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The USAF was kind enough to provide me with this identification chart

Honestly, my main purpose in getting it was to watch HD DirecTV stuff on it. It's been a few years, and I don't have that any more. I ended up watching everything on it. Even when friends had me over to watch stuff on their huge plasma TVs, it still was better. Size does matter. Having a dark room to watch it in really helps. It has a good contrast ratio and brightness, but the darker you can make the theater, the better it looks.

It's moved with me into 4 different houses. I'll describe each. :)

Actually, so you can see, This is the first incarnation of it. This house had a perfect room for it. It was a rectangular room. On one side, there were folding vented doors going to the rest of the house. On the other side was a huge sliding glass door. In the summer, we simply couldn't keep the room cool. I put aluminum foil over the entire sliding door, held in place with packing tape. It sounds cheesy, but it worked great. We closed the verticle blinds over it, and it just looked like it was dark out and the blinds were closed. Where the A/C had a hard time keeping the house at 78F in the summer, that room was now 72F, with the vents mostly closed.

We just watched it projected on the wall. As I found, that's not the most desirable way, but in comparison to the 32" CRT, it was heaven.

In the second house, we bought a pulldown screen. That winter we learned a secret. If you have your screen hanging 2 feet in front of a fireplace, it's a bad idea to watch a movie while you have a nice fire going.. No fire, but it did warp the center of the screen slightly. It was ok, except for when the scene panned horizontally. It was like looking through a warped glass window. The subwoofer also blew out, so I got a much better one. I had to set it so it wouldn't rattle the windows, as the noise is distracting. :)

In the third house, it was the first house I owned, so it was worth doing it right. All the speakers were mounted perfectly, and tuned within about 2dB. I bought proper screen material, and made a hardwood frame, and kept tension on the screen with clips and bungee cords, and hung it properly. The setup was beautiful. The screen itself was something like 6'x10', but we didn't use the whole space. Depending on what is shown, the aspect ratio changes, so we always wanted the picture to fit on the screen. We did adjust the shown size slightly to make the viewing angle appropriate for the couch distance. I also upgraded some of the speakers. It was nice. We could watch movies, and if we wanted to go have a smoke break, we'd go to the back porch, and then it was like just watching a big plasma instead of sitting in a theater. The sound was clear enough that it was very good, although we (obviously) lost the proper surround sound feeling.

In the 4th house, the new space was as large as the previous, and it was a nice rectangular room. We found that the screen material got lost in the move. We just went with a king size sheet. Ya, that's worse than a nice flat wall, but unfortunately the builder had other ideas, and we had to cover a big window. {sigh} The space is a bit "live", which took some work to fix.

It's currently disassembled. A friend wanted to record music in the space, so it became an impromptu recording studio. That went well. :) We're mostly set up again, but I need to order screen material, and build a new screen frame.

All in all, the price hasn't been bad. The first bulb finally burned out at somewhere just over 3,000 hours. I went pricing better projectors. I couldn't justify a better one. There are a few, but not many in the consumer grade/price range. They're really expensive. I found a seller on eBay with new bulbs for about $125. So we'll be back to watching

Well, I do list tinfoil hat adjustments on the list of services I provide. It's not on the list, but we'll be more than happy to hand craft the finest tinfoil hats that money can buy. I can't disclose the secret materials we make it with, nor the testing procedures involved, but I can say that none of my clients has ever proven that any government, aliens, or bigfoot has penetrating their minds. :)

    You know, I totally misread the article the first time around, and saw it as saying that it was a Google project.

    Triangulation doesn't really do much for you. You have to consider the routes used. I ran a side project at one job for a while, which mapped routes between our own points. Well, there is a full description here. In doing this, we had traceroutes run about once every 5 minutes.

    I had more detailed reporting that wasn't shown in the portfolio.

