I just got back from my Asterisk presentation to TriLUG. The room was absolutely full. I don’t think there were seats available. Must have been close to 130 people there.

My slides somehow got corrupted about an hour before my talk was to begin, so I madly recreated them from memory right before packing things up and heading out. I looked like a college kid moving into his dorm, with arms full of computer stuff, backpacks, and laptop bags hanging off of me.

My demo system didn’t behave, which led to some delays, though fortunately not many. My reconstituted slides worked just fine and gave me a good story to tell in the process. I was surprised when Jason Tower motioned to me that I had five minutes left as I felt like I was just getting warmed up.

It was a great turnout. A huge turnout. Lots of fantastic questions were asked. I kept most everyone’s attention for a full 90 minutes, in spite of my technical difficulties. Looking back on it, I’m amazed I pulled it off as well as I did.

Next month’s talk is by former Red Hat CEO Bob Young. Ironically, I owe my speaking success to getting fired by his company. Three years ago, I would have never imagined standing in front of a crowd of total strangers and speaking for five minutes, much less 90 minutes. Leaving Bob’s company led me to my sales engineering job at my last company. It was there I gained confidence in public speaking.

Thanks, Bob, for canning me. Oftentimes those bumps in life are there to teach you something.

I’ll be presenting Asterisk to the Triangle Linux User Group Thursday night. It will be a general overview of the system and will include a live demonstration near the end. I’ll be giving away a few complete Asterisk servers as prizes, too.

The talk begins at 7 PM and should last until 8:30 or so. It will be held at Red Hat‘s corporate headquarters in Raleigh. See the TriLUG site above for directions.

Hope to see you there!

After a long dry spell, we finally got some decent rain. Yesterday morning the floodgates opened on us, dumping three inches of rain in just one day. Amazing.

If that wasn’t enough weather fun, could Irene be coming for a visit?
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I struck up a conversation with a Bellsouth tech last week who regaled me with all the planned improvements Bellsouth hoped to make with its network. He was a DSL tech as well as a line installer and was quite fluent in the upcoming technology. Among the gems he threw out were a 6 Mbit download speed coming in September and video on demand coming soon afterward. The goal is 100 Mbits to the home, and will be here sooner than you think. Bellsouth has embarked on an aggressive deployment of new DSLAMs to growing neighborhoods with the goal of bringing fiber to within 5000 feet of their subscribers.

The video on demand stuff sounded appealing, as that’s where I expect things will be heading. I’ve said for a while that the television network is a dying breed. PVR’s like Tivo blaze the way for viewers to purchase their programming by the half-hour, not by the channel. Bellsouth hopes to capitalize on this with their video service, which will pipe three or four simultaneous channels into your home over their copper. Then again, those of you who were in the game in the early days will remember that ISDN was hawked for video on demand. Look how that turned out!

The tech repeated a line I’ve often heard from other telecom technicians: things aren’t fair because the phone companies are regulated and other ISPs (like Time Warner, or competing DSL providers) are not. The view from the phone companies is that their hands are unfairly tied. That all changed last week when the FCC has effectively killed DSL competition. The ruling allows incumbent carriers like Bellsouth to cut loose competiting ISPs from their DSL network. No longer are the ILECs required to offer their copper to competiting providers. As others have noted, the future doesn’t look good for Internet users.

In many other cases it would be a win for a free market. It doesn’t quite square here, though, because the phone companies owe their existence to their early days as monopolies. That fancy infrastructure the phone companies so jealously protect was bought and paid for at the expense of you, the ratepayer. AT&T executives used to brag how the government, in the name of national security (sound familiar?), paid for a large chunk of its network.

So if we want to talk about fairness, we should take that monopoly into account. We should also take steps to ensure another monopoly doesn’t grow up around broadband access. Last week the FCC opened the jailhouse door and now the robber barons are on the loose again.

If there ever was a time for home-grown, wireless neighborhood networks to show how broadband shold be, it’s now. Let’s dust off those yagis and get to work.

