The other day I got a call from a recruiter. Apparently Apple wants to hire me to work at the Genius Bar at the new Boyleston Apple Store. Presumably they found me through my Apple certification, and I certainly have the resume for the job. Being a Genius isn’t really that bad a gig. You get something like $20/hour, benefits, and, of course, you get to play with toys all day. Of course this isn’t exactly the direction I’m looking to go in professionally. I have no particular desire to work retail. And I certainly have no particular desire to do nothing but fix people’s computers for $20 and hour when I already do that for more money on the side of a more lucrative business. I might consider a job managing the Genius Bar, but retail tech support seems like a bit of a backwards step at this point.

On top of that I think I may be on the cusp of moving my business to the next stage. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve transitioned my business into being primarily about web development and services. My business model has been to partner with web developers who need someone to do the programming for them. This strategy has been working very well, and for the past few months I’ve been much busier on average than I had been previously. Now, I think, things may be about to really take off.

I’m about to start a very big project, my biggest so far. Because of that, I’m basically going to be completely booked for the next two to three months while I work on this. But, with my business model being as successful as it has been lately, I can be pretty sure that during this time there will be a number of other opportunities that arise (in fact I already know of a few that will be coming up soon). This is exactly the position I’ve been working towards since I started this whole experiment just about 18 months ago: having more work coming in than I can handle myself. This means I’m finally at the point where I can seriously consider hiring more people. Of course at this point I’m really only looking for a contractor or two. Someone who can put in a few hours a month for me doing the work I don’t have time for myself.

Having gotten to that point there’s a clear path forward. While I work on this big new project, I’d only hire contractors as I need them for the work I don’t have time for myself. Once it’s done and I have a little more leeway to think about other things I can continue to take advantage of them to reduce my own work load and let me spend more time on finding new business. At some point after that I should be able to have enough business coming in that I can afford to hire a developer full-time and focus primarily on sales myself. And, of course, if that goes well I can hire someone to do sales full-time, and then I’ll really be getting somewhere. The obvious ‘end-point’ of this strategy is for me to be managing a company that employs a full-time sales staff as well as a full-time development staff. Maybe even bringing in my own design team, although I think I’d prefer to maintain my partnerships with a large network of designers. At any rate, I think I’m finally approaching the point where I can truly consider this whole venture to be ’successful’.

In the meantime, I guess I should start looking for some contractors. Any LAMP developers out there who might be interested in a little freelance work? I’m mostly looking for PHP developers, but those working with Python, ASP, Ruby and others are welcome as well. Also, I’d favor the Boston area at this point, but am definitely interested in expanding geographically as well. Feel free to send me resumés at josh@dydxtech.com.

I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, but I’ve finally gotten around to creating a portfolio. Since my website is now Django based this was incredibly easy, and probably only took about 45 minutes to do. Previously I’ve just been keeping a list of links to former projects that I included in emails to prospective clients. I didn’t really want to put up a portfolio when I only had a handful of projects to show off. But in the past few days three different projects went live: Lola Boston for which I created the locations database, Tundratour for which I created a database for the different trips as well as a ’shopping cart’ to allow people to request more information on multiple trips at once, and Sel De La Terre which was live before but now has a tool for purchasing gift cards online that I created. I figured that 5 projects was a big enough number to go live with, especially as it should be growing pretty rapidly in the next few months.

I’m still trying to decide if I want to put more information in there. Should I put in a little description of each project, or at least expand on what my contribution to the project was? The Chainsaw Awards page was nominated for the MITX awards, I should probably mention that somewhere. Fortunately, now that it’s there it will be easy enough to add more to it. The other question I’ve been asking myself is whether or not I should include websites that I worked on at my old job. I was just as much responsible for those projects as the ones I’m doing now, but somehow it just seems like I should leave them off. Fortunately again, it will be easy to add those later if I decide to. And in the meantime I have a portfolio to show off. A pretty nice one, if I do say so myself.

Also, I do still intend to write that post that I promised while I was in Jamaica, I’ve just been very busy ever since getting back. I’m going to be away again this weekend (Florida for another wedding), so hopefully I’ll be able to get to it next week when I’m back.

