November 14, 2008
I think I’m suffering from entrepreneurial-wannabe syndrome.
What is entrepreneurial-wannabe syndrome? It’s an affliction that targets people (mostly engineers, and engineers-at-heart) that starts with them getting a cool idea to solve a problem and ends with crushing psychological defeat. The progression of the disease goes something like this:
- Identify a problem: “Gosh, it really would be nice if I could do X with widget Y”.
- Think of a solution: “Hey, you know, you could add Z to widget Y to do X, let me google and see if someone’s already done it.”. Healthy, normal people stop here.
- Start actually designing a solution: “Well, part Z could be crafted such that it fits into widget Y like so…”. Healthy engineers stop here.
- Image turning solution into a real business: “Hey, I could make Z. It wouldn’t be THAT hard, and maybe I can make a little money on the side.”. Danger zone.
- Actually researching patents: “Dude! no one’s patented Z yet!”. Real danger. Have a beer. You just didn’t look hard enough.
- Start building your prototype: “Hey, hand me that wrench”. See, now you’re wasting real time and resources on this, you need help.
- Think seriously about a business plan, and try and sell your friends on the idea: “..and you could sell it through a channel, the the total number of employees would stay low…”. Stop. Just.. stop.
- Discover that company A already came up with your idea and it’s been on the market for B number of years, you just didn’t find it: “*thunk*, *thunk*, *thunk*”. That’s the sound of your head hitting the table over and over again because you realize your actually thought you had a unique idea that could make you a) a little bit or b) a lot of money (choose a) or b) depending on the severity of the affliction). You realise you’ll be at your normal job, and not in some cushy CTO’s chair for the foreseeable future.
Why do I write about this? Because it’s happened to me twice in the past three months. I got it bad. Best cure I’ve found? Beer. And I’m not even a big drinker.
Want to hear the ideas? Well, I could explain them all to you, but it would probably be easier to just link to the websites of the companies that already do pretty much exactly what I envisioned. Congrats to them for having the ideas and executing on them. I guess I could take some solace in the fact that both companies were founded in 2007, so I’m only a year behind the truly creative people. But, well.. I think I need another beer.
Idea-Already-Done #1: Thinking about the Chevy Volt and the how I liked the idea of a plugin-hybrid in general, I realised my lack of a garage would mean I’d need some sort of safe and secure outside outlet next to my driveway or on my street. Put it behind a cipher or RFID lock keyed to a fob on your key chain. Add some monitoring to the outlet, and you can measure how much you’re spending. Then scale the idea up, and sell charging stations with metered output to office and apartment buildings, where managers could charge their tenants for the amount used. Hook it up to a charge card reader and sell it to parking garages to have people pay there. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this already? Would have to move fast though, because the Volt’s due on 2010…
…Of course, the Tesla Roadster’s here now, which is why a former employee of theirs got together with some silicon valley veterans and started CoulombTech, which does pretty much exactly what I just described. Founded 2007.
Idea-Already-Done #2: Much less ambitious. I wanted a simple way to play chess with my dad and/or friends online. So why not a simple, chess focussed web site site with some AJAX boards and play-by-email options? Throw in some simple tournaments and peer rankings, some GNUChess-backed AI, and put a few simple ads, and you have a niche product that could attract a loyal following. Keep the interface clean and simple so you don’t scare off older players. It could be fun to build. It would never make millions but might provide a bit of extra spending cash…
…for the makers of Chess.com, Founded 2007
On the bright side, I now know a little more javascript then I did, and a lot more about 1960’s era patents on outdoor lockable power outlet covers, and ammeters.
Maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll come up with an idea that hasn’t already been thought of. And that, I think, it symptom #9: Not giving up. Maybe a social networking site of business plan ideas…. wait, someone pass me a beer.
Anyone have their own entrepreneurial-wannabe experiences to share?
Posted by john under General | Comments (3)
November 2, 2008
I’ve been toying some with our finances lately and I figure it’s about time I started tracking exactly where our money is going. Most people use Quicken or MS Money for this, but as I run Linux those are out. I could maintain a spreadsheet, but I know I’ll never manually enter everything. And every time I try and use GNUCash, a baby kitten cries. KMyMoney is only marginally better. And neither of them support automatic downloads from my banks.
Enter the new wave of free, web-based personal finance trackers. Most of these sites contain back-ends which screen-scrape your bank’s website and log in periodically to download your account history. They give you charts and graphs of your transactions over time. Very useful information to have. They do NOT allow you to actually -do- any banking through them (i.e., no transfers or whatever). But they’re quite useful for tracking where your money is going.
