Daniel Kennett

I have a girlfriend. I know, right? Anyway, back when we were living miles away from each other, our primary methods of communication were phone calls and text messages.

Nowadays, we live together and (obviously) see each other loads. This means the volume of calls and texts to each other has dropped drastically, and now they’re essentially used for status updates of queries about shopping.

The quality (especially my side) of our communications via text has rapidly tanked. Here, for your enjoyment, is a series of screen grabs from my generic fruit-based phone.

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A few months ago, I was in perhaps the worst state I’ve been in for a few years. I could see my company’s cashflow falling, and expenses rising. I’m not a numbers and charts kinda guy, but I made a chart plotting the projected cashflow against projected expenses and the chart didn’t paint a pretty picture. Many a sleepless night passed as I figured out what on earth I was going to do.

Eventually I decided that it was time to man the fuck up, admit the mistakes I’d made and what to do about them. So, here we go…

- Moving house just as the credit crunch hit was a mistake
- Having the company buy a sports car to use for testing a product we won’t start making for another year was a mistake
- Not picking up the fact that cashflow was falling earlier than I did was a mistake
- Getting used to the salary I was earning two years ago was a mistake

Now, I’m happy to hold my hands up and admit I made a mistake. Several of them, in fact. In my book, what defines someone isn’t what they get right, it’s how they deal with what they get wrong. So, I sat down and came up with a plan. Next, I phoned up my bank manager and organised a meeting, told him that I’d fucked up and showed him what I planned to do. He seemed to respect my approach and gave me the freedom to execute it.

Unfortunately, my plan comes at great personal sacrifice. In the past month, I’ve been paid a total of £700 from my company. That, as you may guess, doesn’t even come close to paying my mortgage and bills. For a week, my girlfriend had to pay for my lunch every day and fill up the car with fuel so I could drive to work because I couldn’t afford either. More of less every single creditor of mine has received a phone call telling them they won’t be getting their money this month or next because I’ve had a 70% pay cut since this time two years ago.

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A few days ago it was my girlfriend’s birthday. After much deliberation, I’d decided what to get her - a Sony Reader. However, her birthday was on a weekday this year, and at the moment I’m busy enough with work to make it difficult to justify a day off. Out of nowhere, the idea popped into my head to do a treasure hunt.

Design

After a bit of planning, I thought it’d be a great idea. However, I didn’t want to hide an expensive piece of electronics in some random bush, and keeping the treasure hunt confined to the house seemed a bit boring.

The UK partner for the Sony Reader is Waterstone’s - a large chain of book shops. Whenever I’ve been into a Waterstone’s, the staff there seemed pretty cool so I went in to my local Hitchin branch to buy the Reader. As I was paying, the conversation went like this:

Me: Um… can I have someone else come and pick this up later?
Teller: Sure, just have them bring in the receipt and we’ll hold it for them until they can get it.
Me: Ah, well… The person can’t know what it is until you hand it over to them.

They were resistant to the idea until I explained what I was trying to do. After some discussion, which included fetching the manager over, the staff were extremely helpful and suggested ideas including hiding the proof of purchase in an envelope my girlfriend would bring along with her. In the end, they agreed to hold the Reader in their safe and tool mine and my girlfriend’s details as well.

Leaving the store happy, I began to design the hunt properly. This was the flow:

- My girlfriend would find a birthday card on her desk after I’d left for work, which contained a web address.
- Visiting that web address would set off the hunt and lead her to the first clue card, which would lead her on a trail of eleven cards.
- Each card would contain a clue to the next card and a number to be put into the web page.
- When all the numbers are successfully entered, the web page would reveal that the numbers in fact make up a GPS coordinate, and one final clue.
- Upon navigating to the GPS location, the clue leads my girlfriend to Waterstone’s.

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Look around the web, and you’ll find many a review of the Sony Reader. If you’re looking for another one, you’re in the wrong place - this is an account of managing the device on a Mac.

As a Mac user living in the UK, I’m pretty much S.O.L when it comes to using the Reader’s built-in software. The Sony Store, which is an online book store not unlike iTunes’ Music/Video/etc store. However, it only works in the USA due to “licensing restrictions”. Even if I was in the USA, the software that lets you access the store and manage your Reader’s content is Windows only. Super.

Sony did what?

Sony isn’t known for playing well with others. However, someone in the Reader team had the balls to kick management in the ass¹ and as a result, the Reader is the most open Sony product I’ve used in my life. Plug the unit in to your Mac using a standard USB mini-B jack and the internal memory of the Reader mounts on your desktop. Next, copy any supported file format (which includes plain text, RTF, PDF and a few eBook formats) into /Volumes/Reader/database/media/books/ and you’re away!

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1. Totally conjecture, by the way [↩]

I’ve had a Garmin Colorado forquite some time now, and although it’s great, it’s really a pain in the ass to just enter a GPS co-ordinate and go there. I couldn’t find a simple, with-pictures guide online, so I thought I’d create one.

The fact of the matter is, you can’t simply enter co-ordinates. You have to create a waypoint at the current location, edit it, then navigate to it. Without further ado:

Step 1

Hold down the middle of the scroll wheel for a couple of seconds. The Colorado will inform you that it’s saved a new waypoint. Scroll down to “Edit” and press the middle of the scroll wheel.

