A Day in Paradise

I am on hold with bellsouth, and the longer they keep me on hold the longer I am going to rant about them. The trouble started before I even got into work, I started getting reports of “flakey internet” so when I get in and do a quick diagnostic sweep and determine that it was our DSL connection was at fault (as opposed to the shitty DNS service that we get which I can get around) I call bellsouth tech support.

That was 4 hours ago.

The first half an hour was spent with them trying to figure out how to get into our account - even though I gave them our username and phone number. I was then put on hold for 5 minutes while they got someone from billing to take care of us. Billing pulled up my information right away (with the exact same information I gave to tech). They then put me back through to tech and I was on hold for another 20 minutes.

After ever 5 minutes or so, the billing person would pick up the line and apologize for the wait. Finally she said “I keep putting you through to a tech, but they just pick up the phone and don’t say anything and then hang up”. I told her to keep trying and 5 minutes later I was on with a tech.

This tech told me that for them to do anything I had to be directly connected to the DSL modem, not any routers. I asked for a direct number which I could call when I was directly connected and they said that they couldn’t give it to me, but I would have to go through the whole process again.

I hauled a computer to the router and plugged it all in… and then called again and spent another 10 minutes on hold before speaking to another tech. This time she asked me a bunch of (the same) questions before and then told me she had to put me through to a tech.

This is the good part - instead of putting me through to a tech, she put me through to her slightly confused hairdresser.

Once I disconnected with the salon, I had to call back into bellsouth and work my way back through to the tech. Once I finally got through to a tech, they said “we can’t run a line test because you’re having an ‘outage’ - if you still have trouble in 30 minutes call back”.

So apparently we have a couple clowns working on our DSL line, and the only site I can access is my blog… oh well, sucks being them!

At least we have our TVs up

I think we do about 75% of these

Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.

We are in the process of re-doing our office, and are going to hang three 50″ plasmas from a triangular bracket hanging in the center of the office.

After scouring the net for good deals on the Panasonic 50″ plasmas we wanted, we came up with 2 final options.

1. Buy from some online store and get them delivered.
2. Buy from an offer at costco, and pick them up ourselves.

Getting them from costco would mean paying the sales tax, but the deal was better and with the 3% we get off from the corporate card + creditcard they came out to be the same. The kicker was that Costco’s came with a 1-year longer warranty period.

The initial idea was to use my car, but since we weren’t sure that 3 plasmas would fit in it (these things are HUGE) we decided to grab a truck from Home Depot. They only had open flatbed trucks, but the sky was clear and it wouldn’t rain in the 75 minutes it would take to get to costco’s and back. Right?

WRONG!!!

As soon as we got the Plasmas and our other gear loaded up on the back of the truck and got back on I95 the sky clouded up and a storm of biblical proportions headed our way. By the time the rain hit us, the rush-hour traffic had come to a near standstill, and we spent the next 45 minutes crawling along wondering how much of the $5k worth of goodies would survive the rain.

Thankfully, by the time we got back to the office the rain had stopped and other than soaking wet boxes, the plasmas themselves had not been damaged at all. The outside of the boxes were soaked, but no water had seeped through to the inside of the box, and the plasmas themselves were wrapped in 2 layers of plastic. Not bad for having sat on the back of an open truck for 45 minutes in heavy rain.

The moral of this story is: There is a reason why an industry is built around delivering stuff. So will we get the next thing delivered? Probably not, buying stuff at costco is just too fun

Annie lost her first tooth today. She’s been playing with her “wiggle-tooth” for the last few weeks, and has been getting exceedingly anxious to get it out of her mouth.

Today, after my failed attempt to pull it, she disappeared for half an hour, and then re-appeared with a tooth in her hand!

Before

After

Now we are waiting to see what the tooth fairy is going to do about this.

What can I say… it’s getting scary!

.. or why I haven’t replied to your emails in six months.

We break from our usual programming for a quick Wormus family update!

As you may or may not know (depending on how often you read the blog) we are in the process of making a move from Frankfurt, Germany to West Palm Beach, Florida. We have been planning this move since this time last year, and while it has taken longer, cost more, and been far more exhausting than we could have possibly imagined, we are now in the final stretch with only 12 days to go before the big move day.

I’ve been to WBP twice this year (totaling 5 and a half weeks) and if you have been keeping up to date with the Flickr feed you will have already seen photos of our new office, apartment and car.

We are currently in the process of tearing everything down and packing up our current place, while trying to keep on top of all the projects at work. Hopefully in the next 6 weeks this will all be done with and we’ll be somewhat settled in our new place.

Then I’ll have time to pick up on everything I’ve neglected.

In the footsteps of a couple good friends I’ve decided to make the first blog entry of the new year yet another year in review round-up for the year 2006.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already done with 2006, this one went by fast. A lot happened, and due to the overflow of work, I missed a lot of what I did last year (specifically LinuxWorld Expo and LinuxTag).

