S = [ outsourcing, crowdsourcing, trialsourcing ]

You probably have heard of the first two elements of set S. Each of the first has merit, and each has its drawbacks. Whereas one gives you a desired quality at the cost of time, the other gives you a desired timeline, at the cost of quality control.

The third item, trialsourcing, bridges the gap.

hmm

I stumbled across a company called vWorker that has come up with a truly novel idea. Their solution is On the job trial: crowdsourcing, trialsourcing. The principle idea at the heart of the approach a project by letting potential employees provide actual code, for both small (crowdsourcing) efforts and larger (trialsourceing) implementations. It effectively takes the guessing game out of the equations, allowing the person issuing the contract to have confidence in the quality of the contractor’s work.

Hit one of the links to take a look. It is very novel.

Turns out Samsung makes one hell of a baby monitor too…

hi

Only the best for the nerd princess…

Either I have completely blasted past any sort of touch with reality, or this is really funny…

...hmm

A bit of a side note. I was poking around for some new frames, started looking at some online prescription frames, and got fully side tracked. Somehow looking at basic options found me checking out Valentine’s Day glasses, and ultimately dropping a pair of V-Day glasses on top of a sweet robot jpeg. One must admit, the frames are both completely conducive towards Valentine’s day cheer, and for robotic…oh I don’t know…something.

Zenni kills it, regardless of the style. Take a quick look at the source of the image…

yep

I think they would look equally amazing on a human. Preferably a female human.

Tired stupor aside, it is very amazing how far the internet has brought certain industries into the hands of the consumer. Glasses provide a terrific point. I have purchased three sets of frames from Zenni, and can say with a great deal of certainty, that my time in a brick and mortar spectacle shop are done. Have prescription, will go.

Anyhow…sorry about the tired ramble post. It still cracks me up though…

To make matters worse, things move at a quicker pace now more than ever. It is pretty shortsighted to assume your product will ever hit a true support phase. When that happens, you are likely no longer a player in your industry.

The name of the game is managing your services…

single point of contact = spoc

From time to time I check out hosting and virtualization providers on the nets. I stumbled across NCC Data, a Dallas managed service provider, who offers a product that essentially addresses my rant above. The key word is, undoubtedly, manage.

Once you hit a certain level of critical mass, you must make the decision weather to support your goods in house (custom code, legacy systems, chopped and screwed…) or take on somebody to hammer out your details. NCC can handle your virtualization, support, security, and the whole other range of hosting headaches. Hit the link to take a look.

Well, fortunately for us, our issue was an easy fix. As the technician did the normal technician thing, whereas he checks line levels at the modem and works backwards to the stub in, he (we) found a splice into the neighbor’s place. Must have been an inside deal at some point…an inside deal that would have gone unnoticed a few years ago. Once I moved in and started cranking high speed internet and two digital cable connections on the coaxial, it became a sore thumb.

The question of the day is this…what do you do in a place without the physical connections that we have? Are you just s.o.l. and stuck buffering?

Nope.

bingo

Whereas dial-up connections were the status quo, the future is now here, my friends. Satellite Internet is your answer.

It is pretty amazing if you stop to think about it…jumping up to broadband speeds from dial-up, using technology that is superseding that of the cellular industry. Leaps and bounds, when comparing geosynchronous orbit to the height of a cell tower. Think about that.

Anyhow, hit that link above to see how a good provider does it. Or buffer…your choice.

whoosh

Hit the link for yet another awesome video:

Still really enjoying this leaf blower…

That said, I am having a tough time making a decision. Two years and three hundred dollars sits in the back of my mind.

Too bad I’m not considering instead a purchase of eyeglasses. That decision is a no-brainer…Zenni Optical is my place on that front, no question.

Check out these marvelous holiday-themed beauties…

(this really cracks me up for some reason)

I like the frames, and love the price:

wild

Here in the States, Zenni ships for free on orders over fifty dollars. You could pick up twelve pairs of glasses for the amount of money I am going to drop on my phone. Seriously…a dozen pairs. That is pretty crazy.

At that cost, you may as well splurge on some holiday frames. They sure make that robot guy look dapper ^^^

Flash back to present. A time less simple. With Katie’s iPhone 4S in the mail, it is nearing my turn to make a decision regarding my new device. The best phone on the market, in my book, is the Droid Razr. The kicker is the soon to be released Droid 4…

...hmm

This thing has the same stuff under the hood as the Razr, very, very similar to the duality between the Droid 2 and X. Trading .3 inches and AMOLED for a smaller qHD screen…sort of a tough call.

But…the good news is that I have a few months left before I need to make the decision. My Christmas wishlist instead is one involving Unusual Gifts this year. I am a sucker for strange electronic devices…that should be apparent from the remote controlled clock. I’m hoping to pick up some hackable gizmos that I can chop apart, and leave the phone decision for another day.

My workaround didn’t pan out…time to rethink the build. Guess what I have on my desk:

yoink

Adafruit Motor Shield for the Arduino. Two good looking H-Bridges staring at me….that’ll do. I never thought I would find myself treating my Arduino gear as a scrapheap, but the day has come.

The H-Bridge will allow me to cross over (think of a capitol H) and provide bi-directional motion from the hardware level. 3.3V digital outputs…no more open drain needed (bonus.)

h bridge pins

Anyhow, I ended up putting together a little test board…socket, some male pins, and eventually some wires for a more secure connection. Sucking some serious soldering fumes…

custom mod

It looks sloppy, but here is the hardware in its entirety:

+1 great holder

Here is a quick video of my testing. I fired up my IOIOSeek program, which has two simple digital outputs triggered via buttons…

Early success? Yep. Except for the early part…this has been more work than I had assumed. More EE work…hoping the UI and hardware containment goes smoothly. Tune back in.

So, I guess I am winning that game…my work setup is equally that:

trips

I need to step it up and go for quad monitors. Quads would be great…I get sort of jealous when I see something like this when I am daydreaming of the perfect work setup:

fancy trips

Imagine something like that, with three of my 24″s from work sitting perfectly on my desk. Symmetrical, clean, and awesome. I found myself on Mulitiplex’s site looking at some of their setups…I am completely in awe of this guy:

+4

And hence the title of the post…I have an itch to put together a quad monitor setup. Big time. I am up in the air as to whether a single monitor on top of the triple monitor setup would be better than the giant quadrilateral, but either one would be amazing.

Maybe I can get this up and going…