    In what the story is referencing, a report showing all nodes that we controlled, to a specific endpoint would be similar. What we'd see is what anyone else who has done the same thing would see. You may get a few distinct routes to the provider, but once inside the ISPs network, it'll generally go down one route. The best you could know with that is a maximum range from the edge of the ISP network to the end user. Using the Google landmark server only gives you a range from the ISP to the Google server. It's less useful as knowing the ISP edge router. Of course, if you don't know where an ISP's edge is, then this would bring it into the right vicinity. With just network information, you can identify me within the correct US Census MSA, or making me effectively one of about 3 million people. I've had a little luck identifying users locations based on IP, but that uses a machine on the same provider, at a geographical edge and watching the latency. For example with one of the providers, the machine I can use is on the far East side of the MSA. Very low latency means they're nearby, within about 10 miles in any direction. Mid-range latency (for the purposes of this, (15ms to 30ms) puts them in the middle, or a 10 to 20 mile radius towards the West. 30ms to 50ms puts them on the far side of the area. That area is bounded by water on the West side, so you don't have anyone farther west. Over 50ms means they are farther than the West boundary, which either means North or South on the Western edge.

    The network topology makes it pretty easy to visualize. I know generally (or sometimes specifically) where several routers are, and they use an extended star topology. Traceroutes are very useful there, since the end user may be doing a lot of traffic, but generally their first uplink connection won't be saturated.

Hey, welcome to the planet. Have you been here long? You don't happen to have a working exit, do you? I've been stuck here for a long time. They commemorated my arrival with two coin coins (1 2), which was very nice of them. I never did get around to finding out what they said. I didn't actually land until I was on the next large landmass, that they now call "America". Well, land may not have been the correct term. Swimming for an Earth day to reach land, because my landing pod is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is more accurate. I was very lucky some locals some locals saw it, and came out with their small wooden boats to help me. They were an interesting bunch. Too bad relations didn't go so well with another indigenous group a bit later on.

    I'd ask where you're from, but in my travels I've learned it's impossible to know or have visited even a fraction of what's out there. The humans are starting to understand though. They've come a long way in the last 100 years. In the next 1,000 years, they should really start understanding their place in the universe.

    Even though I've been here a while, I'm still learning how to behave like one. The ones close to me are quick to identify that I'm not one of them, regardless of how well it seems I emulate their behavior. Thanks for the tip on spelling. I always thought their errors were due to their limited utilization of their available mental capacity, or due to their strange concept of different linguistic patterns by area. I wasn't aware that it was a cultural behavior to show their humanity.

    How is this? "The refraction of light through your atmosphere has rendered a very nice colour this evening."

Hey, welcome to the planet. Have you been here long? You don't happen to have a working exit, do you? I've been stuck here for a long time. They commemorated my arrival with two coin coins (1 2), which was very nice of them. I never did get around to finding out what they said. I didn't actually land until I was on the next large landmass, that they now call "America". Well, land may not have been the correct term. Swimming for an Earth day to reach land, because my landing pod is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is more accurate. I was very lucky some locals some locals saw it, and came out with their small wooden boats to help me. They were an interesting bunch. Too bad relations didn't go so well with another indigenous group a bit later on.

    I'd ask where you're from, but in my travels I've learned it's impossible to know or have visited even a fraction of what's out there. The humans are starting to understand though. They've come a long way in the last 100 years. In the next 1,000 years, they should really start understanding their place in the universe.

    Even though I've been here a while, I'm still learning how to behave like one. The ones close to me are quick to identify that I'm not one of them, regardless of how well it seems I emulate their behavior. Thanks for the tip on spelling. I always thought their errors were due to their limited utilization of their available mental capacity, or due to their strange concept of different linguistic patterns by area. I wasn't aware that it was a cultural behavior to show their humanity.

    How is this? "The refraction of light through your atmosphere has rendered a very nice colour this evening."

In that case, it would require deflection rather than deceleration. Consider it like a game of pool. Put the queue ball in the normal starting position (centered between the second pair of dots on one end of the table. Put the second pool ball on the other end of the table centered between the second pair of dots, just off center. Put a third ball at the far end of the table, on the center line. When you shoot the queue ball straight down the table, it won't hit the third ball.

