Written by Ok, well I’ve created a new category to track Project Steamroller — my new startup company. Watch this space.
Monthly archives for March, 2004
Leaving NAI
Many of my readers probably know already that I’m leaving NAI at the end of this week. Combination of reasons, but the primary one is that it’s time to move on. I have a very exciting idea for a new company that I’ve been working on, and once I get back from the UK, I’ll be on that full time. Watch this space — I’ve been thinking pretty hard about whether on this attempt #3 it might not be amusing to blog the startup process from the very beginning (well, a little past the beginning given that I’ve already put some amount of thinking into this). The company involves many issues to do with open processes, so the visibility into the creation of the thing might be interesting. Plus I’m somewhat inspired by Jeremy’s blogging of his house purchase process. Blogging as a tool to provide people with help and insight on processes that people don’t often go through, and which can seem otherwise daunting, is probably a fairly good use of the medium. Hopefully my prior experience will also mean that I don’t embarass myself too badly stumbling around and heading nowhere.
Laptop power brick
So I’m flying to England this weekend, and decided since I have the miles to upgrade myself to “Premier Cattle” class, which means a slightly larger seat, but more importantly for a ten hour flight — laptop power. But of course you need a special power brick to plug in. So, I shop around. Pretty well everything I find is both hideously expensive, and ugly, plus just has one problem or another with it. Everything except the iGo Juice. From the website descriptions, it sounded ideal, doing not only Car/Air DC input, but also AC input — so you don’t need to carry both your regular brick and this one — one does it all. The thing works with my G4 powerbook (plus comes with about a dozen other tips for other laptop models), and is reasonably good looking on the website. So I ordered it. After returning the hardcover for some MP3 player that Amazon tried to fulfill my order with initially, I finally got the thing today. Open the box, and it’s even better than I expected. It looks great. It feels solid. The connectors plug into place snuggly. Best of all, they provide you with 3 double-sided velcro cable ties to make storing the cables nice and tangle-free. They provide a nice little carrying bad to hold the 3 cables, brick, and bag of tips (though I’ll probably just stuff the brick cables and the one tip I need into my regular bag). Plug it in: brick has a blue LED on it. Tremendous Kudos to whoever designed this product — truly a well executed product. These guys deserve 100% market share with this thing — it’s truly awesome. Will report on experience of in-plane use once I land in the UK, but based on the AC performance, three thumbs up.
Vonage changes
About a week or so ago, they massively reduced international calling rates (so it’s not $0.02 per minute to the UK, or in other words, it’s now cheaper for me to call the UK than it used to be for me to call Los Angeles on my old POTS line). And now today they’ve update their voicemail-to-email thingie so that it includes caller-id information in the email. Very nice. Of course, broke my perl one-liner which replaces the WAV with a more compact MP3 — so I’ve fixed the script, and as a bonus, I rewrite the email From line to include the caller-id info for easy viewing in my MUA.
Update: if you want to sign up for vonage, use the link here and you’ll get the first month of service free, and I’ll get some $$$ for refering you.
Happy birthday
Happy birthday, spam. Netcraft: Spam’s Tenth Birthday Today
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