It is fair to say that I’m an early adopter on some things. When it comes to technology, ‘some’ becomes most. You won’t find me camping out at the Apple Store waiting for The Next Big Thing! or buying the latest and greatest computer or phone but in terms of free software — I’m on the bleeding edge.

Back in 2002 I made syndicated news reading part of a daily ritual. Using what are known as feeds, websites can provide new content in a specialized file that programs or other websites can gather, parse, compare, and determine what is new on any particular websites. The benefit is that, instead of going to hundreds of websites that I like and trying to determine what I’ve already read and what is new, I can use a program or website that shows only the new content and lets me focus on it. The best program (okay, it was one of the only programs doing this) back then was called NetNewsWire, developed by a guy named Brent Simmons over at ranchero.com.

I found Brent’s website back then because I was interested in the Perl programming language and was actually creating my own feed-reader website. And really that’s what NetNewsWire was missing — the ability to sync the feeds across multiple computers — something a web-based reader could do systemically. Speeding up the story, after a year or two of rolling my own I found Bloglines, which did a better job than what I could muster. I switched over and spent many years there until last year when Bloglines planned to shut down. And then didn’t. But by that time I had switched to Google Reader, which I’d kept current with my feeds since it started back in 2005.

If you’ve used Google Reader, though, you might feel that it is lacking (like I do). I really just couldn’t get comfortable with it. Don’t ask me why. There are many people that it works great for but it just didn’t click. So I was pleased that, when I went searching for my old standby NetNewsWire, that after Brent had sold out, NetNewswire had become ad-supported (aka free) and the software would keep my Google Reader subscription list synced between devices. It may all sound silly, but I spend a lot of time keeping up on news and websites and, consequently, this matters to me.

So now I can use NetNewsWire at the office, on my work laptop, on our home laptop, on our home desktop, or on the iPod Touch and I never have to read old news. For efficiency’s sake this is a great combination.

It will come as no surprise to those in my inner circle when I write that my favorite television show is one that most Americans have never heard of: Top Gear. Top Gear is a British automobile comedy starring three ‘gents named Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond along with a weekly collection of supercars, a celebrity or two, the news, and typically an off-the-wall challenge of some sort. And oh yes, The Stig.

The Stig is an unnamed, faceless, speechless character who’s main purpose on the show, outside of some comedy relief at his expense, is to drive each car around the same test track in order to be able to compare lap times. It has been a great stroke of planning to keep his identity and opinions outside the subject matter of the show in order to let the cars compete basically against each other without driver flavor. And the speculation as to the driver in the suit doesn’t hurt either.

There have been several men who have worn the outfit unbeknown to the viewers through the 15 series of the show. Well, I guess it was clear at one point that they had changed people as black Stig met his fate and white Stig emerged. The point of the character has been that The Stig is a… character, and that the person playing the character doesn’t matter as long has he can perform the tasks that come along with playing the part.

Intro the lawsuit. The actor who played The Stig for quite some time decided to write an autobiography about his experience. The show wants to block its publication. Andy Wilman, the producer of Top Gear, wrote an interesting article entitled “The Stig. He’s ours” and here’s an excerpt:

As you can tell I’m quite cross at the moment, but there’s plenty to be cross about. Last week, instead of working on the next series, I had to go to court. If you go to court you have to look smart, which meant I had to dig my suit out of the back of the wardrobe, and the last time I wore that suit George Michael could still drive in a straight line. So on Monday there I was, dressed like somebody who works behind the till at NatWest, having to listen to people from HarperCollins telling me that they have the right to reveal who the Stig is. Well actually, that’s tosh. The whole point of the Stig is the mystique – the bizarre characteristics he has, the wonderment created about what he might think, feel, do or look like. Kids adore the conceit, and I believe adults, although they know it’s a man in a suit (or is it?), gladly buy into the whole conceit because they find it entertaining. Even the papers, who love to make mischief, have kept everyone guessing over the years because they acknowledge that viewers like the Stig secrecy thing.

Being honest, I have an interest in reading the book. Not because of the person who wrote it — I could really care less about him. As a fan of the show I enjoy the outtakes and behind the scenes stuff. The book falls into that category for me. However, I appreciate the post that Wilman made. He showed where Top Gear is coming from in the same give-it-to-me-straight kind of fashion that makes me enjoy the show over and over again.