When I first decided to start my own business, my idea was basically to offer IT services for Mac using individuals and companies. Previously I had been working in IT at an all Mac corporation, so I definitley have the skill set to do this. The problem with that idea turned out to basically be one of supply and demand: there’s quite a lot of competition in the field, and as a newcomer without much of a background it was hard to distinguish myself and actually land jobs. During the past 18 months or so that I’ve been doing this I’ve gotten some work doing IT, but not really all that much. Instead I found myself filling the gaps by doing web development. For whatever reason, it appears that I’m much better at selling myself as a web developer than I am at selling myself as an IT consultant. So I’ve found myself doing mostly web development with IT work pretty much being something I do on the side.

So in the past month I’ve made the decision to change my business focus. Instead of dy/dx tech being a Mac IT business that also does some web development work, it is now a web development business. I’ve even let my membership in the Apple Consultants Network lapse, as the main benefit I derived from it was the great prices for software which I’ve now already got. There are a number of benefits for me making this switch. The first is that I’ll now be able to focus all my energy on finding web development work rather than it being a secondary focus. Since even as a secondary focus, web development was much more successful than IT, I think this will really pay off. The other benefit is that it will be easier to distinguish myself from the competition. I have a number of web site projects that I’m working on right now, and that I’ve worked on in the past that I can put my name on. Having that lets me put together a nice pretty portfolio of work, something that IT work just isn’t as good for. I’m currently working on putting together a portfolio application in Django to add to my website. This will increase the ability of my website to sell my services, and also serve as visual evidence of my businesses growth and therefore as a rought metric for the quality of my services. I’m waiting to finish up a few of the bigger projects that I’m currently working on before going live with online portfolio.

I will still, however, be doing some Mac IT work. But now I’ll be doing it under the In Home Mac brand. In Home Mac is a company started by Matt Moglia, a good friend of mine from High School. He started doing the Mac IT thing for himself in the Bay Area at about the same time I started doing it in Boston. He’s apparently much better than I am at marketing those services, and has now built up his company to the point where he’s got multiple techs working for him in different areas. I’m now the In Home Mac tech for the Boston area. The main advantage of this for me is that I no longer have to worry about advertising those services. All the advertising and such wil be taken care of for me, so I just have to take care of the work when it comes in. This is just about a perfect arrangement for me as I can focus on selling the services that I’m actually good at selling and still have work to do with the services I’m good at but can’t sell well.

I’m pretty confident that this change will, in the next several months, lead to me bringing in a lot more busines than I have been. Especially as I’ve already got a pretty good business model for the web development side of things. It’s pretty rare to find people who are both good designers and good programers. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it, but what most people don’t realize is that both skill sets are necessary for functional websites. In general, I’ve found that web designers tend to do the designing and then either muddle through with what little programming skills they have or get a friend or relative who knows more programming than them to do it on the side. This works for a while but tends not to be a very scalable model for a number of reasons. First, someone who’s doing web development on the side can often make time to get one project done, but they just can’t do it for project after project because they have other things to worry about. Second, it’s usually not reasonable for that person to quit their day job and do web development full time because a single web designer or small web design firm isn’t likely to generate enough work to justify a full time developer. So I have an advantage here. I have as much time as I need to dedicate to web development. On top of that, I have enough time to fine more web designers to partner with. The more designers I work with, the more steady the work coming in will be. Currently I’m working with two different small design firms which brings in decently steady work, and I’m always on the lookout for more designers and small design firms that might be interested in hiring me to do their development. This basically ends up being win-win for everyone as several different designers get to have a developer without needing to hire one full time, and I get to work full time as a developer without having to sell my soul to a big company.

My eventual plan now is to partner with enough designers and design firms that I can’t actually handle all the work myself. At that point I can bring in more developers in the same way that Matt has brought in more Mac techs and my business can really start to grow not only in size and revenue, but in the variety and quality of the services that I can offer. There’s only so much I can do myself, but when I start bringing in more people I’ll be able to add their unique skills to the services I can offer and I’ll be able to delegate work out in a logical way to improve the workflow, efficiency, and quality. I’m not quite to the point of needing to do that yet, but I think I’m on track to get there. And I’ve already got a few other people in mind to bring into the dy/dx tech web design fold including an SEO specialist and another general developer who’s good with Ruby on Rails.