My requirements are simple:
- Free
- Support for all my banks and credit cards, including my small credit union
- Barring the above, support for OFX or QFX/QIF file uploads
- Support for 401K, mortgage, student, and car loans a major plus
My findings so far have been mixed.
Mint
Mint was the first tracker I tried. Mint has a very slick user interface, and has some really nice features. It also supported at least one of my 401K’s, and supposedly both my mortgages (one always said ‘Experiencing an error, try again later’). However, It didn’t support my main bank, a small federal credit union, and does NOT allow manual account creation and/or manual file history uploads of OFX/QIF files. Without support for my main bank, the site is pretty useless for me, as it won’t even see my paycheck every month. I filed a request to add my bank and my bank’s credit cards, but I was told it would probably be a while. I kept my account for a while but then deleted it. If all your banks are supported, Mint is something you should try, but if not, steer clear.
Quicken Online
Quicken Online I had high hopes for. It used to cost $2.99/month, but was supposed to be free starting in October. But, when I went to sign up, it took me to a shopping card saying that the first 3 months were free, but then $2.99 a month after that. That’s bizarre, they are supposed to be free all the time. So I ‘removed’ the $2.99 from my cart, and it let me log in anyway. Not a good start.
Like Mint, there’s no way to open a ‘manual’ account and upload OFX files containing your history, so you’re stuck with whatever ‘they’ support. They supported my funky current 401K (through Administaff, Mint did not support this), but didn’t support my other normal 401K (American Funds, Mint did). They supported one of my mortgages, but not the other. But they DID support my credit union, it said so right in the list! Of course, when it tried to connect it gave me an error. I strongly suspect that their ’script’ for my credit union hadn’t been updated in two years since my bank redid their website for greater security. Again, useless to me. I suspected much more from a site backed by Quicken. Another bug report, and after three weeks of back and forth over email with tech support, I was able to log onto my credit union.
So now I have half my mortgages, half my 401Ks, and my main checking account. But they didn’t support my credit union’s credit card, which I use for most of my purchases. Finally, I gave up here too, and deleted my quicken online account.
Yodlee MoneyCenter
Yodlee seemed promising, but, like the other two would not let you create a manual account and upload OFX files. It turns out that Mint actually uses Yodlee to do all their accounts, so all the non-supported accounts I had on Mint were still a problem with Yodlee. So, once again, I was forced to delete my account.
Wesabe
Wesabe is very promising. Wesabe is the first site I used that supported creating your own accounts and manually uploading history; meaning that even if they didn’t support my credit union, I could download my history from the bank and upload it to Wesabe. Wonderful!. Not only that, it comes with a Firefox extension that will record a web macro of you going to your bank’s website and downloading your history, and will automatically run that in the background of your firefox instance periodically to “automatically” upload your account data. This way, your account and password are stored on your computer, not their servers. It’s frankly, brilliant. They also allow you to download ofx files of your account history.
I quickly got my accounts set up that were supported natively, and then manually created my credit union accounts for my checking, savings, and visa card. Most things worked great. There’s a glitch with my bank’s website which won’t allow the firefox plugin to work, but I can still manually upload the OFX files periodically. I went through and tagged all my transactions, and was instantly able to see where my money was going through the interactive flash chart.
The only downside is that Wesabe only supports savings, checking, and credit card accounts. There is no support for 401K accounts, mortgages, loans, or other types of accounts. By allowing checking and savings accounts, you can at least track payments to these other loan accounts, you just can’t keep track of overall balances.
Wesabe includes some slick little flash charts and graphs which you can customize to show where your money is going and when. The simple ‘earnings vs. spending’ chart shown right below your accounts gives you a good idea when you’re overspending, and why. There’s also a community aspect to Wesabe, with discussion groups about various financial matters, and offers from sponsors which may help you save more money.
Wesabe is the best site I’ve used, and the one I’m most likely to continue using. There is one more site I tried, however…
Geezeo
Geezeo is also promising. Like Wesabe, it allows you to have manual accounts, making it actually useful to people with smaller banks. It also seems to support a much wider range of banks to begin with. Amazingly, it also supports 401K accounts, mortgages, and loans. It’s the only site I found which could handle all of my accounts plus all my wife’s accounts. Seeing them all collected in one place really drives home the point that maybe we should consolidate some of these things. Since it has access to all of my accounts, it can give an accurate portrayal of exactly how much debt we’re in with our mortgage and student loans. It ain’t pretty.
