I have been busy lately! It has been a good busy. I finally got a job. I am working for SigmaTel. They are a semiconductor company here in Austin. I had another offer in California as a Contractor making a little bit more but the cost of living probably would have ate up the difference. The offer in California would have been just north of San Fran near the Nappa Valley area. NICE, right! Well, I wanted a full time position. I just do not enjoy interviewing. Life is full of choices, you know. It would have been quite an experience I am sure.
The other big news in my life is that I proposed to Christine. I am still waiting for an answer but I am hopeful. JK :) She said yes. It was a pretty interesting proposal that I will go into more at a later date. She will be moving to Austin in a couple of months. She was able to transfer with her company to do her stuff in the southwest. :) So as you can geuss life is pretty good.
Sunday, May 30, 2004
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
Yahoo Rules
Why Yahoo Mail Rules:
- Integrated into my homepage along with all my other links and information that I use
- Same interface available worldwide
- It automatically scans all attachments and downloads for viruses without having to purchase or download additional software and updates to every box that you own or will use.
- Will be my address for the rest of my life regardless of who my ISP is
- FREE (as in beer)
- Very, very little spam makes it into my inbox
- No software running on your machine
- Impervious to simple buffer overflow hacks and attacks
- No software to update ever
- OS independence!!!
- Address book is not on your local machine and therefore if your machine is compromised it will not spread to everyone you know
- Much less obtrusive advertising than other free email providers (mail.com)
- Not owned by a predatory monopolist (hotmail.com)
- It just works! You don't have to know anything about computers. Isn't that what everyone really wants out of a tool (mac)?
Why Yahoo Mail Sucks:
- It might be a bit slower than other locally run email programs especially if you are trying to access your email through a low bandwidth connection.
- There are potentially more privacy concerns with storing all your email on a remote server. However a novice or even intermediate computer user will probably leave themselves more open to privacy concerns than having them stored on yahoo's servers
- They are not saints and you still have to watch out for changes in there User Agreements. Like humans every company has the potential for great acts of evil and great acts of goodness. No company is always one or the other (except for Microsoft).
- Formatting of the messages is more limited
For my personal use I find that the positives far outweigh the negatives. I am almost always on a broadband connection so execution speed is not a problem for me. The limited formatting does not bother me. In fact I am a big fan of straight text emails as opposed to HTML emails. It’s a big waste of space if you ask me. Include the URL in the text if you must have some HTML. I am already running a browser so it will take me less time to click on a link than to have browser software running in addition to my email client. Those are my thoughts on Yahoo Mail.
- Integrated into my homepage along with all my other links and information that I use
- Same interface available worldwide
- It automatically scans all attachments and downloads for viruses without having to purchase or download additional software and updates to every box that you own or will use.
- Will be my address for the rest of my life regardless of who my ISP is
- FREE (as in beer)
- Very, very little spam makes it into my inbox
- No software running on your machine
- Impervious to simple buffer overflow hacks and attacks
- No software to update ever
- OS independence!!!
- Address book is not on your local machine and therefore if your machine is compromised it will not spread to everyone you know
- Much less obtrusive advertising than other free email providers (mail.com)
- Not owned by a predatory monopolist (hotmail.com)
- It just works! You don't have to know anything about computers. Isn't that what everyone really wants out of a tool (mac)?
Why Yahoo Mail Sucks:
- It might be a bit slower than other locally run email programs especially if you are trying to access your email through a low bandwidth connection.
- There are potentially more privacy concerns with storing all your email on a remote server. However a novice or even intermediate computer user will probably leave themselves more open to privacy concerns than having them stored on yahoo's servers
- They are not saints and you still have to watch out for changes in there User Agreements. Like humans every company has the potential for great acts of evil and great acts of goodness. No company is always one or the other (except for Microsoft).
- Formatting of the messages is more limited
For my personal use I find that the positives far outweigh the negatives. I am almost always on a broadband connection so execution speed is not a problem for me. The limited formatting does not bother me. In fact I am a big fan of straight text emails as opposed to HTML emails. It’s a big waste of space if you ask me. Include the URL in the text if you must have some HTML. I am already running a browser so it will take me less time to click on a link than to have browser software running in addition to my email client. Those are my thoughts on Yahoo Mail.