    Here is a diagram illustrating it.

    The red ball is the incoming asteroid.
    The blue ball is the shield object.
    The green ball is the earth.

    The lines illustrate the trajectories of both. The shield object, would ideally would be captured in orbit again. The asteroid would go elsewhere (top right pocket, if you make the shot right)

    I know it's not a perfect example, but it should simplify it for human consumption.

    I attributed the inside wear to cornering also. It's only in prolonged hard driving that I've seen it happen to both edges. It was never as significant as the outside edge wear. I am anal about my tire pressures to the point of if I spot a friends car with low tires, I'll tell them and then walk them through checking their tire pressures, with the associated lecture.

    When I've been in boring areas, the tires wear evenly. Like, amazingly evenly. All four tires will wear down equally, so I have to change all four at the same time. That is unless I hit a road hazard. This happened last December, where I hit a pothole on the left side, and bent both left side wheels. {sigh}

      Before that, I ruined a front tire. I kept the rear tires (moved to the front), and put the new tires on the rear, so I had unequal wear between the front and back, but equal wear side to side. Taking out both left side tires left me with no way to nice equal wear, which can lead to dangerous handling. The tires that were on there were $111/ea from Tire Rack. The ones I replaced them with were a slightly older series for $86/ea. When I have money again, I'm going back to the $111 tires, they were much better. For now, these do well, but they don't give me the amazing traction in the rain, and occasionally I get some tire spin, which I really don't like. Being up close to 400hp has it's downsides. :)

    There are cops on Angeles Crest Highway, but it seems they are doing more to stop people who are dangerous, and look for people who didn't make it. There are always accidents out there, such as the JPL van crash a few years ago. Most of the accidents don't make national news. The road was blocked once, because they flew in a search and rescue team, and were airlifting someone out. Based on where they were, it was a car went off the edge. It was straight off a "straight" part (all 1/8 mile of it), before a 90 degree corner.

    I'm sure there are other similar roads in very mountainous areas. You just have to ask around with the locals. There isn't anything like it here, but there are some interesting places to drive fast, like Alligator Alley. It's a very long, very straight highway, but because of this it is heavily patrolled. But, if someone is feeling brave, that 85 miles can be crossed in 30 minutes or less. There's a good chance of a fatality though.

    Be safe, save hard driving and high speeds for the tracks.

There's only one thing to say about that.

    When I'm sitting at home wondering how I'm going to get any money in, the rate becomes very flexible. My listed rates peak out at $100/hr, except tinfoil hat adjustments which hopefully no one will ever contact me for.

    I had happily paying clients for a long time. Emergencies would keep me busy, and my pockets happily lined. Now I get lots of questions, and offers down to $15/hr with no transit or per diem charges. I can't do $15/hr to drive two hours to your site and spend 1/2 hour there (they also want it prorated to the 1/4 hour). That'd be 4 hours of driving for $7.50. I'd spend more in gas.

You know, I really like venn diagrams. :)

    This one should explain it for everyone else.

    I'd watch out for the folks where all three circles overlap. They're dangerous.

    Some people will still say I belong slightly more towards the red circle though. So far I've stayed away from sociopathic tendencies, which is probably why I haven't formed my own world dominating cult yet. :) Not too many of those have gone all that well though, and I'd rather not die in a government induced fire in a place called Wacko.

Well, he was only 9 times the mass after he was done.

    Nom, nom, nom.

I just sketched a venn diagram of that. You didn't show any relationship between the two circles.

    Most of the people I've met who have mental illnesses either don't drive, or they drive automatics.

    I hope this clarifies things.

You be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.

[the masked stranger walks off towards his ship "Revenge"]

So... JWSmythe, what kind of porn was it that had the customers harassing you so...

