Adam McFarland

Back when we moved into our warehouse we were shocked to find out that there was no high speed internet available in our building.  When we contacted local high speed providers, we quickly realized that adding a line to the building would cost a ton (like either $4,000 down plus $140/mo, or $300/mo with a 5 year commitment).  So our somewhat risky solution was to get a Sprint Mobile Broadband card and use it in conjunction with the Linksys WRT54G3G router below.

We didn’t know how good of cell phone reception we’d get.  We didn’t know if the router would cover the entire warehouse.  We didn’t know if the speeds would be adequate.  We could have totally fallen flat on our face with this risk…but we didn’t.   I wanted to make sure I wrote a follow-up post so that everyone knew how well this has worked for us. This solution for internet service has absolutely been one of the better decisions we’ve made.  In fact, I plan on using this same setup at home (being able to “take your connection with you” by just pulling the card out of the router and putting it in your lapper is sooo cool).

Before I get into specifics, keep in mind that we are about 30 minutes outside of Albany in an area that resembles farm land more than the inner city…meaning we don’t get the worlds best cell phone coverage.  Also keep in mind that the warehouse is a steel framed building, which certainly isn’t helping reception either.  After almost five months of use, here are my thoughts:

• Connection speeds are fast - generally within the range that the broadband card states (600 kbps - 1.4 Mbps download and average upload speeds of 350 - 500 kbps).  Now if you’re uploading movies you aren’t going to like an upload speed of 350 kbps, but for our daily activities these speeds are more than enough.  The router certainly doesn’t prohibit you from getting the maximum available connection speed.
• Connection is strong.  Everywhere in the 5,300 sq-ft warehouse you get a full five-bar connection.  It’s nice to know you can move around and not lose a signal.  Again, being in a steel framed building you just never know what you’re getting.
• Downtime is minimal.  In five months, I’d say we’ve only had one day where we lost connection for a significant amount of time.  It was about 2 hours one morning.  Otherwise, just clicking a button on the router to disconnect / reconnect always solves the problem in less than a minute.  My home internet service is down more often than this is.
• There’s no slowdown when all four of use are connected at once.  These broadband cards aren’t necessarily made for this, so I was worried that the connection would lag or we’d get kicked off if there was too much combined uploading or downloading going on.  I’ve never noticed a difference whether there were five computers using it (our lappers + the shipping desktop) or just one.

In sum:  if you have a Sprint Mobile Broadband card you’d be nuts not to pick one of these up.  For us, trimming a $300/month expense down to a $60/month expense was huge.  Every penny adds up, and that $240 is money we can use to market our sites, pay other warehouse expenses, or pay our salaries.

We had what we thought was a great situation for our web hosting. One of George’s friends from college runs a small hosting company. The server we are on has only a few sites in addition to ours, is blazing fast (4 GB of RAM I believe), and extremely affordable. While the company was a one man operation, we were generally satisfied with the level of service. All in all, nothing to complain about.

Unfortunately on Friday night one of the nameservers (that he does not control) went down….it’s still down, causing Detailed Image to load sloooooow. We eventually learned that the company controlling the nameserver was recently sold and our server manager was going through hell trying to get in touch with the people who could fix it. Not his fault, but a cause for us to re-evaluate our situation.

We decided that our sites are too large now for this to be out of our control. The cost of a managed dedicated server is essentially negligible for what we’re doing in sales. Prior to this we didn’t have a compelling reason to move. Now we do, so we did. After spending quite a bit of time researching, we pulled the trigger on a managed dedicated server from Liquid Web.

The next few days I’ll be scrambling to migrate our sites. Not the way I really wanted to be doing this, but the end result will be more control in-house of something that’s critical to our business.

As for the lost sales: our business insurance covers e-commerce revenue caused by forces outside of our control, so we’re already starting the claims process to recoup some of the lost revenue. Once everything is up and running again we’ll be profusely apologizing to all of our customers and offering discounts & specials.

Should we have probably done this prior to now? I guess so. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty. The best we can do now is move forward and continue to put as many systems in place to prevent future issues.

