Watch The Bridge Being Built
I was fooling around and went to a web site I had bookmarked and mentioned here before. This Caltrans site lists all the web cams they have on our roads. Kind of fun seeing what's going on around the county in this rain.
I'd never noticed before that they had this camera covering the Confusion Hill bypass so we can watch the progress of construction. I either missed it or they added it since I last visited. Fun stuff.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 1:37 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Fred it's a new feature. My buddy Seth Johanessen put the high-speed internet in for them, so they can keep an eye on everything anywhere in the world, and Caltrans can tie all of their computers together.
Seth owns 101 netlink, and he has connected people all over the north coast with wireless high speed internet. He was up and running while the rest of you poor saps were down when the fiber got cut. Kristabel and I were still blogging while you guys were going stir crazy. That gave Seth some serious credibility on the north coast as the alternative system. Nice system isn’t it?
Thanks for the heads up. Confusion Hill is an interesting project.
Ernie wrote, "He was up and running while the rest of you poor saps were down when the fiber got cut.".
Yes, I've heard of him. Hey, you might want to run a suggestion by him I made earlier on the Talking Tech blog when his operation was highlighted there.
It was pointed out all his users were online while everyone else was cut off. My suggestion was that 101 Netlink start some kind of emergency type account. He might make all kinds of money with it and not have to do much of anything.
The idea would be to let people have access to the netlink service for emergencies. For example, charge a dollar or two a month to open an emergency account. This would allow you to connect with Netlink if our main fiberoptic breaks again. You could have maybe 24 to 48 hours continuous usage during the outage for your one or two bucks a month but you wouldn't be able to just use it all the time.
Or, maybe just one lump payment for an annual account. Maybe $12 a year gives you a certain number of hours you could use in an outage. The idea would be that he'd already have all your account info and you could just log in quickly during an emergency. If you go over your alloted hours, you get billed for the extra time.
I would think he could make some easy money, except for the bookkeeping aspect of it. Think if you could get ten or twenty thousand people to commit to one or two bucks a month. Be sweet, except when an emergency occurs and they all try to connect at once.
Oh, I might add, in case anyone thinks I'm way off base with my "emergency account" idea, such things exist:
I have my cell phone account with U.S. Cellular. I used to have one that cost like $40.00 a month years ago, when cell phones were a fairly new thing, but I found it just wasn't worth it as I don't use it much, if at all.
I went to cancel my account and explained to the gal on the other end of the phone that I liked having the phone for emergencies but didn't use it much and didn't want to pay so much every month.
She suggested I sign up for their "Security Plan". I'd get 10 free minutes a month for around $10.00. That's what I ended up getting and still have to this day. Sure, most of the time I pay the $10.00 (actually more like $13.00 after all the taxes and fees) and don't use the phone at all. Still, I have it when I need it and have used it for emergencies.
I don't think I'd even pay $5.00 a month for an emergency internet account, but maybe one or two bucks a month in one lump sum of $12 to $24 a year might be worth thinking about.
Fred
Seth and his helper are hooking up people as fast as they can. They have some BIG accounts, that I‘m not a liberty to divulge. But it takes some pretty expensive equipment to hook up to the wire less. Similar to what you need in a cell phone. So, I don’t know how the standby thing would work.
They are five times faster than the cable modem system in town, and they are way cheaper. But with all of the up-front equipment costs it requires a commitment.
Awesome bridge!
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