Rebuilding a Home Network

I’m not the typical home networking user. The demands I place on my network are more than what the average consumer might throw at a residential grade “all-in-one” router. After several nights of my Boxee box throwing a hissy fit with streaming video over my network, it was enough for me to make the decision to upgrade the LAN.

The amount of network traffic I produce on a regular basis might not be anything extraordinary in the eyes of professional users, but when it comes to the speed at which my network operates, I don’t play around. With two Macbook Pros, two iPhones, two iPad 3′s, and three printers all consuming wireless bandwidth, I decided some time ago that having my home media center adding traffic to my wireless network – a Boxee box, Blu-ray player, Apple TV and XBOX 360 – was not the best of ideas.

My personal experience with Netgear business-grade products has been a delight and I decided that if I was going to upgrade my infrastructure, I wanted to see what offerings they had. Since my network demands are different then that of a home user, I decided that going with business-class gear was better than trying to force a solution out of gear purchased from the local big box store. I’ve done that before and it never ended well.

My old infrastructure consisted of the following:

• a bridged Comcast Dory cable modem
• an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station handling routing Ethernet and 802.11n traffic
• a 5-port Netgear Gigabit Switch connecting my media center

What I quickly noticed was that due to the amount of equipment I had on the network, there was an unusually large amount of broadcast traffic, in addition to regular network traffic. The only way I could ensure that the important traffic gets prioritized and doesn’t lead to network congestion (and thus, slowing things down for everything on the network) was to implement a QoS solution.

My new infrastructure consists of the following:

• a bridged Comcast Dory cable modem
• an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station handling routing functions of Ethernet and 802.11n traffic – for now; later this will be bridged as a WAP
• an 8-port Netgear GS108E smart switch
• a 5-port Netgear GS105E smart switch
• eventually, I’ll be adding a Netgear FVS318G 8-port Gigabit VPN firewall as the brains of the network, handling routing functions

With QoS, I can now specify which devices on the network should receive priority. For example, without QoS, data packets sent from my XBOX to the WAN would be prioritized the same as data from any of the wireless devices. Since I’m an avid gamer, I enjoy latency-free play. With QoS, I can specify that any data transmitted from my XBOX receives priority over the network out to the Internet and any wireless devices such as a laptop or iPad will have their data transmitted with less priority. This is much more noticeable when I watch TWiT on my Boxee box while surfing the Internet in my living room. The video packets to the Boxee get priority while my background surfing and downloading receive less priority.

As a side note, the FVS318G allows for VPN, so I can easily remote into my home network safely and securely. It’s handy for those times that I need to access something on my network’s NAS away from home and it doesn’t force me to load up a bunch of thumbnail drives/portable hard disks or take up valuable space on my laptop’s hard drive. Anywhere I go that has an Internet connection, I have access. I’ll definitely have to re-evaluate DynDNS, since the firewall supports connections using that DDNS service. Handy for residential-grade customers that need access to their network without having to upgrade to business-class service just for the static IP.

It may seem like a lot of overkill – I guess you could say I’m a bit of a control freak over my network. They way I see it, why would you pay a good chunk of money each month for a fast Internet connection just to experience network congestion on the private network side?

Earlier today, I decided to treat a spammy email as a one-off and simply send a tweet to @DKNewMedia to bring the error of sending me a spammy marketing email to their attention. Anyone in social media worth their salt knows how to track their brand and monitor how it’s mentioned on social media – Twitter queries and Google Alerts just to name a few. However, this tweet seems to have not garnered even the slightest, “We apologize for the error,” in reply.

For a brand that is so die-hard on self promotion and blogging about their social media prowess, it’s a real shame that they couldn’t take the time to acknowledge their error. A simple apology and a promise to correct the error would have been enough to satisfy me. I guess their attitude is that if my name is on their list, it must be because I submitted it. Yet, it is even more puzzling when you consider the fact that the email address that was solicited is my personal address which I have and would never use to subscribe to such things, nor was it even created and in use until October of last year. What’s more, I’m pretty sure anyone in the Indy social media/marketing scene that I’ve come in contact with over the past two years knows how I feel about the fraud they perpetrate and as such, really should know better than to spam me like this.