Lately I’ve been realizing just how fast technology changes. In December I wrote an article about our company embracing the open source software alternatives:

So we came up with a plan. We would have a set of desktop workstations (one to start) that have the full Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (the $2,500 one) and Microsoft Office Professional 2007. Our laptops would then use the OSALT (open source alternative). Aside from that warm and fuzzy feeling you get from using great open source software, this move will save us thousands of dollars each year. We figure that 95%+ of tasks can be complete with the OSALT, but when we need to use the standard software for better performance or file compatibility we’ll have desktops at our disposal. The only way this really breaks down is if the 95% doesn’t hold up (in which case we’d probably buy a copy of the software needed for that individual) or if too many people *need* the desktops at one time.

In the comments Anthony from Xonatek and I had a great back-and-forth about taking our mentality a step further utilizing Google Apps and free web based software.  Ultimately, we didn’t change our plan at the time but the conversation left the thought in the back of my mind.

Just before we moved into the warehouse George’s computer died and we lost all of his data.  I personally was doing an OK job of backing up my files, but we didn’t yet have a company backup plan (something I planned on doing once we settled in).  The more I thought of it, the harder the idea of a backup plan became because we’re always on the move.  You can’t set your laptop to auto-backup at midnight if it’s in a different location each night at midnight.  What happens if it’s suspended or shut down?  If it backs up as soon as you boot up that could bother you and prevent you from performing a time-critical task.  If it skips the backup that defeats the purpose.

More and more I decided the route to go was not to back anything up, but to have everything stored on the web.  Aside from not needing to schedule and perform backups, you can also work from any internet-ready device at close to full capacity.  The downside of course is that if you have a slow internet connection many of the apps straight up suck.  We combat this by having the open source alternative installed on the hard drives on all of our computers.  We also still purchase software when necessary:  for example, Mike has a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 that isn’t really replaceable  with an open source alternative for the graphics work he does.  We also sort of killed the idea of a super duper master $5,000 PC - what’s the point when almost everything is online anyway?

Here’s how we have it set up:

• We use Google Apps for:
  • Email hosting through Gmail.  This is for our @pureadapt.com emails.  For the rest of the emails (sportslizard, iprioritize, tastefullydriven, etc) I use the mail fetcher to take a copy of each incoming email off of the server and put it in an appropriate folder.  It leaves the message on the server for me to download in Thunderbird (still my email client of choice), acting as a great auto-backup.  I also set it up so I can reply from any of those email accounts via Gmail if I’m on the road and don’t have access to my Thunderbird on my laptop.
  • Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations for our office suite.  We’ve already had quite a bit of great collaboration on some docs and spreadsheets that otherwise would have been emailed back and forth a bunch of times.  Far more useful than I anticipated.
  • Google Sites to replace our Wiki’s.  We have one wiki for just the owners that has critical info in it and a second wiki that employees will have access to that has all of the important processes (like how to pack and ship an order).
  • Google Calendar to manage our schedules.  We don’t use it much, but it’s an easy way to set up a meeting with everyone without having a big chain of emails back and forth.
  • The company start page where you can access all of these things.  I can’t over-emphasize how nice it is to have one login for everything.
  • The Remember the Milk plugin for the company start page as a shared task manager (ironically, I had someone email me the other day ripping Remember the Milk and saying iPrioritize was far better…maybe so, but iP doesn’t have a plugin like this…suppose that’s my fault…)
• Xdrive for storing other files like our Quickbooks backup, database backups, PDF files, PSD files, etc.

So far it’s going great.  The coolest part for me has been that it has opened up a whole new world of devices away from my laptop where I can work.  I went from working solely on my one powerhouse laptop (dual core processor, 2 gb ram, etc) to now sometimes using my desktop for its 22″ monitor when I need more space.  I even pulled the trigger on an ultra portable Eee PC for when I’m on the go.  For $399 I figured I could reduce the wear and tear on my current laptop (especially the hard drive - the Eee has a solid-state hard drive which is much better for traveling) and reduce the amount of stuff I need to carry on a regular basis while still remaining almost as productive as I would be on my lapper.  Linux took some time getting used to, but with the help of EeeUser.com I’ve become addicted to hacking up this little device.  I’d say at this point I could work solely from the Eee PC for a few weeks with very little productivity loss.  I wrote a full review over on the Tastefully Driven blog, but take a look at how much smaller it is compared to my current lapper:

Random happenings not worthy of a full post…

• This weekend I’ll be moving to a new apartment so the posts might be slow for the next few weeks.
• Check out this little analysis I did over on TD:  Gas Prices Got You Down?  Buy Online…Really
• Thanks to the NBA and NHL playoffs my sleep schedule is all f*cked up again. I’m still getting up at 6, but going to bed really late means I need to take a nap in the afternoon….which kind of sucks.