Like Wesabe, you can tag all your transactions, and it seems to to a fairly good job of keeping track of what’s going on. But there are no nice charts like there are on Wesabe, the lack of those made it easy to see where money is going. In fact, the charts and history seemed to randomly be limited to only 30 days previous, even though I could see account history all the way back to the beginning of the year. It also seemed to have some issues with my manual account, whereby it was dropping the ‘current balance’ I had put in when I created the account. It also doesn’t seem to recognise transfers nearly as well as Wesabe. Geezeo is also big into ‘communities’ like Wesabe, but I wasn’t all that impressed with either site’s community content yet.
Basically, I really love the fact that that I can finally see ALL of my accounts in one place, but the interface still needs a lot of work, and I kept getting the feeling that things just weren’t right on the site.
So, after the past few weeks of looking at these sites, I’m still fighting it out between Wasebe and Geezeo. If Geezeo can fix up their interface and provide some more powerful charting features like Wesabe does, then I’ll completely commit to it. But overall, I think I like Wesabe better. The experience is much deeper and more polished, and just seems to work better. I just wish Wesabe would add support for mortgage and loan accounts (and, to a lesser extent, 401Ks).
Anyone have any other experiences?
(Updated to fix minor typos on 11/2)
Posted by john under General | Comments (5)
September 23, 2008
I’ve had the same old Linksys WRT54G router for years and it’s always been good to me. Recently I’ve noticed a bit of a problem though. I have several wireless devices, including several laptops, a Wii, and various wifi USB cards. They’ve all connected to the router fine. However, when my wife’s laptop is sending a lot of upload traffic over wireless (say, uploading pictures to Picasa or, now, doing a full backup to our local server), then my laptop drops off the network and can’t connect until her traffic is complete.
I have 4 current clients on the wireless network, and looking at my DHCP logs, my wife’s computer (broadcom b43) is uploading things just fine, and my mythtv box seems happy (zydas zd1211b), but both my laptop (atheros ath5k) and the wii (unknown) appear to be struggling to reconnect while her computer is generating soo much upload traffic. All computers run Ubuntu Hardy or Intrepid.
So, is it common for other computers to drop off the network if one wireless client is sending a lot of traffic? Why would I not have seen this before? I tried looking at the router’s QoS options but there really aren’t any for wireless devices. Options?
Posted by john under linux | Comments (2)
September 15, 2008
I’m not a car guy, and outside of oil changes, I don’t do much to my cars.
My family always bought GM cars growing up, and you inherit your family’s prejudices. My first car was the family’s old 1982 Chevy Chevette, It showed me that you don’t need much in a car to get a lot out of it. It also taught me to value and take care of an older car.
My next car was a 1994 Chevy Cavalier that I bought used with 30K on it. I tortured that car, driving it for 5 years all over the northeast US, going to college in northern NY, moving to MA, all the while driving down to see family in MD. The transmission starting acting up around 99K, as well as other problem, so I decided it might be time to move on.
I decided to buy a new 2002 Saturn SL2, even when most of my friends were laughing at me for buying domestic. It was the last year of the original Saturn. Today, my car turned 150K on my way home from work, and it’s had very few problems. Other than routine maintenance, I’ve spent less than $2500 total on repairs for this car. Not only that, it’s been paid off for years. Hell, I learned to drive stick on this car and it’s still on the original clutch. It’s been a good, cheap, reliable car, that still gets good gas mileage even though the engine isn’t quite as powerful as it was when it was new.
I’m not trying to deny that domestic cars have suffered in quality, in fact my wife and I just bought her a 2009 Carolla (after a bad experience with a used Hyundai Accent we bought 2 years ago). She has a bias for Toyota and Honda, and at under $16K, it was a good deal too.. that’s the problem with some domestic cars, when you can get a Carolla/Civic/Camry/Accord for that cheap, it’s hard not to get one. But I do believe there are some real diamonds in the rough, and if you haven’t considered a domestic car recently, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t at least look. And my friends? The only one I know of with a car as long as I’ve had mine bought a cheap Ford pickup.
With 150K, and the fact I commute 80 miles a day on the DC capitol beltway, I’ve started to wonder exactly how much more I can expect out of this car. I face the choice of taking on another monthly payment, or keep driving this car into the ground. If I find a good deal on a new Chevy Cobalt, say around $12K, I might just be tempted.
I have no idea what I’ll do, but no matter what happens, I’m happy with my Saturn.
Posted by john under General | Comments (1)
September 14, 2008
Just a short note talking about the various things I’m splitting my time doing when I’m not a) doing work, or b) enjoying my family life.
So, between work which keeps me very very busy, real life, and all these little projects, I think I’m set with free time for a while.
Posted by john under linux | Comments (0)
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