One of the guys from work suggested that I could probably pull of a great concept site. Something like YouTube (wishful thinking). I’ve been pondering the comment. Can I really do it? Can I pull something off like that? Maybe not to that scale, but a great concept.

So this evening I was thinking of some concepts. I’ve seen a few sites that have great ideas, and very simple too. Take YouTube for example. The premise? Allow people to share videos. How difficult is that? Well conceptually it’s incredibly simple. From an architectural standpoint, however, it becomes a little complicated. The bandwidth requirements for something that simple must be huge, but that’s not the point here.

Another simple concept, LinkedIn. The premise? Allow users to share relationships with other people. Be it colleges, or friends, the site shares the information. Why? To build networks. The idea? The more people you have visibility with, the better it is.

Another one, LivePlasma. Ever used Amazon, and looked at a book, where it shows the recommendation on what other people have been buying? This app uses the same concept (wouldn’t actually surprise me if they are using Amazon’s APIs). Type in an artist, and it’ll build a relationship of other artists based on what others buy/listen to. MusicMap is another case of this.

All of the above examples also have massive potential for income. Not simply from goliath’s like Google buying you, but small things. LivePlasma can get revenue from using Amazon accounts when it displays links to artists (they probably do). YouTube could show a short clipet of a few seconds before each video, a banner for a sponsor or something. LinkedIn has the potential to reach out to thousands of employment agencies (I believe I’ve seen a dice.com ad on there at least once or twice).

These are just a couple of examples, and doesn’t even go into others like FaceBook, ClassMates, Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us, and the likes. So what’s my idea? I’ve no idea yet. I’m all out of juice in my creativity engine. However, if you have an idea, and need a coder/sysadmin, drop me an email/comment.

Last night, one of our developers stumbled across an odd issue.  I think I’ve seen it before, but it was a long while back.  Windows 2003 server is fairly well locked down to not be running applications it shouldn’t be. This is a good thing (tm). The problem is, it seems to stop tasks such as creating VPN tunnels. The developer referenced an odd error message. That was:

  Unable to create the specified connection. 
  This can be caused by insufficient memory or not enough disk space.

Now I know the disk space isn’t an issue, they have 80GB drives in, and this is a clean install of Windows 2003 server. Memory? A possibility I guess, but 1GB for Win2003 should be enough to allow it to run, and create a vpn connection (but you never know I guess).

It turns out the error message is entirely missleading. Missleading in the fact that it has nothing to do with drive space, or memory, but more to do with services not running. It’s a known “issue” and is documented in KB254631.

If you cannot find a good solution for a long standing problem, such as a communications issue (see Katrina, and WTC communications problems), then why not “hack” your way around the issue and make it a law that other people have to solve your problems.

Slashdot has a link to a report done by the University of Indiana showing that “The Daily Show” has just as much substance as a standard news broadcast… with humor added.

It seems it’s Microsoft test day for me. I’ve been cleaning up my “Downloads” folder, and realized I’d downloading a bunch of applications that I’d not yet had a real chance to take a look at yet. While I am trying to remember what tasks I have to do, I decided to do some cleaning up. Why? Something I’d read from David Seah suggested that a good way to get things going is to get organized, and having over 5GB of downloaded files is rather cluttering, especially when I barely use them, and some are not so descriptive (setup.exe).

Back on topic… One of the downloads was for Microsoft Max. It’s designed to be a picture viewer/sharer type thingy, with News bundled in. I must say, it’s quite nice in terms of looks. I’ve not had a chance to play with the imaging side of it, but the news is certainly interesting. It has some interesting features to it, and some strikingly obvious missing ones too.

What do I like:

• The newspaper style interface.  I like the fact that the interface has a nice clean split, and only displays a few articles at once.
• Scaling. If you resize the window, the fonts, and “paper” resizes with it.

Things I don’t like:

• No sorting.
• Articles aren’t always listed in the most logical order (date sorted, but in the newspaper format isn’t always obvious).
• No clear notification on new articles.

It’s a start, and the developers look like they’re taking notice to what the community is saying, so it should be interesting. I’m going to give it a run about and see how it goes against Feedreader.