One of the big work-related events is a new venture that I’ve been working on this year. <project-pimping>HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation was officially launched on December 1st, however about 18 months worth of work had gone into the product and building a client list before the site launch. The sprang out of my work with HedgeCo Networks which involved a the development of a high-end statistics/graphing package which generated quantitative statistics for Hedge Funds. After deploying the product on their flagship product, they started receiving request to license the package on various other website platforms, so the package was reworked into a slimmed down edition which can be deployed in smaller sites.

As we started deploying the product we realized the potential, and reallocated some of the design talent that we had been working on other project into creating entire websites and Hedge Fund start-up consulting/compliance packages. Since our Dec. 1 launch we have had a fantastically profitable month (to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing check out the Hedge Fund Websites blog)</project-pimping>

All of the above required me to reallocate my own time away from other projects, until the point that for the last year I have done little else. So as of Jan 1, 2007 I am officially working full time for HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites… Freelancer no longer! This year I’m also moving my family up to West Palm Beach, Florida and will be working in the brand new HedgeCo offices (will post pics of when we move in later this month).

OK, so now that I’ve spent all my time pimping my current project I’ll skim through the news.

January: Slow month, Sid officially joined our family as “brother”. I weighed in on the PHP Security debate du jour wondering when good security verges on paranoia and the side effects.

February: Traveled to UK for PHPLondon conference. This was a fantastic event (looking forward to next year), as far as I remembered there were about 250 geeks attending the 1-day event. Got a cool new LCD. In defense of PHPNuke (and other applications of low repute whose name starts with PHP*) I responded to Marco’s post reminiscing about how great PHPNuke was back in the day.

March: Slow month… google releases finance portal, barra stops reporting S&P numbers and screws up my webservice. Tom Fox is Executed.

April: Gearing up for the world cup 32Cards PHP-based card game is released. I start using backpackit to organize my life (note to reader, I stop using it in a couple months, when it stops scaling with my needs). I spent 10 days in Florida, unfortunately missing PHPTek by 10 days.

May: I question open-source for highly specific niche applications (more specifically my statistic package). I enjoy Scott Sigler’s “Infection” which is in full swing. I start watching theshow with ze frank.

June: DSL CRASH!!! I try to “upgrade” my connection by switching providers which turns into 3 weeks on dial-up. During this time I camp at friends houses during all night product launches, and drive everyone around me insane. I finally return. World cup is in full swing, and Germany is World Cup CRAZY! I take pictures.
I travel to Norway for the eZpublish conference & PHPVikinger. Ammar Ibrahim comes to Frankfurt, we watch some football!

July: A slow month… I try Fedora Core, only to get frustrated when I can’t mount my ntfs external drive with the correct permissions (worked fine in root, was able to find no usable explanation). Infection ends. Put out a notice for css code monkeys get more response than I can handle. Macs Rock? During one of the hottest months on record the kids have chickenpox and we are confined indoors.

August: I subscribe to Gail Orenstein’s Flickr feed during her trip to Israel. cool pictures (quite possibly NSFW) with political commentary. Two talks are accepted for ZendCon. I manage to squeeze into the PHPConference schedule at the last minute. We take the kids on a mini-vacation to Legoland and then visit some friends in Switzerland.

September: Catch Mark Nemcoff on in a 5-minute-review. I deploy a site using eZpublish, blog about lessons learned. RIP Lilo. Do some myspace defending.

October: The Pear book is out!. I speculate about google world domination, and yahoo opens up the login api. Spend a week in WPB Florida, then fly to LA and drive down to San Jose for Zendcon.

November: Conference season. Meet Scott Sigler!!! Give talks at Zendcon, fly back home and give tutorial at IPC2k6. After seeing that the Zend Framework is more than hype I take a look at it and start my Zend Framework Hidden Gems article series. I dump backpackit for google docs (which I am still happily using). When is it a good time to rewrite your platform?

December: HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website launch. Fantastic month on the work front, however not a whole lot of time for anything else. David (CPUNerd) on the other hand has way too much time on his hands, and immortalizes me in kilt.

And that’s about it… probably the longest blog entry ever! I’m looking forward to this year as being the craziest yet. I’ll be flying to WPB next week, and for this first quarter will probably spend more time on that side of the pond.

A big THANK YOU to my readers (let’s make that anyone who made it this far into the blog entry). And most of all thanks to Stella, Annie and Mia for putting up with me during this hectic time.

We took the kids out to the park to have a bbq. While we were waiting for everyone to show up, Annie comes up and says

Annie: “I want to play goofball”
Stella: “goofball?”
Annie: “yes, where you have a stick and hit the little ball”
Stella: “You mean mini-golf?”
Annie: “Yes, mini-golf”

Nikon D50/D70 vs Canon Rebel XT Shootout

I’m looking at upgrading my s100 to a digital SLR. I played with Mike’s on Sunday and I am totally sold on getting an upgrade.

Taking these kinds of pictures is worth whatever the cost.

