Binarynomad

Out of the blue, an old friend of mine popped up on IM and we started chatting for a bit, I hadn’t spoken with Ted in (what feels like) years. We used to work togeather at PGE and then he took off to Lucent and I to Wink Communications. I’m glad we had a chance to talk and we plan on more catching up tomorrow night.

So a few days ago I was contacted by an old Wink coworker of mine. He left me a message asking me to give him a call when I had some free time. It turns out he just joined a new company that is starting to rapidly expand and they had a position that he thought screamed my name. It turns out they are building their IT infrastructure and want someone to take the lead on that project. Now this strongly coincides with my current goals of starting a business that builds SMB infrastructures.

BUT, my initial reaction was to possibly decline based on two reasons:

1) I may have to quit in Dec 2005 because of possible plans to travel outside the US. This is a very strong reality for me and I don’t want to put a new business in an awkward position of starting to build everything and then take off. 2) At first, I wasn’t sure I had the skill set to design/build the IT infrastructure yet. That is why I’m currently studying at Berkeley, and working on my RHCE, to fill in any of the holes on system/server design / best practices. But I took another look at the job posting and all of the points they are looking for I have (except for the “OpenExchange” experience). And looking back at the job posting, I think I may have read more into the scope of the position than what is actually needed. (but I’m not sure)

So even after I gave them two wide berth warnings, they still want me to send them a resume and come in. They said I was well spoken of. (always a nice thing to hear 🙂 )

Now I need to update a resume that I haven’t touched in over 5 years….ack. Wish me luck.

I felt really bad for this one girl today. I was getting out to lunch really late, 3pm’ish when I passed by this girl on the sidewalk, she caught my eye and when she noticed I had looked it was like a switch had been turned on. She burst into this introduction/I want to tell you about bad things happening to the environment. She told me she was with this group called “Environmental Action”(see link at the bottom) and that there was this bill in going through that would allow companies to dump 8x more mercury into the environment. They were canvasing for people to join and make donations. Now, I live in the Bay Area and work in San Francisco. I’m no stranger to environmental petitions or money requests on the streets. By my own rule of thumb, I am weary of walkups. If I think a organization or cause is interesting I will first check it out online and see if they are a legit organization, if there are any warnings, etc. I kept telling her that I don’t plan to join there on the street or give a cash donation right off the bat until I check them out a bit. She kept pushing, kept saying how street signups show that there is strong support for the cause and has more impact than online signups. I kept trying to convey I didn’t intend to hand over money or sign anything without checking it out. Eventually I just said “How do I know you are not someone trying to con me?”. Now I was using that as an example of how a person has to be careful, and realize I should have said something like “How do I know that they are a legitimate organization…” but I used the former sentence and it looked like I had just struck her. She had this absolute look of “How could you think of me that way” I immediately felt bad and tried to apologize and tell her that I did not mean to sound like I was attacking her character. I felt that she was about to start crying, and she said that she was not conning me because she would not do that type of thing. Then she picked up her back and walked away. At that point my stomach was in about 500 knots and I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat. I walked back to my building and decided to get online to follow up on the organization. I found their website:

http://environmental-action.org/

And started looking around and the website was very basic, the information she gave me was there “Bush passing the Mecury bill…”, “Getting Nixon to sign environmental laws 35 years ago…” etc. But the site was very “two levels deep” and what I mean by that is it was enough to fill someone looking to see if the site even existed, but if you decide to look around there wasn’t much. I was beginning to wonder how real they were. A lot of links turned out to be dead ends “404 errors” or the such. The JOIN button was not working:

Not Found The requested URL /environmental-action/join.html was not found on this server. Apache/1.3.27 Server at www.oursecureserver.org Port 443

All in all, kinda the place I would not trust. But then tonight I looked up their domain name ownership and found that the person who registered the domain also owns:

http://www.pirg.org/

Which is “Public Interest Research Group” and it seems a more real. And yet, as I do lookups on each of the state chapter websites, there are NO registars for the domain names:

whois www.calpirg.org NOT FOUND

So I don’t know what to think at this point. I want to look into this some more. A lot of the links in Google trace back to PIRG with very few non-PIRG owned sites talking about them.

Minor Update: I also found that the JOIN button of “Environmental Action” has the wrong URL.
It was: [https://www.oursecureserver.org/environmental-action/join.html] When it should have been: [http://environmental-action.org/join.html]

So I’ve been procrastinating. You see I have all this stuff that has happened and for each day that goes by, I have more and more I want to post, yet, back in Austin, when I was working on upgrading this site, I kinda went on a hiatus. Now, as time waits for no one, my pile of posts has become some-what intimidating and I’ve been avoiding posting anything up due to guilt that I need to first post my backlog.

