Sqeaky's Dumping Ground

Be Active in the Community – Bring Google to Omaha

I am still trying to raise awareness of Google’s Fiber Internet access roll-out project. However I am not getting the traction I wanted. If you want really High speed Internet Access, for all the good it will do for You, the Omaha-Metro Economy and The Omaha-Metro Community, then you should do something. Take Action, tell your friends, tell your family, call people in power… do something.
 
Here is what I did, and what I think you should do: I called the Mayor’s Hotline, KPTM, WOWT, KETV, and The Omaha World. I called the Mayor’s Hotline, because he is the big decision maker in town, and I contacted the news outlets because they can each reach all of Omaha rapidly.

This place could use some Incredibly fast internet

• The mayor’s hotline – (402) 444-5555
• The Omaha World Herald – (402) 444-1000
• KETV Channel 7 news – (402) 978-8954
• WOWT Channel 6 news – (402) 346-6666
• KPTM Channel 42 news – (402) 558-4282

 
This is what I did, but see what creative ways you can alert everyone in Omaha to Google’s Fiber Internet access plans. Tell them about how this could create jobs, how it could bring Videos into the home in seconds, How it make Husker Games available anywhere at anytime, How, with the help of the medical community be used to save lives and How it can do things I haven’t thought of but your will.
 
If you are talking to Google, this is also to their advantage. Since they already have an Office on Council Bluffs, they already have a staging point for planning. Since they want to service Internet Service Providers as well they can work with Cox and Qwest. They want Technically inclined home users and people to move away from dial-up, and we have plenty of people who want this and want to ditch their dial-up.
 
Any questions, drop me line at toppij@gmail.com or give me a call 402-714-7539. I would like to involve all of Omaha and the surrounding communities so give it your best shot, and if you would like to help but don’t know how, talk to me and we will work it out.
 
Also see my First post on bringing Google Fiber to Omaha.

Bring Google Fiber to Omaha

Google has some big news about Fiber Internet. They want to run Internet directly to homes and businesses at 1 Gigabit per second. Check out Google Fiber for Communities page and sign up for it now.
 
To put this in perspective, let me use a plumbing analogy. Dialup at 56 Kilobits is like a leaky bathroom faucet, it let’s the data trickle through, at 1 drip per second. Cable or DSL at 5 Megabits is like turning the faucet on halfway and getting a stream equal to 42 drips per second. Googles fiber would be like the spigot that fills your bathtub or waters your lawn at more than 4,200 Drips per second, more like a torrent than a collection of drips. (I guess a faucet -> Hose -> Hoover Dam analogy would have been more impressive, But I like accuracy.)

Fiber is good for your diet and your Internet connection

Here in Omaha and it’s suburbs we have a disproportionate amount of IT Businesses like InfoUSA(La Vista/Omaha), Yahoo (La Vista), First Data (Omaha), Cosentry (Bellevue), Google (Council Bluffs) and many startups from individuals to Business incubators like the one University of Netbraksa Omaha (UNO) Houses. Combine the businesses with the technically inclined residency; it seems to me that everyone wants better internet service for their personal projects. All this should make for a receptive welcome.
 
There are several other ISPs here including Cox and Qwest, and Qwest attempted Fiber roll-out with mixed success. With clout like Google’s, you may be able to arrange deals with these local ISPs to help with the ever expensive `last mile` and truly get the most out of the available technology. Since one of your goals is openness having these ISPs already in place provides an opportunity as a backbone provider.
 
I will post this to my blog before the sun sets on Omaha, calling for the People of my Community to sign up for this as well.

 
When asked about the quality of my Internet service I said:

The quality of my current service is mediocre at best, It seems fast most of the time, but then as soon I have to download something or upload a real file it fails or becomes sluggish. Customer service could be better, for a simple move to a new apartment I was billed extra several times (for one move), and it took no less than 5 calls in total.

 
Surely you can think of your own reasons that we need this, if for nothing else, sign up to bring more jobs to Omaha. If you cannot think of you own reasons copy and paste mine. But if you can, put your own reasons in, nothing is more convincing than earnest and heartfelt sincerity.
 
Now hurry up! Sign up Omaha For google fiber now! If you know any political figures in town, get them involved. If done right this can be of enormous Personal, Community and Economic Benefit.
 
 
I used the USGS Faucet dripping calculator to crunch these numbers, and I assumed that 1/2 ml = 1 drip = 60 Kilobit (Minor rounding was involved).

IT Certifications Aren’t Worth the Paper They’re Not Printed On!

At work we are trying to attract a new client. They toured the facility, they looked around and asked questions, all while my peers and I demonstrated our knowledge and abilities. They were impressed as we took actual phone calls for actual users. They oohed and awed as we remotely administered dozens of servers, of varying types and platforms. It all seemed to be going smoothly until they wanted to see our certifications.
 
We were like see our what… You are kidding right? We are doing the work for many other customers and we have real working relationships with fortune 100 companies, but they want us to produce papers to prove that we can do it. We all agree we should go get the papers; how tough could it be? So we all start working on our Server+ certifications and other IT(Information Technology) Certifications.

Server-like Systems

This is how related Server+ is

• Created in 1986.

In an industry that you have to read the news daily or get left behind, what from 23 years ago could possibly still be relevant. I skipped the 32bit/64bit transition because I knew I didn’t have time to keep up to date with all the news, when I stepped out of IT for a while. I picked it back up just earlier this year, and I hit the books (The Web really) relearning what was needed. Only occasionally do I need knowledge generated during my 18 month IT Hiatus a year ago. How could I ever need knowledge about something 23 years ago rather than more knowledge from now, or at least the historical relevance of archaic tools. I could understand studying why one technology beat out another. But no, they go into technical details like this:

• Standard: SCSI-1
• Data Bus Size (bits):8
• Clock Speed (MHz): 5
• Throughput (MB/s): 5
• Maximum Devices (including SCSI controller): 8
• Cable(s): 50-pin Centronics

When the information wasn’t old or unrelated it was inaccurate. I could see how some of these could be judgment calls, like when they said Itanic Itanium as a good 64bit chip. I was was there for the beginnings of the Itanic, and I know better, and the Itanium Sales Forecasts agree with me. But, someone still could still disagree because on some level it is still an opinion. However some of the items that used in this Certification are just plain wrong by the math.

Incorrect Question