Money on Evan Hoffman

Upcoming downtime

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:33:57 +0000

I’ll be moving this site to a new hosting provider over the next few days, so there will likely be some downtime. Not that this site gets that many repeat visitors, but figured I’d give a heads-up so Google can cache this ahead of time.

Compellent "future proof?" Not so much.

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:39:33 +0000

So, I’ve written about Compellent a few times from a price perspective, mostly on the disk side. I was recently contacted by our vendor with quotes for two new Compellent controllers. “What’s this all about?” I asked. “Why don’t we have a call with Compellent to discuss?” he replied. I rolled my eyes a little but figured it was worth hearing them out, since our Compellent SAN is at the heart of our infrastructure.

FCC Report shows Verizon much faster than Cablevision

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:14:18 +0000

The FCC recently conducted a study of some of the top broadband ISPs in the country and measured customers’ actual bandwidth as compared to what the ISPs advertised. FiOS really came out on top.

The report is available on the FCC site. The bottom line, though, is that Verizon FiOS averaged nearly 120% of advertised speed (i.e., more than was advertised) and Cablevision was between 50% and 75% of advertised speeds. Latency (ping) was also heavily in FiOS’s favor.

US Public Debt - historical

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:14:10 +0000

In a recent “debate” with a friend, I looked for historical data about the US public debt. I found Google Public Data, which has info about the annual budget deficit/surplus, but apparently (oddly) doesn’t have the debt. Odd because this info is available on the Treasury website.

I copied & pasted the data into Google Docs and made a chart of my own and some basic comparisons over time. Here are some of them rendered as images, though the scale makes the horizontal access kind of useless. I tried embedding the interactive Flash-based graph but it didn’t work. Oh well.

VMWare 5's new licensing model.

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:20:56 +0000

After reading up on the new VMware licensing&pricing model I understand the uproar. Limiting vRAM is a reasonable constraint, but 32GB per socket for Enterprise? 48 GB for “Enterprise Plus”? If you have a dual CPU server with 144 GB (easily configurable last year), with 4.1 you’d only need 2 enterprise licenses to use all 144 GB, since in 4.1 an “Enterprise” license covered 1 CPU (up to 6 cores) and up to 256 GB memory on the host.

Information is overpriced.

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:21:09 +0000

In which I show how cheap I am.

Back on FiOS again (finally)

Fri, 20 May 2011 13:35:01 +0000

Well, that was quite an ordeal.

Does anybody think the USA's current healthcare system isn't awful? Why?

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:16:51 +0000

A crazy late-night rant about the stupid health insurance system in the USA.

Going back to FiOS

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 01:40:05 +0000

I’m not sure why these guys operate this way - they’re more than happy to lose me as a customer and then throw huge discounts at me to get me back. If they’d just give me a good price I’d love not to have to go through this rigmarole. But after being with Cablevision for 2 months I checked Verizon’s pricing and it beat my current deal with Cablevision.

FiOS digital voice with number ported for free; 25/25 Mbps internet; HMDVR free “forever” plus a second HD STB, Showtime, Movie Channel and Flix. Since I already had the battery thing installed last time I had FiOS they gave me a fair discount. Basically the whole package for $87/month + tax, price locked for 2 years, no contract. Not as great of a deal as I’d had with FiOS originally, but it’s pretty good, and FiOS’s service is definitely better than Cablevision’s. I’ve heard Cablevision was rolling out their “DVR plus” service with all programs recorded “in the cloud” rather than on the actual box, but it’s been two months and I haven’t heard of it coming to Long Island. So basically 2 years later Cablevision’s service is exactly the same while Verizon has iPhone apps to control the DVR and use the phone as a remote, plus DVR that’s much faster and just generally better service.

2010 Hyundai Sonata - 1 year later

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:00:34 +0000

In April, 2010 I bought a new 2010 Hyundai Sonata V6 Sport. Here are my impressions one year later, and more than you ever wanted to know about my automotive history.

Speed comparison: Optimum Boost vs Verizon FiOS

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:26:38 +0000

Optimum Boost advertises 30 Mbps down, 5 Mbps up. Here’s a speed test I just ran at Ookla’s SpeedTest.net:

(My desktop is plugged into the router, the router is plugged into the Arris cablemodem.)

Here’s one of the last speed tests I did with Verizon, on 2/15. I had the 25/15 internet package:

(Desktop was plugged into 8-port Linksys 100 Mbit switch, the switch was plugged into the FiOS/ActionTec router.)

Back to Cablevision (upcoming downtime)

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:59:18 +0000

So the credits are finally wearing off my FiOS bill. I was paying $49/month for about 8 straight months for all 3 services plus HBO & Cinemax (a ridiculous price) with great phone & internet, plus HMDVR and 2 boxes. My most recent bill was $127 which includes a $40 credit that ends this month, so next month’s bill will be $170 or so.

Cablevision’s been beating down my door for weeks to come back, but they couldn’t come close to the deal Verizon had given me so it was easy to fend them off. But after this recent bill I gave them a call and signed up for the Optimum Triple Play. They have a special deal for people coming back from FiOS: $69/month for all 3 services plus Boost (30/5 Mbps) and a DVR. I added another box and HBO and it came to $100.30. So as of Friday I’ll be on Cablevision and this website will probably be down until I find a new home for it - maybe Wordpress.com.

Who pays the most tax? Who pays the least tax?

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:05:17 +0000

Why do I care? Maybe I don’t. But this is fun anyway.

Go to the IRS.gov website to the SOI Tax Stats page.

Download one of the Excel spreadsheets under Basic Tables: Returns Filed and Sources of Income. I used All Returns: Adjusted Gross Income, Exemptions, Deductions, and Tax Items for 2008.

Look at spreadsheet columns I through N. I & J show the amount of taxable income in each bracket and the number of returns in that bracket. M & N show the number of returns that had tax and the total amount of tax in each bracket.

Thank you Cabinetparts.com!

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:10:31 +0000

A couple of weeks ago the hinge on one of the cabinets in our kitchen broke. I took the door off, unscrewed the hinge, and went to Home Depot to try and find a replacement. No luck. I went to a local hardware store, same deal. I was annoyed, and worried I’d never be able to find a replacement. I headed home.

I looked at the broken hinge and found imprinted on it, in tiny numerals, was “32.260-01”. It also had “blum” imprinted on it, which I assumed was the brand name. A long shot, but I entered “blum 32.260-01” in Google. I was thrilled to see that while there were no organic results, there was a paid link for CabinetParts.com. I clicked through and found the exact part I needed. They were a little more than I’d hoped to spend, but since I had no idea where else I could go to find them, I was happy to pay it. I got the part a few days later and it was exactly what I needed. Cabinet: repaired. So, hooray for them!

How does paid blogging work?

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:44:43 +0000

I’ve been hearing for years about paid bloggers. If people are getting paid to write their crap down in an ad-supported industry, it seemed like it might make sense to throw some ads up on this very site to see what happens. I’ve had Adsense running on this site for a few months now and the short answer is a whole lot of nothing. Here’s what the earnings look like since 1/1/2009 (my Adsense account is much older than this site; I put the banner ads up around Fall of 2009):

Compellent Doesn't Suck

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:28:59 +0000

I noticed a bunch of people landing on this site by searching for “compellent sucks.” I just want to avoid any confusion: Compellent doesn’t suck. Now that the pain of spending the money to expand our Compellent SAN is in the past, I am back to being in love with the product. The only gripe I’ve really ever had with Compellent is the price, and as Ben Franklin said:

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

Compellent Doesn't Suck

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:28:59 +0000

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall VMware Appliance (Vx) finally exists!

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:24:12 +0000

When I started at my current company, spam was handled with a separate server running SpamAssassin and a few other services. This sort of got the job done but required babysitting. I wasn’t part of the Sysadmin team at that point but I know they had to restart SpamAssassin relatively frequently, manually clear out the email queue when people noticed they weren’t receiving email, etc.

After a few months, someone wised up and purchased a Barracuda Spam Firewall. I assumed this was basically a pretty GUI wrapper around the same tools we had already been using, but it was certainly worth the money. In addition to the basic filtering of spam it filtered for viruses, performed recipient verification against AD via LDAP, had nice graphing and reporting.

FiOS speed 10 months later, better than ever.

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:44:48 +0000

I switched to FiOS in December, 2009, and I was pretty apprehensive, having been a Cablevision customer for many years. I really had no problem with Cablevision’s service, I just thought their pricing was much too high in the face of the new competition (and deals) Verizon was offering. I ended up going with Verizon due to their awesome deal, but now it’s almost a year later and I can’t imagine going back to Optimum. It’ll probably come down to price when the current promo pricing I have with Verizon ends, but if the price was equal then no contest - I’d stick with FiOS.

How to cancel Cablevision service

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 23:14:58 +0000

To cancel your Cablevision service, you need to call them.

Nassau county: 516-364-8400.- Suffolk county: 631-267-6900 and 631-727-6300.

Other phone numbers are listed here:

http://www.optimum.net/Support/PhoneList

The bright side of Compellent

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 16:07:46 +0000

Since I was bemoaning Compellent’s pricing recently I figured it would be unfair of me not to highlight the upside. Their tagline is (or was when we purchased it) “The only SAN so sophisticated it’s simple.” While I can’t say whether they’re the ONLY one, the idea is definitely true. This is the first SAN I’ve ever used, and aside from the learning curve for iSCSI itself (targets, spinup delay, etc.) it’s totally simple and intuitive. Create LUNs, map them to servers. Don’t worry about things like RAID levels or hot disks. We’re into our second year with Compellent and it’s definitely lived up to its promise of simplicity.

Oh, Compellent... again with the disk prices.

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:57:04 +0000

Time to expand the SAN again.

I planned and budgeted for this this year but it still pisses me off. Look, I realize these guys have to make money, but the bottom line is they’re charging over $1.40/GB for SATA storage. There are 7200 RPM 2TB SATA drives on Amazon and Newegg ranging in price from $130 to $220. That’s as low as $0.065/GB. There was even a 2TB WD “Green” drive (sub-7200 RPM, I think 5900 RPM) on Slickdeals today for $99. That’s 5 cents per gig.

Moving an Exchange 2003 server to another location with minimal risk and disruption?

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 01:38:51 +0000

So our Exchange server is located in our office building. This made sense at the time because that’s where the users are. Over time though, this has proved problematic for a few reasons. Primarily, our office is certainly not a datacenter and doesn’t offer the amenities of one - clean, reliable power, and redundant cooling. In an average year we lose power probably 10-15 times, often for an hour or more. The rest of our production environment is hosted in a top-tier datacenter, so after a while I started to wonder why our Exchange server wasn’t there, and making plans to move it there. Oh, and did I mention I’m not an Exchange admin in any sense of the term? I just inherited the Exchange server about 2 months ago.

Top Long Island teacher salaries

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:47:43 +0000

Average teacher salaries for Long Island school districts. Courtesy of NYS DOE, via Newsday - data are from 2005:

1	Fire Island	$96,228
2	East Williston	$93,001
3	Island Park	$88,992
4	Quogue	$88,975
5	Great Neck	$87,444
6	Roslyn	$87,277
7	Mineola	$85,978
8	Lawrence	$85,400
9	East Rockaway	$84,130
10	Bridgehampton	$83,568
11	West Hempstead	$83,546
12	Jericho	$83,150
13	Carle Place	$83,088
14	Locust Valley	$82,553
15	Port Washington	$82,520

