I recently discovered that this wasn’t just a dream but actually quite possible. Head over to iPodCarKitDirect.co.uk, choose your make and choose your kit. I went with the Dension Gateway Lite because it would charge the iPhone.

Installation was surprisingly easy.

First, remove the radio. You’ll need a pair of radio removal tools, which are easily found in Halfords or other auto shops. I didn’t bother disconnecting the radio completely, just pull it enough to get at the leads.

Pull the radio out and plug the Dension into the back

Now, pry off the panel holding the gear lever with a screwdriver (it’s really easy).

Pry off the gear lever panel with a screwdriver

Move this out of the way and thread the dock cable through the corner and up into the radio compartment. Connect it to the Dension Gateway and stuff the Dension into the space at the bottom of the radio compartment.

Thread the cable through the edge of the panel and up into the radio compartment

This is the cable coming up into the radio compartment

Now, test that the car still starts and see if you can change the source to a CD changer. Connect your iPhone and you should be able to hear the music. If it doesn’t play automatically, and if the next/previous controls don’t work, then it’s likely the iPhone isn’t seated correctly (I had to remove the hard case I keep mine in).

All done and mounted

Alternatively, you can watch the slideshow with some appropriate music I selected:

“A sign of the times”

“In these difficult times”

“The world we live in”

“At least you still have a job”

I fucking hate these stupid platitudes which are currently being banded around in boardrooms up and down the country (including ours, this morning, when free tea & coffee was cancelled). It’s as if uttering one of these phrases makes everything ok, that we can’t argue with the choices, that we can’t dare to dream of something better. It’s that assumption that dreams must be abandoned that really irks me.

I’ve been moved from feature development, to backlog defect fixing, to customer development support, to QA on an entirely different product — all in the space of a year. I now work report to a manager in another country, work on a product which only 4 people in the building work on and I’ve been told, in no uncertain terms, not to look for development work within the QA role. I must simply accept my fate, play my part as the pawn to be moved about, and dance like a monkey performing the same repetitive manual test scripts. Oh, don’t even think about trying to automate that you naughty developer! This is screwing with my career and, whilst those decisions might make sense from a business perspective, this isn’t something I’m going to be happy with. I’m fucking pissed.

What will I do? Firstly, there are choices everywhere and anywhere, in every situation. So, I’m going to accept my lovely new QA role with open, if somewhat limp, arms. I’m going to do my job to a level which will neither get me fired nor garner me any awards or praise. I’ve abandoned any and all prospects of a long term career as an employee so I’m not trying to impress anyone here. I need to take my fate into my own hands and no longer be beholden to the decisions made in corporate boardrooms. I’m going to concentrate 100% of my life energy into starting a business and growing it to a level that will replace my full-time job. It’ll take time, possibly lots of time, but that’s even more reason to start. right. now.

I’ve also got a few new catchphrases for “these difficult times”:

• Fuck it
• Fuck that
• Fuck the Recession and
• Fuck the “Real World”

That night I coded up a basic ruby on rails application which did just that. I waited a week whilst the .ie registration was processed and then spent another 2 evenings working on the theme. Another few more hours here and I present to you:

dualpricing.ie

It’s a simple little site that lets you enter a store, an item and the UK £ and Irish € prices. It does the simple calculations to remove the appropriate VAT and then converts the £ to €. The items and stores are tabulated so you can see who the worst offenders are. Give it a go with the price tags you’ve taken off the Christmas presents (you did remember to remove the prices before wrapping, didn’t you?). I’m morbidly curious to see how the tiny server it’s running on will handle the load.

I’m trying not to be too judgemental with this site. There are obviously cost differences between UK and Ireland, and I’m sure Irish prices will always be a little bit more expensive, but I’m also convinced that many of these retailers are exploiting the Irish consumer. After all, if the retailers were just converting from UK prices and adding in a little Irish cost factor, why would our € prices be such neat numbers? Surely £10 should convert to something like €13.37 not €15? Anyway, it is not my intention to understand, criticise or justify these price differences — just expose them.

Didn’t all the stores remove their UK prices? Actually, some did. Here’s my notes from a morning in Mahon point shopping centre:

• Next: places a label over the UK £ price (but you can easily see through or around it)
• Ladybird: detaches the £ price (no doubt, to “prevent confusion”)
• Debenhams: dual priced labels except on fragrances
• Zara: No UK prices
• Ecco: No UK prices
• Principles: detached the UK prices
• River Island: places a thick label over the UK price (can’t see through it, or easily remove it like in Next)

Where stores have removed their dual prices it’s still easy to look them up on their UK shopping sites. I only wish I could make this happen automatically.

