Soliciting Fame

A few days ago my shipment of Open-Mesh routers arrived! They’re super small and really cool.

Here are a bunch of pictures of me opening them.

The setup was really simple, just like the Meraki routers. Basically you need to plug in on of the repeaters to an internet and power connection for 5 minutes so it updates and then the WLAN lights will start flashing, this means it’s ready to rock. Then you just log in to Open-Mesh.com and add the router’s MAC or IP address to the network and BOOM, it’s broadcasting.

To expand the network you just add more routers and place them around. A repeater doesn’t have an internet cable connection, it just picks up the closest wireless signal from the same network and rebroadcasts it. A gateway has an internet connection and therefore a stronger signal.

Right now I have one router sitting in the window at my cafe. I’ll make another post soon to explain why

I’m sitting in my internet cafe with my good friend, Rob Davy. We’re working on a new website project to do with equestrian classified ads.

For the last few hours we’ve watched a group of people across the street in front of Starbucks holding up “free hugs” posters. I’ve seen this before around town and at university. From official home page for the Free Hugs Campaign:

Free hugs is a real life controversial story of Juan Mann, A man whos sole mission was to reach out and hug a stranger to brighten up their lives.

In this age of social disconnectivity and lack of human contact, the effects of the Free Hugs campaign became phenomenal.

I’ve always liked the idea of the FHC, it’s something I think that brings everyone involved closer together, mentally and physically. I personally wouldn’t go and stand on a street corner because I have other priorities, but I have hugged a person or two in the past.

I’m reading up on Joomla! It’s a seriously kick-ass open-source application. I’m a bit miffed that I haven’t taken a closer look at it until now.

The reason I’m reading up on Joomla is because I accepted the IT Director’s position for the Alberta School of Business Students Association (BSA). It’s not a “real” IT Director’s position where I implement new grandiose technologies and run a huge department or anything. This is basically a service position for the students where I help maintain their website, publish updates, work with the Students Union to do our BSA elections, and help students get personalized business cards if they want. The great thing is I can do this while I’m in Germany.

Rob, one of my best friends and my employer for the summer, and I are going to try and rework his old site Equine Edmonton, I’m going to suggest we use Joomla! to streamline any problems we’ll run into.

Does anyone see a problem with doing contract web design and then implementing prefabbed infrastructure like WordPress of Joomla!?

There’s a nifty little site named Death by Caffeine that calculates how many drinks of various products you would have to ingest before croaking. I picked my favourite pop Diet Coke and ran the calculation:

Apparently if I drank 425 cans of Diet Coke I’d be dead….

I decided to run some more calculations: 424.67 cans of Diet Coke would be approximately 151 litres of pop. According to sources, your average human can handle about 2 litres of liquid in their stomach at a time. Also, your bladder can only reasonably hold about 500ml before you must urinate. In addition it takes your stomach approximately 25 minutes for your stomach to empty 50% of the liquid you ingest.

So… 151L/2L x 50min. = 3775 minutes (63 hours).

Now, if you have to pee every 500ml this means 150757.9ml/500 = 301.5 bathroom breaks.

Good luck killing yourself.

Sources:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/JonathanCheng.shtml
http://www.diabeteshealth.com/read/1996/01/01/523.html