Well, guess what? I have yet another, new employer.

Soon after I started at Aquacue, the company was bought by 100+ y/o Badger Meter Inc of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’ll be doing the same thing that I did for Aquacue, just under a different company name. This week I had the distinct pleasure to meet Richard Meeusen, Badger Meter’s CEO. He explained his philosophy and vision for the future. He also shared the following video with us, where he explains how a water meter is made:

Yesterday and this morning I installed a new package on the router which implements a transparent proxy to scan downloaded files for viruses.

Remember this is sitting on the router, which means that every single device in my home is automatically protected. Each and every request is now scanned using the Clam Antivirus scanner, no matter whether those requests come from Macs, PCs or handheld devices. The package is configured to download new virus/malware signatures every few hours. That, combined with AV software on individual machines leaves a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Original at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHp5cVQ5yw

In late 1993 I received a call from a German headhunter. She told me that there was an interesting position at the European headquarters of an American company. She could not provide a lot of details and suggested that I should just for an interview. At that time I still worked for Siemens in Munich through another consulting company. Things were slowing down there and rumor had it that Siemens wanted to cut down on all those “expensive” consultants. The time was right to make a move and I decided to go for an interview at the German subsidiary of Adobe Systems Inc.

I remember the interview vividly: then head of European operations, Micha Moses, interviewed me to the point where I was convinced that I did not stand a chance for the job. I recall getting out of the room half an hour later and telling myself: “What the f*ck was that?”

Needless to say I was even more surprised when the headhunter called me again and told me that I was invited for a 2nd round of interviews in Amsterdam, because I made a good impression during the first interview. I knocked out quite a number of other candidates and got the job. Early 1994 I took a one-way trip from Munich to Amsterdam.

For the next 3 years I would live in an amazing apartment on Brouwsers Gracht in Amsterdam (if it wasn’t for the stairs) and work at Adobe’s headquarters south of town. The years were filled with Postscript training classes, helping European printer manufacturers to implement Postscript on their devices and working on the Postscript codebase in general. I don’t know how much I traveled, but it was a lot. Almost every week I was on the road to one or another European city. I most cherish the time I spent in Barcelona working with Hewlett-Packard. I helped them with their Postscript implementations while they helped me to understand Barcelona’s night life (remind me about the time I met some of the HP workers for dinner at midnight).

In 1997 I arrived at a point where I could not see myself advancing in the flat organization of Adobe Europe. I told my manager that I needed something “more” and that Adobe Europe could not provide it. He agreed and allowed me to start looking for a new job. It took a few hours before I received a call from Adobe’s HQ and was asked whether I would be willing to relocate to the US and work for the company there. I thought about the offer for a while (well, hours) and accepted it.

Early 1997 I took another one-way trip, this time from Amsterdam to San Jose. I still remember Amsterdam disappearing below the clouds as we departed from Schiphol Airport, sipping a glass of Champagne (thank you, Royal Wings, for the complimentary First Class upgrade).

For another 4 years I would work on Postscript and create Adobe’s first pay-for online service (https://www.acrobat.com/createpdf/en/home.html). In 2001 I had enough of the Bay Area and decided that I needed a more quiet, open environment. I told my manager that I would move to Santa Fe, NM no matter what. Adobe was willing to give tele-commuting a trial and I was allowed to work from my home here.

Things seemed to work out and I was granted permission to work permanently from my home(s) in the desert. For 10 years I worked in a number of different roles on Adobe’s online offerings. All I needed was a fast, reliable Internet connection to do my work (“reliable” is still hard to come by, even in 2013, as far as NM is concerned).

Over the past few years I came to the conclusion that my time at Adobe was coming to an end. I was doing the same stuff over and over again under different code-names. I started to get bored and I did not see a way out of it. I was in long-term relationship that gave me everything I needed, but I did not feel satisfied.

Luckily I had kept in touch with ex-colleagues and one of them offered me a position at a start-up company in Los Gatos.

In September 2012 I told my manager at Adobe that I would leave the company at the end of the year. I always hated it when others left from one week to the next and I thought it was fitting to give my employer enough notice about my departure. That allowed me to clean up behind me (well, almost) and transfer knowledge where necessary. 12/31/2012 marked my last day.

