My associate who referred this customer to me, when asked, tells me the customer is “no bullshit” and to “take him seriously” and has cited some of my customers prior jobs which are extremely impressive.

So anyway, over the last 2 months the customer has been talking about a business he is intending to establish in Los Angeles. He requires the assistance of someone like myself, who in his own words “is fluent with technology to the point new unknown challenges are of little issue”. Quite a compliment on my skills – essentially he’s intending for me to operate an IT department. He would like me to come to Los Angeles for 3 to 6 months to assist building his technology driven business. He has stated the offer isn’t rolling yet, as they’re seeking financing as it is a large scale operation. He has hinted at the financing they’re receiving, although very unspecific, it is a figure in the tens of millions to start-up.

I met with the customer earlier this week and he told me his business partner is in Los Angeles right now and only last night was approved financing. They are now in panic mode and are drafting up plans for everything. The customer will come to me in the coming weeks with an offer.

So tonight I did a bit of research into my actual expenses and determining what I think is fair. I worked out that intending to live in Los Angeles very close to my work will cost a minimum of $50,000 USD with expenses like accommodation, travel, a car, my necessary tools (computers), etc.. I also have to consider the job is intending to place me under much stress and pressure so I should be well compensated – and during the trip I would intend to travel to New York, Canada, and Mexico. Also, I’m being asked to close up a business in Australia for an extended period of time that’s taken me over a decade to establish. But maybe I can keep my Australian business rolling. If I can convince my partners brother to cut his very long hair, it may work out that I can employ him to conduct my Australian operations while I’m away and rely on Skype to supervise and train him from LA.

It seems very fair to ask for amounts upwards of quarter of a million dollars for the totality of this job.

The job is also a film or motion picture orientated business. My customer appears to be well connected to well known Hollywood based talents. The phrase “going Hollywood” pops to mind since if this job pans out, that’s what I will be doing.

I’m also fascinated by the idea that LA has extremely low cost fibre optic Internet, and its very likely my office in downtown LA would be sitting on a GigE connection with the intent of streaming real-time high definition video and providing free Internet access to customers of the business. I’ll ultimately be responsible for a couple racks of equipment, which likely will be in my office.

My partner is really thrilled by the idea that if it pans out, we’ll be jumping off the plane and unloading $50k almost immediately. The job is also interesting because my partner is prepared to give up her newly acquired job (only today in-fact) if this pans out. I can keep her occupied obviously by having her work directly for me. Alternatively, my customers business model to me obviously requires someone with her qualified skills – so either way she can come and shop and will also have a job to keep her occupied while I am. I’ll also end up proposing to my partner overseas somewhere really special.

I would also like to have my parents come visit and my partners brother, both of which I’d have to finance. My partners parents I’d like to visit too but they could likely finance their own trip. With all of them I’d intend for them to stay at our home in LA. I would use Skype to stay in touch with them too – the office should be able to saturate any Australian broadband connection with high definition video of us.

I would intend on returning to Australia, maybe, depending on how financially rewarded I can remain in LA. Ultimately I’d want to be very financially rewarded to remain in LA because I’d be distanced from my family, and have fears of differences in politics like no free healthcare in the US while we have Medicare in Australia. If I stay in LA or if I returned to Australia, either way I’d want to invest a large chunk of any income from this job into my business – I figure if my business can generate that kind of income, its clearly deserving of further investment, and takes priority number one for how to spend that money. If rolling a few tens of thousands can give this kind of reward – what can I achieve from investing $100,000? What kind of job offers will I get in another 10 years time? This kind of investment though – I’d want to do very very carefully, but at the same time, I’d have to make sure I’m not too careful and don’t retain it too long where its ultimately wasted over a long period on useless purposes.

However you have to take everything with a grain of salt. I’m not expecting this job to pan out, but yes I am really excited about it. To me it seems like an achievement that someone who does not bullshit and is the real deal is offering me such a job. If only it could be put on my business portfolio – but right now I don’t think it can since the entire project is top secret (oops, did I blog a little?).

Unfortunately when digital TV came out, only the lounge room had reasonable DTV reception – the bedroom dropped in and out quite a lot. Also I’m not sure the antenna should be wired like that – since the lounge room has a power injector for the masthead amplifier, and effectively my bedroom outlet receives the power injection.

