Vidal's Site

A friend of mine asked me to write about how I am starting my new software company with (almost) no money. The answer is very carefully, remotely and with some open source. Here are some resources I am using on almost a daily basis: craigslist, rentacoder, and elance. I am not saying these sites are full of great programmers. In fact, I have had plenty of horror stories in the past with off shore resources I found on those places. But when you have little money, you don't have much choice but to try. And I have a few friends who claim to have had success finding resources on these sites. I would love to hear any success stories people have had and best practices on these sites. This process reminds me of the show "Junkyard Wars." I did manage to connect with one really good logo designer recently on eLance, so if you need a good logo I have just the place for you.

Another one of my bad consumer experience stories. I have just tried for about 1 hour to get through to Sears home delivery, Hillsdale Mall store, for a friend of mine. It is impossible to reach a live person. There are no humans to answer the line, and neither is there voice mail to leave a message. When I asked to speak with a manager at the store, I was transfered to someone in the shoe department. They told me there are no managers around. So basically the store is being run out of the shoe department. Finally, I tried to contact them via their website and leave a complaint. Well, they will not have any of that. Eventhough I filled in all the info, I got, "In order for your request to be processed, please enter your name, a telephone number, an email address, as well as your comment or concern." Of course, there no customer service email address. Sears cannot be long for this world....

Here is my first YouTube video. Which actually turns out to be two videos as you will learn in a moment. The specific content of this video may not be interesting to you unless your kids also go to the same school as mine. I took this video at the dedication ceremony for my children's new school DIscovery Charter School. What I found interesting is how difficult and how time-consuming it is to upload something like this to the Internet. There were no completely free tools to do this acceptably either that I could find. I started by taking this video using my Samsung Digital camcorder which has the great advantage of capturing video directly to AVI files. The dedication ceremony was 18 minutes long and at highest quality that resulted in an 872MB file. My first problem was to reduce this to a manageable size. I attempted to load the video into Apple QuickTime Professional but it would not accept the large original file and just died. I could watch the video in Windows movie maker but they were reading the options that I found useful to export it to a better format. I often go to YouTube, a popular video sharing site, so I decided to try to upload the file there. You cannot upload files that are larger than 100 MB or longer than 10 minutes. YouTube also prefers 320x240 videos in MPG format. My video was very different so knew I had some serious work to do. I searched and downloaded a variety of video conversion tools attending to find one that would resample the video into something manageable. After much searching I settled on Ulead Video Studio 10. First I had the video converted to iPod format but this was still too large. So after some tweaking using the custom save as option I was able to get the right format file and make the entire video under 100 MB. Unfortunate still too long for YouTube, so I had to cut the video into two pieces. For me, Apple QuickTime professional was the quickest way. These conversions all took a long time, and I have a very fast PC with a lot of RAM. Finally it took over half an hour to upload the pieces on to YouTube site. Part one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlOLlWMTlOc Part two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXxyCZ-w_XY

If anyone knows how to hard reset an LG-2000 cell phone, let me know. My daughter has forgotten the PIN code to this phone. There doesn't appear to be anyway to reset this phone back to factory settings to clear this. We even went to the Cingular store and got no where. They told me to throw the phone away. Basically, the phone is now a $169 paperweight. Incredible. Thanks, LG.

Update: 9/25. It turns out that I got bad advice from the Cingular store that I went to, and LG is not to blame. I went to another store and they were easily able to unlock the SIM card. Again, incredibly, the first Cingular store I went to told me to throw the phone away. Wow, how incredbly knowledgeable these reps are....

I will be at the Handango Partner Summitt and CTIA in Los Angeles next week if anyone would like to meet and catch up. And while I am there, I might have to stop by the Commerce Casino.

As of yesterday, I have started fundraising for my new startup. It's interesting so far the conversations I have had with people since just putting this word out, and what I am learning. A really freaky coincidence happened to me today too which maybe is some sort of omen or just randomness. A client of mine needed me to deliver something urgently to them at a top VC firm on Sand Hill Road where they were making a pitch. If I wrote the name of the firm, and if you follow Silicon Valley news, you would probably recognize it. I don't get asked often to come to these places, so I spent some time in the lobby of the firm looking at the memoribilia they displayed of their successful investments and it was cool.

I don't know how many of you also got this, but I received yesterday a big box of free food from Amazon.com. It had quite a bit of stuff including lots of snacks, soup, cereal, nonprescription drugs, coffee, batteries and a small flashlight, and a Tide to Go pen. I've known about the grocery store on Amazon.com for while but I have never ordered from it. I think this is a very interesting promotion they did. And it shows how more and more stuff is being sold online. I totally enjoy ordering from Amazon.com, and I certainly enjoy it more than Safeway.com which I wrote about my bad experience previously.

I just heard on the drive in today that there is a new TV show about lawyers called "Justice." That's like making a TV show about a whorehouse and calling it "Love." Apologies to my friends out there who are attorneys, but I really don't get this endless fascination with TV shows about lawyers. I think we need shows glorifying professions other than the law.

Flock — The web browser for you and your friends

One of my friends recently took a position at Flock. He showed me their browser and I decided to try it. After about 1 week, I have pretty much switched to using it as my primary web browser both at home and at work. Flock is based on the Firefox browser which I was already using and so the transition was easy. Almost all the extensions I use are available for Flock with the exception of Colorful Tabs which I miss. You have to re-download your extensions because Flock cannot import them from your Firefox installation. Some nice things that Flock adds are the photo, newsreader and blogging integrations. I like the way you can see Flickr photos from within the browser and it includes an uploading client as well. I exported my OPML file from Newsgator and the integrated RSS reader in Flock was able to import it without any problem. I am enjoying the integrated RSS reader better than what I had a Newsgator. Flock is only at version 0 .7 so I'm sure there's a lot more that they are planning to add to it. I could go on about all the cool things I discovered about it and some of the minor annoyances it's just easier if you try yourself. This is a cool product and it's free of course.

Blogged with Flock

I purchased a "TV Timer BOB" last week, and started using it with my kids. It is a small, very simple to use, household transformational device that sits next to your TV. You plug the power cord from the TV into the back and it locks in place, then you plug the device into the wall. You can program it to allow your kids to only watch so many hours of TV per day or per week. You can set up as many as 6 different accounts each with a different PIN code. It has a lot of nice options. When time is up, the power to the TV shuts off.

What was really interesting was that even though I gave my kids a generous starting allowance of TV per day, their actual TV time dramatically decreased. Before when TV time was free and uncontrolled, they didn't mind killing time by watching it. Now that TV is measured and limted, they don't want to waste their time allowances watching shows that are not worth it. They don't even use their whole allowance. And oh, TV Timer BOB keeps your timer running if you forget to turn the TV off!