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December 15, 2005
Entrepreneur of the Year
Venture Voice has announced its "1st Annual Entrepreneur of the Year Award". Of those currently on the ballot I'd really like to see Joel Spolsky win. Although several excellent choices have been nominated, I like Joel for two reasons:
1) By all appearances he has built a successful software company on his own terms, and
2) He has opened his mind to the world with Joel on Software, providing unprecedented transparency into his recipe for success.
This second point is interesting for yet two more reasons:
2.1) The content Joel has produced has significantly helped large numbers of people be better developers and/or business savvy technologists, and
2.2) I am 100% sure that any and all competitors to Fog Creek Software read his material voraciously. Nonetheless Joel can still sleep peacefully at night knowing that completely duplicating what he has done is sufficiently difficult, even with an open manual, that he can maintain an advantage.
It'll be interesting to see who wins. Maybe next year I'll vote for Mr. Fried. The year after that I am going to try to win it!!! :-) LOL... I guess I need to get started building a company!! Soon.
Posted by harris at 08:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Honda Hacking
I was put in between a rock and a hard place recently by the state of Virginia and Honda. You see, in VA, you have to periodically pass a safety inspection. Passing this requires that your car meet certain requirements including, if you own a Honda, that the SRS light is not on. This light is known to be flaky in some years of the cars and unfortunately this light came on recently in my Accord. So it failed inspection because a light that the dealership couldn't reliably diagnose was on; and the dealership conveniently, after multiple trips with varying answers, decided I needed to spend $480 to "fix" it.
Unhappy at the prospect of giving more money (yet another story) to a dubious cast of characters at Fairfax Honda, I turned to a good friend, Mr. Inter Net. He introduced me to Mr. Josher who wrote a piece entitled, "How To Reset The SRS Indicator Light", and I did what I felt I must: hack the SRS light. Two paper clips and about five minutes later the light was turned off in my 2000 Honda Accord and later in the afternoon the state was appeased.
Chalk up another one for Mr. Inter Net empowering the little people of the world. Now I just have to make sure I'm wearing that seat belt!
Posted by harris at 08:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack