Posting will be light (again, sorry!) today and tomorrow because I’ll be up at the SEVC conference in/near Washington DC.

You can read all about the conference here.

If you happen to be attending and would like to catch up, post a comment or send me an email.  I can be reached via the "Contact Us" link on the disruptorMonkey home page.

Categories: Business
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Growing up in the UK, I have that reptilian hind brain (sorry, I couldn’t find a good link to explain that one) that inexplicably draws me towards teeny tiny cars that get great gas mileage, like this one.  I think most ride-on lawnmowers here have bigger engines than my first car…

When I see Hummers, Suburbans or other oversized vehicles, my flight instinct kicks in and I switch off.

So as you can imagine, I’m generally not much of a fan of American muscle cars (with the possible exception of this one).

What the heck does that have to do with anything?  Well, let me tell you about the first time in my life I seriously wished I owned a big old clunky beast…  And it’s all thanks to being an entrepreneur.

My wife drives a VW Jetta.  It’s a lease, and the lease contract is almost up.  Since we’re stretching every dollar (and my credit has been repeatedly ambushed, mugged, abused and thrown in the gutter to fend for itself), we decided to buy the thing.  We got an okay deal, much lower payment, and all in all it’s a better deal than buying a car we don’t know the history of for the same amount of $$$.

The Jetta is coming up on 40,000 miles and the warranty runs out soon, so I took it to the dealership and had them fix a bunch of odds and ends.  They were very keen for me to have the 40K mile service, so I dug in to see what they actually did for the $500 they wanted to charge me.

Oil, oil filter, air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs and a bunch of walking around.  For $500.

Jeez.

So my "cheap alarm" went off and I declined the service.  I had them change the oil, oil filter and fuel filter (had a bad experience with one of those once) and resolved to do the rest myself. A day and $60 in parts later (I bought new wiper blades too), I had everything I needed to do the job.

The air filter was easy.

But the spark plugs?

Some idiot designed the engine so that the entire exhaust manifold is on top of two out of the four spark plugs.  For those of you that aren’t car inclined, rest assured that unbolting the entire exhaust manifold is neither fun nor wise.  Especially when you’re armed with knowledge that’s easily 15 years out of date and a set of tools that MacGuyver would laugh at rather than try and use.

It took all of 10 minutes to replace two of the plugs.  It took another 2-3 hours to do the others.  And at the point of my third major bit of skin removal, it occurred to me that there’s probably a bit more room to swing a socket wrench on a big old SUV.

So there you have it.  Years of prejudice re-evaluated thanks to the wonderful world of entrepreneurship…

Categories: Inside My Twisted Start Up Brain...
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For various reasons I won’t bore you with, I’ve been playing with a Blackberry lately.  I bought one used and unlocked on eBay and have been messing with it for about a week.

I don’t get it and I really don’t see the reason for all the hype.  There are things the BB fails to do that my crummy old iPAQ PDA would do back in 1999, and I’m really not kidding.

Now admittedly, I’m not running Blackberry Enterprise Server.  Running BES may dramatically improve your user experience, but without it, this thing is lame.

First of all, it’s hard to use as a phone.  The form factor is horrible — you have no choice but to dial with two hands while looking directly at the keypad.  Not to mention that the "end call" key is EXACTLY where your fingers rest when holding the phone to your head.

The UI is pretty clunky too.  You access everything through the scroll wheel, but no part of the UI allows looping, so if you’ve scrolled all the way to the last menu item to find something, you have to scroll all the way back up to access a different menu item. Slow slow slow.  Not to mention that functions are oddly separated — no way to easily search your contacts when in the "recently dialed" page.  No real ability to set up my own shortcuts.  Call voicemail is buried in the phone menu…

And why on earth is the backlight in no way connected to user actions?  You have to press the backlight button (which is tiny and hard to find in the dark) to activate it.  That’s just dumb.  There is an app you can download that solves this for you, but jeez…

Now the thing the device is famous for is email and desktop integration.  When I plugged it in to Outlook, the sync worked flawlessly — my first and only visit to a Blackberry happy place.  I got my POP3 email account set up on the device and sure enough email just started arriving.  Feeling the potential for some excitement, I send myself an email with an attachment.  Oh.  Attachments aren’t handled by the device itself.  The BBSS (big Blackberry Server in the Sky) parses the attachment, fiddles with it, and sends a text version to the Blackberry.  But only after you try and open the attachment and wait for a few minutes.

Hmm.  Must be a better way.  So I download an app for the Blackberry that claims to let me preview and edit Office documents.  Only to find that it works the same way.  Doh!

Oh well.  But still, kind of nice to get real-time push email, no?  Well actually no.  For one simple reason: there is no way to synchronize the inbox and sent folders with your desktop.  Yup.  You can sync your tasks, your contacts, your calendar, even your stupid notes.  But you can’t sync your inbox and sent folders.  Come on!  Active-sync could do that in version 1.0 on an otherwise crummy Windows CE device. 

So now I have to either not use the BB to reply to important emails, or jump through a bunch of silly hoops to make sure I have a copy of my response on my desktop.  Not to mention that the mini-qwerty keypad just ain’t that fast.

Prior to getting my Berry on, I used a Sony Ericsson W810.  Small candy-bar format, good menu system and with a bit of hacking you can restore SE’s basic POP3 email client.  For those with a itch to be in contact, you can even set the email client to ping the mail server every 5 minutes — no re-routing through BBSS required.  I also find the T9 predictive text to be faster for most short messages than the Berry’s qwerty keypad.  I can use it one handed without looking directly at the phone and it has a pretty good built in camera.

I’m sure newer Berries have some improvements over the 7290 I’m trying to use, but trading my phone for a second-rate closed-system PDA with issues is clearly not for me…

Categories: Thought o' the Day
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One of the TV shows that always makes me laugh is "Top Gear".  It’s nominally a car show, but that’s a very loose framework within which they have a lot of fun.

Case in point, an episode I saw a few weeks back where they tried to turn a small car into a low budget Space Shuttle…

Enjoy!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Categories: Tip O' the Hat
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I was a nerdy kid ("Noooo" I hear you cry).  Had a hand-drawn periodic table on the wall, took apart anything I could get my hands on and had a number of toys that apparently you just can’t get any more because they’re "not safe".

One of my favorites was the Thomas Salter Chemistry Set.  These things were available in "Levels".  Level 1 contained some water, iron filings and probably little else.  But by the time you reached Level 7, you had most of the periodic table, a dash of plutonium and enough odds and ends to do start some serious fires.  Well, okay, maybe not plutonium, but you could have some scarringly good fun with any kit beyond Level 4 or so.

Sadly, if Wired
and other sources are to believed (and I think they can be), such
danger has been removed from the lives of today’s kids.  And that’s a
real shame.

I distinctly remember some random combination of Salter chemicals that bubbled up and out of the test tube, melted the test tube holder and made a fair sized hole in the various layers of newspaper etc protecting the kitchen table. Now that’s what I call an educational toy — I gained far more respect for chemicals from my Salter-inspired misadventures than I ever from what we did in school.

Categories: Dead Technology
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