Apple has surprised me again and really come through. Apparently it’s no longer the case that all laptop repairs are sent in; they now do about 95% (according to the woman at the Genius Bar that I talked to) right in the stores. They had the right size hard drive in stock, so I was in and out in less than an hour with a fully functional MacBook. Also, for the first time since the Genius Bar concept really took off (it took about a year, really) I didn’t even have to wait in a long line for service and even got in before my scheduled appointment. So apparently they’ve done something to vastly improve the appointment system.

On top of all that, since they had to replace the hard drive I got a fresh OS install. And the version they installed is 10.4.8. Ordinarily I’d be a little annoyed about the forced downgrade, but in this case I’m rather happy about it. I’ve been one of the unfortunate few who’s been experiencing AirPort problems in 10.4.10 (although I was only having intermittent dropped connections and not kernel panics like some people), so I’m leaving it at that version for now. Hopefully the 10.4.11 update that should be available in the next day or two will fix those problems, otherwise I’ll just wait for Leopard to update.

In other news, the Indian place in the food court at the CambridgeSide Galleria is extremely disappointing. At first I thought their prices were ridiculous. Then I saw how huge their portions were and though the prices might actually be fair. Then I tasted the food… Needless to say I won’t be going back (not that I often eat at mall food courts anyway).

I’ve been getting bad about updating regularly, and I’m trying to fix that. I have, however, been very busy lately. Here’s a quick rehash of what’s happened since my last post:

1. It turned out that the work I was expecting to have to do while I was in Illinois ended up getting pushed back by my client. So I never really had to test out my Parallels/Gentoo/Lighttpd/SQLite setup for web development (although I did some very basic tests that worked out just fine).



2. I got to meet Jessi’s sister’s new daughter, and basically my niece, Maura, just hours after she was born at around midnight on Sept. 28. Here are some pictures of her meeting her aunt Jessi, her grandma, her great-grandma, her mom, and, of course, me, all taken on my iPhone (the one to the right is my favorite of the many funny faces she made).
3. Went to the wedding of some of Jessi’s friends from home.
4. Flew back to Boston.
5. Had a whopping 4 or so days before some other friends came from Illinois to visit us, and then got to show them around Boston and expose them to some of our favorite things here (like G’vanni’s in the North End and Tacos Lupita in Porter Square). Though in the process it finally dawned on me that since we have a car now the Providence and Manchester airports are within range so we can actually fly on SouthWest and save some money when we go places that JetBlue won’t take us (they flew SouthWest into Providence).
6. Finally sold the Mercedes. I didn’t get quite as much for it as I wanted, but I still got enough that it was worthwhile having repaired and sold it rather than just junking it when it died.
7. Finally got that project that I had expected to be working on while I was in Illinois. Ended up having to do the whole thing in two days (ah, the joys of sub-contracting).
8. I lived out my 9,125 day, remarkable only in that it’s a multiple of 365. This was the same day we ate at G’vanni’s, and afterwards got pastries from the North End’s Modern Pastry.
9. I put off development of my WiFi database site in favor of a different project. This one will be less flashy, but will have much greater personal utility. It will also probably be useful for a lot of other people too, so my plan is to make it a hosted (free) service and open it up for anyone to use. I’m considering the possibility of maybe some premium features that you have to pay for, but that will have to wait.
10. My MacBook, which I’ve had for approximately 17 months now, died. I’m fairly positive it’s a hard drive failure as when it happened there was no kernel panic or any other sort of error message. The computer was still running, but any processes that were trying to access the hard drive locked up. Then the hard drive started making a pleasant clicking sound. Upon attempting to reboot I sill get the starting chime, but then it just goes to a white screen and clicks. This all seems consistent with a hard drive failure as when it happened most of the system would have been running in RAM and so unaffected, and the startup chime is stored in firmware and so also unaffected.

