Matt O’ Rama

If we were smart, we’d get somebody to put this image on acid-free parchment and into a Dead Sea Scroll jar someplace, for the sake of our remote descendants. It’s not just any civilization that can take candid photos of the bottom of Jupiter.

As usual, Bruce Sterling has just the right thing to say about this. And yes, it’s a picture of the south pole of the largest planet in our solar system. Hooray for humanity.

For a great speech I’m about to listen for the second time, download Bruce’s SXSW festival speech [mp3 link]. It’s a great, wide-ranging look at the world.

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f)

This is a great article. I guess it’s about people a little older than me (35-ish versus 27 for me) and being NY Magazine it’s about people who are more trendy than I’m familiar with but it’s interesting. I’m always amazed when I see or hear about trends that both describe me and point out just how out of it I am. I own an ipod, but have never heard of Bloc Party. I like the New Pornographers but don’t know who Neko Case is. I wear jeans and tshirts but I bought the Decepticons Transformers shirt I’m wearing to work today years ago because I actually liked the Transformers, not because it’s ironic. I’m wearing jeans and Vans but the only way I would pay $250+ for pants is if they came with a supermodel to put them on me every morning and tell me how good I looked in them.

A lot of the stuff in this article seems pretty lame, actually. I listen to my music around Allison and she knows who Johnny Cash is (for the record she likes Walk The Line the best) and recognizes The Hold Steady but I sure hope she gets her own tastes and we don’t like the same stuff. I think it’s only right if the next generation makes up their own stuff and pushes past their parents. I’ll be very disappointed if I like the same stuff as the kids in 10 years. That’ll mean they haven’t progressed, not that I’m a super cool “alternadad”. I’m glad we got Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and lots of rap that my parents didn’t like. They listen to country for pete’s sake, what do they know. :) I don’t want to be skateboarding with Sam, I want him to be hover-jet-skating around his old man and laughing at me for being old and lame. Parents shouldn’t try to keep up with their kids because it’s cool. Parents should do their own thing and if that means *shock! horror!* you aren’t hip and don’t know who the hot new group is, that’s okay.

Never trust a man who has read only one book.

This is good advice in general but the character is talking specifically about people whose entire worldview is based on their particular religious text.

Two quick things that gave me a serious case of eye-widening this morning.

On the latest Gilmor Gang, Michael Arrington of TechCruch said that the new news site NewsVine is “probably only burning $100,000 a month”. Jeeminy Christmas. My friend might have hooked me up with a free hosting option for my new site and I’m extremely happy to save that $60 a month.

TechCrunch also has a post about a new Web2.0 parenting site called Minti. The site just launched and is basically an old-school advice site with Web2.0 goodness and Ajax baked in. He mentions that they’ve raised $1.6 million in initial seed financing. Cripes. That’s a lot of freaking money, especially for a site that’s just barely out of the gate.

Sometimes I think that all this stuff about how cheap it is to start a new startup is only cheap from the perspective of all these guys who know VCs and are older with lots of money in the bank. I’d love to prove that somebody like me can launch a site, build a community, and get something real going without having access to all the stuff these big companies have. I’m a big fan of being ignorant so I can not fall into the traps people who know more fall into but I’m hoping that I’m being ignorant, not stupid.

I’m pretty close to going live though so we’ll find out. :)

Tags: grommes, business, startup, money

I just bought the server for the Web Thing. It was $650 after shipping, $600 for the parts. I think I did a good job of picking semi-inexpensive parts without going cheap and sacrificing performance. I got Fedora Linux installed over the weekend and initial unscientific testing (using Folding@Home) shows that I got a very nice machine for the money. Parts list after the post. So my real-money expenses for the project so far is $600. If I decide to do a real LLC (I still need to talk to some people about that option versus just doing a sole-proprietor business) that’ll be another $200 or so through Quicken’s MyCorporation.com. So under $1000 in real “just get going” costs. I’ve got a hookup for some temporary bandwidth for beta testing purposes and I found what looks like a good place to host the server for cheap ($60 a month). I’m sure I’m missing things that a bigger company would do with more money but I’m going super cheap and I’ll learn as I go. One of my favorite phrases is from the director Robert Rodriguez. He says that having a lot of money means you can point the “Money Hose” at problems to wash them away. With no Money Hose, you have to be creative and learn as you go.

This post on the 37Signals weblog is a breakdown of costs that a company called Carson Systems incurred launching their web product, DropSend. It’s cool to see somebody break this stuff down like this but it’s also a bit discouraging. He spent $45K on his stuff. There are differences though. He paid other people to do all the development and I’m doing mine myself. He also pays $900 a month for a company to host the server and build the infrastructure which I don’t need right now (if I have to build a big infrastructure at some point that’ll be a good problem). His product is way different than my site will be so I can take comfort in the fact that I don’t need $45K to get my stuff launched.

If I get this thing launched I’d like to be in the position to encourage other programmers to develop their own products. We always hear how you need $50,000 to get anything going and that’s just not feasible for a lot of people. It just isn’t. If I have 1/10th of that in the bank I think “I’m rich!” I think it keeps a lot of people from doing something they want, and that’s not right. I can get a ton of advice from the net and from people I know. I can register a company, shop for hosting, do all the stuff I think you need to do to get started, all for very little money. The resources are out there. Of course I’m just learning all this stuff right now myself so I don’t know what I don’t know but if it works it’ll be great. In six months or a year I’d love to be able to give a talk about what I learned and how I made this work for no money. I’d love to encourage more programmers to strike out on their own and make their own products happen for themselves.

Server parts list (everything bought from Newegg.com except the case):
Motherboard: ASUS A8N-VM CSM – $79
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice
RAM: CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB
Hard drives: Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA2 160GB
Case: 2U rackmount with 400w power supply

I just realized this is even more dumb because fedexkinkos.com auto-redirects to fedex.com with no 5 second timeout.

Working on my own site I’ve suddenly become very picky and judgemental about other site’s failings. This is so easy, why not just do the easy thing?