Well, plenty of people have posted about, I’m sure you can probably Google for reviews, and all other fun stuffs about it, but I thought I’d give it a whirl myself. “Interesting” is what comes to mind.  It’s a little like using MS Word, though there are some quirks about it that I’m not sure I can get used to.

It is nice in that it it downloads the formatting from your blog (even supports logging into Wordpress), and displays it as you go.  I’m going to give it a shot for a few days, and see how it goes.

Because they are relocating my office further down town, I am now considering using the Tollway. The new office sits right next to the George Bush Tollway in Dallas, and it’s a straight line drive down the tollway for me. So I am investing in a Tolltag from NTTA. I must say, they have certainly invested in their site design. It’s very smooth, crisp, clean, and easy to operate. It looks like they certainly did their research, and got a good team behind the site.

I’ve not had a chance to watch all of them, but I watched a segment called “Photowalking”, with a San Francisco photographer. It’s great to see the work, and how he does things. My only criticism of it would be Robert Scoble not having a microphone on himself. Questions from behind the camera were very quite, and I ended up cranking my speakers up to hear, only to be deafened by the response from Thomas. I’ve been carrying my camera around with me almost religiously, however I think I need to invest in a better bag, as the shoulder one, along with a 17” Dell Inspiron 9300 makes for a heavy load.

Great segment, I look forward to the rest.

I was reading over my usual list of blogs on Friday, and Neill posted a bit of a “reflection” and more of a plan on the future. It’s interesting to see some of what he wants to do, and what he has come to the conclusions on. It seems he’s finally settled into a job he enjoys (yay). It’s weird… I remember sitting in college, thinking about the future, and not having a clue about what/where/when/how I’d get there, or even what I wanted to do. I used to want to be in the army (actually still have inclinations to do so), however borked knees makes for a terrible time trying to even pass the physical, so I ended up working in IT. And I have a rather crazy Welshman to thank for that. Now I’m a networking administrator at a rather successful company, married, with a kid, and looking back at the past, rather than the future. Why? Because I’m once again, back to not entirely sure where/what/how/when I want to go.

I look at what Neill has written down as “things to do”, and come to similar conclusions. I would love to be running my own successful IT business, in a long term relationship, in my own house, and be financially stable. I must say, I have a successful job (though sometimes restrictive), not sure where I’d go with my own business, I have to think more on that. I am in a long term relationship (of course, I’m married, and I have a son). And I’m financially stable. I don’t think I’ve looked at my bank balance in nearly a month. Why? Because I know, no matter what comes out, it’s covered. As for the house, not there yet. That’s in the next few years I think. I do live in my own apartment though.

I believe I need to take some time, sit back and relax a bit, and set myself some goals in life. Currently I think I’m just plodding along. A little like my work right now. I don’t really feel like working on any work stuff tonight, but I have 3 apps to knock out for tomorrow. sighs

Now I am wandering into my rambling stage, where my mind has things on it, and isn’t sure where, or how, to put them, so I’ll draw a line there, and just put these things in:

• Work
• Home
• Life

I need to think of those, and get some “plans” in place.

Today, I woke up feeling terrible. For the last week or so, I’ve actually been waking up tired. Not the normal “first thing in the morning” tired… but physically tired. Probably due to the hours I’m working, and I should take a break. Today I got a chance. I had the possibility of a Blackberry being dropped into my lap. This would give me 24x7 email access. This would be a good thing… for the people at work. While I am generally reachable 24x7 anyway, having the ability to check my email 24x7 means I would have more means to be actually working. This is a bad thing for me, because I am, what most would call, a work-a-holic. If I have work in front of me, I will do it, regardless of the time, or the day. I already have 24x7 nationwide internet access courtesy of Verizon.

So why didn’t I take the Blackberry? Actually I was going to, was even filling out the form for it to be reaquisitioned to me. They hired a new director, who is far more important than I am, and as such, he gets the Blackberry. Hooray for me, no Blackberry.

On the other hand, I am trying to get out more, and I am planning on getting back to the gym some time soon. I need to do something other than work 18-20 hours a day.