A Day in Paradise

6 hours till our plane lifts off and I’m still waiting for the gravity of the step we are taking to kick in.

While the physical journey is about to start, the journey started one year ago to the day when I flew up to West Palm Beach to meet with HedgeCo for the first time. At that time I had been working with HedgeCo for over a year as a consultant on various projects, and I went to FL to try and iron out some issues with a massive internal project which we had been working on for quite a while.

As anyone who has worked remotely knows, there is nothing like working in the same office with people who you have only communicated via Skype/phone/email. I really enjoyed my initial 2 week stay, and we were able to bang out a lot of projects as well as lay the foundation for future work.

HedgeCo also offered me a full time position at the company. The position would be as the project manager of a spin-off technology branch of the company.

The standard freelance-consultant joke is “Why spend 8 hours a day working for someone else when you can spend 14 hours a day working for yourself.” Working from Germany for companies in Germany as well as on the East and West coast of the US is physically exhausting. I was working till midnight every night, and both my family life, community interaction, and social life was severely suffering. On a personal basis, I couldn’t keep it up any longer.

So, I accepted the job, and Stella and I began the long process of closing up shop, working out all our paperwork, packing our stuff and moving over to the US.

As with everything, the process of moving was far more complex and expensive then we imagined. From having to deal with mobile phone providers who refused to end your contract (eplus sucks by the way), to changing magazine subscription options, to getting Stella a greencard (which was a grueling process on its own), finding a place/car in FL, etc. All of this while trying to wrap up projects and stay on top of the projects that you are working on.

But now we finally come to the end of the German phase of this move, and I wanted to thank Stella more then anyone else for all the effort that she put into this move. She put her life on hold for the entire year, and put in most of the effort organizing and preparing everything for the move. Thank you, we couldn’t have done it without you!

So this will be my last blog entry as a resident of Germany, being in the US I probably won’t be able to hit as many of the European-based PHP conferences as I have in the past, but hopefully I will have more time to get back into the community and hope to catch as many US based conferences as I can.

See you on the other side of the pond!

Currently at #7 on Amazon’s best seller list! This thing has momentum!!!

It’s time to bumrush Amazon, and push Ancestor to the #1 place! Before I bought my copy it was in the 4000s then it jumped to 1076, then 138, and is currently at 93 and fourth place in the New Releases section, and 1st place in New SciFi.

As an aspiring author, I value Scott Sigler’s success not only as the personal success of a friend, but much more important as a sign that independently published books and new media can be just as popular as books published through traditional publishing houses.

So get out there and buy the book now!!!

Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.

Here’s part of what bothered me:

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.

Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.

Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.

Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.

A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.

For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.

Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.

Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:

1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzas

Gpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.

Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:

The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.

Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.

YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.

When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?