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Scary Russian Hackers

On Monday morning NPR had a piece on Gavin Newsom’s bid to get city wide wireless for San Francisco. As part of this they interviewed some guy from the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. This was his comment:
“Wireless is convenient as well as secure. To snoop a wireless signal you need to be right next to [...]

Network Administrator Day

Unable to find any waves (or anything that even resembled a wave) yesterday I gave up dreams of surfing [1] and decided to have a network administrator day. When I rebuilt one of our guest room closets I wired it to be a house server closet which included a print server and printer. While my [...]

Overheard, 21 Dog Years

I got a chance to read 21 Dog Years last week by Mike Daisey which is a humorous story of life Amazon in the customer service and biz dev department during the boom. I loved this quote:
When you’re young, you think that you’ll live forever. Hey, check me out, I’m sixteen and I’m bullet-proof. [...]

Wise florist

“Is it hard to work all day with things that are dying?” Asked the young man.
“We are all dying.” Answered the florist.

These two guys walk into a bar…

Funny story told in a meeting today (context withheld for obvious reasons):
A plane with two pilots crashes in the desert. One goes looking for food and returns to say “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is only camel crap to eat. The good news is that there is [...]

Tech Victory

My dad was a do-it-yourself kind of guy. I spent a lot of time with him working on house projects. Furnace giving you problems? Take it apart. Electric work not up to code? Roll-up your sleeves (and put on rubber boots). I remember once we working on a project and everything was going right. It [...]

Surfing and Salsa

Jul had to work this afternoon so I headed up to Pacifica and managed to get about five hours of surfing before the ends of my fingers got blue enough to make me worry. While I was out on the water today I realized people don’t talk much about the waiting involved in surfing. Which [...]

Early Flowers

Jul is doing the flowers at my sister’s wedding next weekend so we got up at 3:30 this morning to head up to the wholesale flower market in SF to place orders. The market covers several square blocks in San Francisco (about a football field) and is filled with a patchwork of farmers selling a [...]

Diabolical Pirates?

I checked my mailbox at work for what has to be the first time ever today because something was sent to me through interoffice mail. One of the pieces of mail was from Verisign. The heading read:
“DIABOLICAL INTERNET PIRATES COULD BE TARGETING YOUR SITE.”
I kid you not.
Apparently all I need is Verisign 128-bit SSL encryption [...]

Tivo’s Pause Button

Ken Norton has a great write-up on Tivo’s marketing challenges. He addresses something I often wonder — how is it people live without Tivo? I appreciate his analysis.
I think Netflix has a similar issue. They seem to believe their pause button is “no late fees” and Blockbuster seems to agree. (They responded with the [...]