Saturday, March 27, 2004
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Imagine a World...
Imagine how different our world would be if the person that the majority of Americans had wanted to be president the 2000 election had become our president...
I started thinking about this again after I read an article about another recount in Florida where Dick Gephardt beat Kerry 2-1! Bush won in Florida by 537 votes.
The next scary thing to think about is the fact that with some electronic voting machines (one of which I voted on yesterday) there is no capability for a recount because there is NO PAPER TRAIL! This is a very scary situation in which hackers could very easily decide an election and nobody will ever know what happened. I made a stink about this at the polling station (probably not the right venue) and then went home and wrote to the Secretary and to the paper asking them to fix this problem. And they say Window$ has security holes!
I would ask anyone that votes on eletronic voting machines to write their Secreatary of State to demand that there votes be verifiable.
I started thinking about this again after I read an article about another recount in Florida where Dick Gephardt beat Kerry 2-1! Bush won in Florida by 537 votes.
The next scary thing to think about is the fact that with some electronic voting machines (one of which I voted on yesterday) there is no capability for a recount because there is NO PAPER TRAIL! This is a very scary situation in which hackers could very easily decide an election and nobody will ever know what happened. I made a stink about this at the polling station (probably not the right venue) and then went home and wrote to the Secretary and to the paper asking them to fix this problem. And they say Window$ has security holes!
I would ask anyone that votes on eletronic voting machines to write their Secreatary of State to demand that there votes be verifiable.
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Now Time For Some FUN!
Well it seems as if the primary is all but wrapped up. Now its time for some fun! Its time to get president Bush out of Washington. To quote a bumper sticker I saw the other day:
"Save the environment: Plant a bush back in Texas!"
I received notification of a chance to help do just that and I signed up to volunteer with moveon.org. I would encourage others to do the same. I know that many of you do not have as much free time as I do but I would ask you to give what you can. You can volunteer at the following link http://www.moveon.org/pac/pledge/?id=-3126228-MqNDrCFbBTfbnXPySvNynA . Please help get the US back to the people or at the very least away from Bush.
Here is an interesting link I site I found today.
"Save the environment: Plant a bush back in Texas!"
I received notification of a chance to help do just that and I signed up to volunteer with moveon.org. I would encourage others to do the same. I know that many of you do not have as much free time as I do but I would ask you to give what you can. You can volunteer at the following link http://www.moveon.org/pac/pledge/?id=-3126228-MqNDrCFbBTfbnXPySvNynA . Please help get the US back to the people or at the very least away from Bush.
Here is an interesting link I site I found today.
Monday, March 01, 2004
Needed: oscilloscope
I am in desperate need of an oscilloscope. I have done as much debugging as I can with my DMM and I am stuck in my tracks until I can get an oscilloscope to debug my problems. My part not willing to go into ISP (In System Programming) mode so I cannot program it. I have checked all the connections and the oscillator and everything seems fine so I think that it must be either the 12V programming power supply (of which I have tried three different ones now) has to much ripple, not enough instantaneous turn on current or the reset pulse is flaky. Any one of these at the very minimum requires an analog scope and ideally would have a digital storage scope to debug. I have access to one old analog scope at the Austin Robot Club on Thursdays for about a half hour but if I am going to make any progress I need to find a way to get more time on a scope. If anyone can help please let me know where I can get some time on a scope or a place where they sell used scopes for a decent price I would appreciate it.
Qualcomm Interview
The interview went really well. It was much more technical than I thought it was going to be. I had thought that I was just going to be talking to someone from HR but it turned out to be one of the managers! The project they are hiring for is adding additional functionality to there 3G wireless chips. They want to add video and some other things and need to do more verification if they add in all the features they want. That's were I come in. They do not want to fly my in for an interview until I have heard back from IBM. DOH! No bargaining there I guess. Anyway they seemed pretty interested and they had three positions open. The market is DEFINITELY getting better!
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