My dad was in the plastics business in the 1970′s, but before that he was a tinkerer and made things in the oven using a mold and a vacuum cleaner, I think they referred to it as vacuum forming. It seemed kinda dangerous to me when I was a kid, but I wish I could have worked with him to create his wonderful inventions…..

Collapsible lightweight shipping container on the google patent site. Joseph Liggett ]]> My dad was in the plastics business in the 1970′s, but before that he was a tinkerer and made things in the oven using a mold and a vacuum cleaner, I think they referred to it as vacuum forming. It seemed kinda dangerous to me when I was a kid, but I wish I could have worked with him to create his wonderful inventions…..

Collapsible lightweight shipping container on the google patent site.
Joseph Liggett
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I saw this while leaving a clients at 27th between 10 and 11th avenues. Its my favorite New York City picture….

the corner of 10th and 29th street NYC

I was taking advantage of the less than 30 minutes (the rest of the neighborhood has 90 minutes) of alternate side parking that is enforced on east 86th street. I am writing this post in an effort to own my own content and not give it all to facebook and twitter.I made friends with this flirty butterfly. I am unsure why it chose to land on my retracted window, but it did long enough for me to snap [...]]]> I was taking advantage of the less than 30 minutes (the rest of the neighborhood has 90 minutes) of alternate side parking that is enforced on east 86th street. I am writing this post in an effort to own my own content and not give it all to facebook and twitter.I made friends with this flirty butterfly. I am unsure why it chose to land on my retracted window, but it did long enough for me to snap this picture.

Thank you butterflyNYC.

PS: I also posted a copy of the NYC 2010 alternate side of the street parking calendar on my website here.

Being in the computer industry is sort of like being in the wild wild west. There is no computer workers labor union, no licenses, no governing body, and a government that understands so little of what is going on that they wisdom can not fathom the world around them. Therefore, those in my industry have never been able to strike effectively, some have chose other more drastic methods, but I am not going to go into that [...]]]> Being in the computer industry is sort of like being in the wild wild west. There is no computer workers labor union, no licenses, no governing body, and a government that understands so little of what is going on that they wisdom can not fathom the world around them. Therefore, those in my industry have never been able to strike effectively, some have chose other more drastic methods, but I am not going to go into that now.

I have witnessed strikes at various times in my life, mainly in New York city as I was growing up. I have seen the “union rat” and many other forms of labor protest, but it is rare that I have seen a labor protest reach something louder than yelling through a blow horn.

Today was different, as I was walking towards the rush hour subway on 86th street and Lexington Avenue, I traversed 85th street and 3rd avenue, which I do on occasion.
View Larger Map
I came across a labor protest of some self-proclaimed skilled workers in front of a new residential building on that side of the street.

As a method of protest they decided to march in a narrow oval pattern as to allow commuters pass them on the sidewalk while they proceed to blow whistles, while wearing heavy duty ear plugs. The noise almost tore right through the sound of the podcast I was listening to using my in ear headphones. However, the poor people that walked by this noise field with no ear protection were cringing and covering there ears as they hurriedly walked passed the strike.

This to me was a successful case of proving a point. How this point was going to get these people there job back, I have no idea, but it struck a cord with me enough to author a blog post about it.

I have been on the mac platform using OS X daily for about 9 years. When I was first introduced to it professionally, OS 8 had just been released and I was a Windows/Novell administrator at Carnegie Hall. Switching from Windows XP to OS X was a no-brainer, it just worked better and looked a ton better. Coupled with the fact that I am Certified Unix administrator and I can run real Windows, it was a smarter [...]]]> I have been on the mac platform using OS X daily for about 9 years. When I was first introduced to it professionally, OS 8 had just been released and I was a Windows/Novell administrator at Carnegie Hall. Switching from Windows XP to OS X was a no-brainer, it just worked better and looked a ton better. Coupled with the fact that I am Certified Unix administrator and I can run real Windows, it was a smarter choice. However, the sad truth that differentiates a Windows and Macintosh is that Windows does business better and mac does creative better; a dubious distinction, but one none the less.

More or less with the help of Parallels I was able to feign all of the windows capabilities I ever needed, but then when I started my own business I needed hands-on with my finances. I chose quickbooks on the mac, knowing that it was glorified crippleware, but for the simplicity of a one man operation, I thought it would not matter.

Quickbooks on the mac is the fisher-price equivalent of accounting software, and that is after running the update. The stand-out features are .Mac sync’ing and the ability to transport it to the windows version (but it is a one way process, and I was always afraid to test it) and a nice mac aqua style interface. The best part was watching the accountants eyes glaze over as he tried to find simple things like tax reports. I felt like I might have been better served by paying attention in accounting class and doing my bookkeeping in a ledger book. It would have been more portable that way…

Well, anyway, 6 months after upgrading from Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard (10.6) and using my legitimately purchased copy of Quickbooks 2007 4-5 times a week, the software decided that it could no longer operate without phoning home and registering my copy with the Quickbooks Master Licensing server. As the quickbooks registration software failed, it told me to call up Intuit support. Having called intuit on behalf of my clients many times, I knew that it would be unlikely that a phone call to Intuit would result in a positive outcome.

My call to Intuit connected me to a Representative who could have been no closer than 4500 miles from my current location in the western hemisphere. And after explaining the situation, I was informed that there is no fix for this problem and I would have to upgrade to the latest version of quickbooks for the mac for about $200 in order to view my financial records that were trapped within my version of quickbooks. I explained to the representative that I thought that was typical business practice for those in the business of extortion, not financial accounting software for small businesses, he did not understand. After requesting to speak to a supervisor, and another 20 minutes of hold time, I was told that the other option I had was to downgrade my system back to Leopard (10.5), not a trivial process by any means. It turns out that the registration program works in old Leopard…

Out of not quite desperation, but because I was annoyed, I trolled the internet to find what others have done to solve this problem, because I thought that I was not the only one. I found a few people that had a much bigger problems with Quickbooks 2007 on Snow Leopard, but none seemed as trivial as the registration software not working.