Well I’ve decided, what the hell. I’m not going to try and catch everything up at once. I’ll just start posting again and as free time presents itself, I’ll see about cleaning up that old queue.

(lets see how well I do 🙂 )

So, I’m stressing a bit right now. This morning started off on an off balance foot, I had to crawl out of bed around 5:30am to take my mom and Big Brian to the airport, I was actually surprised that I could form coherent thoughts that early in the morning, I’m usually up around 7:30am and even then it’s normally hard for me :).
(more…)

Sorry about the funky layout, I’m in the process of upgrading to WordPress 1.5 and I need to work out some of the layout kinks from my plugins. I’m thinking I’ll move away from Pictpress and start up a Gallery engine to link to.

So today is the first day of South By Southwest interactive. I’ve been going back an forth on what type of ticket/badge/wristband to by but discovered all the online options closed as of today, I now have to head to the Austin convention center to register.

Pat and I met up with my brother Trey and his mom “Joyce” for lunch at a nice Mexican restaurant. Had corn soup and beef taco. Did some catching up, and then continued on to the convention center.

The Austin Convention center is huge! After Pat dropped me off, I wandered around looking for the registration area, it felt like I was lost in this huge indoor city. Eventually I made my way up to the upper levels where all the main booths were. The line was something like you would find at Six Flags for a roller coaster, except no one was moving. It turns out the computer system had crashed and they could not process anyone. The staff was trying to hint that they were open until 8pm and we should try our luck later. I decided to hang around for a bit since I had time. In line I met Wade McDonald with Pointedfilms.com, he been doing B2B and training/marketing videos for awhile, and has just moved into the Documentary films genre. This was his first time at SXSW too, next year I think he hopes to be showing instead of viewing 🙂

After getting my Interactive Badge and a Film pass, there wasn’t much going on, so I went in search of a coffee shop. I ended up in Starbucks, so I grabbed a mocha and went over all the bag goodies, calendars, etc. I was amazed at how many things were going on, I could fill up every hour between 10am and 2am easy. I finally worked up a tentative schedule but I don’t think I’ll really be putting the $58 film pass I got to full use. I only think I may hit 3-4 movies in the run.

There was one file showing this night that I really wanted to see: “My Big Fat independent Movie” which does to independent films what “Scary Movie” does to horror films. It was great, I lost count of the number of films it poked at, everything from “Run Lola Run” to “Pulp Fiction”, almost a decade of Movies 🙂 The “Alamo Drafthouse Downtown” is a GREAT venue! It’s a move/restaurant/pub. Your seat has a bench table infront where you fill out a card with your order, place it in a card holder, they pick it up, make everything and then bring it to you. You can order anything from appetizers to full meals. Beer, Wine, coke, deserts, everything. The pre-show was fun, they were playing 80 cartoons. I got to watch Underdog, Pink Panther, and some pseudo comic/cartoon from Marvel starring the Submariner.
After MUCH laughter, the movie ended, we all shuffled out and I headed on home.

I’m trying to decide if I should rent a car or not. Right now, Pat, through great generosity, is giving me rides, but some of the movies I want to see start at Midnight, which puts me on the road around 2am, and I don’t want to inflict that on him. So right now, I’m considering the cost of a cab home vs car rental+parking. I think the cab would be cheaper and would allow me to visit a pub if I wanted to. After googling it, it turns out the trip is only about 8 miles, which will run somewhere around $16-$18 for a ride home. Car rentals are around $25/day so I think the cab option is a go.

Overall, It was a great night. I’m looking forward to tomorrow when all the panels and main events startup. Lots to see.

http://pointedfilms.com http://www.originalalamo.com/downtown/frames.asp http://mybigfatindependentmovie.com

One more day of work and then I’m off to Austin, TX. I’m heading out there to see the South by SouthWest Festival. I’m really looking forward to seeing my brothers, they are the closest family I have to my mom and I haven’t visited in about 8 years.

I’m also planning on using this time to gather myself for the coming year. I’ve got some fun things in the works, but I need to make sure I’m ready for them 🙂 ‘News at 11’ (sometime later)

I also hope to use the time to update this blog. I have a few events I need to post (pics included) and then upgrade to WordPress 1.5.

http://2005.sxsw.com/

So I’ve been kinda procrastinating lately. I’ve got a bunch of pictures to post up, a number of entries I should write, and to top it all off I need to upgrade my blog software to the next version. On the other hand, letting my mind veg on CSI is damn tempting. I think I’ll get things moving Friday, if nothing pops up 🙂 .

“The bad news: there is no key to the universe. The good news: it was never locked.” –Swami Beyondananda