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Preface: Note that all figures talked about in this entry are approximate, but based around my own sales and costs to make the figures relevant.

This argument seems to pop up again and again in the Mac development circle:

How do I collect money from my users?

Back in the days of shareware being distributed on floppy disks with magazines, many developers simply asked the user to send a $5 bill through the mail. These days, however, cash is pretty much obsolete for anything but car boot sales. Now we have to charge the user’s card¹ over the web and have the license delivered by email.

When looking for solutions, the aspiring Mac developer has two options: either write the store yourself and integrate with a payment gateway (like their bank or PayPal) or use a third party service that does the lot (like eSellerate).

At first, doing it yourself looks like the much better option. Payment gateways are cheaper than full services, and you have the coding experience to throw together a simple store that integrates with them. It’s also been done before, and there are a few open-source stores you could use instead of writing your own.

Number Crunching

Right, let’s break down the average direct costs of selling apps - not including man-hours.

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1. This includes PayPal accounts, since they’re just another thing the user has that contains money [↩]

To all my friends and family,

Due to work commitments, I’m officially postponing my birthday until Saturday, 18th April. Please refrain from lavish gift giving until that date.

Thank you for your time,

– Daniel

In November 2008, I bought a pair of Sennheiser HD 595 headphones. A few weeks ago, they developed a really annoying rattle in the left can, so I set about looking for the receipt so I could take them back. It or the original packaging were nowhere to be found.

I don’t live near the store I bought them from - Richer Sounds in Watford - so I phoned them up and asked if I could return them to a different store. They said yes, and also offered to look for my receipt on their system - an offer I accepted, but they couldn’t find me.

Convinced that the receipt had been thrown away with the packaging, today I ended up at the Cambridge store with my headphones but no box or receipt, pretty much saying “My headphones are broked!” while looking sad. They had another go at finding me on their system and couldn’t, but before I could even start asking if I could phone my bank and get them to find the transaction on my statement they replaced them for me anyway!

I was so impressed with their service that I bought a new remote control - a Logitech Harmony One to replace my ageing Harmony 880. When we got home, my girlfriend saw the red “Thank you for purchasing!” leaflet they put my receipt in and said “I’ve seen one of those!” and disappeared upstairs. Thirty seconds later, she returned with the original receipt for my headphones!

Today, I’ve decided to add a new ambition to my list:

I, Daniel Kennett, would like to - one day - buy a new car that works and stays working.

Not that I’m contributing to the disposable car culture or anything, but in the past year or so I’ve bought (or bought on behalf of my company) four new cars.

- A year ago, I bought a Volvo C30, which almost immediately suffered an electronic anomaly and went batshit insane. Other than this one problem the C30 has been perfect.

- Nearly a year ago, my company bought a Lotus to use as a test car for a future project. Since then, it’s done nothing but fall to bits - it squeaks and rattles, an air intake hose came free, the lock on the passenger door doesn’t sit properly, it’ll lock and arm its alarms when the door isn’t really that shut, etc. Lotus aficionados will laugh and say “Well, that’s Lotus for you!”, but back in the real world where a company needs equipment it can depend on, I’ve vowed never to buy another one ever again.

- In November, I bought an RX-8 R3 as a trackday/play/etc car and took it to the Nürburgring where it performed superbly. However, on the way back it developed a gearbox problem and ended up with a new gearbox. Again, other than this one problem it’s been perfect.

- Finally, last week. After getting a dog, the C30 doesn’t quite cut it. He fits in there fine, but given my penchant for driving around Europe with bikes and luggage, the C30 just isn’t big enough. Other than the space, the C30 was a brilliant car so I decided to upgrade to what’s essentially the estate version of the same car - the V50.

It’s blue!

Aaanyway, about twenty-four hours after I collected it from the dealer, this was the scene:

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At the beginning of this week, my company moved offices for the third time. The company has just finished its fourth accounting year and we’re looking to have a great fifth year. Four years ago, I was hoping I’d get this far but had no idea whether I would or not.

It’s been pointed out to me that this final move is the most significant move yet for me personally. I didn’t notice because I’ve been so busy actually organising the move, but they’re right - the past five years of my live have revolved around the University of Hertfordshire campus, first as a student then a tenant in their offices.

If I’d realised that before the move I’d have probably been a bit apprehensive about it. We’re all resistant to change and this marks the end of the biggest chapter of my life so far - I started it as a kid fresh out of 6th form and I’ve come out an adult with more responsibilities than most¹ pretty well equipped to deal with the real world. Whatever that is.

I thought it’d be interesting to give a little history to where I’ve been (physically) with KennettNet Software, and why I went where I did.

2004: Working from Home

This doesn’t really count as a location for the company, since I moved into a proper office pretty much as soon as the company was formed. Still, it’s where I started! I built this desk (not very well) myself - favourite feature was the inbuilt backlighting and power sockets for charging stuff.

2005: St. Albans

In 2005, I took a year out from my Uni course (Computer Science) that was supposed to be a year’s industrial placement. Unfortunately, running my own company didn’t count, since the University “doesn’t like it when students work for members of their own family” and, no matter how much I argued, I’m a member of my own family. Bummer.

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1. Man, that comment’s an invitation to get flamed, isn’t it? [↩]