16	Oyster Bay-East Norwich	$82,513
17	Amagansett	$81,440
18	Fishers Island	$81,434
19	Plainview-Old Bethpage	$81,163
20	Syosset	$79,065
21	Garden City	$79,030
22	Cold Spring Harbor	$78,599
23	Glen Cove	$78,485
24	Valley Stream 30	$78,089
25	Southampton	$78,050
26	Oceanside	$77,448
27	Uniondale	$77,132
28	Wantagh	$76,480
29	East Hampton	$76,436
30	Shelter Island	$76,272
31	Herricks	$75,539
32	Hempstead	$74,950
33	Valley Stream 24	$74,743
34	Seaford	$74,479
35	North Bellmore	$74,424
36	Patchogue-Medford	$74,316
37	East Islip	$73,405
38	Westbury	$73,326
39	New Hyde Park-Garden City Park	$73,284
40	Sachem	$72,846
41	Levittown	$72,832
42	Franklin Square	$72,812
43	Lynbrook	$72,547
44	Bethpage	$72,467
45	Elwood	$72,202
46	Port Jefferson	$71,984
47	Comsewogue	$71,980
48	Floral Park-Bellerose	$71,952
49	Mount Sinai	$71,773
50	Babylon	$71,674
51	Freeport	$71,575
52	Baldwin	$71,566
53	Bellmore	$71,527
54	Copiague	$71,465
55	Sayville	$71,396
56	Rockville Centre	$71,325
57	Center Moriches	$71,016
58	Riverhead	$70,193
59	Farmingdale	$69,838
60	Malverne	$69,449
61	Southold	$69,432
62	Westhampton Beach	$69,408
63	Massapequa	$69,269
64	Bayport-Blue Point	$69,202
65	South Country	$68,981
66	Springs	$68,752
67	North Merrick	$68,752
68	Longwood	$68,752
69	Bellmore-Merrick	$68,750
70	East Quogue	$68,727
71	William Floyd	$68,627
72	West Babylon	$68,419
73	Sewanhaka	$68,216
74	Plainedge	$68,143
75	Island Trees	$67,988
76	Miller Place	$67,624
77	Sag Harbor	$67,266
78	Elmont	$66,602
79	Montauk	$66,463
80	Brentwood	$66,241
81	Merrick	$66,170
82	Amityville	$65,522
83	Islip	$65,042
84	Hauppauge	$64,877
85	Harborfields	$64,711
86	Hicksville	$64,638
87	South Huntington	$64,543
88	Northport-East Northport	$64,483
89	Huntington	$64,385
90	Commack	$64,302
91	Central Islip	$63,864
92	West Islip	$63,727
93	Roosevelt	$63,298
94	Bay Shore	$63,094
95	Three Village	$62,802
96	Mattituck-Cutchogue	$62,718
97	Half Hollow Hills	$62,588
98	Smithtown	$62,547
99	North Babylon	$62,505
100	Middle Country	$60,868
101	Wainscott Common	$60,774
102	Lindenhurst	$60,231
103	Rocky Point	$60,146
104	Hampton Bays	$59,478
105	Eastport-South Manor	$59,021
106	Deer Park	$58,541
107	Kings Park	$58,483
108	Tuckahoe	$58,362
109	Remsenburg-Speonk	$58,034
110	Wyandanch	$57,469
111	Greenport	$55,657
112	Shoreham-Wading River	$55,436
113	East Moriches	$55,108
114	Oysterponds	$54,324
115	Little Flower	$53,784
116	New Suffolk	$42,150

Lotsa downtime.

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:23:02 +0000

Lots of power outages lately. Not the greatest time to move my site. :P Good thing I don’t need 99.99%+ uptime. Or even 95%…

Sped up Wordpress by adding 1 index.

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:35:41 +0000

I noticed WP was taking a long time to load since I moved it. I added an index to the “autoload” column on wp_options and it seems to be much faster.

I still hate MySQL though. Postgres is so much better.

Website is moved.

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:12:39 +0000

I left Bluehost. They raised the prices (which seems to fly counter to what one would expect in the hosting industry with Google Apps breathing down their necks), and I realized I didn’t need it anyway. My MX records go right to Google. Anyway, time to go to sleep.

Cablevision loses WABC (Channel 7)?

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:34:51 +0000

Wow. Glad I left. I imagine this will be temporary (like the HGTV ordeal earlier this year).

On another note, I got my 3rd FiOS bill - still running a credit. That’s $43 for 3.5 months of great service. Good luck competing with that, Optimum.

Free DNS Hosting?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:07:41 +0000

My Bluehost renewal is coming up soon and I’m really debating cancelling it. It’s like $8/month, but with my email going directly to Gmail now, this dumb blog is the only thing of note at evanhoffman.com, and I can move that anywhere. I already copied all the content to another server but I can’t find free DNS hosting anywhere. Maybe i’ll just run my own nameserver.

MAYBE!!!

Got my second FiOS bill

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:21:18 +0000

So I got my second FiOS bill a couple of weeks ago. After the issue with my first bill was straightened out I ended up paying about $43 for the first 6 weeks of service. Well, my second bill was about $90, but applied a $180 credit on my account, so the bill showed -$91. So basically the first 3 months of service will end up costing me about $43. Even if it comes to $90/month for the remainder of the contract, this is such a huge savings that I don’t see how Cablevision could match it.