There are positives of our setup however… the position of the antenna is above tree level and is mounted well enough to stand over 100KG loads – so the wind should never blow down the mast, but rather, things would fall off the antenna mast. Also I discovered that the existing masthead amplifier is digital capable and seems to be a current product.

Recently we got yet another TV and wanted a third outlet which is very close to the antenna.

To fix these issues and connect a third outlet, I got a Kingray SAM224 (PDF manual) on Fleabay and installed it on the antenna masthead.

I used a short length of coax to connect the input terminal on the SAM224 to the output terminal on the MHW34G. I then connected the original wiring to the SAM224’s 1’st output terminal.

Enabling the third outlet with the existing wiring was extremely easy since the outlet and cable had already been installed leading to the antenna – it just had to be wired to something. So I wired it to the SAM224’s 2nd output terminal.

I then turned on some TVs after turning on the power injector, and noticed on the SAM224 the power LED had illuminated. There was no signal. So I enabled the ‘power link’ feature on the SAM224 by shorting the appropriate pins with the supplied jumper and immediately a signal popped up.

After some experimentation I found that the best method was to continue using the power injector on the lounge room outlet for now. The new outlet works great, its actually the best outlet in the house since its only 5m by cable from the antenna.

I also discovered that the best configuration of the 3 gain dials available across both masthead antennas, was to have the SAM224 set to maximum gain and then use a very small gain on the MHW34G’s VHF dial and a slightly stronger gain on its UHF dial.

Ultimately I’m going to re-cable the bedroom so there is a cable running directly to the antenna. I tried disconnecting the bedroom TV’s antenna and noticed that on the lounge room and the new outlet, signal strength & quality jumps noticeably. I’m happy with the new SAM224 since there is room for this improvement, and its installation has slightly improved reception compared to what we previously got.

If I didn’t live in a fringe or regional area, I probably wouldn’t have these issues, but its just something we have to deal with living in peace and quiet.

Since I last used the XBox Microsoft have made a big push for IPTV, and have even signed Foxtel as a content provider. For $34.90 per month I signed up to the Foxtel on XBox service with the basic channel package + entertainment package which gives me 28 live content channels all up and stacks of on-demand content.

I thought I’d try this out for a month at least. The monthly cost is a little lower than a satellite TV install, and every quote I’ve had for a satellite TV install has been several hundred at the very least considering the TV sits a good 30m of cable length from the roof.

I also can’t actually get Foxtel in this area. When I signed up on the XBox I had to use my step-fathers business address which is in a Foxtel area, otherwise I’d be serviced by Austar.

TV over IP does actually work quite well though. Exetel provide me an excellent service through a Telstra ADSL2+ line which syncs around 8500/900. While watching Foxtel more than 75% of the bandwidth is still available for use. The on demand content hints at the actual bitrates, with hour long shows being only 700MB or so. Lately the 200GB of quota Exetel give me has been largely wasted, so Foxtel will make some kind of dent in the quota.

The quality of the video surprised me. While it isn’t the same as Foxtel HD because its only 720p, there doesn’t seem to be much loss compared to an MPEG2 Digital TV stream – if you can notice any loss at all.

The only downsides I can see, which I can probably solve, is Internet use can impact Foxtel viewing.

Another thing that Foxtel never mentioned – using their service requires you to have Gold Membership with XBox Live. However you can always create a new profile for the free 1 month membership.

It would be much nicer though if Foxtel developed a similar Android app to enable the same functionality on any Android mobile phone or media player like the Noontec A9. For a start, comparing the Noontec A9 to my XBox – the Noontec has no fans.

Out of the box the Noontec doesn’t have a lot. It has a tiny 11 button remote and a power supply.

The Noontec A9 is really easy to plug in and get up and running, especially with a HDMI connection (obviously you’ll need to buy the HDMI cable as extra). Simply plug in an Ethernet cable (optional, WiFi could also be used), your TV, the power supply, and you’re up and running.

At very first you need to confirm your Internet is connected. If you didn’t connect an Ethernet cable you should set up WiFi under Settings. Load up the Browser on the home screen to ensure your Internet is up.

A USB keyboard and mouse goes really well with the A9. I plugged in some generic PC versions and they work great. However on Android there are some minor differences to the keymap that you’ll need to know. The very first one is right click won’t bring up a menu, it has the same action as the “Back” button.

USB Keyboard Keymap

Another thing I needed to do before I did anything at all… Out of the box the default firmware wasn’t so crash hot, and at the time of writing v1.1.06 OC03 11-11-29 is the latest firmware available from the Noontec download page. Installing the firmware is fairly easy but you’ll need an SD memory card. I tried using a USB flash drive but it would not install correctly. As Noontec instruct, you simply download their ZIP file and extract the recovery.img file to the root folder of your SD card. Then when inserted into your A9 which is already powered on, it pops up with a dialog to install the new firmware.

With the pre-installed firmware I couldn’t install ES File Explorer, the Android Market said it wasn’t compatible with my device. After performing the firmware update I could. This app is really useful to install as it allows you to play videos from Samba/CIFS/Windows File shares. So for a downloader like me, I just setup ES File Explorer to read some shares on my PC and I download videos on my PC and when they’re available I can play it on the TV with the Noontec remote.

One slight disadvantage for video playback with the A9 is there is no information on rooting, or installing the SuperUser application and the /system/xbin/su binary it requires. This means you cannot use CifsManager which would be the desired operation for playing media from Samba shares – since it would allow any application to play the media, and not limit you to media players that support Samba shares. It’d also allow you to run ClockSync which seems wise considering that “Automatic Network Time” is a feature of GSM networks that the A9 cannot support since it has no support for GSM networks or any mobile phone networks at all.

YouTube and any website which uses Adobe Flash Video (FLV) also works very well on the A9. YouTube obviously works best with the app pre-installed with Android, while some FLV streaming sites for pirated content don’t work so great as the overload of Flash based advertising can overload the browser making it quite slow. ABC iView doesn’t work so great since the screen layout of the A9 increases the size of the page, and essentially blows it up so its too big to be useable. I’d love it if either ABC or Noontec did something to fix this.

For an overall rating on the device, with ES File Explorer it does do the tasks I purchased it for – play video from the downloads folder on my PC and from websites which use Adobe Flash. The interface is a little clunky on the A9 and could be improved, however it is useable & functional. Compared to Apple TV, the A9 is cheaper and doesn’t have limitations of iTunes software or DRM. Given the clunky UI and the comparison to Apple TV, the price is probably very reasonable.

Christmas day was actually quite frustrating though, as I made a mess of my bedroom and frustrated as to why the TV antenna wasn’t working. Sorted all that out though.

I’m still yet to program up the Logitech Harmony 600 remote I have for the new gear so that remote is essentially useless for now. The Noontec didn’t come with any remote at all, except a tiny thing thats very useless with web browsing. Noontec apparently have a remote sold as an optional extra that has a touchpad. So I’m wondering if having the Harmony is even a good idea.

Another issue is that Android out of the box won’t mount SMB shares, which would be a very handy way to play videos on the A9 off my PC. If I root the A9 I can mount SMB shares, but there doesn’t seem to be any documentation about this. So thats something I’ll also have to look at. For now I can play videos I download on a USB flash drive, and I can still hit YouTube.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find the Vivo TV has USB recording built in. While it doesn’t really have timeshifting capability, recording is still very nice to have since Dick Smith never let on it had this feature and instead tried to upsell to different more expensive models. I’ve now plugged in a USB extension cable into the USB port to make it more accessible (its on the rear of the TV?), and I can see that some regular programs like Deal or No Deal will get recorded daily just in case we miss it.

This year my partner got me not only a 32” LCD TV, but her and her parents got me a Noontec A9 Smart TV Box. Knowing I have a wholesale account with their Australian distributor, they submitted the order to me today – ha! I’ll also be fixing up the TV antenna over the Christmas break so it better supports digital TV. Quite a dramatic improvement to my current CRT style TV with a very noisy PC attached via S-Video. The new system should be better for playing Internet or computer based video with the fan-less remote controlled operation. Only today did I realise the A9 ships with a wireless keyboard and mouse, WiFi capability in the box. I’m uncertain though about the camera and if thats in the box or an accessory. I just hope my partner enjoys the presents I have for her as much as I will enjoy hers.

