Yet Another BofH

Tis the season to network borrow

Gary M*** here from San Jose with a part time home in Arnold.  I just happened across your wireless network (the SSID is matt-cabin AT peterson.org) and am able to get a low sigal connection to your network.  I've enjoyed 'borrowing' a bit of your bandwidth.  For the past couple of years I've been suffering with ~28K dial up at the Pinebrook house.  I've cetainly enjoyed my web access via your network the past couple of days.  Hope you don't mind. Again, thanks for the open access.  I'd even be happy to contribute to the access point for the 4-5Mbs that I'm getting.

Installed wireless on the SF office roof, borrowing Internet c/o Sflan7 (6^th/Mission @ UnitedLayer).  The “no phone line required” Speakeasy line still isn't installed.  Wanted to have some form of Internet available for the company party on Friday.

I fergot how much of a b*tch crimping outdoor Ethernet cable is.  The pairs appear to be 22 guage, instead of the usual 24 (I think).  The fatter size combined with nasty goop glue stuff, it just makes crimping into a RJ45 plug a big pain.  I cheated on the office end of the cable, used some 3M “jelly bean” things to a normal Cat5 cable/plug.  The cable delivered power fine (Soekris net4521 w/ OpenBSD 3.6) but no Ethernet link, grr! Amazing how 90% of the AP's have some form of WEP, guess folks are starting to get a clue on basic security (or maybe more units ship factory-direct w/ WEP turned on?).

Attended a few meetings.  It's fairly obvious that security needs to be addressed, along with networking. I'm looking forward to the challenges.

Woop.. a stipend in Amex gift checks, neat; go Cisco!  Lesson learned, Cisco's CallManager Express paired with CallUnity Express just seems to work; I barely read the online docs and just plowed my way though configuring extensions, voicemail, etc (all of this within a few hours).

P.S. To the cranky Cisco IP phone lab guy who was hating on Asterisk (he kept saying “It's Linux” with a large grin of disapproval); check your own backyard. The voicemail NM module is actually a full-blown PC running Linux!

P.P.S.  The screen like'ness in IOS is rather weird.. I think it was Ctrl-Shift-something-6 to switch between the router itself and the VM NM module, funky!

I'm so tired, so little left of my brain to function.  This study is structured in an interesting way. Two young professional “usability engineer” ladies (actually contractors, Cisco still apparently has a hiring freeze) basically spying on me and asking what I'm thinking.  They sat fairly close to me, constantly monitoring my behaviors (“Why did you flip to that page in the manual, how are you going to configure X without knowing how Y works, what documentation would be useful for you right now, is the box enclosure attractive, etc”).  It was actually kinda neat, they were obviously not tech heads or product managers.  I do feel sorry for them, over a month of observations. 

early morning stroll

Note the time, god awful early in the morning.  Today and tomorrow I'm heading down to Cisco to participate in a usability study.  I'll be attempting to configure their small-business IP phone solution along with one competitors.  I've been asked to attend “clean slate”, with very little studying up on the product.  I did however take a quick peek at their marketing foo, it appears to be a VoIP solution not requiring a Windows server in the mix, (*gasp*). 

I suppose if I land this job @ a blogging company, I better drink the kool-aid and write about my life (regardless if I have an actual audience besides my previous bed partners or immediate friends; word to Internet spying).  Matt Westervelt of SeattleWireless.net will be proud, I've now joined the cult of wiki's AND blogging  I will note however, in late 1998 I wrote my own online journal.  First in paper form, then edited while converting to HTML.  I made my own custom background (tiled picture of my sloppy handwriting), took pictures and even posted replies from friends (mostly my teenage peers I was chasing after); bummer I didn't see the business model before my eyes!  I stopped the journal after a year or so, mostly cause my parents finally discovered it and that was all to weird (ie: now they'd know why I was stumbling in the house @ 4am).

In typical start-up style (amazing to behold in 2004) the offices were packed with random computer bits, people working in hallways and no available conference rooms.  The operations guy and I spoke for well over an hour @ the local Starfunks.  Coffee is slightly drinkable with white chocolate flavoring (anyone know the Starbucks language for douple flavoring?). In a oh-so-common occurrence, we happened to have worked @  the same dot bomb (introducing Matt's law: all tech workers in the Bay Area are always less the 2 degrees of separation from their peers; 1 degree if you're female; Orkut, Tribe or whatever social-networking-site-of-the-week will prove this).  Many of the architecture and economical flaws aren't being duplicated with this company, woo hoo!  They appear to be fairly “lean-n-mean”, even with a the taint of VC funding (*boo hiss from the peanut gallery*), which doesn't really matter to me.

Similar to previous gigs, I'd be positioned as the “IT guy / SysAdmin / Network Engineer”.  I tend to enjoy this role, in theory it would have minimal repetitive tasks and growth to learn new skills.  The opportunity to spread the gospel of BSD, VoIP and BGP appears to be available, nice bonus!  My conversation with the co-founder went fairly well.  I attempted to “up sell” myself, but it's so difficult to know where to draw the line (“Yes, I'm really good @ xyz, whoops, I've said this four times already”).  He already did some initial background work, finding an old newspaper biography of me online and a glance of my resume (I think we're only 3 years apart in age).  I was glad to hear many avenues exist to make money for the company, all of which are doing well - “We're popular in Japan”; always a good sign. 

I didn't have a firm answer for “What sort of compensation are you looking for?”; better then non-profit pay ($55k/yr), not so hip on lots of stock (considering they already have >40 employees, doubtful the strike price' will be worth it, nor has stock ever worked out for me in the past) and certainly flexible work hours.  I sure hope they extend an offer to me; the ops guy seemed sold, not sure about the founder.  Would be kinda a bummer, I would only have had a week of slacking/jobless'ness.  Need to study up on Fedora, go tree..err I mean Penguin huggers.

Pros:

• Young hip co-workers

• Respected in the “blogosphere”

• Market-rate pay?

 

Cons:

• Core offering built on Perl (while one can knob turn to scale this somewhat, it doesn't much after awhile; in the dot com days this meant the exit strategy was clearly sell the company/ignore the problem before porting to C; having a mod_perl guru on staff should alleviate this problem)

• Office location requires atleast two separate public transit providers, though they're moving to SoMa in two weeks (good for my commute, bad for bad luck of the area)