The one area that didn’t work well was transferring large files from and to our Network Attaches Storage (a 1 TB Buffalo LS-WTGL, predecessor to this model). Transfer speed from my MacBook Pro maxed out around 20 Mb/s. In other words filling the 1TB drive would take about 4.5 days. That’s a bit slow. How to fix it after the break.

The question was why it was slow? A list of possible bottlenecks include:

1. The CPU of the Buffalo NAS Appliance. It’s fairly low end and not designed for  speed.
2. Latency and loss from the Ethernet over Power
3. The Linksys router
4. Running over 100 Mb/s vs. 1Gb/s (which both MacBook and NAS Appliance support)
5. The lack of Jumbo Frames on the MacBook Pro (which is just weak, Apple could have spend the extra 50 cents for a better part)
6. Mac OS X, although that seems unlikely

It turns out it was probably a combination of (2) and (4). A quick trip to Fry’s to purchase a tiny Netgear GS105E (hardly big enough to fit 5 ethernet ports) and goodput jumped to about 110 Mb/s. An NTop trace is above, before 12:00 noon I was using the old setup, afterwards the GS105E. At over 100 Mb/s I am pretty sure I the CPU of the NAS Appliance is now the bottleneck. In practice 100 Mb/s seems sufficient for anything I am doing right now, even editing large RAW images or video stored on the NAS in Lightroom.

Lesson learned, if you want fast NAS at home, investing the $50 for a 1Gb switch and two CAT6 cables is worth it.

On a side note, the GS105E is pretty amazing. Something barely the size of a beer coaster with VLAN support and QoS. Now if it only would run OpenFlow/Indigo (Hi Dan…)

For complete statistics visit his blog post here. Stanford is far from typical network. However it sometimes is a good leading indicator of things to come. That phones are becoming a major category on wireless networks (and eventually the majority) seems like a safe bet. How quickly it happened is amazing though. It has been 2.5 years since the iPhone was introduced).

The scammer who uses a variety of names including “Brian Clark”, “Brian Moore” and “Thomas Moore” basically promises employment for AskSunday LLC and as part of it tries to get complete bank account information from applicants. It them seems like he then he  transfers money into the account, ask the applicant to spend it on a project and then withdraws it. The result is the applicant being out of pocket.

More details below. I also highly recommend reading the many great comments below the original post. Please post any new comments there.

The scam seems to start with an email sent to people posting on job boards (e.g. monster). A sample email is posted below:

Having studied your resume/profile at Monster.COM we believe you obtain all skills required for a part time position available in our company. Let me briefly restate the main points that the following position does entail at Make Sunday LLC (licensed, bonded and insured lifestyle management agency specializing in the management of personal & business affairs and concierge services for VIPs, celebrities, athletes, entertainers and corporate executives). We provide customers with access to a team of personal assistants accessible by email, phone, and the web to handle both small daily tasks and handle complicated assignments. Feel free to study our corporate website http://www.MakeSunday.com for a better understanding of what this job is about.

P.A. Requirements
-Age 21-60 years (male/female)
-Very sharp and a quick learner. A go-getter and non quitter
-Ability to anticipate needs of client.
-Possess fluent knowledge of the city and geography of surrounding areas. Knowledge of the restaurants, amenities, clubs and tourism industries to provide to our guests.

This position is available national wide (90% home-based). Make Sunday is looking for talented, career-oriented assistants. You will be a key player in every stage of the process-from collecting information and making pre-arrangements to assisting with personal requests during customers stay.
The responsibilities of the position include
-Organizing and research (when no clients visiting your area)
-Planning (Events, Entertainment, Meetings, Social events)
-Make all pre-arrangements for our customers and provide assistance with any request during stay
-Errand Running
-Shopping and Acquisitions
-Household needs and family needs

Benefits
- $31,200.00 Annual Salary ($600.00 every week) + Bonuses
-Automatic pay increases at six-month intervals
-Five-day workweek, no Sundays required
-Medical, dental, disability, and life insurance with dependent option after 60 days
-Employee Purchase Plan
-401(k) with company match

This position is available immediately. Apply now for more details by replying to this email.
Sincerely, Brian Moore, Jr
HR manager
MakeSunday.com – A Personal Assistant Dedicated to You.

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, disclosure, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please promptly notify the sender by reply email and destroy the original message. This email transmission (and/or the attachments accompanying it) may contain legally privileged and confidential information, and is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above.
IMPORTANT: 1) It’s recommended to login into your email account and add info@MakeSunday.com to verified sender’s list. This is necessary to prevent delivering our messages into spam/bulk folder.
2) Make Sunday LLC will never share any of your private information to any 3rd parties.’