And that brings us to today. Currently I’m waiting until it’s time to head over to the Apple Store in the CambridgeSide Galleria to have them look at my MacBook. The problem is such that they’ll spend a few minutes looking it over and then tell me that they’ll have to send it in to the service center for repairs (they only do work on desktop locally, laptops are always shipped out). It should be a fairly quick repair though, so I should only be without my laptop for probably a week at the most. Fortunately I bought AppleCare for it, so the repair will be free.

I’m also working on designing a home theater setup for the condo. Currently the only screen we have to watch the few tv shows and movies we watch is my monitor. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, as it’s a Dell 24″ LCD with greater than HD resolution (1920×1200), but it does mean that we have to sit in the office on our desk chairs which isn’t as comfortable as it could be. The other day we tried moving my computer out to the living room to see if the screen was big enough to use as a tv in there. It isn’t quite, but it wasn’t actually all that bad. However since my MacBook just died I had to move the computer back into the office so that it would actually be useable. So now I’m planning out what will become our home theater system. I’m fairly positive that for the screen I’ll be getting the Olevia 342i, a 42″, 720p tv without an HDTV tuner. This may seem lacking, but it isn’t. At about 8-10′ away, the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 42″ screen won’t really be noticeable. And we dont’ need a built-in HDTV tuner, because I’m going to be using the TV with a SiliconDust HDHomeRun. The HDHomeRun is a much better choice for us becaues it’s a dual-tuner device, and it’s compatible out of the box with MythTV, which is what I plan on using to manage our video library and for it’s DVR capabilities. That leaves only the question of how to implement the MythTV system. I’ve narrowed that down to two options:

1. A Mac Mini. Actually, that’s a vast oversimplification. The Mini would only be running the MythTV front-end. The back-end would be running on a Linux box. I already have a suitable machine to use for the Linux box (I built it a couple years ago as a gaming rig, and it’s more than up to the task), I just need to reformat the drives and install MythTV. So the only cost there would be the Mac Mini (about $600) and the drives for storage ($330 for a 1 TB drive to start). So the total initial cost of that MythTV setup would be around $1000.
2. A TVease Zodiac. I’d get the $900 base model, because I don’t need/want the analog tuners and it’s cheaper to use the HDHomeRun than to get a model with HD tuners; also it’s cheaper to add more storage myself. This ends up being a little costlier, but significantly easier in terms of setup and usage. It also reduces the number of components the system has by allowing me to put the MythTV front-end and back-end in the same box without significantly reducing my storage capacity (it has room for three drives, so a maximum of 3 TB, but I can always add external drives as well so the maximum storage capacity is essentially infinate). I probably wouldn’t get a new HD for it right off the bat. Even though it will only come with a 250 GB drive, I can point it to the 500 GB RAID that I currently store my digital video collection on over the network so I think it will be sufficient for now. Of course eventually I’d probably want to put another TB or more into it. The total initial cost of this MythTV setup is also about $1000, but much easier to accomplish.

So I have to figure out which setup I want to use. The Mac Mini will look better, but the Zodiac doesn’t look that bad, and the eventual plan is to recess it into the wall anyway which will look pretty cool no matter which I use. I’m really leaning towards the Zodiac right now, but I want to do a little more research before I make any sort of decision like that. In the mean time, I can at least get the TV and see about hacking it into the current setup (perhaps using KnoppMyth on my PC (the reason I’m not going to just go with a plan like that is it won’t look as good and will be loud, should be perfectly fine for a temporary setup though).

This will be my second post written from my iPhone. I’m currently in the middle of nowhere in Illinois at Jessi’s mom’s house. We’ll be here until the 30th, which means I’ll have some work to do on the trip. On my previous visits here there was always a wifi network available from one of the neighbors who was kindly sharing his sattelite Internet connection with the rest of the town (it’s a very small town and they can’t get cable or DSL out here). Sadly it turns out that someone had been using up his monthly bandwidth allotmen so that’s no longer available to me. Hence me writing this entry from my iPhone.