Further to that my partner has also let me borrow her 22” widescreen LCD for my PC. So now I have dual screen with the 17” 4:3 LCD I already have, something I lost when a 17” 4:3 LCD blew its backlight and the replacement part was worth more than a screen replacement.

My parents also wanted a new TV for their bedroom. I ultimately ended up selecting a TV not once but 4 times as an exercise to decide which was the right product – and it seemed I came up with the same TV 3 times. My parents ended up getting the same TV as my partner got me which was ironic considering my last TV they had an identical unit as they purchased the same TV at the same time.

My partner and I also spoilt my partners brother too… got him a new couch. We managed to find a place that was clearing damaged goods at below cost prices as a tax dodge for another business. The couch we picked up was worth $800 but with some acceptable damage they only wanted $225?

My partner has already gotten the Vivo 32” LCD TV I blogged about

Of course the sales rep did the usual upselling sales babble that instilled some doubt in my partners mind. A quick call from her to clarify what the sales rep was talking about set her mind at ease and she began to ignore his advice. He was trying to sell a similar TV that costs $300 more simply because it has a couple stars better energy rating. Or, he also tried to upsell some small amount to Sony TV that wasn’t full high definition.

Since I blogged about it, the price went up slightly to $328 at Dick Smith

However buying it in store got a bonus DVD player and indoor antenna & cable. Unfortunately I already have a DVD player and an indoor antenna won’t work in this area.

One relative doesn’t have a DVD player. Another relative has a TV on their back deck with a damaged antenna. They also happen to be in an area where an indoor antenna would work great.

The free 2GB package is well used. You can get 250MB of extra space for every person you refer, up to 8GB. In other words, you can have up to 10GB of space for free through referrals.

And it also happens that Google Adwords are giving away $75 free advertising coupons like they’re candy.

Combine the two, and you can run an Adwords campaign for Dropbox using your referral link for free. As people sign up, you get bonus space.

I just did it myself, and for about 2 days nothing happened. Then tonight all of a sudden 10 referrals have rolled in as Google have activated my ad campaign. I guess I’m staying up until I get up to my 8GB which should be very soon.

The following video is a good guide on how to do this yourself:

So in order to make the most of this I thought I’d do what nobody with access to these eBooks has done, and sell them online.

I used Zen Cart for this project.

Out of the box Zen Cart has PayPal Express Checkout and support for downloadable products. I then found a template, modified it a bit with my own logo etc., modified a few pages in Zen so they had all the appropriate information, and now finally I’m working on submitting all these eBooks as products. It would also be nice to get some XML sitemaps up so Google can crawl the site a bit better, and SEO friendly URLs.

I really like this running an eBook store idea because it means that every purchase is pure profits. The actual expenses of hosting the website are already there as I pay hosting for other websites and the same infrastructure can run this new project – so the only real costs is the domain name which will easily be paid for by the very first sale.

Expanding the business seems easy too. I have a couple of thoughts on where to obtain some rare books where I have rights to redistribute them in eBook form – and buying these rights will only cost me around the same amount I’d charge to sell the eBook format anyway.

So essentially there are no costs to operating this business, and the business should always cover its own expenses for expansion.

Also because I haven’t actually operated an eCommerce site, this project serves as a good test case for eCommerce sites, as its needs are essentially all included in the Zen Cart package.

Today I blogged about Cheap TVs for Christmas. I later realized the models I mentioned are not full HDTV or 1080i compliant, just the tuner is, and the image on the screen is downscaled.

I’d rather true HDTV.

So Dick Smith have the Vivo 32” A32L07T at $298. I’ll have to check one of these out in store and see what the picture quality is like, but it’ll probably be the screen I get for Christmas.

My beautiful fiancé will be getting it for me. Yay!

Considering a set top box with record capabilities is only $40 on FleaBay, record capability built-in to the TV isn’t all that important. Recording through a set top box would be better anyway, as you could watch another channel at the same time.