One thing we learned quickly when we started adding up the costs of a warehouse was that everything is more expensive when you’re a business. It’s as if every service provider hears “business” and immediately jacks up the price 50%.

As of Monday we had everything squared away except our internet access, which has always been a bitch every time I’ve ever moved. That’s why we got out in front of it and about two weeks ago George put a call in to Time Warner Cable to inquire about getting Road Runner in our warehouse. They told him they needed to send out a technician to see if the building was already wired, and that they would get back to us in a few days. Well, after harassing them several times they finally called George on Monday afternoon:

They wanted $4,000 to run cat5 cable into our warehouse! To be fair, they either wanted $4k OR a contract of any combination of phone, internet, and TV exceeding $300/month for the next five years. Never mind we don’t want phone or TV from them. Oh, and I failed to mention that the same Road Runner that we all have in our houses and pay $50/month for costs ~$200/month for “business class” at comparable upload/download speeds.

Suffice to say, our answer was a resounding NO. Unfortunately we looked at other local internet providers and they were all in the $200-$300/month range, which is still freaking ridiculous for a biz of our size.

So we started to get creative. I’ve always been fascinated with mobile broadband cards so we started looking into the alternative of purchasing an unlimited data transfer card for each of us for $60/month. Then we got the idea: what if we could buy one card and somehow get it to work with our router? I took a quick look on Sprint.com, and in 3G areas like our warehouse the connection speeds were comparable to Road Runner.

Then Mike found this Linksys Router that actually has a PCMCIA slot in it and is designed to work with Sprint Mobile Broadband Cards!

Freaking awesome right! We’re all pretty in tune with the tech world and none of us knew anything like this existed (at least legally anyway).

George and I went to the Sprint Store in the mall on Monday night and got a 3G mobile broadband card for free with a rebate. Then we took our unopened router to Best Buy and returned it for this one, which was actually cheaper than the original router we purchased. Let’s sum up: we’re getting similar service for $0 down and $60/month when Time Warner wanted $4,000 down and $200/month. Ha - take that bitches.

About ten minutes ago the FedEx guy showed up at my door with a package. I saw the OLPC (one laptop per child) logo on the box and I immediately dropped everything and busted out my camera. The Give One Get One Laptop finally arrived! Here are some initial pics…I’m shocked at how small it is.

Just connected to wi-fi, I’ll write a review after I’ve toyed with it…

In college, I downloaded music from our school’s network and used Winamp to play my music. I swore I’d never be one of those “fools” who actually paid for music and fell into the iTunes/iPod trap. Then I got an iPod for Christmas one year and realized I should start paying for my music (you know, since it’s legally and morally the right thing to do), so I fell in love with iTunes and to date haven’t looked back. Amazon’s affordable DRM free store is a great start, but they don’t have near the selection iTunes does. So I figured I’d always be an iTunes Store guy.

That is, until I started seriously playing around with Grooveshark. One of the best parts about Music-Alerts drawing some attention is that I’ve received praise from - and consequently struck up conversations with - some young startups in the music industry. One such new acquaintance is Andrew Wise of the upstart company Grooveshark, which was started by three University of Florida students. It’s so unique and has so many features, that I’ll just cut to the chase and list off what it does:

• There are two components - your online profile and the file-sharing software (like old Napster or Limewire) that accesses your MP3 files.
• You can listen to streaming music for free on the site as much as you want.
• You can create playlists, add friends, receive suggestions, etc (all the social networking stuff).
• When you want to download a track, you add funds to your account and buy it DRM free for $0.99. Royalties are paid to the labels, to Grooveshark, and to the person who you’re downloading the song from. Hence the slogan “everybody gets paid”.

After being invited to be a BETA tester, I just went in minutes ago and set up my profile and added $5 to my account. I then proceeded to search for a song, download it, and import it into iTunes (gotta be able to transfer it to the iPod). It worked awesome. Bottom line - as long as Grooveshark is able to strike up deals with all the labels and be legal, it’s now where I’m starting my music search. It’s a cross between a social network, p2p file sharing system, and streaming music service. For the same price as a song on iTunes, I get it DRM free and I get the advantages of a social network that knows my music habits (incidentally, if I have a feature request it would be to import my iTunes library XML file so it already knows what music I like).

