BadCheese.com

Amazon announced this morning that they're offering a new node type in EC2 - HPC nodes! Yea, say goodbye to your huge linux cluster that you paid millions of dollars for, now you can get it on-demand from Amazon and spool-up with a click of a button! :) This should put some more companies out of business pretty quickly. SGI? Linux Networx? Aspen Systems?

Basically, the node type is the same, but the nodes are guaranteed to all be high-CPU, co-located and have some special low-latency network cards in them.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/?ref_=pe_2170_16291170

So, for about two years now, I’ve been using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to generate a little extra income.  It’s turned out pretty ok overall.  I can do it during ‘idle’ times and not miss out too much on what’s going on around me.  If I had a better laptop, I could do it while watching TV, but my laptop sucks and is tethered to a wall socket and network connection.  I managed to generate about $2000 between May and November last year which was enough to cover most of our family’s Christmas expenses.  Here are some things that I learned along the way.

I found some hits (jobs) that were fairly well-paying and were semi-reliable and paid enough to be worth my time.  $0.10 per job that took a few seconds to complete was my target for the baseline job type.  I found a good job and requestor (employer) on turk that paid out regularly, but unfortunately, a bunch of other ‘turkers’ also liked this job, so it became difficult at times to get work because others would snatch up the jobs faster than I could hit the refresh button.

So, I checked the terms of service for Mechanical Turk.  In short, the TOS says that you can do whatever you want as long as a human does the work (not computer-solved) and you don’t mess with or break their site.

So, I went about writing a script to pull in jobs on a regular basis – I was sure that others were doing this too, so I figured that it wasn’t a bad thing to do.  There is a queue of 10 open jobs in the Turk system that a ‘turker’ can claim and then work on at their leisure.  My script polls for work and if it finds a job, it pulls it into my queue so I can work on it.  Then, I’ve got another script that returns completed work.  It’s all done in perl and seems to work pretty well.

Normally, getting laid off is not a very happy thing. However, when I was laid off from Pronto this summer, it was probably the best thing that could've happened to me at that time. I got to spend time with my kids for 3 weeks. Normally, I would only have an hour in the evenings after I got home in-between dinner and bedtime, but I've really had a chance to bond with my children this summer. Swimming, going to karate lessons, parties, hanging out in the back yard, running through sprinklers, ... It's these times that kids remember the most (my kids are 2 & 6 years old) and I am very thankful to be able to be part of those memories. I also love going to large, outdoor public swimming pools and we've done that a lot now that I've had some time off from work.

I had some time to spend keeping the lawn short and watered in the hot summer days. I never have time to do this at all, but since I had a few weeks at home, I decided that I'd be a little more of a homemaker. I also messed around with Rosegarden, my synthesizers, XEN, ZFS and took a BBQ class - awesome!

I've had some time to re-evaluate my goals and dreams. Life changes - whether you initiate them yourself or they're thrust upon you, are excellent times to change direction. I've made some interesting decisions about how I live my life and do my work in the last couple of weeks and we'll see if they end up providing some much-needed relief down the road.

June 10, 2010, I was laid off from Pronto.com after 4.5 years of employment, by a guy that I interviewed for my own supervisor’s position.  Two hours after laying me off, the company immediately put my job description on craigslist in an entry-level capacity.  I loved Pronto – I had worked there since it was just a few months old.  I considered it “my baby”.  June 10th was not a good day for me.  Three days later they announced the buy-out of the rest of the original Pronto.com shares by their parent company IAC.

I’ve got a house, a wife to support, two kids and two broken cars that I need to fix.  Everything nowadays requires money.  I can’t wait to find work.  Every day that I’m unemployed, I lose $250.  Time to start my search for a new job, and fast!