In the same way that many of Top Gear’s episodes over the years have not been great on their own, the progression of the series makes each show necessary for the overall sum to be a success. Their stance on this lawsuit may be very similar. You can argue their position on it pro or con just as you could Jeremy’s hatred of the Porsche Cayenne (aka Cockster). However, in the end this is just one more ‘episode’, albeit outside of any series, that — pro or con — will not spoil the whole.

The Apple marketing machine was in full “on” position today as they streamed their product event live using a new video-streaming scheme ala Pandora‘s “chunk”-based delivery method. But this post isn’t about that, but rather the AppleTV, a topic I recently wrote about.

In my last post I was interested in replacing the hard drive in my AppleTV with an SSD version which would make the machine run cooler and quieter. Steve Jobs mentioned these two items as feedback they’d received from consumers. He also mentioned that AppleTV owners wanted all HighDef content which I can understand but which imposes some limitations. So, in no particular order, here’s my list of how even though the price of the new AppleTV is quite a bit reduced, so (apparently) is its usefulness:

• There is no local storage so you can’t load the AppleTV up with kids’ movies and take the thing with you on vacation (sans computer) like we did last year on our trip to Florida. Well, there is obviously some unreported amount of local storage but the point is you can’t sync movies to it anymore and then “unplug” from your local network or the ‘net in general and watch those movies like you can on say an iPod Touch.
• The UI of the new AppleTV seems to only give HighDef options. That may be fine for those with fiber-to-the premises in apartments in New York but with my 3mb DSL connection (380KB/s actual peak download) I can’t order an HD movie and plan on watching it within the next 90 minutes. StandardDef movies are awesome in this regard — rent-to-start time is literally within seconds on my connection. I’m sure this is part of the reasoning behind keeping iTunes HD rentals to 720p resolution instead of 1080p but there is still a huge connection speed gap for most of America.
• No apps? Come on! My son is becoming quite the weatherman and I’d like to be able to show some weather map widgets on our HDTV. Don’t tell me the new AppleTV doesn’t have the processing power at this resolution — the A4 processor is an apparent workhorse and can do wonders on the iPhone/iPod Touch at 960p.
• I understand that, for size & cost’s sake, the component-out on the old AppleTV didn’t weigh in that heavily as a must-keep item but I’m glad to have it on the old version. In a few weeks we’re having an outdoor movie night and the projector I use has component-in. Much easier to connect for that application than HDMI-to-DVI-to-RGB. Options are good to have if you can afford them.

All that being said, I’ll probably buy one of these new AppleTV’s somewhere down the line (rev B or C in 2011 or 2012?) but at this point it just seems like you get less utility for less money — which is only half what I’d expect from Apple after 4 years of product development.

After a week of negotiating a number of deals on behalf of my clients — some that got done and some that didn’t — I enjoyed reading through Breaking down the breakup on the BackBlaze Blog. It is the story of their 6-month negotiation with several companies that were in the hunt to acquire them. Ultimately the deal didn’t go through and the time spent had no immediate reward, monetary or otherwise. Again, a lot like my week. But at the same time, in the midst of that kind of experience, lessons learned will pay future dividends. Here’s what they learned:

Lessons Learned
I feel like I took so many lessons from this that I couldn’t possibly capture them in one blog post, but let me start with a few:

1. Build trust – it’s job #1.
Spreadsheet models can show anything. Due diligence can overlook things. Commitments can be lawyer’ed out of. Ultimately, the difference between success and failure of a merger is whether the teams trust each other. Start early. Partner. Meet live. Talk to references. Do whatever it takes to make sure both sides trust each other. If either side doesn’t, no amount of legalese in a contract will help.

2. Getting acquired is expensive.
In our previous companies, the process cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees alone. We worked with our lawyers to offload as much of the work to us as possible and use them only when critical. This helped a great deal. It was still very expensive. Consider whether you can “afford to be acquired” and look at getting a breakup fee and/or working out a deal with your lawyers just in case.

