LessThanHumble.com

I hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday season. Outside of catching the flu this past week (which is like a yearly tradition for me) things have been great, a little family time, lots of productivity - it always makes you feel good. I’ve been meaning to post more often, and as a matter of fact I have some great posts queued up that just need to be proofed more so hopefully I’ll get them out in the coming week.

I didn’t really get myself too much for Christmas besides a new laptop (and a free upgraded cellphone because my other one died - thanks Sprint), so instead I’m heading to CES next week with a good friend for a bit of relaxation and oo-ing and awe-ing at the technology. If you’re going to be there, hit me up, I’d be glad to take you to lunch or something.

I’m also launching a couple projects this week, SophVoice.com (including the customer portal), AZEntertained.com (after something like 2 years - gee whiz), and a project I’m working on with my good buddy Kenneth. As soon as those are up, I’ll post some info about them. Exciting times and I’m poised for a great 2008.

Anyways to reflect on last year a brief bit, and my plans moving forward. I’ve moved a ridiculous amount of times this past year (I think 4 or 5 total times) lots of explanations why, but basically I’m busy. On top of that, I absolutely hate moving, it’s a huge waste of time, it is exhausting, and it’s always more expensive then you think it’s going to be. I’m planning to move back to Tempe, AZ once my brother gets back in town around March (never move in the Phoenix area between April and September - it is wayyy too damn hot).

Though I’ve barely posted on here, I’ve spent tons of time on other web projects, built my own billing/support system for all of my projects (been needing to do this forever!), and launched a few new projects. Fiscally things are better than they’ve ever been, and I’m pretty stoked overall about the future.

Anyways, I wish everyone the best of success in 2008. Hope you get some stuff, make a little money, and have a blast doing it.

You know what is funny, it happens all to often. In the technology world people have an ungodly amount of loyalty to specific brands, specific products, specific applications & operating systems. You’ve got the Linux loyalists, the Window loyalists, the Mac loyalists, the Intel loyalists, the Corel Draw loyalists (okay…maybe these don’t exist). I find it pretty annoying. I’m a huge fan of technology, but I am always willing to try something new, even several times, and more important than anything else, I am a preacher of it always being about the application.

A funny example of this is the ISP I used to work for. It’s a Windows only “shop” that thinks their success is based on this - even though that isn’t the case let alone if you could even consider them successful. They run a Windows-based mail server called ModusMail, which in my humble opinion, is the opitimy of a mail server. No real scalability, no real load balancing solution, and way too many features that the developers have buried themselves alive. Every release brings back past bugs, memory leaks, and so much more. What I find funny is that this ISP has such arrogance about it, they think their running the best mail platform in the world, and in fact I find their attitude really annoying. What is even funnier, is that fact that I’m running Exim & MailScanner, and although it isn’t the best thing out there, I have no problems with nealry 1,200 active domains and over 8,000 mailboxes. It is roughly the same size as this ISP, yet the hardware I have under it is probably a 1/10th of what they have and yet I have absolutely no problems (I will however take this chance to knock on wood…knock knock).

My biggest frustration is that I really hate seeing people make stupid decisions, no matter how much I might like or dislike a person. People literally bring their businesses down because of ill-founded loyalties and alliances like these, this seems to be even truer in the technology world.

Anyways, I spent another day working with a partner on AZEntertained.com. It is coming along nicely and I’m really excited about the launch, which will hopefully be soon. We have had one guy literally spending the last three months combing directories to generate a accurate list of restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, and the like. It’s probably one of the top “hit-it-big” projects that I have going, so I definitely have my fingers crossed.

Bryan-Baker.com had a great blog post on Confrontations. I literally love confrontations, I am not the type to ignore a person because I like either diffusing a situation or coming up with some sort of resolution to it, it is a huge adrenaline rush and a constant challenge that never get’s old. But none the less, check out his article and his blog if you’ve got a moment.

For those of you who have previously seen my blog, you may have noticed it went through a bit of a face lift. I felt like it needed a different feel and I was definitely ready for something different. What are your guys thoughts?

In other news, I discovered MyBlogLog.com, which I might add is totally badass. You’d have to check it out to understand if you haven’t already, but from my assumptions, it is basically a blogging commuting that automatically tracks viewers (take a look at the box to the right), stats, and quiet a bit more.