Some of the scam used the domain MakeSunday.com. The domain is now down, but Google Cache has a copy and it is a copy & paste from an old version of the legitimate AskSunday home page. A whois query for MakeSunday.com lists:

Domain name:             MAKESUNDAY.COM
Name Server:             ns3.nic.ru
Name Server:             ns4.nic.ru
Name Server:             ns8.nic.ru
Creation Date:           2009.11.10
Expiration Date:         2010.11.10

Status:                  NOT DELEGATED

Registrant ID:           WBIG6BZ-RU
Registrant Name:         Atashnaa Werner
Registrant Organization: Atashnaa Werner
Registrant Street1:      158 Pinon Way
Registrant City:         Nederland
Registrant State:        CO
Registrant Postal Code:  80466
Registrant Country:      US

Administrative, Technical Contact
Contact ID:              WBIG6BZ-RU
Contact Name:            Atashnaa Werner
Contact Organization:    Atashnaa Werner
Contact Street1:         158 Pinon Way
Contact City:            Nederland
Contact State:           CO
Contact Postal Code:     80466
Contact Country:         US
Contact Phone:           +1 4033432220
Contact E-mail:          michele.hiatt.hr@gmail.com

A Hungarian email address, russian DNS servers and an address that is that of an empty house for sale in Colorado (RE/MAX real-estate listing here). The scammer is not exactly trying to be subtle. The registration for Ask-Sunday.com has a similar set of fake entries.

Interestingly enough, the fake sites kept the phone and fax numbers of the real AskSunday company. People who called AskSunday mention that AskSunday seems to be aware of the scam and is warning people about it.

If you have anything else to add, please add to the comments below the original post.

Sunnyvale Police and Santa Clara County Deputies (about 15 of them) where out in force to manage the crowd that was well north of a thousand. From what I could tell,  people that came early (i.e. before 9am) and did get shots, even if they were not in a priority group.

For more, see the H1N1 Flu Clinic Photo Gallery.

There are a number of alternatives to email for collaboration and communication, but none of them quite work yet. IM is real-time (good) but functionality is very limited (it lacks open APIs, no forwarding or other routing, no rich media). The social networks have built-in messaging, but the user interface is terrible. Wiki’s and Google Docs are great for collaboration, but have no messaging component.

Given all this, it’s great to see that a team at Google is trying a different approach. Google Wave is essentially a closed messaging system that structures messages around threads (aka conversations). Messages are updated in real time (i.e. you see people type), thus it also has many of the qualities of IM but also of the collaborative qualities of Google Docs or a Wiki. Conversations can easily be embedded in web pages, although I did not try this out. Finally it uses a number of clever ways to mark up and display messages in a more structured way. Overall it is a good user experience, although it still feels a little alpha.

The first thing to notice is the lack of integration. While it copies a lot of the functionality of other services, it doesn’t allow you to leverage existing ones. How do I migrate my existing social network and contact data into Wave, how do I integrate devices that are not web based (e.g. mobile devices) and users that want to use existing clients? While Google Wave gives you an email address <name@googlewave.com> emails sent to it don’t show up in your inbox when I tried.

The second issue I see with Wave is the UI. Seeing people type in real time is great unless you want to get work done. I usually read about 200 emails in 75 threads and write somewhere around 50. The goal of a good UI is to hide things which are not currently relevant. Showing me someone is typing before he has finished his message is usually counterproductive. Google Wave also isn’t quite as responsive as GMail or let alone a local client. And speed really matters. At 200 emails a day, needing 3 seconds longer for each means an hour less productivity a week.

For me, the main conclusion is that Wave does not replace email. In fact, I think it doesn’t even try to. With some additional polish, Wave has the potential to be a powerful tool for groups to collaborate internally on projects and documents. Essentially a Google Docs with built in Workflow. But for external communication one would need a tool that offers better integration with other platforms and a UI that is written with the goal of getting things done.

Based on the back-of-the-envelope math in my previous post this rate of fundraising would mean venture captial would shrink to a little over 200 firms or a quarter of its current size. While possible, that seems pessimistic. From what I hear from people in the VC industry, there is at least some evidence that investors are still interested in VC as an asset class and investments will increase as the liquidity of long-term investors gets better. I think there is a chance that this is the low point of the fund raising activities for this downturn.

I had the privilege today to be on a great panel this evening organized by the Churchill Club on storing your data and personal experiences in the cloud. The discussion was kicked off by Gordon Bell (photo to the right) who recently published a book on the subject called “Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything“. The book is a great read and I can definitely recommend it. While I have been moving a lot of my data to the cloud, my efforts seem trivial compared to Gordon’s vision.The discussion on the panel was fun with Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, Suni Vermuri of reQall and terrific moderation from Barron’s Eric Savitz.