I checked out this review on the difference between the Nikon and Canon low end digital SLRs. The conclusion was somewhat inconclusive:

Both the Nikon D70 and the Canon Digital Rebel XT offer a number of individual advantages when compared side by side. Overall, the Nikon D70 provides the richer feature and function set of the two cameras, while the Digital Rebel XT offers a smaller, lighter 8MP solution, and the benefit of Canon’s latest DIGIC II image processor (faster performance than predecessor Digital Rebel, lower high ISO noise.)

While many potential buyers might be drawn by the 8 megapixel power of the Canon EOS Rebel XT, it is important to remember that resolution is not the end all in terms of image quality. The difference in print quality that the 8MP resolution offers is for all intents and purposes barely noticeable at an 11″ x 14″ print size compared to the same shot taken at 6.1 MP. The advantage of the 8MP resolution sensor lies mainly in the ability to crop an image while preserving more detail.

When comparing the respective standard kit lens packages, the Nikon D70 with the AF-S Nikkor DX 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G zoom versus the Canon Rebel XT with the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 II zoom, the Nikon DX 18-70mm offers superior performance with its AF-S motor, brighter f/4.5 aperture at telephoto, ED low dispersion glass to minimize ghosting and flare, metal lens mount, internal focusing and extended focal range coverage up to 70mm. The higher Nikon D70 kit price versus the Canon Rebel XT kit is mainly reflected in the value of the lens.

Which camera to choose is a personal one and depends on a number of factors. All things considered, bottom line is that the Canon EOS Rebel XT and the Nikon D70 digital SLR are both capable of delivering excellent image quality. We recommend looking at what features are the most important to you, and making your decision accordingly. You really can’t go wrong.

Does anyone have any suggestions either way?

Representing the offical Toby-Fanclub-FFM I took Annie and Mia to Hessen Tanzt. Very early on Mia fell and smashed her nose on one of the metal bars, which turned into a bloody mess (literally). Thankfully, we had tissues and the bleeding quickly stopped without any damage (other than a bruised nose).

We had fun, stayed for a couple hours, and then went downtown to do some mothers-day shopping.

The picture above was taken with my old 2 Megapixel Canon S100. I’m getting a Rebel XT, just haven’t gotten around to finding a place that sells the black one for a reasonable price.

And the thunder!

The first Monday of Daylight Savings Time. It always sucks loosing an hour of sleep, but then again I get the benefit of sitting in my kitchen with my coffee just in time to watch the sun come up.

Another weekend gone by too quickly. On the list of things that didn’t get done was to set send out the first mass mailing to all the readers of this blog. I’ve been toying with setting up an email list for quite a while, and a couple weekends ago set up dadamail for this purpose. What I’ll eventually do is grab the emails of everyone who has ever commented and left their email on this blog and then send a subscription invitation. Once I get a couple “readers” I’ll start to send out a weekly email with a roundup of the blog entries for the week plus some unique content (aggregation of popular linkblogs, del.icio.us feed, etc.).

I did get a new phone (Nokia 6230i) and hooked it up to my laptop via bluetooth, the thing that I was most impressed with is the 1.3 megapixel camera. In good lighting it is good enough to take “OK-for-Web” pictures, because there is no flash, the shutter speed is very slow. I downloaded a bunch of applications and loaded the phone up, so we’re good to go. I also upgraded my mobile phone package, but am not very happy with the deal I got, since while there are plenty of free talk minutes, there aren’t any free SMSs included with the package. This makes sending 2 SMSs just as expensive as a 1 minute call, that sucks…

OK, now back to work…

I was getting my cup of coffee… I grabed a cup from the sink, rinsed it out (I think) and then filled it up with coffee. As I was mixing the milk in, I wondered if this was a different type of milk since it was a lot more foamy than usual.

There must be something different about this coffee, since it has a fruity taste, almost like lemon or orange or something… it’s hard to place.

I’m half way through my cup when Stella calls out “Aaron, did you take the cup that I put the dishsoap in?”

Time for a premature refill.

Last Saturday, I splurged and bought myself a 19inch LCD monitor. I liked my old CRT but it was getting old, and taking up a LOT of space so I figured I was well over due for an LCD.

I got the and LG, it had nice reviews, specs and of the LCD monitors on display it was certainly the most pleasing on the eyes.

After hooking it up, adjusting all the color levels (these things are BRIGHT) I noticed a dead pixel in the central bottom section of the screen. I called up support and they told me that depending on the gaurantee of the individual monitor I could might be able to take it back under the gaurantee. Thankfully, here in Germany we have a 10-day, no questions asked return so today we drove the 40km back to the Media Markt where I bought the LCD and traded it in for another of the same LCD.

So I get home fire it up and this one also has a dead pixel, in almost the same position as the last one. When talking to one of the techs at the store, he said that most gaurantees only apply after 3 or 4 pixels. Are dead pixels something that LCD users just have to live with? or am I supposed to keep returning these damn things until I get one that I like?

Thankfully, the the good part of this story was that we decided to check out this wooden bar that we had seen and liked last week, and today they were having a 25% discount on all their furniture. So we went ahead and bought ourselves the bar along with a matching table and got shipping free