*During the first story, “Come On Eileen” is playing. I know the hurricane was named Irene, but it’s close enough.

Duration: 43:44

Show Notes
Hurricane Irene cuts Atlantic City, NJ Beach in half
“I HATE ICELAND!”
NASL Season 2 Breakdown
Day9′s got a cool story, bro

1. Bitcoin is growing!
2. The difficulty is increasing rapidly.
3. The power of the network is increasing.

Number one is self explanatory. More people are mining/buying/selling Bitcoins and more retailers are accepting them. Two and three are sort of two-in-one. More people are mining and existing miners are adding power to their rigs. This in turn increases the difficulty so mining blocks stays around the same (around 8.5 blocks/hour). This is expected, its built in to the system.

For my personal effort, I have good and bad news.

The Bad

Since the difficulty increased around the same time my new rig came online, my BTC/day stayed around 2.5. I was able to hit ~4 for a day before the difficulty went up. Another thing, heat. The heat my three machines produce turns out to be border line ridiculous. I actually had to move two miners to separate rooms. With temperatures in my area climbing to over 100ºF, I actually had my miners off for a few days.

The Good

I BROKE EVEN. Being a miner, this is the best feeling in the world. Everything from here on out is pure profit (aside from power, which is minimal considering a $14 Bitcoin).

As difficulty increases I will obviously make less money which is fine considering it is technically free. Given the rate the Bitcoin is increasing in value, this should be a while. I don’t think I will add any more power to my effort but it has been fun and profitable. Until then, keep up with all the latest news over at Bitcoin News.

Donate: 1AUBdscNuTXYLTC3fgXSP4krTPv6FW6Gxc

My Research

I downloaded the official Bitcoin client and simply pressed the “Generate Bitcoins” button. After a few days of my i7-2600k chugging away I had 0 bitcoins. I was bummed. I headed on over to the official forums where I realized the days of CPU and solo mining as they called it were long over. Due to the nature of the software it gets more difficult over time to solve a block. The reason is to regulate the release of coins into the economy. Now days you need to join a “pool” which works by pooling several individual’s efforts to mine for a block and your reward is a percentage of the total block value. I also figured out that my CPU was working at about 11 megahash per second, or 11 million operations per second. Sounds like a lot huh? No. Turns out GPUs, more importantly ATI GPUs are MUCH more effective for Bitcoin mining. My HD 5870 can mine at 380 mh/s which is actually getting somewhere.

My First Pool

My first pool was the MtRed pool. I joined and added about 380 mh/s of power to the pool of ~10 gigahash per second and eagerly awaited to get a reward. After only a few hours I had mined my first Bitcoin. 1.5 of them to be exact. 1.5883 to be even more exact. I continued mining here and averaged about 1 BTC per day for a week. Turns out this particular pool was unreliable and inconsistent. It turns out all pools are inconsistent. Some days I would go without mining a single BTC and others I would get 3. Tinkering around I joined a much larger pool called deepbit. The pool rate there is an astonishing 1000 gh/s. On average this pool mines a new block every 20 minutes. Yielding the same payout but more consistently.

Upping the Ante

I’m hooked. Last week I ordered a HD 5830 to add to my mining efforts which upped my mh/s by 250. Add that to another card I had lying around and I’m up to about 700 mh/s. At this rate I average 2.5 BTC per day.  That’s 70 BTC/mo or $450/mo. Not bad. On my high, I impulse bought two more 5830s just yesterday which will leave me mining at 1.2g/hs and generating about 4.5 BTC/day.

This Can’t Be.

I don’t believe it either. I mean what is the catch? Simply put the days of mining will eventually come to an end. The network will only give out 21 million bitcoins and they are becoming harder to get. Pair that with electricity costs and before long (depending on the exchange rate) it may become unprofitable to mine, but that doesn’t mean Bitcoins are just a fad. Eight decimal places are built into one BTC which yields room for deflation and other economic stuff I don’t understand enough to explain but you can read more about it at the official site or Bitcoin wiki. Fees on transactions (very minimal but they add up) also allow for more theoretical blocks to be mined.

To Sum It Up

DO IT. Read more about it and understand how it works. There are tons of retailers already accepting these things. MtGox, the leading exchange site, deals with a volume of 20,000 per day. If you have an ATI card (nVidia turns out to not be so cost-effective for mining), join a pool and put it to work. The power consumption is minimal compared to the current difficulty. For instance my 1.2g/hs will consume about $45 USD of power a month but since I should be making over $800 that is hardly a concern. I will update with my progress.

Donate: 1AUBdscNuTXYLTC3fgXSP4krTPv6FW6Gxc

PS. Podcast next week.

Duration: 58:19

Straight out of high school I enrolled in a near by technical college where I wasted about one year of my life. Let me explain. I was in a ‘computer repair degree’ program, basically two years to get the equivalent to an A+ but I didn’t know any better. About 8 months in, a computer repair shop contacted my instructor looking for someone to work part time. I applied and a few days later I was contacted by the shop for an interview. I was hired on the spot. A few months in I realized that this ‘degree’ I was working for is useless. Once the semester was over I didn’t go back and work at this shop started to pick up. I was soon hired full-time with benefits and started to work as a lead for some of our offsite contracts.My high life came to a stop abruptly when my company managed to lose EVERY contract it had within 2 months but that is another story. Two months later I landed a PHP/MySQL job in Atlanta, it was a temporary contract to help manage workload. I was making WAY more than my previous job. I was also working WAY more. 3-4 hour commute daily with 8-10 hour days. I was so miserable I quit after about 3 months. I had a feeling the contact was ending soon anyway and I just literally couldn’t take it anymore. But, to my avail, one of the contracts I used to manage needed a replacement and hired me just a week later. However, this was another temporary job and it ended 10 months later. Unemployed again. So after trying the whole freelance thing and attending a community college (again, another story) my funds started to dry up. So I figured I would start looking for a job again and about 3 months into my search I found an excellent job at a data center that I have been working at for a few weeks now and enjoying it.