Adobe was good to me, very good in fact. I learned a lot there and met some incredible people. If you ever get a job offer from them, please accept it – you won’t regret it.

Now I’m working with just a handful of people passionate about water conservation and I feel I can make a real difference in areas that matter in this world …

That’s a 33% increase year over year. I called up MetLife and asked them what the reason for the increase was. I was told that 1) 6-7% account for inflation and 2) insurance premiums in New Mexico were “adjusted”. Funny that they are always “adjusted” upwards and never downwards.

Weeks ago the 3 terabytes in one of my servers were 90% consumed. Yes, there is lots of junk on it, but also a lot of data that I want to keep. The server is accessible from all devices in the home network and I make good use of it. I always eyed a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device as a remedy to my storage requirements. With the new job (more on that in another post) I also get to juggle with more data than ever before. Just to give you an idea: the main database I’m dealing with on a daily basis is around 9GB and I have multiple versions of it around.

My employer agreed to purchase a Drobo 5N NAS for me. All I needed to do was to fill it with disks. I purchased 4 3TB Seagate disks (Barracuda ST3000DM001 to be precise) and stuffed them into the unit. Because of the way that the Drobo handles disks and disk space, I ended up with a bit over 8TB as usable space. After some spring cleaning I also shrunk the data from the server down to a more manageable 1.5TB.

So far the NAS has been working flawlessly and I get close to the maximum transfer speed I can get on a Gigabit network.

My main router in the garage has two network interfaces. One of them receives the Cybermesa connection and the 2nd interface is serving the home network. This router is also running pfSense.

Up until this morning the CNSP connection ended up serving a wireless access point, which I could reach from the house.

At any time you could either be connected to Cybermesa or CNSP, but not both of them at the same time.

The router happens to have a wireless card built-in. This card is usually used to create an access point directly on the router. I never used it, because I already had a different wireless network setup. However that card can also be run in “Infrastructure” (BSS) mode, which allows pfSense to use a wireless signal just like another cable, DSL, etc. connection.

That coupled with pfSense’s “gateway grouping” allows me now to connect to both ISPs at the same time from the same router. The result is a load-balanced dual connection with fail-over capabilities or in other words: when one connection is busy, the other one is used. If one connection goes down, then all traffic is automatically routed over the other connection.

And the most beautiful thing is that it happens for all devices in my home without any further modifications.

Yep – I’m a geek sometimes …

Those cameras offer actually quite a nice set of additional features. Two of them being: motion and sound detection. You can setup the cameras to automatically send emails (with camera snapshots attached) whenever the cameras “hear” or “see” something. That’s great, because then they can act like a security system as well.

Only problem is that you need to remember to turn on motion/sound detection when you leave the house and also remember to turn it off when you return to the house. Ok, so make it a habit to change the setup of the cameras upon departure/arrival. Here’s the next problem: it takes too long. If you logon to each individual camera and change the alarm settings, it takes entering username/password and several clicks to arm/disarm. Way too much work:

I looked at several Android Apps (tinyCam Monitor among them), but they also don’t seem to make “arm/disarm cameras” a single-click option.

I ended up reverse-engineering the Foscam camera protocol and created two simple scripts, which would automatically arm/disarm the cameras. Part 1 was done.

Next I needed a solution that would execute those scripts automatically. For that I installed the (excellent) AutomateIt app on my Samsung Galaxy SIII. AutomateIt allows you to have your device automatically execute certain actions when a specific event is detected. Most often this is used to lower the volume when earplugs are connected, switch off the ringer during the night, etc.

However it also has a “proximity” event. This event is fired when you get close to a location or leave an area. I defined my home as the proximity location, created one action that is executed when I leave my home and another one that is executed when I get close to my home:

Now all I have to remember is to bring my mobile phone whenever I leave the house. And that’s something my 45+ y/o brain can handle.

Imagine how surprised I was, when this was the first e-mail message I found in my Inbox:

For a moment I really wondered whether I was still dreaming …

I let Janet know that I won’t be attending class anytime soon