Jennlog

While exploring the hammockverse earlier today, I decided to interrupt my laptop reading to look over some of my older blog posts. It seems that my first blog post was made on Thursday April 5, 2007 at 6:53pm.

In this year, Wordpress claims the following statistics:

There are currently 119 posts and 18 comments (not including the IntenseDebate comments), contained within 51 categories. Now I don’t remember making a post nearly every third day, but who knows — I could be a sleepblogger.

I hope to at least double the first two metrics in Jennlog’s second year.

Wow, so this is my first post in March. I’ve been meaning to post but I’ve been busy with Statuspalooza and a number of other things this month.

I ended last month in California, working on a contract in Sacramento. I returned to Boulder on March 1.

The next week was a very busy event week for Tech/Start-up folks in Boulder with Open Coffee, Silicon Flatirons’ IP Law Panels at CU and the NewTech Meetup all occuring on Tuesday, then the Tech Cocktail event happening at The Foundry on Thursday.

On March 13th, the Boulder County Business Report published an article about the Boulder TechBootstrap project Patti Miller and I have been developing.

Statuspalooza took a fair bit of my attention and energy this month, because not only did I need a new work visa, but I needed a new passport. With the exception of a very grumpy US immigration agent (who felt I had misrepresented my experience to the US government in 2000 and therefore demanded that I re-substantiate my claim to work in the US on this application or be denied entry), it all went very smoothly.

Statuspalooza Tour 2008:

1. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Arrive Toronto
2. Tues March 18, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Photos taken
3. Wed March 19, 2008 - Morning: Passport Application submitted
4. Thurs March 20, 2008 - Afternoon: Passport Picked Up
5. Mon March 24, 2008 - Afternoon: US Visa Application Approved
6. Mon March 24, 2008 - Evening: Depart for Denver

I spent the week at my parents’ place. It was nice to relax for a while and visit over Easter, which I haven’t done in years.

There’s a Yallery update that’s about half finished that is meant to standardize our css implementation. I hope to create a more formal document structure that will enable an easier fix for Windows browser issues (mainly font sizing and layers). I’ve also spent some time looking into IE6 fixes and workarounds and concluded that there will never be an IE6-compatible version of Yallery, so upgrade your old nasty Windows browser.

Lastly, Billie the neighbor cat has gone missing. He hasn’t been by to visit in over a month and a half, so it’s been pretty lonely without my keyboard-hogging head-butting bud around.

Last night, as we crossed from Nevada to California, I noticed Frontier’s map go a little twilight zone-ish.

going 0mph 881,089 ft above california

A few months ago I was excited to learn that Denver Airport’s WiFi was free.

On my second visit to this service, they appear to break the Web by encapsulating websites within a Sub-frame so they can display persistent text ads from Google.

This framing not only obfuscates the actual location of a web page (It seems stuck on the initial request location and never varies from that page address), but it destroys almost every webpage dashboard layout I attempted to view.

Denver WiFi forced frame breaks Yallery

Even the Yallery pop-up window was corrupted. This negated the only solution we could find that would allow people with 1024×768 sized displays, but on browsers crowded with toolbars and sidebars to display Yallery.

Cookie? What Cookie?

This “man in the middle” encapsulation also kills IP-based identification as a result of proxying the request and removing all state.

Blah.

This post answers the questions I was pondering in my Foreign Entrepreneurs and US Visas post last November.

In November, I was working full-time on Yallery dev, writing our pitch and talking with angels and VCs with one eye focused on fundraising and the other towards applying for an Entrepreneur (investor) visa as my TN-1 visa status expired in March 2008. I was also entertaining the notion of returning to Canada after nine years in the People’s Republic of Boulder if the fundraising and visa situation couldn’t be worked through.

Well, a lot has changed since November.

A couple weeks ago I created Boulder Tech Bootstrap with Patti Miller — a Wiki + Forum community resource and information sharing site for people starting and operating new tech companies in the Boulder-Denver region.

On the Yallery front, Michael and I removed the “Invite Wall” — and now anyone can view the art or create an account and share their own art (my personal Yallery Collector Dashboard is here: http://yallery.com/jennr). I’m considering it to be in a soft launch state while we continue development.

After a lot of great feedback, I accepted that Yallery was not going to interest investors until there was a demonstrable membership base and revenue (no matter how much I believe in the value and novelty of art relationships). Yallery is still a “project” and the revenue is still a far ways away — removing the Invite Wall will improve the membership base situation.

I also accepted that I could no longer afford to support myself while I worked full-time on Yallery and started to put out my feelers for consulting work. And so, next week, I start some product development & advisory consulting for a company just outside of Sacramento. It’s a short contract that may go longer-term if we gel.

What this all means is I’ll be re-upping my TN-1 for a year due to my new Management Consulting gig in California and will be sticking around in Boulder while I work part-time on Yallery.

And now that this has been sorted out, I can set some milestones for the year:

My Yallery milestones for this year will be to get it working correctly on Windows browsers, implement the revenue generation components of Yallery, grow the membership and start operating the marketplace features.

My professional milestones for this year will be to add the most value I can to my client’s products.

My personal milestones for this year will be to get out of debt, restart saving again and get out and enjoy friends, life and love more than I did while I was in startup mode.

It’s going to be a good year.

Lifelock,

No. I did not provide an “affiliate” with permission to sell you my email address.

Neither you or your “affiliate” bothered to authenticate the ownership of my email address after it was provided to you or them through fraudulent means. I dare you to prove that you or your “affiliate” acquired my email address from me.

This is the second time you have spammed me with this weak “You are receiving this email because you opted to receive messages from us or one of our affiliates” scam.

Stop.

Edited to add:

It appears as if some of their website “contact us” email addresses that I emailed with a request to stop spamming me the first time (and never received a reply or obviously any action) have added my email address to their personal “email deny” lists.

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–
<tami@lifelock.com>
(reason: 553 Sender is on user denylist (Mode: normal))
<member.services@lifelock.com>
(reason: 553 Sender is on user denylist (Mode: normal))

Irony.

At 10:30pm last evening, I pushed the 2-week effort known as “Public 1″ to production.

New in this revision is Search, the Visitor user, a new registration method, a new password recovery method, a new member directory method, a new public home, some ideas leading to a new private-user home and more than enough bug crunching to have me looking forward to bed right now.

There’s still a bunch (well, a bunch of bunches) to do, but it’s looking ok.

Yay us.

So I came home from a meeting yesterday afternoon to a notice taped to my front door:

I did a little exploring and realized that this house is a few doors away from me:

It should be quite the show as they round the corners and get to the power/cable/telco lines running across the street.

My neighbors suggested that the new owner is having the house moved to his property out of town rather than rip it down like everyone else — Now that’s a commitment to recycling.

I was walking by my front tree today and I saw one of the squirrels going to town on one of the stumps left by the tree guys a few months ago.

I then noticed that all the stumps left on the tree were running (literally dripping) with maple sap.

Welcome to Spring Thaw in Boulder.

At the last Boulder OpenCoffee Club meeting, Patti Miller suggested an idea that would enable the Boulder tech start-up/bootstrap community to share resources online. We’ve been working on it steadily since then and will be launching the site as a Wiki+Forum at this morning’s meeting.

The address is: http://boulder.techbootstrap.com