I was actually surprised how well this worked out and how diverse and interesting the sessions were: Tax for Techies, Google SketchUp, Technology & Gealige, Twitter API integration were just some of those I attended.  A special mention must go to the Contrast lads (Eoghan & Des) who gave an impassioned talk on simplifying your webapp interfaces, which left me completely reconsidering what ShutterScouts should be and how it should function.  They preach from much the book as 37Signals but with a healthy dose of Irish wit and increduality. I wish the session had been captured on video as I’m sure a much wider audience could benefit from hearing their opinions (of which, they have plenty!).

Of course, meeting up with an old colleague really made the day and I’d really recommend you check out his recent app, TweetRush, a very nice looking Twitter analytics tool.

Buying things to make me happy is the quick fix and isn’t really going to solve my problems so I’ve resolved to only buy any of these items when I can do so without guilt or regret.

Since Smugmug and Flickr provide OpenIDs, most potential users (i.e., photographers) were likely to already have one so it’d be easy for them to participate in ShutterScouts (and an ID Selector makes it really easy to use). The difference this time is that I a) needed to support multiple OpenID providers (previously I just tested with the excellent MyOpenID) and b) not all providers support the same features.

Smugmug, like many providers, doesn’t support the optional attribute exchange so you still have to ask the user for their name, email address etc. That’s just a pain in the neck because you can get these attributes from some providers and not others. So sometimes you’re left with a full user profile object and others it’s invalid (i.e., missing email address etc). On top of this, the Yahoo support for OpenID is the most complicated series of steps that I’ve ever tried. Now, I’m no Yahoo fan and I’m still confused by their range of mailing list settings, but I’m not the only one that has found it too complicated.

So, in the end I’ve dropped OpenID support from the first iteration of ShutterScouts. I probably should have done it sooner too as OpenID issues have been complicating my code, making the site hard to test and generally stressing me out. It’s also still too complicated for general users to figure out.

So what might I do if days were longer, work was shorter and my mind sharper? I’d look at how things have changed over the decade:

• What were the most popular subjects? Extract keywords for each year and compare (there’s surely a good visualisation here to show how our subjects/interests have changed over the last 10 years)
• How did user engagement change? i.e., are there more lurkers today than 10 years ago? Did people have longer or shorter discussions? Are the length of posts different?
• Has language itself changed? Particularly the use of slang/swear words.
• Analyse the external links. Of the links posted, what % are still alive and not returning a 404? Have the main sources of information changed? Was everyone linking to ireland.com before they got all subscription on us? Did the Independent take over? And has that changed since the Irish Times gave up on subscriptions (ok, this is only very recently)?

Oh, if only I had a couple of undergrads and some interns!

• When people ask me how I am, I say “I’m fine“. When they ask me if I’m in pain, I say “No“. But the truth is that I haven’t had a pain free day since the accident. Each day the foot, thigh, knee, hip or arm hurts, sometime all together — ranging from a dull ache or stiffness to sharp stabbing pains that make me wince. I’ve kinda forgotten about them and to the average person I look no different than I was at Christmas. If I’m complaining about the pain then it means it’s pretty bad. I don’t take painkillers though. Partly because if I did start, I’d be on them 24×7 and that’s not a road I want to take. Partly it’s because the pain makes me angry. And I want to be angry.
  The pain reminds me that I need to get better, be better, that life is short and I need to do more with it. It drives me.
• In September, myself and Hilary will have been together 9 years. That seems like a lifetime. In 9 more year my daughter will be 9. Another 9 year later and she’ll be 18. I can’t imagine how our lives will be in 9 years, let alone 18. The enormity of it seems quite daunting. What job will I have? Will we own a house? Will we be in financial difficulty? Will the world be a stable place?

In some ways life is short, in other ways it seems to stretch on forever.

Anyway, John mentioned LinkedIn which I thought was still invitation-only. Anyway, I gave it a go. The idea seems a lot more reasonable than Facebook: connect to colleagues and old friends so that you can use these contacts when looking for a job, starting a business etc. I’ve already found an old friend from uni there but I’m terrible at maintaining these networks. My current tally of old friends I keep in contact with (~ once a year or so):

• School: 1
• Uni: 0
• Bluewatch: 1
• Broadcom: 2 (and I married one of them!)
• MLE: 0
• Uni of Southampton: 0

However, I can see that maintaining a LinkedIn network, which you only leverage occasionally, can be very valuable (see Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties) so this is something I’ll try to do more of in the future. LinkedIn seems like the sort of site you’d use a few times a year (instead of a few times a week/day for Facebook) which meshes better with the types of relationships you’re trying to cultivate.