The only real question is about the legalities. What are the origins of the music I’m downloading, and if 90+% of the music on the site is bootleg, how will record companies feel about it? On one hand, they might like the fact that they’re actually making money from it when they otherwise wouldn’t be. On the other hand, they might not like the fact that other people are getting a cut for uploading it. Only time will tell. I’m certainly rooting for it to work.

P.S. - the Music-Alerts Facebook App is REAL buggy. I know about it, I just hate debugging under the constraints of Facebook. I’ll fix it…eventually. My bad

Last night I set the alarm for 5:50 AM and this morning I forced myself out of bed prior to 7 AM for the first time in recent memory. Why? Because today - at 6 AM Eastern Time - OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) started their Give One, Get One program.

The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child. In order to accomplish our goal, we need people who believe in what we’re doing and want to help make education for the world’s children a priority, not a privilege. Between November 12 and November 26, OLPC is offering a Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During this time, you can donate the revolutionary XO laptop to a child in a developing nation, and also receive one for the child in your life in recognition of your contribution.

For $399 ($200 of which is tax-deductible) a laptop is sent to a child in a developing nation, and one is also sent to you. In addition, you also get one year of free T-Mobile HotSpot access (a $350 value).

For those of you who haven’t heard about the laptop, it is absolutely revolutionary. It can be built for under $200 (soon to be under $100), and runs a plethora of custom open source software on a special Linux operating system. To accommodate the developing nations ,the laptop has long battery life (and can be re-charged using a hand crank on the device), a screen that can be viewed outdoors, and antennas to act as relays for wireless internet access!

I became very intrigued by the mission of the program when I first heard about it, and once the Give One, Get One program was announced I was absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to donate one of these amazing machines AND get one myself. My hope is to eventually have Pure Adapt develop web applications to work specifically with the laptops unique resolution and web browser to help make the knowledge of the web more accessible to these kids, but in the short term it’s just going to be a fun toy. On top of that, I’m pumped to get the T-Mobile HotSpot access so I can finally get free wi-fi at Starbucks (Albany, like every other city in the country, has about 500 Starbucks and maybe 5 other coffee shops with wi-fi…it’s nice to have 500 more places I can get out to do some work and grab a good drink).

Some people have been critical of the mission of the organization, namely their focus on developing countries over domestic kids in need. From their FAQ:

Why are these laptops going to children in developing nations when there are needy children in the U.S.?

In the U.S., the average expenditure for education is $7,500 dollars per child. In developing countries, the average expenditure is typically less than $300 dollars per child. One Laptop Per Child is initially focused on where the need is most urgent. A number of U.S. states have approached One Laptop Per Child and expressed interest in the program, and in the long run, One Laptop Per Child hopes to work with those states and help children everywhere.

I can certainly understand the opposing view, but I happen to agree 100% with that sentiment - I view the entire world as one family and our brothers and sisters in the most need are in developing countries.  If you happen to agree too, there’s no better Holiday gift that you can give than the gift of education to a needy child.

A few posts ago I mentioned our PDF invoice system for Detailed Image, one of the main benefits of which is that it brings us a step closer to being a paperless company. Every PDF I’ve opened since we began working on that has reminded me that I’m saving paper by reading it on my screen.This afternoon I had the same thought while “flipping” through a digital booklet that came with an album I recently purchased on iTunes. At first I thought “isn’t it nice that I’m saving a little paper by viewing this on my computer”. Then I thought “I buy like 5 albums a month…I’m saving quite a bit of paper”. Which of course led me to think “oh crap, how much waste is being saved each time a CD is downloaded instead of purchased?”

Let’s break this down. Each time you download a CD on iTunes (and back it up electronically as opposed to printing the album cover and burning the CD) you save:

• Paper and ink from the album cover and backing.
• Plastic for the album case.
• A CD and the ink used to print on the face.
• Shrink wrap to seal the album.
• Gas and other costs associated in transporting the CD…more than once (from manufacturer to distributor to consumer).
• Electricity and other resources consumed in manufacturing and assembly.

Like most people, I love iTunes for the convenience. Turns out it might be having a larger impact than we realize.