So what does this have to do with getting you getting a job?

Well, through my ‘years’ I think I have found some key bits of information on obtaining a job in IT. You might be asking yourself,  ’How would he know how to land a job? He’s never had a steady job.’ Well my answer is, yes you are correct all the jobs I have held in the past were mostly contract or temporary but GETTING the job is different from KEEPING a job. My job terminations this far were beyond my means in every case so I don’t think my results are typical.

Don’t Suck

This may be the most obvious but I’ve had jobs where some of my coworkers just plain sucked and have been working the same job for years. Be good at what you want to do, in fact the Information Technology field is so competitive you have to be the best. Focus on the job you are applying for and intern to get the experience. Real life experience is what will get you the job. In ALL of my jobs I have been THE youngest employee. I was working with people who have been doing the same job for 10-15 even 20 years because they basically sucked. It also makes them bitter. So if you are young, expect a lot of flack but just outshine them.

Learn, a lot

As you probably know technology changes very frequently. Part of the reason some of the older people are suck is because they quit learning. I worked along side people who didn’t know the difference in different types of RAM,  interfaces, newer features, and loads of other stuff because their knowledge has aged and they didn’t keep it up to date. Read magazines, blogs, forums, never stop learning. Get certifications and keep them up to date. Learn everything you can about the field you want to work in. Unless, you WANT to be the old grumpy fart doing the same mid-level job for 40 years.

Branch Out

This kind of ties into the last point but this is some crucial information. If your goal is to be a desktop support technician, learn enough about networking so you can explain to your network engineer the problems or issues you encounter. This is one of the bigger things I find that people can’t do because they are either lazy or don’t know better and have to play catch up. Branch out, but don’t branch out too far.

Network

Network. Network more. Build up a huge contact list of people in your industry. This is ongoing and takes time so don’t feel like you have to have 100 contacts in a year. I might have 40-50 solid contacts of IT people in nearly every branch in the industry that I’ve been building for years. In between jobs (if you ever are) you can go through these contacts and put yourself out there and be hired in (hopefully) no time. Also, once you have a job you can earn yourself some serious brownie points if your current company is looking for a network consultant and you come up with one on the spot.

Don’t Give Up

My last point and conclusion is don’t give up. The job you don’t get is just more reason to better yourself and try even harder. I’ve left job interviews feeling very good but never hear anything back. The list of reasons are endless but getting better only helps.

Side Note – Dave’s mic occasionally sounds like it’s being drowned out by distortion. I wasn’t able to edit it well enough. You should still be able to hear what he’s saying when it happens.

Running Time: 27:07

Show Notes:
MPAA shuts down 50+ torrent sites
77 Torrent Sites Shut Down Back in November
Saving Your PS3 Games to “The Cloud”
The VW XL1
2011 Egyptian Protest Wiki Page
Spam Text Kills Would-be Suicide Bomber

Duration: 30:12

Show Notes:
The Music Bay
PS3/Modern Warfare 2 Hack
Modern Warfare 3
AngryBirds: The Animated Series
L.A. Noire Wiki Page
Creed Song Saves Norwegian Boy From Wolves
Felicia Day of THE GUILD Being Asked About Her “Carpet”

Some notable games on sale:
Super Meat Boy: $3.75
Portal: $3.74
Battlefield Bad Company 2: $6.79
Deus Ex Collection Pack: $2.99
Unreal Tournament Pack: $14.99
Valve Collection Pack: $49.99

Some packs may not look like the BEST deals out there, but if you look at the content, there’s no way you could pass them up. For instance, The Valve Pack includes every Valve game from Half Life to Counter Strike to Team Fortress 2.

There are also a bunch of Indie Game Packs on sale. Don’t over look these as there are a ton of great indie games out there.

There are tons of deals out there so make sure to look through all the pages and to check up EVERY DAY UNTIL JANUARY 2ND. The daily deals will continue to be updated as the days pass.

One thing that Google has done is made a web/java based App Inventor for Android devices. I think the current version only works with phones but with the recent release of Google TV (review coming soon) and the upcoming release of Chromium OS, you could only speculate that Google would adapt this software for these new products. I was invited as a beta tester a few months ago to use the App Inventor but I had no idea what I would use it for. I poked around and did the standard Hello World program but I didn’t touch it again until today. Today I was emailed by the Google team telling me that they had released the App Inventor for everyone and since I had kind of forgotten about it I decided to check it out. I knew just what I was going to make. My girlfriend has been taking American Sign Language classes for almost two years now and is very fluent so when I go with her to different deaf culture events I am completely lost. She tries to teach me but it doesn’t stick. So after about 30 minutes of messing around with tutorials and reading documentation I started work on my “ASL Quizzer”. I took a library of sign pictures and imported them into the App Inventor, plugged away for another 30 minutes or so and after only two compiles later I had a working quizzer. I was super excited on how easy it was. There is very little code to write, most of it is click and drag. I have used the Android SDK with Eclipse to create an app and from what I can tell this program can handle most lower level stuff and even has some higher level things that I didn’t really mess with.

While it is very unique and takes some getting used to, I think it is a wonderful tool. With maybe another half hour or so I could definitely polish this application and stick it in the marketplace. (Of course I would have to get permission from the creator of the images I stole) The idea though is Google has made it insanely easy to create applications, you don’t need to run a special OS and you don’t have to purchase an SDK.