Going back to the primordial interface the connects my seat to the dull black key of my MBP, I checked to see what exactly worked or did not work after quickbook failed to register and did not let me open my company file. It seemed that they had ghosted every useful menu item, and as much as that sucked the actual quickbooks program was still running.

I thought to myself what would a stubborn computer user do in this situation? There had to be a simple answer and I was trying to solve the hard problem. After spending about 5 minutes sifting throughout the numerous backups that quickbooks had no Idea how to keep track of I found my most current active quickbooks file. I double clicked on it, my company file opened. I was saved. IT JUST OPENED, what the F!!!!

If I were a normal user I would have probably never read the error message or called Intuit and wasted over an hour on the phone with incompetent tech support. I would have just tried to double click on the company file, and everything would have just worked.

So in the end the annoyance of dealing with the registration of software within quickbooks, software that I legitimately purchase exposed a flaw with quickbooks that is just the tip of the ice berg in how Intuit tries to throttle cash out of America’s small businesses. If you feel like switching to better accounting software on the Mac platform, I would recommend
Accounting Edge or MYOB.

I needed a heavy duty super secure and bullet proof access point for a new client. I am familiar with Cisco products and the Cisco IOS, and I currently have Cisco Wifi access points deployed at 4 location. I was pleased with the capabilities of the aironet 1100 series, but as they are not being produced anymore, Cisco has replaced it with the Aironet 1140.Some highlights of the specs are Gigabit Ethernet, multiple antennae, and the ability to [...]]]> I needed a heavy duty super secure and bullet proof access point for a new client. I am familiar with Cisco products and the Cisco IOS, and I currently have Cisco Wifi access points deployed at 4 location. I was pleased with the capabilities of the aironet 1100 series, but as they are not being produced anymore, Cisco has replaced it with the Aironet 1140.Some highlights of the specs are Gigabit Ethernet, multiple antennae, and the ability to broadcast multiple SSID’s on seperate VLan’s.

I ordered it from amazon here; for about $650, unfortunately the package we received was lacking the 48v power supply. When we called amazon, they offered to reimburse us if we purchased one from another vendor because they did not carry that part in stock. I thought that was cool, I like amazon sometimes.

Once we received the power supply, thanks to the folks Domino Computing in New York City, I was able start configuring the aironet. My first obstacle is that Cisco ships the aironet in a super secure mode that only allows consoles access via serial port and hyperterminal (yes, I actually have a pc with a serial port) on the Cisco serial to console cable, thank god I had one, because making one would have been a real pain. I then discovered that the firmware it ships with does not have a web based administration console, and in order to get it I had to upgrade the firmware on the unit.

And of course upgrading the firmware on any Cisco enterprise products is less then *trivial*. In order to flash the firmware on the unit I had to connect it to the local network and let it grab a DHCP lease and then I had to setup a TFTP server so that then instruct the aironet via the console to grab the firmware binary and update itself.

After futzing around with several different TFTP alternatives I finally settled on the gui TFTPserver.app, told it where I was hiding the binary, plugged my a laptop into the network (it did not let me when I tried to do it over wifi), told IOS that i was the super user and then told it grab the file from my laptop running the TFTP server. After about 10 minutes of grinding and a reboot or 2 the Aironet came up and lo and behold it had a web interface….awesome.

In my next post I will explain how we set up and configured the Access Point.

|joeNYC|

I went to my first NY Tech meetup group meeting at FIT’s Taft hall.

http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/

It was packed and there was a buzz in there air…I do not know what the buzz was about, and the buzz never became apparent, maybe because everyone was nervous…

Here is some of what I got out of the lecture:

Comics. http://comixology.com

This website just launched an iPhone application that allows you to read and buy comic books on he IPhone

Blip.tv http://blip.tv

Content workflow for Internet television creators with 20 [...]]]> I went to my first NY Tech meetup group meeting at FIT’s Taft hall.

http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/

It was packed and there was a buzz in there air…I do not know what the buzz was about, and the buzz never became apparent, maybe because everyone was nervous…

Here is some of what I got out of the lecture:

Comics. http://comixology.com

This website just launched an iPhone application that allows you to read and buy comic books on he IPhone

Blip.tv http://blip.tv

Content workflow for Internet television creators with 20 employees in NYC.  The rule is that you create the content and it has to be show format not viral or family video.

They work with advertisers to create vertical of demographics of groups of shows.

2 distributing outlets; unrestricted and restricted.  Double gated syndication, and must be approved by 1 or more of the partners

Magma by rocketboom creator

http://mag.ma/

Shows aggregator; top videos
Aggregated by social media of by platform
Invite code ; Contact me directly.

Catherine Faye with Hunch

http://www.hunch.com/

Hunch leads you down a decision tree to give u a result that it would give no one else ; or unique.

Hunch asked you taste based questions on the sign up process.
They monetize using affiliate links

There have widgets and a developer API for integration

Translation party
http://translationparty.com/tp/

In order to reach equilibrium…

The developer has linked in to some translation api’s in order to translate any phrase into Japanese and then back into English until the English and Japanese are the same phrase.

Not terribly useful but, interesting how awful translation still is….

I saw this motorcycle riding up west 26th street, check it out:

sorry about the reflections, the glass the glass!!!!