For those of you that know me, you know how I used to profess to WellsFargo, I’ve now changed that mind and absolutely hate them. I don’t care to go into the story, but let’s just say I’m not longer a customer, pulled all 5 accounts and 5 digit balances away from their crap-ass bank - and of course I suggest avoiding them now. I’ve moved back to Chase, more than likely permanently. We’ve been a customer for a long time (since back when they were Bank One) and haven’t had too much to complain about, especially since we do merchant services indirectly through them.

I am also still moving forward with moving my equipment into a new datacenter, which I’m totally psyched about. We’re also looking at getting a DS3 ATM from Qwest so we can offer DSL Services in the greater Phoenix area, because we’ve got a great angle on it.

Because of the first of the month, I have been busy as hell with the financial end of things and never got a chance to do some more test driving, but I’m looking at either a Acura TL, Infiniti G35 Coupe, Lexus IS250, or something along those lines. For some reason, I’ve been ungodly indecisive about it just because it’s not a huge priority, but something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time (literally I’ve been driving the same car since the first day of driving).

But anyways, sorry for the short post, I’ll drop in again through the weekend.

Wow - It has been over two weeks since my last posting.

I have been busy with 1,000 different, unfortunately more important tasks and projects. over the past ~14 days. I am still trying to wrap things up from last year and get the go-ahead on a bunch of exciting new stuff. Signed paperwork with TimeWarner Telecom last week, and if everything goes as planned, we should have a new cabinet up in Downtown Phoenix on April 1st, nearly a month away.

The car search continues, and I’m waivering around again on what I want. I think I’ll go do some test driving this week and finally make a decision, I’m looking at either a Audi A4 (or S4), a G35 Coupe, Lexus IS250, or a Acura TL. I can afford around $55k, but would definitely like to push it under $40k if possible, so we’ll see what happens. I love car shopping because test driving is awesome, and I have never turned down the chance to legitimately haggle someone on pricing (I should throw down a blog next time on my view on haggling).

On the entertainment side of things, this past Friday night we re-discovered a new place downtown, called Bostons. We hit it at like 11:30PM after a little hookah, it is definitely a quiet and chill place, unless a game is going on. It is a great place to just hang out, relax, and play billards, so I am sure it will become a weekly hangout. Then, last night I went and saw Breach which I must say is pretty good. It is basically the story of Robert Hanssen, a FBI agent who gets pegged for espionage a few years back.

After Googling around today, it looks like it follows the real story pretty close. If you dig ’spy’ thrillers, you should definitely check it out. Not really too dense with action, but the movie moves along at a decent pace and has a great story line. One could argue that it might not be worth the full ticket price, so check out the matinée.

So great things are brewing in the works right now as far as business deals go, things that would make my life so much easier financial, stress wise, and work load. I’ve got a hosting project in the works that might triple our current customer base, as well as a screen printing project that could turn out to be great. I don’t want to say anything else in fear of jeopardizing them, but as soon as I have news I will be sure to post it.

For those of you familiar with Asterisk, I wrote a kewl, simple little system for recording voice prompts. Basically the way it works is that I identify every prompt/recording with a 3 digit code and then reference the recording by that ID. Here is the code I use the code to record and play them:

[recording-system]
; Voice Recording System
exten => s,1,Wait(1)
exten => s,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/802)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,9,1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,9,1)
[recording-system-record]
exten => 9,1,Wait(1)
exten => 9,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/804)
exten => _XXX,1,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,2,Set(lastPlayedRecording=${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,3,Record(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/${EXTEN}:gsm)
exten => _XXX,4,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,5,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/805)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
[recording-system-play]
exten => 9,1,Wait(1)
exten => 9,2,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/803)
exten => _XXX,1,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,2,Set(lastPlayedRecording=${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,3,Playback(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/${EXTEN})
exten => _XXX,4,Wait(1)
exten => _XXX,5,Background(/usr/local/share/asterisk/sounds/805)
exten => 1,1,Goto(recording-system-play,${lastPlayedRecording},1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(recording-system-record,${lastPlayedRecording},1)

You then just reference every message with either Background(ID#) or Playback(ID#). If anyone finds this useful, post here, I’d love to hear about your implementation/modification.

Anyways, I’m off to finish a Nagios configuration for my network, I’ll share some stuff on that tomorrow. Take it easy…

“A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship.” - John D. Rockefeller