3. Find great advisors.
I cannot overstate the value of our advisors – our lawyers, our accountants, and our business advisors. We did not hire bankers. They sometimes make sense. But advisors help with contacts, getting perspective when you are really deep in the process, understanding what is common in the market, background references, and more.

4. Know your wants and walkaways up front.
Unless you’re desperate, you probably do not just want to be acquired. What do you consider being fairly compensated for the company you have built? Do you want to stay and run the company or does everyone want to sell the technology and leave? Where will you be physically located? Will you be able to continue executing on your vision or will the technology simply be repurposed? What about your existing customers and partners? Figure out what is important to the team up front and write it down – it easier to stay true to it throughout the process and for the internal decisions to be less emotional.

5. Require quick movement.
Deals have a flow and when they stretch too long, people get “deal fatigue.” We sell one core service, have fairly few employees, no VC funding, no complicated contracts, and are generally a very simple company to understand. If a deal is taking months to execute on, this is suboptimal for both parties. If two companies want a deal to happen – push for it to happen quickly. Get people in rooms. Ensure the decisions makers are there. Set short deadlines. Don’t let the deal stretch out into multiple months.

BackBlaze is a remote/online/cloud backup company that potentially saves your digital life (photos, emails, documents) from catastrophic loss due to fire or hardware failure. I particularly liked the details they put out several months back regarding their custom-built data storage hardware. It impressed the Boilermaker Engineer in me.

Along with many other folks who own, use, and enjoy Apple’s AppleTV product, I have been waiting on the release of the much rumored update to the Pentium M-based platform which has gone unchanged since its delivery to the market back in 2007. Back then Jill and I had just purchased our first HDTV — a 34″ Sony CRT model touting HDMI and 1080i — and decided that the AppleTV was a product worth rolling the dice on. The purchase was on the heels of us getting rid of our long-term relationship with Dish Network several months earlier after not being able to stomach new users getting free upgrades to HD while customers like us, who had never missed a payment for service in 12 years, were treated like distant cousins. Which is to say: poorly.

The AppleTV product itself is part iPod and part iTunes Store.  It requires a host computer to be its “mother” while it can also bypass mom and go straight to bid-daddy’s digital stash in the cloud.  Once set up, you can just order movies and music directly through the iTunes Store interface as purchases or rentals without going back through the mother-computer.  Coupled with our high-speed internet the match has worked very well.  Well enough, in fact that as we added an LCD HDTV to our bedroom back in 2009 we bit the bullet and got a second AppleTV.  This LCD was a 32″ Sony XBR model with ‘only’ 720p.  With our viewing distance, it made sense and just happened to be the highest resolution that the processor in the AppleTV would pump out.  Happy days.

That is, other than the ever-present click of the hard-drive.  I am a heavy sleeper, but I found the ‘click-click’ of the drive very annoying — even with the fan on in our room masking the noise.  So annoying that when we redid the basement I didn’t think twice about just moving the AppleTV down there instead of just getting another one.  With the next version touted to be capable of 1080p and using flash-based storage instead of the spinning ‘clicky’ media, I decided I could wait.

And I have… for a long time it seems.  Until I purchased two SSDs from Crucial several months ago.  One for the iBook and the other for the PowerMac G5 we’re using before it heads to Africa next summer.  The iBook upgrade was a snap but I couldn’t get the G5 to recognize the SSD for some reason.  (Still haven’t figured that out)  The SSD just sat in the drawer collecting dust until last week when I began thinking that, if Apple isn’t going to provide a product that fits my needs right now, I will just have to improvise.

I searched around and found a used AppleTV on eBay for around $100.  I then searched around to see if anyone had installed an SSD in one and one guy had.  But I didn’t notice something key, which I wanted to point out here.  The AppleTV uses an IDE interface to a laptop hard-drive.  Almost all SSDs manufactured today use SATA instead.  Without checking I assumed that a very thin IDE-to-SATA bridge existed and put all this in motion… and then didn’t find one that would fit inside the AppleTV’s housing.

So, okay — the SSD I have isn’t going to work.  What’s out there for IDE SSDs?  Not much.  Basically it comes down to just one affordable product (in my brief search): the Transcend TS32GSSD25-M 32GB SSD for $99.  But that’s the issue: if I spend another hundred on this upgrade and then Apple comes out with the new product in that same price point I am going to be upset… so I think I’ll deal with the clicks for now.