One of the more interesting discussions was around what companies will do well in this space. It was great to see how Evernote, reQall and Eye-Fi (all represented by the people on the panel) integrate their services. I think the fact that many data stores with relevant information have no APIs for integration is one of the main issues that this emerging sector is facing.

I am currently looking for a virtual assistant that can help me with simple everyday tasks such as scheduling meetings, dealing with call centers, organizing travel and simple research tasks. After hearing good things about AskSunday I decided to give it a try. Overall it was a disappointing experience. Ask Sunday feels very much in beta and the staff doesn’t seem to be up to the task. The basic test assignment (schedule a haircut) was not successfully completed after one week and 25+ emails. If anyone has a better experience with another service, please let me know.

Going into this experiment, my thinking had been that the two biggest challenges when working with a virtual assistant would be context and security. The problem with context is that an assistant knows very little about me, my job(s), where I live, how I organize my life etc. For the assistant to be successful I need to provide a lot of detail (e.g. it takes 30 minutes from Stanford to the place I get a haircut , leave that much buffer please) which reduces the time saving. The second problem is security. Assume I want to call my dental plan about a billing issue. At a minimum the assistant needs access to my health records, social security number, credit card information,  address and online credentials. The perfect Identity Theft Starter Kit. But it turned out with AskSunday I never got far enough to even get into these issues. Details below.

To set up AskSunday you basically provide account and payment info, and you are good to go. Unless you need to reset your password. I lost mine (password manager snafu),  went through a standard reset process, but never received the confirmation email. A quick check on my incoming MTA logs showed that the AskSunday  emails from 125.16.9.10 were rejected by the mail server as spam. Why is that?

root@server [/var/log]# host 125.16.9.10
Host 10.9.16.125.in-addr.arpa not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Their mail server has no reverse DNS entry. Ouch. Today this is makes it almost certain that the mails will get rejected. I twittered about it, and shortly after got a friendly mail from Peter, their VP Ops asking for details. He eventually tracked down the issue. Not bad, the AskSunday ops team is definitely on top of things.

With that out of the way I provided my Google Calendar credentials to their portal, and sent my first request:

Dear Ask Sunday Team,

could you schedule a haircut for me with [...] in Menlo Park as soon as possible. Please make sure I have time (in my Google Calendar, you have access to it) and allow 20 minutes time for travel between Stanford and [...]. Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions via email if you have any.

Guido

20 minutes later at 10:17, the reply from Vern (I assume not his real name, his accent sounded South Asian which is where I believe their call centers are) arrived:

Hi Guido,

Per your request, I called [...] and spoke with [...]. I was informed that she has made an haircut appointment for you today at 11:00am with [...].

I was unable to access your Google Calender, please provide us with your
login credentials.

Vern McDonald

I just did provide my login credentials, so something went wrong here. Also, scheduling without looking into my calendar is usually a bad idea as I tend to be mostly booked. Lastly, while I said as soon as possible, sending an email about a meeting in 43 minutes with 20 minutes travel time is cutting it a little close. In this case I had a conflict. I asked him to cancel the appointment and re-entered the credentials. Then it was time for attempt #2:

To: “Sunday Agent (Vern McDonald)” <request@asksunday.com>

I re-entered my Google Calendar credentials. Please have a go and see if looging into Google Calendar works now.

Shortly after that I receive a message from his supervisor:

Hi Guido,

My name is Michael and I am the supervisor for the said agent. There are
somethings which I would like to clarify about the autologin feature -

Generally what happens is, we use a script for autologin commands and
unfortunately, these scripts, at times, would be rejected by the website
(such as in this case) and so we have difficulty in accessing them.

[...]

So I would request you to please consider the stated fact and share your
information with us to help you better.

Ok, so their login script doesn’t work and they ask me to send them my Google Account credentials directly. This is a slight problem because a bunch of other services (Google Checkout, Google Voice etc., Analytics, Mail) are on the same account and I don’t want to give them access to it. But it is also the wrong model. Google Calendar has great sharing and delegation functionality, you don’t need to share credentials. While we are sorting this out, I get this:

I have again called [...]I spoke with Joanne and canceled the appointment which was scheduled at 11:00am today. I was also informed that they do have availability at 4:00pm and 4:30pm. Please advise.

He is still trying to schedule without being able to access my calendar. I politely ask him to hold off for now. In the mean time we found a solution to the credential issue. I create a new Google Calendar account, give them the credentials and give that account access to my calendar:

Michael,

given how many different services I access through my email account, I don’t feel comfortable sharing its credentials.

However I found a different way of accomplishing the same:
- I created a new account on Google that has access to my Google Calendar
- I am happy to share the credentials for this account

The account is [...]

