Thats a good one jimmy

I am completely amazed at how mundane tasks can chew away at the day. Just managing to get dinner cooked seems to take up every evening lately, by the time we get food on the table I am starting to think about bed!

So after the parents left our house in pristine condition, (though we had no idea where anything was) my brother and I decided to make a mess. The liquor bottles came back down off the shelf and onto the counter where they belong, and we went about manly tasks of making things with power tools and electronics.

We took the drawers out of the desk Chris is sitting at, and nailed in a shelf for the xbox to sit on, his computer is in the base of where the drawers used to be, and cables come through a hole we notched in the base. We setup a hub so the one 100' cable could serve his needs for gaming and tv,(and I can cable in to play WOW so I get less lag). Once he had an xbox and the 8" lcd tv setup we made his xbox into an media center extender and he was up running. A nice little media corner if I do say so myself.



Tags: Convictus Media Center Home Entertainment Home Life

Killing time

In between real jobs I thought I might knock the dust off of my cabling skills and pickup some contract data cabling work. I had forgotten that installing data cables is really a small step above construction work.

I have found myself in side of crawl spaces up to my elbows in insulation, and covered in conduit muck the last few days, and to make it all worse I apparently am slow. Not slow compared to the peers I learned with, but slow compared to the industry workers. These people must have no feeling whatsoever in the tips of their fingers. Mine ache from all the untwisting of wires, and finessing them into place for termination. I also forgot how much I hate outside plant cable. The icky pick inside is like working with Vaseline all over your hands.

LOL, not such a glamorous life.

Payperpost... I got payed

Well, I suppose I expected to be paid when I clicked on opportunities and blogged about them... but I am still excited about that I did get paid! I have been posting very infrequently about payperpost.com opportunities, it is nice to get some direction for your postings; otherwise you might not have anything to talk about.

Well thus far I have been paid $25, not a lot, but consider how long it takes to rack up adsense revenue or any of the other "monetizing" options for webmasters, and that is exciting. The company really seems to be listening to their bloggers, and have added an option to report what you consider a bad opportunity. It does give the blogging community a way to let Payperpost not to allow certain kinds of advertising.

Tags: payperpost Homelife Convictus

Goodbye job, you won't be missed

Have you ever had a job that treated you like a cog? Ever been stuck in a rut, and every suggestion, or attempt to make the prison better was batted away by the guards? Well that's where I have been for the last 7 months, and it only took me screwing up an entire week to be asked to stop coming. Its like the could read my mind....

Any how, screw it. I was checked out of there 2 months ago. I made the process so easy, I think any of my minions can do it now. Just hope they like being a robot.

Codemonkey out, no more boring meetings with boring manager Rob.

Now that is outside the box.

Be mindful of your pride

Payperpost.com, simple concept. See an offer that you find value in posting about, write a post, take the offer and wait 30 days for your check(paypal, but whatever). Simple, and scary for the "authentic" bloggers out there who believe that corporations having a voice in the blogosphere will ruin it.

The bloggers out there that generate huge volumes of traffic, generate it because they are "not corporate" and "have something to say". Mostly they have very pleasing to read writing styles, excellent wit and humor as well as fantastic content. None of these qualities are easy to acquire, and none are easy to fake for long. Corp blogs seeking to capture these qualities (and the enormous click through it can generate) will not be able to sustain that, so if a few people pick up Payperpost listed ideas on their blog it is very very unlikely to do any more damage to them than the current spam blogs are doing.

That said, Payperpost will have a very long road of finding quality companies requesting buzz, and should steer clear of being overly proud for quite some time, and the following does not qualify:

"Get a hold of a picture of one of the bloggers that bashed us when we launched: techcrunch, scoble or any of your other favorites. Combine that with the phrase "All Our Blogs Are Belong to Us - PayPerPost.com" in your favorite photo editing tool so that the text is along with the image. Post it on your favorite photo sharing site like flickr and on your blog. Tell us what you think about the elitists who think they are the only ones that should get paid."

Tags: Techcrunch Payperpost Convictus

Net Neutrality and the costs of infrastructure Part I

I have been reading for a while now about the Net Neutrality and "Save the Internet" sort of passively for the last few weeks now. While I see that this has a great deal to do with how the rest of my online life will be shaped, I just hadn't mustered the energy to go look at the mess and try and muddle out whether or not I needed to be concerned or not.

Given the countries recent legislation, I had a bad feeling going into the research on this, and had my slashdot.org news byte bias on high.

The basic end of the legislation and all the lobbying that is going on by both sides appears to me to center around the central theme of infrastructure. How it is used and regulated. AT&T comes from a history of Telecommunications feels shackled to innovate by their past regulation agreements and wants to not have to continue to open up its networks to carry whatever traffic passes through. This is the principle of "common carrier" and required the protected Baby Bells to share and share alike, but it also required them to contribute to a Universal Service fund that helps pay for infrastructure upgrades and support.

Cable companies, do not appear to have the "Common Carrier" portion of regulation interesting as they are represent the largest portion of "Last Mile" service providers for internet.

Tags: Net Neutrality Regulation IPTV VOIP Telcos Convictus