The Casimir Effect: v. 2.0

If anyone out there wants to buy me a database server, it would be a great help to a budding ASP.

I’ve been working on this for a while now, with varying results.

Occasionally, I’ve revealed part of its top-secret functionality.

There has been the occasional boast-and-taunt. Oh, if you’re still developing synchronous web applications: I’m finally making fun of you now.

Tony Lake, foreign policy adviser for BHO, is coming to town Wednesday, June 6th to have lunch and talk foreign affairs with Obama supporters.

It’s a bigger ticket event than the last one, but it looks smaller and more focused than the last one. If I can find the dough I’m going to try and show up. If you want an invite, give me a shout and I’ll think about it.

I’m rapidly on my way to a complete night of sleep. The final switchover to a new router/proxy at the office has finally gone through seamlessly, and all of our VoIP phones have been working now with a decent quality of service for almost 16 hours (!)

It’s a decent sized network with a few mission-critical services that I’m managing with little exception entirely solo, in addition to my normal marketing workload. I was explaining yesterday to a friend of mine that this amounts to two full-time jobs worth of work, at least during build out.

So, some tech happenings: Dell is selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu, which Steven reminds us that we all use already anyway.

Oh, and guess who has a radio show now?

I find myself, at 1 am, realizing that I haven’t blogged about anything for going on two months and I should probably explain my absence.

It turns out my skill set of Linux administration, PHP programming, generic web design, and general geekery is suddenly in demand more than it used to be. I’ve been spending much of the last two months rolling out a Asterisk IP-PBX for my office. As I delve deeper into the world of SIP trunks and ITSP service, I keep finding more and more useful things to do with it. Here’s a cool example:

Say you shell out a monthly fee to AT&T for unlimited data on your cell phone. We’ll assume for a second that you get some decent bandwidth on this. Let’s say you’re short on peak minutes. In that case, Fring is here to help. Fring lets you place VoIP calls over your data enabled cell phone. You use only your data path and your call never uses the cellular phone network itself, so you don’t incur any minute-by-minute charges. Mobile VoIP = Free Cell phone minutes. If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.