If this is how self-proclaimed down-to-earth marketing/social media experts attempt to attract clients and market their brand, they can all go to hell. I want no part of a subset within an industry that uses sleazy tactics to aid in the growth of their bottom line. If you want me to shut my mouth about this, the solution is simple: stop spamming me.

A Kickstarter to buy Kickstarter? The irony of this is just too delicious not to post.

Jay Rosen has it right. Finally, somebody gets it.

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated…” is the more familiar line, and it’s funnier, even though Twain didn’t say it.

Interestingly enough, while Twain didn’t say this exact quote, it was the one that Jobs’ used in his first keynote back from his medical leave of absence. Not only does this douchebag Daisey present the misquote, but he exhibits the audacity to use the borrowed quote from a man whose empire he’s doing his damnedest to destroy. Regarding reports in the media about Daisey, Rosen says further:

He doesn’t think it matters whether there actually were such reports. The audience will get it: he’s not going to hide in some cave! He will go on. Yes. And so will his con.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

With the voracity that Mike Daisey has displayed in going after Apple, you would think that he would have some clue about the situation. His latest blog post is a grotesque display of admitting he’s wrong while still trying to prove he is right overall. What Daisey doesn’t seem to get is that there are plenty of other corporations that derive their products – in whole or in part – from Foxconn plants, but he fails to mention them in the same way he does Apple.

In one instance during his post, Mr. Daisey lambasts the audience as mindless sheep who are focusing on his indiscretion over the real issue of rights violations. In the same post, he has the audacity to use a quote which Steve Jobs himself borrowed during his first keynote speech after returning from his first leave of absence – all without proper attribution.

Quite frankly, Mr. Daisey is a charlatan and a shameless self-promoter, to which no agenda is as important as his own personal brand. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the next iteration of Michael Moore for the tech world.

It’s interesting to see the brain of Apple’s first marketing consultant picked over the early days of marketing the company. In a recent interview with Ad Age, McKenna details how he advised Jobs to handle the negative press Apple received over the issue surrounding the antennae in the iPhone 4:

I looked at the data, which was really interesting. They had more complaints and service calls on the phone before it than they did on the iPhone 4. Because of that, I did not think it was a significant problem. I thought it was a media-cycle issue and that they should address it with the data they had and be confident about the outcome rather than be apologetic.

I think most people would have otherwise attributed the fact that the issue “went away” because of Job’s reality distortion field. I think that while it may have had something to do with it, it in fact had very little impact on how the situation was handled.

It seems that Philly’s official website has gotten a much needed facelift. Although their last attempt at a redesign was decent at best, this new design seems to really have the city’s digital citizens in mind. In a recent post by Yael Borofsky on Technically Philly:

Aside from a cleaner, more appealing look, the biggest improvements to the site are the navigation — designed to be more user centric — and the new ‘Topics’ section, Adel Ebeid, Chief Innovation Officer for the City told Technically Philly. Ebeid said these updates are intended “to demystify the workings of the city and puts it in a form that city constituents can understand.”

I welcome these changes and anything else that can be done help our citizens benefit from city services. Getting important information from our city government is a crucial step to improving the lives of those who use these services. Coming from a city that has a wealth of tech startups yet local government rarely calls taps that resource to improve the city, it’s refreshing to see a much larger city take those same steps to help improve access to vital government services.

It also helps when major ISPs offer city-wide wifi hotspots so you never have to hunt for an Internet connection.

Often I hear of conversations that people have regarding amateur photography. Unfortunately a lot of those conversations seem to end of with the sum total of all thoughts saying, “You should invest in a nicer camera and you’ll take even better photos.” This is the biggest myth amongst those that start out in photography, the side effect of which cheapens the craft that professional photographers strive so laboringly to perfect.

Mind you, I’m not a professional photographer by any stretch of the imagination. I’m what they call an advanced amateur. Hell, more times than not, I think my photography sucks. That doesn’t stop me from enjoying it when I take my camera in hand and spend an afternoon traversing the city in search of that one shot that will make it all worth it. And as you can probably infer, it also doesn’t stop me from wanting to get better.

When it comes to skills vs. gear, skills win every time. I’ve seen some stunning photography taken with a point-and-shoot or camera phone having a lower megapixel count and it comes out beautiful. I’ve also seen what would have otherwise been beautiful imagery, if it were not for the lack of subject, focus or lighting, or exposure, taken with decent digital SLR cameras.