(from jwsmythe.com)

I came to this decision a long time ago, after coworkers were harassed by customers outside of work. What's it like to have a customer who is dissatisfied with the company you work for, calling you at home; showing up at your house; sending threatening letters; making threatening phone calls? These were all because that company didn't live up to that particular customer's expectations. That wasn't a gray-market company. The product and services were clearly outlined, and provided in accordance to that.

    What do you with your domain? Anything you damned well please.

    Check out http://jwsmythe.com

    I have an redacted copy of my resume, some tools I use on a regular basis, my portfolio of some of the more unique and complex work I've done (and some lame stuff to fill space).

    Under my site, if you know the directory names, you'll find work I did for particular customers that I wanted to make available, some personal projects, and other crap. My full resume is also hidden under an unlinked subdirectory, so I can give out the specific link to the full resume with my full name, address, companies I've worked for, etc. Sometimes I just need to move a file from point A to point B, where I can't FTP or SCP to either one, so it's a good transit point for me. Copy it over, and scp it down.

    My site takes up 30Gb, even though the visible part is maybe (just maybe) a few Mb.

    So, what do I do with my site? Anything I want. I don't have a blog on there yet, but I'm writing one from scratch. I've picked up a few new paying customers since I was laid off from my full time job, the paying customers take priority over anything I want to do for myself. Since I advertise myself as a sysadmin/programmer/network engineer/security engineer/DBA/etc, it would be silly to put a pre-packaged blog software on there. :) It also has my rate sheet, so if someone asks me, "Can you do this for me?", I can point them directly to it, so they can reference it any time they want.

    My other domains, I put whatever is appropriate on them. You'll find my news site linked from my personal site. That makes a little money. You'll also find my cryptography site. It doesn't make any money, but it gets a lot of traffic from various places including universities and government/military facilities. I have to assume some have integrated my open source software into their own applications. It would be nice if they told me, but no one ever does.

    I have a couple dozen other domains. Some are almost completely dormant (with Google or Amazon ads). Some got a good Google PR, so I keep them around to help raise my rank on other projects. :)

Mine isn't that bad, but I've seen it. Right now, it reports 48Mb/s "Very Good". Still, it disconnects randomly. Sometimes it doesn't want to talk to my AP any more. We have two here, and I'll find myself on the wrong one. I do different things between specific AP's, because of the machines that are physically attached to those segments. I gave up, and set one to manual, so I always connect to one, it just disconnects occasionally. I blame .... [spinning the wheel of excuses] .... solar flares.

That makes it interesting for copyright law. It's my understanding that if you quote an insignificant piece, that's simply a quote. If you quote the whole work, then it's infringement.

    Like, it's generally (but not always) ok to quote say one line from an article in a magazine. But if you copy the entire article that's a little fuzzier. If you copy the entire publication, you're just not going to win no matter how it's argued.

    So, to quote an insignificant but complete phrase from a twitter is almost always going to be the whole thing.

    The 1886 Berne Convention states that the © mark (the circle around a c) indicates that the document is copyrighted by declaration. The Buenos Aires Convention of 1910 established that some sort of copyright warning was required, such as the simple statement on the publication "all rights reserved". To the best of my knowledge, both currently apply inside the United States.

    By quoting a copyrighted work, you'd better be clearly inside the lines of "fair use". Of course, fair use is not clearly defined, so it can be fought by both sides, and the bigger meaner (and usually richer) side will win. The considerations for fair use are:

      1. the purpose and character of the use;
      2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
      3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
      4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

    By quoting a few lines from a New York Times article in a high school student essay, they're likely going to be ok. It's frequently looked at as the impact on the original publication. A blogger with 4 daily readers probably won't get a C&D by the NYT either, even if they publish the whole article. A blogger with 400,000 daily readers, who reguarly reposts NYT material may have an economic impact on the NYT, and therefor be in a bit of trouble. The C&D will generally say "cut it out, or we'll play rough."

    So, if some twit you wrote (err, twitter twittlie doo, whatever) got quoted by ESPN.com, either you can be happy that someone actually looked (because the rest of us don't care), or you can call your lawyer and have a C&D sent over. They'll retract that part of the story, and never quote you again. Or they won't really care, and you can take them to court for your (oh my gosh) serious economic losses and personal suffering.

