is either dial-up or ala Amazon's
cloud services via a physical shipment of a portable hard drive.

Imagine that by the way, the leader in cloud computing has
you ship your data to them on a physical hard drive cause the
net just isn't fast enough. I feel the pain right now.

I have a few MB's to send, imagine a few TB's.

At least my old school ways are current again. We used to ship
removeable disk packs around. Back then, the first ones I
used were 5mb.

I still have a 12" 10mb around here somewhere. That was from
when disks were disks and real computers had flashing
lights.

This is my Jeep just before heading off to become mine again

This is my Jeep just before heading off to become mine again
Originally uploaded by sloppynet

A snafu when I bought it put the wrong plates on two side by side Jeeps.

I have had the wrong Jeep for 9 years. The VIN on the Jeep does not match my registration and all of my paperwork.

The dealer picked it up today to get a safety check done on iit in order to transfer the physical vehicle into my name. Then I will be able to get current plates and drive it on the road.

So I hope.

Sent from my Treo™ Pro smartphone.

I'm on fire for ya' baby

I rented an HHR in San Francisco one time.

Someone left a note on the window proclaiming:

"Dude, that is one butt ugly car".

It didn't have flames.

An HHR with flames is a different car than one without.

Watching my luggage load when .....

first came the jungle exotics


















then my main bag

finally my gadget case but only after it was scanned, re-scanned and then loaded.

What all can I say ?

Ramblings from the couch....

1) Watched Hockey Night in Canada.
2) Bill of BilTel should check his sphelling; satallite usually has only one 'a' , eh
3) Bill seems to prefer to work for Canadians fans, hasn't heard of the Sens and should not be allowed to work for leaf's fans
4) Summer is here and so are the Iced Capp's
5) I've found Jool's Holland

Dog, Man and Machine

We don't have a dog anymore but this automatic dog washer seems like it could do dogs , young children and sleeping bags.



http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek/0,29409,1895117_1877064,00.html

I am now a published blogger

You can get your Kindle and read me too !!!!

Time to get out of Dodge, the sherriff is back in town

Twitter is bigger than I thought

I was reading my FriendFeed summary (sort of like a TiVo for twitter, rss feeds, comments) and I came across a posting about Oprah having over 1 million followers on Twitter. This means Twitter has over 1 million users.

That's alot of tweet potential.

I wonder who the 15 people than Oprah follows are ?

from treo 700wx to treo pro

I just upgraded my aging windows mobile 5 treo for an shiney, new windows mobile 6.1 treo pro and I like it.

I work for a company that is a Bell Mobility customer. So, that means an iphone is not a consideration. I'm still not sure i would want one.

A keyboard with keys is something that I still think I need. I do type on my phone. Email is a must and being a Microsoft Exchange/Office shop means that Office Mobile is a plus.

New shiney thing is faster, windows mobile 6 seems to address many of the flaws in 5. I added a 16gb msd card to it so I can have stuff on it that I might want as well as stuff I know I want.

Wifi adds flexibility and speed too.

All in all, I got what I expected.

and daughter with the itouch and a basic flip phone thinks it is cool and want it.

finally my itouch envy is over.

and facebook on it seems better than the pc browser version. Being forced, due to screen size constraints, to focus on the important aspects of facebook make for a better user experience.

They sure are cute but...

We have too many Canadian Geese in Canada. Where they used to be wild, they are now prevalent in inhabited areas.

It is so nice to see the babies, healthy, growing and thriving. But beaches and parks are now having to deal with the infestation of geese and the droppings they leave behind.

Parks that once were playgrounds for young and old are now littered with goose poop.

If only there were a market for goose poop. We could offer a reward of $1 per pound like we offer rewards for empty bottles. The homeless could comb the parks and trade goose poop for cash. They collect bottles along the shores of the rivers in Ottawa and we've noticed an improvement in the shoreline. The collection model works. It's proven.

But who would buy our goose poop ?

If you know, call 1 800 O canada

My Kindle is bigger than yours

Box which is an app linked to LinkedIn has adopted the same business model

The app is free until you want more or want to know something. Like who downloaded a file. Or in this case the address of the downloader. Rates are $9-$20 per month !!!

I like Linkedin but.... $500.00 per year is their step up from free ???

I think LinkedIn is a good tool for business networking.

It has the right features.

But I was shocked to see what they think is a reasonable price other than free. Their charges per month are what I would have expected annually. I think this will cause them to flop unless they really don't need paid subscriptions. $500 per year is what they think I should pay for the ability to see who looked at my profile. Even $300 per year is out of line.

So I will stay free.

Performance Management - Planning for Capacity Requirements before you need it

I observe the issues some sites on the Internet have with capacity planning. Some have issues with performance management; this being a more holistic view including how the application is designed not just what is required to support it.

It is the same inside the firewall as outside. Applications are launched and underperform. Applications start underperforming over time.

I remember back to the late 80's when I was leading the architecture team building an Integrated Control System for Public Payphones for Northern Telecom. We found that the peak daily usage of payphones was just when school finished. We designed around this major peak. By buffering and staging/delaying updates we were able to greatly reduce the hardware requirements. By designing to the workload, we were able to reduce it's impact on system sizing. This was greatly valuable back then as hardware typically was half the cost of a major SI project.

These days the problem is not so much of cost, as one of not being able to just throw hardware at the performance problem. Software design and application architecture typically effect whether or not an application can scale to meet demands.

I came across this chart and it brought back memories of this project. As you can see, the peak football viewing audience is matched in occurance by mobile football activity. The pc activity is different, the usage is not the same.

What does it mean ? It means that was is and what is was.