The trademark of a photographer who is in charge of their craft is they understand that technology is supposed to help you, but not do it for you. If you can’t take a decent photo at 5 megapixels, what makes you think 16 megapixels is going to somehow magically make you better? Megapixels have nothing to do with how in-focus your photos is, or help you take your photo at the correct exposure. That is the photographer’s job. The only thing megapixels do is determine how large of an image you can print. What good is a 20″ x 30″ print of a poorly composed image?

There are times you need to step up to a more adequate set of equipment. That’s one reason why I chose to step up from a D40 to a D7000. At the time I was very heavily into my 55-200mm lens and I started noticing a lot of nasties in my photos when cropping shots in post. That’s probably not the best reason to upgrade, but I have to honestly say I don’t have that as an issue now.

The main reason I opted for a D7000 versus something like a D90 is because I wanted to force myself to get better. This may sound backwards, but it was my way giving myself motivation to learn how to use a camera properly.

Photography was always something I’ve been interested in – I never was able to afford a decent camera until recently. I decided that if I was going to drop almost $1200 on a camera body alone, I was damn well going to learn to shoot the thing in manual (the way nature intended)! Because of that (and because of my naturally talented wife’s patience in teaching me the basics), I am a much better photographer today than I was when I started out with a Kodak camera shooting 110 film.

All of these semantics to arrive at my point, which is: yes, it’s true that sometimes it’s the gear that’s inadequate and sometimes it’s the operator’s skill that’s inadequate. The trick is be honest with yourself and to know which it is that’s holding you back. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen in my experiences, there are a lot of under-skilled blaming it on the equipment, rather than face the fact that all they really they need some basic instruction to hit the ground running.

After reading Kirsten’s post on the DDK Portraits blog, the one thing I can determine is the simple rule of the Internet: If you don’t want people “sharing” your stuff online, don’t post it online.

There is no possible way to enforce your copyright as a photographer online, unless you want to sue every person that shares your stuff or you want to take the time to send out takedown notices to hosting providers. Both are very arduous processes and consume massive amounts of both time and money.

The bottom line is that if you want to post your stuff online, be realistic about what people are going to do with it. You can’t honestly post to the modern-day social web without thinking that, at some point, someone is going to discover your work and share it. Traditional copyrights are simply not compatible with the social web.

Unless Pinterest makes significant changes to their terms of use, I would discourage people from sharing creative works via the service. That’s one reason why I don’t have my own Pinterest account.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard (and possibly read) the New York Times’ article in which Target knows which of its customers are pregnant.

You may think it obvious that your health insurance company has certain information about you – more obvious than what Target is doing. However, the information that insurance companies obtain from you goes beyond the obvious methods of data capture. Everyone expects (or should expect) their health insurance company to capture data reported on a claim form (i.e. Procedure and diagnosis codes, data from medical records, medications, etc).

What most people don’t realize is that this information goes farther than just simply affecting your premiums. Information obtained from an insurance company, captured in aggregate, is compiled into a database where it is analyzed for certain metrics. If a managed care provider wanted to send mailers out to men in a certain age group about colon cancer and pre-screening options, they will assemble a database of customers fitting the basic criteria – age and sex – but they will also sort through medical information to determine the most at-risk customers for a given disease. When I worked for an insurance company, people would call up all the time and ask why they received a particular piece of literature in the mail regarding heart disease/diabetes/breast cancer/etc, despite the fact they had no claims coded with any of these diagnoses.

We should realize by now that everything has a cost, regardless of the price of something. Take for example, downloading a free application for your smartphone. Usually, that application, if made by an independent developer, will have advertising embedded somewhere in the application. Those ads are usually tailored to the user’s experience, as in the case of iAds. How Apple is able to serve relevant ads to it’s user base is by aggregating data – the same way that Facebook serves ads on its own site. This is the non-monetary price the consumer pays for a monetarily free application.

Privacy in our modern age has completely changed so much so that we as consumers must forsake a part of our privacy in order to reap the benefits of what is being offered. Despite the fact that Facebook offers little in the way of privacy, it doesn’t stop millions of people from using the service every day. To think that the retail world is (or should be) any different is just naive.