I was checking Feedlounge for the last time before bed, when I saw this come up in the Microsoft Knowledge Base feeds I have subscribed:
You write the funny punchline, because I just don’t know where to start…
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
I was checking out a few random stories from the Weblogs, Inc. network of blogs, when I came across this story from Information Week over at The WiFi Weblog.
These guys apparently had a 6-hour internet outage as Verizon experienced some problems up the line. Since their entire business is based on the internet, there was more than a slight problem here. During the outage, their CIO decided it was time for a back-up ISP, just in case this kind of thing happened again.
Wireless was the wave of the future. From a tower on top of the Empire State Building, they’re now beaming their backup connection right through their office windows. If you check out the story, you can see a picture of the antenna, bolted to the wall, right inside the window. It’s oddly cool looking. Ours at work is on top of the building, and all rusty and old… nothing of interest.
So I’ve decided this is what I need. The company they got their backup connection from offers service up to 19 miles away, at speeds from 1.5 to 3 Mbps. When are we going to get that around here? Sure we don’t have anything remotely like the Empire State Building in the upstate of South Carolina, but we’ve got water towers every 20 feet in most cities…
Hell, the City of Greer even has wireless downtown now, fed by a repeater that’s linked to an antenna on top of the water tower down the street. It’s a lousy 256 kbps link, but there’s no reason we couldn’t take it up a notch, right?
Just think… You contract out with the City of Greer to use their antenna, get a faster link to the water tower, and start offering service to the entire city. We could encrypt all the traffic, and require that everyone connecting to our service have a special base station, which simply serves as a VPN-endpoint of sorts, providing their access. For $20 a month, we’ll give you 2 Mbps service. Can you imagine how many small businesses and even home residential users would jump on this?
I could pay $50 a month for my DSL, plus another $30 or so for the phone line it runs on, or I could just pay $20 a month for this wireless service, and dump the phone and DSL entirely.
So you start this service with a DSL link. Pick up 3 or 4 customers, and now we’ve more than covered our base monthly expenses. So we add another DSL line. A few more customers, and we’ve once again got our monthly expenses covered. Before you know it, we’ve got several dozen customers, all more than happily paying $20 for their 3 Mbps service each month, and we’ve upgraded to a T3 line to provide full-duplex service so we can start enticing more businesses to jump on-board (for a slightly higher charge each month, of course).
Honestly, at the prices these guys are charging for DSL and cable service (*cough cough* BellSouth, Charter, Verizon…) do you really think you’d have a problem getting people to switch? Even the marketing would be bloody simple. We’re talking a very limited geographical area to start with. Get a few initial small businesses on board and have them all put up a sign “Free Wireless provided by
Now, if only I had the time and capital to pull something like this off…
I’d been putting it off for weeks now… Somehow I’d gotten duplicates of about 2 dozen CDs in my Music folder. I don’t know if I Consolidated my library in iTunes one too many times, or simply thought I hadn’t imported that music off my other PC or what, but they were there, and I was far too lazy to spend an hour going through deleting duplicate MP3s.
Content to live with these dupes for eternity, Download Squad came to my rescue today when Marc recommended Double Killer, a great little app that will scan any directory structure you tell it, and check for dupes not only by name, but also by size and CRC value.
Marc, you saved me at least an hour of some of the most repetative and boring work I can imagine… I’d say you have no idea how greatful I am, but since you used Double Killer for exactly the same reason, I guess you really do… Thanks anyway!
Well, I finally gave in to all the talk, and decided to sign up for the Flock preview / mailing list / what-have-you.
I have to say, this is a pretty cool idea. What would be really cool is if they’d create extensions for Firefox that let you blog from your browser and such. Ahh yesss, that would be the day.
Putting it all in Perspective, because Life is Good
I know you guys probably don’t find him as interesting as I do, but I’ve said it before (probably far too many times), and I’ll say it again: I love Wil Wheaton…
It’s probably not that his blog or life is anything spectacular or out of the ordinary, but rather the transition he’s been through. Everyone saw him as the dorky Ensign Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation for years, and most of them probably hated him for it. Then, years later, he comes back to show you just how much more dorky he can be by blogging about life, love and fulfillment beyond the Starship Enterprise.
Two books (soon to be three!) later, and he’s helping me get back some perspective on life with posts like this:
Those comments have really hit home for me. I haven’t seen some of my best friends more than a half dozen times in the last year, and lately I’ve been wondering if this is one of those transition periods… You know, where everyone slowly loses touch because life has pushed them in different directions. As much as I don’t want to lose them as “friends”, maybe it’s time just to let go and face the fact that we can’t hang out like we used to and no matter how hard we try, it’ll never be like it was back in high school.
I also went through a bit of a life-crisis involving work recently. I felt unappreciated and insignificant, like I was resisted at every turn whenever I tried to improve the overall quality of life there, and was just generally down-in-the-dumps overall because of it. With no one to turn to for consolation, I mulled over it and slowly worked myself into a deeper and darker hole as the weeks passed. Then, it was like something inside me just snapped… Suddenly, I decided “fuck it, it’s not worth it anyway” and stopped caring so much. If they don’t want to take my suggestions and improve operations, that’s their problem. I’m not going to work 10 hour days anymore, and I’m not going to work at home anymore. If all they want is the bare minimum of effort, that’s what they’re going to get, and I’m not going to worry about it anymore.
So Wil, if you happen to stumble upon this in PubSub or through a trackback, I just want to let you know how much some of your posts can mean to your readers. I may not have kept up for the past month or so as your blog got lost in the mix that is my life, but now that I’ve come out the other side of that tunnel, you’ve really helped me grab back onto my perspective. Thank you!