Part of my routine is skimming though web content on Bloglines including dealmac.com’s storage deals.  While on vacation I saw the 64GB Crucial RealSSD and finally bit. I ordered it from Crucial along with a 2GB RAM module intent on speeding up our 2008 Intel MacBook.

Well the hardware was waiting for us when we got home: I swapped out the 120GB SATA drive for the SSD and replaced the two 512MB RAM modules with the 2GB. The Time Machine/Time Capsule combination made the restore very easy using the Mac OS 10.6 install DVD. It took several hours (overnight) but we had our old MacBook back… or did we?

Actually it looks the same but is quite different. Wake from sleep used to take a noticeably long time as did closing some programs (like Entourage). Everything now is lickety split fast. Also battery life seems longer although it is just perception.

I’ve read that over time the SSDs tend to slow down a little but the model I got – spec wise – is so much quicker than our laptop can seem to handle I hope we don’t even notice it. [read speeds of 265MB/sec vs. around 100MB/sec for the drive it replaced] Yes we lost a little HD space but other than an occasional job for Handbrake we don’t create much data on the lappy.

Opinion: more RAM and SSDs are good things.

UPDATE: the additional SSD I had ordered to put into the G5 PowerMac was a flop – I couldn’t get it to recognize the drive…  I had been very interested to see what speed increase we’d see using the SSD as a boot drive and leaving our massive iTunes library on the existing rotating platter.  Oh well.

Jill and I like to do custom invitations and cards for holidays and get-togethers.  I thought I would post the  invitation we sent out for a Last-Day-of-School Luau.  Unfortunately the party hasn’t happened yet due to weather.

To come up with the design I searched the web for luau and came across a drawing of the luau dancers you see above.  In Illustrator I used the Live Trace function and tweaked the settings to get the look I liked.  There are websites that will do the image-to-vector work for you for free a fee, but Illustrator does the job even better.  Jill provided the party info which was added in Illustrator and a high-quality export was sent to DPS Printing.

We’ve got the process down pretty well as far as working together and it makes our events a little more special… at least to us!

For many years we have used the MovableType content management system under the hood.  Over the last few years, however, it has gotten much less usable with each new iteration.  Finally enough was enough.

So yesterday I decided to make the switch to WordPress.  This is good and bad.  The good is that WordPress if very easy to install and importing of our MT posts was very easy and straightforward.  The bad is that WP creates all of the pages on the fly instead of static pages, which means that instead of replacing all of the old MT pages it will just serve some pseudo pages instead.  I was hoping to keep all of the same file structure but having pages ending in .html won’t work for the WP installation without some .htaccess voodoo which I don’t feel like doing.

And the style — I’m not sure I like this one but with time we’ll work out the kinks.  The main thing is just having a place on the web to occasional post some thoughts, which we still have.  And hopefully WP will keep the clutter down to a minimum.

I’ve posted a screen shot of the old website here for posterity.

This chart reminded me of a story I was telling the other day. Back in high school some friends and I went to Cedar Point. During that trip one of my friends bought some cheese fries and managed to drop a glop on the sidewalk.

At the time it was common for me to order very little when we were out to restaurants and then proceed to eat the leftovers from everyone’s plate. A common question I would ask was, “You done with that?” In this case, of course, I didn’t even have to ask. Everyone but me was “done with that” glop of cheese fries on the concrete. I scooped it up and ate it.

Years have passed since then and I received no ill effects from eating that or the leftovers on my friends’ plates but I wouldn’t (and don’t) do the same today. Funny how we look back on our lives and wonder why we did such silly things.

It would seem that our iMac G5 will not go without the capacitor problem that so many other people have had. One page in particular says that while the official program to repair the issue ended in December 2008, they are still fixing the issue if you ask nicely. So we’ll see if I’m nice enough!

If you click the photo you can see how some of the capacitors are “blown out” — in other reports there have been ooze coming out of some of the more roasted ones, but it didn’t get to that point on ours. It would seem that there are guides out there for replacing these DIY but I’m not sure I’m up to it.