IMPORTANT REQUEST: When adding an appointment, do *NOT* add it to the default calendar for “[...]“. Instead add it to the calendar “[...]“.

After one more iteration (which was my bad, I sent them a wrong password) and two more mails confirming that they should go ahead and try scheduling again, I get this update:

Per your request, I called 1[..] and spoke with representative. I was informed that your haircut appointment is confirmed for [...]

I logged into your Google calender account and added the appointment into
your Guido-Private calender

Looks good. Except that the time he picked conflicts with an appointment, and that the meeting was not added to Guido-Private but to the main calendar of the new account.  Still not making much progress, it is time to be a little more direct:

1. On October 8 my calendar Guido-Private there is a meeting called “Churchill Club Event” which collides with the time you picked for the haircut appointment. Please always look at my calendar to make sure the time slot you schedule for is available. [...].  If anything is unclear about this, please let me know.

2. The appointment was added to the default calendar of guido.assistant [...]

I’ll spare you the details, but we tried again and while we eventually got the calendar was right, all attempts ended in scheduling the hair cut for a time slots that was already taken. At this point I gave up and calceled my account. After 25+ emails over one week I still haven’t booked my appointment. While I am pretty confident that we would eventually get it right, it seems unlikely that in average using AskSunday would save time. Equally important, it raises doubts on how AskSunday would perform on more complex tasks. Google Calendar Sharing can be confusing, but compared to booking a multi-hop  international flight with an on-lap toddler, it is comparatively easy.

One other thing that I found strange were the assumed European names. I know this is a common practice in call centers. But an assistant (even a virtual one) is a trust relationship. Knowing he uses a fake name runs counter to the spirit of that.

Ask Sunday today is definitely not a service that is useful to me.  At this point the service feels “beta” with site functionality not working and at least in my case an agent that seemed under-prepared for their task. If anyone has a better experience with any other Virtual Assistant service please let me know. I am still hopeful for this category.

It turns out that virtual economies like WoW are still very inefficient. The arbitrage opportunities and price fluctuations in the in-game auction house are large, and creating crafted items from raw materials often yields margins of 30% and higher. My initial assumption had been that working capital would be the main limitation for how quickly I could grow, but that turned out to be wrong. Instead market size and “shelf space” day set the limits for growth. The server I play on has an “active” market of about 2k players during peak hours (source). Assuming the average player spends 100g per day, this means the total addressible market is only 200k gold. About half of this market consists of items that are found in-game and not produced. Of the other 100k I was able to capture about 10%-20% a day for revenue of 10k-20k and profits of about 2k-3k. The main reason for only capturing a small part of it is that I listed items on the market only once a day, and would often get undercut quickly. Thus often I was only the cheapest provider for a small part of the day.

The in-game time keeping suggests it took about 170 hours of play time to to the peak, or around 1000g/hour. The WoW gold exchange rate fluctuates, but a quick survey suggests an exchange rate of around 150g = $1. Thus my account is now worth in the order of $1500 (although it is non-trivial to liquidate that much gold) and I made $8.30 per hour. While that is more than the the California Minimum Wage of $8, for now I’ll stick to my day job.

My Home Workout Setup

One of the challenges of working a lot with computers is that you end up sitting in a chair for a large part of the day. Recently a number of people have started experimenting with setups where you don’t sit down such as using a computer while on a stationary bike, treadmill or standing. I tried the bike approach and having had the setup for a few months now, I really like the experience. I usually spend 2-4 hours online after coming home from work in the evening. Of that I spend about 10-12 hours per week on the bike wich adds up to somewhere around 3000-4000 calories per week. Not a huge amount, but I definitely feel a difference.

It’s not a replacement for running though. My heart rate while on the bike is usually just above 100, far below what it is even on a slow run. The bike setup is also not suitable for all tasks. For editing photos, making slides or complex writing it is back to the Aeron.

The parts for the setup are actually fairly cheap, although you need a 2nd monitor.  Exact setup after the break.

The recumbent bike itself is a Schwinn 226 (similar to the 230). It’s actually made by Nautilus, Schwinn just licenses their brand. It is a pretty good choice as it has a well positioned keyboard tray, and similar bikes (e.g. the 213 here) have been used by similar projects.

The display is a cheap 28” HP Monitor. I initially was using a 24” screen, but it doesn’t work well as the distance to the screen is larger than for a desk setup. I use a IOGear KVM to alternatively have my Mac (for work) or my PC (mostly for gaming) on the display and to switch keyboards between the two computers.

The hardest part was finding a decent shelf to place the screen on. I ended up using two Ikea shelves with a combination of short legs on one side (similar to these, the exact model doesn’t seem to be available online), and adjustable long Vika Byske legs on the other side. As it turns out I am not the first to have this idea, Ikeahacker has a post of a similar setup.