Fortunately, I came prepared to work without Internet access. I had planned to do some work on the flight over here, so before I left I created a new Parallels virtual machine and installed a copy of Gentoo Linux in it, and set up a lighttpd server with PHP and Python running in FastCGI as well as SQLite and MySQL so I could do both PHP and Django development without having to only guess at whether or not it would actually work (technically this wasn’t necessary for Django since it comes with a lightweight development server built-in, and OS X comes with SQLite installed standard, but I figures I might as well).

I also tried setting up Tinyproxy on my iPhone so I could share my iPhone’s EDGE connection with my laptop for browsing, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be working even though I had no problem with it at home.

The end result is that, even though I have no real Internet access to speak of, I can still do my work. I can even keep in touch with everyone thanks to my iPhone and meebo, and, if the need were to arise, I could always set up an SSH tunnel through my iPhone and get SFTP access to my webserver (or any other, for that matter) that way. So even way out here where they don’t even have DSL, I’m still fully connected. This is one of those times where, even though I spend pretty much all my time working with technology, I’m still completely amazed by it.

Now, I believe, it’s time for dinner.

My first Django project is now live. Sadly it’s not a very interesting one, just a re-develop of the dy/dx tech website. It looks exactly the same as before, but it’s now powered by Django. This doesn’t really offer any advantages at the moment, but it will. For example, pretty much all the data on the site is currently stored in a database which means it will be extremely simple to add, remove, or change any of the services show in the services tab. Not that I really expect that to change any time soon (although you may notice that the services tab is the one part of the website that has changed; I’ve added a few, and consolidated some redundant ones), but the principle is sound.

More importantly having the site powered by Django will make it much easier for me to add some new features/online services that I’ve been thinking about for a while. The first one will definitely be a portfolio tab. I’ve worked on a pretty good number of websites in the year or so since I started this business, and I really should have a portfolio on my website to show off my work. I’d also like to put up a clients tab where I can list my clients and, if I’m lucky, get some testimonials to put up there as well. Then of course there’s the WiFi database that I’ve been talking about for a while, that will have it’s own subdomain, but I’ll give it its own tab as well. Hopefully now that the whole site is done with Django and I’m a little more familiar with how the framework works development of those things and others will go a little faster.

A little while ago I posted about an idea to create a good online database of places that offer WiFi. My motivation for this is that, as I have no real office, it’s often nice to work from a cafe or something like that. This is especially true during the summer as those places usually also have air-conditioning that I can take advantage of as well. Additionally, while there are any number of sites that claim to fulfill that purpose, none of them do a good job at it. I’ve been unhappy with every such site I’ve tried for pretty much as long as WiFi has existed. So now I’m going to do something about it.

This project is also a good opportunity for me to learn some more web development skills. Up till now the web development that I’ve done has been almost entirely in PHP. It’s also been coded 100% by hand. I like doing things that way because it means that I know exactly how everything is working under the hood, and have no qualms whatsoever about going in and changing things. Now, however, I’d like to expand a little beyond that. I’m comfortable enough with the way web programming works that I no longer feel the need to be completely in control of everything; it’s time for some shortcuts. Fortunately, frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django exist to provide exactly those sorts of shortcuts. Being, as I am, a huge fan of Python I’ve decided, with a little input from Jesse Legg that I’m going to create my WiFi database site with Django (I’ve got another project planned for the near future that I plan on using as an opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails as well).

I’ve just finished installing Django on my web server, so development for the WiFi project will be beginning shortly. The way I see it, the key to creating a successful site as opposed to the ones that have existed previously, is to make sure that all the relevant information that people might want (information such as available bandwidth, number of outlets available to customers, whether or not you need to purchase a coffee to get a code before you can use the internet, &c) is available, make sure it’s presented in an easy to use way, and, most importantly, make sure that the list is complete enough and the site good enough that users actually want to contribute. This will never work if I just try and make a list of cafes with WiFi that I maintain myself; it absolutely needs to allow for contribution by users. People need to not only be able to find out that the Boloco in Davis Square has free WiFi, they also need to be able to add the Grand Prix Cafe to the list as well if it’s not already there. They need to be able to let other visitors to the site know if they’ve had problems connecting to the network with Vista or OS X or Linux, or if the staff at that particular cafe tends to be rude with people who spend ‘too much’ time using the WiFi. There’s a whole lot of information out there that someone looking for a place to get WiFi could use, and the only way to make sure that all that information is available is with some sort of community participation.

