I’m feeling lazy today but wanted to bring this to people’s attention. It’s a very cool idea and I’ve read about it. So I’m just going to quote from their web page:

PERM is the Practical End-host collaborative Residential Multihoming framework. 802.11 networks have spread rapidly in the residential area, and it is common for neighbors to receive signals from each other’s home wireless networks. PERM allows residents to leverage such an opportunity to improve their last-mile Internet connectivity, at no additional cost, by pooling their Internet accesses together. PERM is practical in that it does not rely on support from the network infrastructure in terms of advanced naming scheme or proxy, the remote host in terms of new transport protocols, or the end-user in terms of explicit application feedback or configuration. Instead, PERM employs automated on-line analysis of the user’s networking behaviors, and exploits the identified patterns to achieve high-performance scheduling at the flow level. PERM is also highly usable for normal residential users. It preserves a user’s privacy and security, and mitigates the free-riding problem. We have implemented PERM for Linux clients and the open-source Linksys wireless router.

Usually I’m not one to pass on advertisments but when two great products sleep together you can bet their love-child is going to be hot.

I love Firefox and I love OGIO bags. Many of you might not know OGIO but they are a local company (Draper) and make world-class bags. My current computer bag is made by OGIO and I would love one with the Firefox logo. Or a Tux logo. I’ll tell you what, $60 is cheap for an OGIO bag as well, which usually go for about $80-$100. Get yours today at the Mozilla Store!

A friend of mine and I were talking about past work experiences where the company president was a terrible manager and knew the company was going under and, in general, acted like an ass. She told me that when she left she sent an e-mail to everyone in the company as a parting shot. Ironically, her letter had some effect and the managment style of Franklin Lewis was looked into and found to be lacking. In the end, her letter saved the company about $1M by letting Franklin go. But the e-mail is a gem and I present it below for your enjoyment:

Open Letter to Franklin George Lewis / State of the Company

Mr. Lewis:

We all quietly pretend that the company is headed in the right direction and like you, we tend to smile and pretendthat nothing is wrong as you casually take people–our friends and coworkers–and turn their lives upside down. On the surface everything is OK but we all have known that you are the direct cause of the current state of the company.

Of course you must believe that you are a victim of some external force, a market condition or perhaps the implosion at Canopy. None of these could be further from the truth. As the CEO of this company, you alone are the reason that this company is about to fail.

Pride is the Seed of Destruction

Pride and arrogance are major components of your personality. I don’t know how many times I’ve said a friendly hello to you just to be ignored in return. When we do see action from you, you’ll terat your employees like cattle, as if you own us. You hire and fire without regart to the human factor. Like a sociopath, you treat us merely as objects that are to provide for you. If one of the objects happens to get in the way, It’s nothing for you to pull out the axe and have Doug Minnick or Rick Kempton go to work.

When you hire neighbors for thousandsof dollars a month to come spend 15 to 20 hours a week really doing nothing, it tends to have the appearance that you may be trying to be the “Big Wheel” in your neighborhood at the expense of legitimately running a company. Maybe I am wrong, but that really seems like a waste of company resources. Perhaps you could share with us all what your feighbor brought to this company in exchange for thousands of dollars?

“The Greate De-Motivator”

Never have I seen someone that can know exactly what not to say and then deliver it perfectly to destroy any morale that may exist. The vacuum of leadership that you bring to ITZ is worse than having no one at all at the helm. You can come into a meeting, sit there for 15 mintues, all the while adding nothing to the discussion, and on your way out say something with a lot of big words that mean nothing. I’ve been around many leaders; some great and some not so great, but I have to say you are by far the worst I have ever seen. You seem to only know fear as a motivator. Here’s a big hint, it’s been proven that happy people are more productive for longer periods of time.

Report Card

In an effort to be fair, we all have strenghts and weaknesses, so to provide a little feedback I have listed yours below:

Strengths

• A big corner office with lots of big windows. The biggest in the company. You da man!
• Working knowledge of a lot of big words
• The “Five Questions”.
• A complete mastery of who should sit where, according to importance and title.
• A finely goomed mustache
• An almost “queer eye” for what is allowed to be placed and displayed on the walls.
• A great parking spot in the garage of the building.

Weaknesses:

• Cannot motivate without the use of fear
• Doesn’t know industry or customers or anything about them!
• Has not provided direction, leadership, goals, objectives, encouragement! It’s not a sign of weakness to say good job and to appreciate efforts made towards the betterment of the company.
• Cannot see the dire state of the company, or does see it and lies to us all.
• Usually a CEO in a failing company should be at work more than 20 hours a week, and be more infolved in providing assistance and direction.
• Cannot make decision without convening a committee, or talking it over with Kristine W.

Finally, do yourself and the remaining ITZ survivors a big service… resign. You have proven that you are incompetent, and that you have no skills or abilities to direct a company and more importantly you have no redeeming qualities.

Sincerely, Lynette J. Upchurch

Legal Dislaimer: Because I am aware of your ITZ Company-provided legal staff and your lawsuit-happy nature, anything I have written that could be construed as slanderous, liable or inaccurate is merely my own opinion.

You youngsters weened on iPods and iTunes may not know that you owe your MP3 addiction to Winamp, the first (and many would say) the best MP3 software player.

Not wanting to digress into a history of MP3s (and how it took a day to encode an album using the Fraunhofer command-line program) and the popularity of Winamp as a universal player, I’ll let Wikipedia catch you up on that.

But this design concept for a physical MP3 player based on the original Winamp skin would be fabulous. I would buy one in a hurry. I originally saw this on Gizmodo which linked over to Mobliewhack–I don’t know where the original is. But it’s still cool.

I think the time has finally come to get my family a gaming console. So I dug out my Atari 2600 and a stack of cartridges and a wide assortment of joysticks and introduced my kids to the joys of gaming.

After a lot of explaining and some dumb looks from my daughter (who acted like I’m an idiot) I decided they needed something a little more current with more graphic appeal. So I decided to skip a whole generation–leaving the Atari 5200 in the basement and went for the big guns…

Behold! The Atari 7800! Just kidding, I don’t have a 7800 but if you do and would like to donate it to my Atari museum, please contact me. (Just as a side note here I also have an Atari Home Pong–first ever home video game and an Atari Video Pinball machine too).

But serriously, my kids don’t even want to play on the used-used Nintendo 64 that I’ve got. I’ve even got 4 controllers for it and one decent game.

If anyone knows where I could get a great deal on a Game Cube, I would be interested. I would be willing to trade items for it as well, such as computers, monitors, XanGo Juice.