    Really though, if you didn't want it quoted, you shouldn't have posted it for the world to read.

    © (c) 2009, JWSmythe
    All Rights Reserved
    For Republishing Information, Please Reference http://jwsmythe.com
    IMHO, YMMV, RTFM MF. :)

You should be careful what you submit. You asked about 1,000 users, you got answers for 1,000 users.

    I just posted a brief overview of what it takes to handle millions a day. There may be a lot of theorists and wannabe's on here, but I've actually lived it (for years at that).

    You can contact me directly through my web site (linked in my profile). A little advice is free. :) I'm more than happy to share what I know.

Yellow on red seems like a very popular high contrast color combination for several years.

There's a secret to having good skills. Get experience.

Go on eBay, and buy an old Catalyst 2916, or 2924. Set it up at home. Play with the settings. Figure out how to set up snmp, and then graph your ports. Generate traffic, and see how it behaves. Be good. Be bad. Find exploits and run them against your equipment. Look around the script kiddie sites for ways to generate traffic. Use the seemingly normal stuff, and the obviously bad things. It's a fake network, you can't hurt anything. If you do, wipe out your configurations, and start over. :) Do firmware upgrades. More fun is to screw up an upgrade. Put the wrong one on, and figure out how to fix it (hint: serial cable, very slowly). You can get images not-so-legally through various places, including a neat program, "ISO Hunter"

Then you can pick up a couple T1 routers. Make yourself a T1 crossover cable, and hook them together. Route two fake networks together. Spend a few extra bucks, and get a few more, so you can have a more complex network. Play with the basic routing protocols too.

You'll appreciate doing it once you actually go to the CCNA class. You won't be playing in the dark, you'll be walking in with experience. Things that you'll break as a novice will help you learn, and since you'll be doing it on your own, you won't have a choice but to learn how to do it.

When it comes time to take the Cisco test, there are several simulator tests, so it would be to your advantage to have some real world experience. If I remember the scoring correctly, they said I passed 100% of the simulators.

The guy who ran the school I learned at would buy every piece of equipment he could afford off of eBay. He had about 100 pieces in the classroom for lab work. Since I had experience with it, I had a lot of fun. A lot of people were asking "you plug what in where? What does that command mean? How do you ....?"

I originally learned Cisco by getting thrown into it. Years ago, I was suddenly in charge of a network with a 7200 series router, a Catalyst 2924, and an original PIX firewall (4u - Pentium Pro 200 based system). It was all fun and games until one day our provider went down, and their support said "Oh, it must be your firewall, take it out." and then "Your network still doesn't work now? Well, we can't support bringing it back up. We have a guy who can help, but he won't be in until next Thursday." Welcome to the Cisco crash course. Learn it or loose your job. It took me an hour, but I tied it all back together, and over the next month I made it better until it worked better than ever.

I had an odd learning curve several months ago. I bought up 3 Catalyst 5000 series switches, and a whole bunch of cards. They behave a lot differently than the others that I had used before. The commands are different, but the ideas are the same. It was a bit of an adjustment. The 5000 series switches are cheap, but you'll likely want to learn on the Cisco IOS first, and then the CatOS. After I played with them for a while, I sold all 3 at a profit, since I bought them untested, my experimenting time now made them tested and verified switches, and I sold them as known good working switches with a 90 day warranty. I got a few bad parts in lots, but even those were covered by my profits. My customers were happy. This was my favorite one:

http://jwsmythe.com/ebay/Cisco_5500_13_slot.jpg

I got a second supervisor in another lot, which matched the first, so I pulled the top most ethernet card, and put the supervisor in as a hot spare. It's never needed it, but it's there just in case. I just gave it to them, and left the extra ethernet card as a spare for them. Be careful if you get a 13 slot 5500, they're heavy, even with no cards installed, and then need two 20A power c