Basically, this is probably going to turn out to be a pretty large project. It will be interesting to see if and how it grows. It will also be interesting to see how much data needs to already be on the site before it hits that critical mass point and becomes useful enough for people to want to add more data on their own. It should be fun.

According to The Somerville News, Somerville is being considered as a site for a new soccer stadium. This stadium would become home turf for the New England Revolution. At the moment, I have mixed feelings about this.

There would certainly be advantages to having a sport stadium in Somerville. For one, having it would bring a lot of attention and money to the city. Just the fact that we’re being considered for the stadium I’m sure will help raise people’s awareness of Somerville which, in turn, will probably bring some increased investment in the city. Not to mention the tax revenues on everything that’s sold at a stadium, parking, and incidentals bought by fans while they’re here. And certainly Somerville has a large soccer fan base. There’s even a grocery store called ‘Gol!!!’ on Somerville Ave., not too far from our condo. Obviously a sports stadium can be a big money maker for the city.

But there are also negatives to this. First and foremost, we’re basically in Boston here, and Boston sports fans are …an interesting bunch. I don’t know how much overlap there is between Revolution fans and Sox fans, but just ask anyone who lives in Kenmore Sq. how they like their neighborhood on game nights. I sure wouldn’t want to see the same thing happen to whatever neighborhood in Somerville gets the stadium when the Revolution has a home game (and I’m sure the people who live there have even stronger feelings about it). There’s also the question of where the funding is going to come from. A whole lot of professional sports stadiums are subsidized by the cities they’re in, and I really don’t have any desire to pay more taxes just so that we can have a soccer stadium. Then there’s the issue of space. Somerville isn’t that large of a city, and unless they’re going to pave over some park land, building this thing will require demolishing some existing houses and/or businesses. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but what if the people in the proposed spot don’t want to leave? Will the stadium simply go away, or will eminent domain be exercised to force them out? And what about traffic? I don’t think there’s a single city in Massachusetts with well designed roads. Can we handle the influx of traffic that a stadium will bring? Or is Somerville going to have to basically shut down the roads to everyone but fans on game nights like certain areas of Boston?

So, like I said, I have mixed feelings on this. My general inclination is that that bad would outweigh the good, but I don’t really know enough about the issues to make any sort of real determination. Seems like it would be a good topic for a municipal referendum, if such a thing is possible.

Modern diesels are coming to the US. As I’ve predicted and hoped for, the availability of low sulfur diesel fuel in the US (which, I might add, is what we put in our car) is at long last spurring the introduction of new diesel US models beyond the heavy duty truck range. Toyota, Honda, BMW, the Chrysler group, Nissan, Audi, and GM all plan to release new diesels in the next few years, and Volkswagen apparently plans on selling diesel versions of the Jetta and new Beetle starting next year. I’m hoping that some of the other European manufacturers such as Peaugeot, Renault, and Citroen end up coming back to US shores as well—more competition is always a good thing—although at the moment I believe only Fiat has plans to do so.

It will be interesting to see what this does in terms of the ‘we can’t be more efficient’ line the US manufacturers have been giving us for years. In the course of one year we could easily see the maximum fuel efficiency of non hybrid models jump from something like 30 mpg to closer to 70 mpg. Something tells me that we won’t however, as the US manufacturers are going to want to slowly edge towards their true maximum efficiency at a snails pace. Hopefully the introduction of the diesel Jetta, which in Europe gets something like 50 mpg, will push them to do better. At any rate, it should be an interesting couple of years in the US automotive industry as the amazing advancements in efficient and clean diesel technology battle it out with the preconceptions about diesel most Americans formed in the 80s.