NASA‘s Mission Specialist Steve Robinson, the guy whose spacewalking duct-tape job made the shuttle safe for reentry, has recorded the first podcast from space. Take a listen to Steve’s personal account of the STS-114 mission.

Here’s a partial list of stupid business cliches I wish would just go away. I’m thinking of devoting a whole page at MT.Net just to stupid business cliches that should go away.

• Touch base: You touch my stuff … and I’ll kill ya.
• On the same page: Who’s page? Don’t we have “paperless” offices now?
• Gut check: This is business, not rugby, tough guy.
• Heads-down: This one isn’t worn … yet.
• Bottom-line everything: What, am I a spreadsheet now?
• Going/moving forward: This one always makes me think of Dan Quayle. Bless his heart.
• Reinvent the wheel: Come on! There are millions of inventions since the wheel. Can’t you think of something else to reinvent?
• Skinny: On a slippery slope to being worn.
• Slippery slope: Had to throw that in there. Heh.
• Out of pocket: Keep away from my base and stay out of my pocket!
• End user: What other kind of user is there? Try “user” instead.
• Level set: Trendy is another name for becoming worn.
• Skill set: Set this, set that. Just say “skills.”
• Solution set: Ditto.
• Put the cart before the horse: Long after horses and carts have been put out to pasture, this one’s still kicking.
• Plant the seed: Not too annoying, if used sparingly.
• Opening a can of worms: Acceptable if you alternate occasionally with “slippery slope.”
• Ping: It has its place…if you’re a dweeb.
• Add value: This one is soooo second millennium.
• In this space: Spaces, bases, pockets. Oh my!
• Bring to the table: Stop it before it kills again.
• Mindshare: This is code for “I have no clue what I’m talking about.”
• Leverage: A buzzword-bingo winner every time.
• Interfaced: Nothing says “I’m a geek” than slipping this one into conversation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
• Seamlessly: This one drives me nuts. Nothing, and I mean nothing in the computer industry is seamless. It’s a myth. Give it up.
• Vision: The CEO of a dot-bomb I once worked for kept being called “visionary.” I was smart to head for the exits.
• Cycle back: Acceptable in geek company, but overuse could put it on the Endangered Cliche list.
• Arena: No one’s duking it out in the Roman Coliseum here. Time to hang up the gloves, champ!
• Utilize: There’s a better, shorter word which means the same thing: “use.” Saying “utilize” makes you look like a puffed-up buffoon.
• Greatest thing since sliced bread: Sliced bread was invented in the 1920’s. What was the greatest thing before sliced bread? Has nothing progressed since the 1920’s? Is there nothing greater?

That’s all for now, though I’m sure there’ll be more. If you or anyone you know spouts any of these, please: seek help immediately!

I flew on a business trip yesterday. At the ticket counter, I gave the agent my driver license, as usual. She did the usual check-in process, then looked up.

“Mr. Turner, what is your date of birth?”

I gave her my birthdate and she continued typing.

Curiosity caught up with me. “So … I’ve never been asked for my birthdate before,” I said in a friendly tone. “What did you need that for?”

“Oh,” she replied casually, “just to clear you from the watch list.”

Very interesting, indeed.

The kids gave me a happy wake-up this morning, so I thought I’d have some fun and play some guitar while we were lounging around in our pajamas. It was the first time I played guitar since I injured my finger. I’ll be happy to note that the injury didn’t affect my playing at all: I play just as badly as I did before!

The kids didn’t seem to mind, though. I drew the line at getting out the electric guitar. Cranking up an amp at 7 AM is not a good way to keep your neighbors happy!

The only sign left of my finger injury is a small scab. In a few weeks, it will be good as new.

One thing I do is heal quickly and well.

I asked a programmer friend who’s also a musician if something existed to that would render a musical score in a web browser. Neither of us could find anything.

What I’d like is some sort of easy way to display sheet music in a browser. That way musicians could post their work and others could make clean (and correct) printouts of the music to play themselves. The format could be XML, or some HTML cousin, or perhaps the music could be in MIDI format and the browser could render that.

Does this sound useful to any musicians out there? Anyone good with Java?