Johnux.com

A LOT has changed in my life lately, but it’s the things that remain the same are what I find myself most interested in. I really feel as though I haven’t changed as a person through all of the turbulence I’ve encountered lately and my goals and outlook on life still stick with me untouched.

The 5th was my birthday and it was the first time I spent it away from my family. It really was a special one, my girlfriend really knows how to make me feel loved and appreciated and I really do adore her. The 5 days leading up to my bday were all spent down in LA between Disneyland and Knottsberry Farm. It was my first time that far south, which is really surprising considering how many other states I’ve visited and now many times I’ve traveled across the state. Just never South I guess?

Anyways, I try to keep this as much as a tech blog as I can so I’ll leave a link to my picasa and youtube for those of you who would like to see what I’ve been up to outside of electronic life. Oh, and twitter for those of you interested in it.

I think really, from a technological standpoint, the most absolutely amazing thing so far has finally happened to me. I’M NO LONGER A SLAVE TO CLEARWIRE!!! Or any other overpriced, underperforming, shaped, disgusting excuse for an ISP. Yes, thanks to my great friend TJ over at PC Guys Wireless I’m now rocking an uncapped, unshaped, ultra low latency symetrical connection off of his point to point wireless service. We haven’t finished configuring it yet, but right now I’m @ 8mbps up and down, with 14 being the number we’re hoping to achieve. The best thing of it all is the reliability and response time. I consistantly get 8-10ms pings from every major CA server I’ve tested so far. DSL is 30-80, averaging about 60ms. Clearwire was very commonly 248ms… This is fantastic! All of my requests are now almost immediate and the painful process of uploading files through Dreamweaver has reduced to .1 seconds per 5kb file vs. the 20seconds, 1 minute, and NEVER WORKING file authentication and put process I endured under Clearwire’s terrifying grasp.

Even with so many good things going on, I’m still not fully relaxed and I’m hoping my semi-depressing attitude isn’t wearing off on anyone else. What it all really comes down to is PEOPLE and WHERE I LIVE. From 2008 till current bad customers and poor business relationships did not seem to be in short supply. Normally this wouldn’t be too uncontrolable, however, it’s taken it’s toll on other relationships as well as the most important one, the one with MYSELF. I’ve been neglectful to a handful of my GREAT customers who are really deserving of great service and attention, as well as to some of my friends and family. It’s just not easy to live with having bad business relationships when you are self employed. Bad customers are always demanding, always flaky, and require more time and effort. And they are also the types of customers who like to plague your life in odd hours, and make sure that they are ALWAYS on the back of your mind, nagging at you to either ruin your life to help them, or fire them. I’m thinking this is about over and done with now, thankfully because I’ve finished working for some of them, and fired a couple of others. Now I’m left with a handful of remaining projects to complete for customers who really do deserve great work and are assuredly going to receive it.

As far as personal projects… you know, the DREAMS and IDEAS and real chances for creativity… well, those have all been stepped on by my lack of time, and the battle I fought with Clearwire for so long. Seemed like when I DID have time, my link to the outside world was gone because Clearwire was down yet again. I really do have NOTHING good to say about their service, everyone I know who has it HATES IT. Why don’t they just go out of business already? I know, now I’m ranting, but listen to this… I was working on one of my MOST IMPORTANT personal projects last month. I was uploading some files to attach to the framework and it was going to take a long time. I let it do it’s thing in the background and when I come back I realize that it wasn’t working at all. I try to start it again and I have no connection at all. I play with it for another HOUR and eventually I’m forwarded to a Clearwire page. This isn’t because of non-payment or violating the terms of service, but because I’m a GOOD customer, they grabbed a hold of my connection by it’s very tiny balls and redirected me to a site where I can get a free month if I renew my contract for another 2 years because I’ve been such an awesome and loyal customer who has paid his bill EVERY month. SCREW THEM.

^^Rant lol

Regardless, I’ve been researching the EC2 on Amazon and I’ve realized that the cloud server environment is absolutely too good to be true. I will be working with it soon and let everyone know what it’s like. Joomla and Rails, probably on Solaris. Yeupp… mmm… fast delicious virtual servers…

I have a couple of new gadgets, that’s going to be another blog entry.

Thanks for reading.