adrianbye.com

This ad was published in a small local newspaper (Pereira) in Colombia on 25 July 1998. The entire newspaper was in spanish except for this advertisement. I am sure all Canadians are very proud.

Ok, I admit it. I have zero sense of direction.. I’ve no idea how it happened, I even competed in orienteering when I was younger (competitive map based running through the bush in Australia). Anyways, today I’m an expert in getting lost.

Since I recently moved to Santo Domingo, I don’t know my way around. In addition, people drive like its their last day on the planet, so the traffic can be a challenge and its easy to get lost. I love driving in the US – I just install my GPS and I can find my way anywhere.

For years I’ve wanted GPS maps of the Dominican Republic. But no go. I’ve searched all over the net for commercial maps, I’ve checked out open source community maps, nothing. I was even going to pay someone to make them, but that turned out to be more complicated than we expected.

On the Dominican message boards, DR1, they mentioned the other day that someone had made maps for Santo Domingo, released just a week ago for Santo Domingo! Wow! So I dug out my Garmin GPS I use for trips in the US and went over there (in taxi naturally, since I couldn’t find it on my own!).

I was concerned my US maps wouldn’t fit with my dominican maps, but it turned out that wasn’t an issue. Once I got there, I was sent upstairs and there was a guy installing the GPS units. He was very friendly and just connected my unit via the USB cable and copied over the data. It took about 10 minutes. Then I paid him RD$1400 ($40US) and off I went.

So firstly, they’re not complete maps, its nothing like GPS service in the US. You can’t look up a street address like you can in the USA. All you get are maps of the city, working on your GPS. If you want to go to a specific address, you have to find that location on the GPS map, pinpointmark the position on the GPS and then it will take you there. It has a limited selection of restaurants and locations built in which you can preselect, but its nothing like a mapping unit in the USA which has virtually complete business data for the entire city.

On my first trip it took me about 25 minutes to figure out how to get it to work. But once I’d programmed in the place I was going to (which I had to find on the paper map first ironically), getting there was a breeze. And, once I was there, I marked the position as a favourite in the GPS, so I will be able to find out how to get back there again.

One night when I was coming home late, I got lost for almost 2 hours.. There are often limited sign markings in the DR and late at night there may be nobody around to ask directions.. With my GPS that won’t happen again. 🙂

One cool thing was that my GPS is running in english, but giving all the street names in Spanish. So it tells me to turn left in english. For a lazy spanish speaker like myself, I like it. 🙂

Without the ability to search for streets and towns, its not perfect, its about 60% of a US GPS map system. But its a great start and hopefully will be improved.

The only issue I found out is that my cigarette lighter electricity had been disconnected, presumably when my ipod system was installed.. So the GPS ran out of power.. Ah, DR mechanics.. but we’ll get that fixed. 🙂

Here’s the unit: http://www.ola.com.do/gps.php

Thanks Ola, and good job!

To read this week’s interview on how a small company can leverage the legal power of the US Government to compete, go here: http://meetinnovators.com/2008/12/18/renata-hesse-from-wsgr/

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I’ve always moved around a lot. The longest I’ve stayed in one country since 1990 until now has been 3 years. Now I’m moving from a city I’ve lived in for the past 7 years, Santiago, Dominican Republic, to Santo Domingo, the capital (Santiago is the second largest city).

I’m moving for a couple of reasons.. people think i’m crazy but i’ve developed a real phobia about earthquakes. iIf you haven’t lived through a major one you may not understand. We had a big one here in 2003; everyone in the city thought we were done for, and it was only a 6.4.

Santiago is right on a major fault, similar to the san francisco bay area. The difference is that in the Domincian Republic there isn’t earthquake resistant construction. In fact, my current building is designed with a car park UNDER the building, so if a major quake comes, the entire building will collapse on to the car park. (this information comes from some caribbean earthquake geologists from the US). But my earthquake phobia doesn’t come from the initial quake – its the 2 months of aftershocks. As far as I know they’ve not had that recently in the bay area.

In Santiago, the entire city was on edge in 2003 because we never knew when the next quake would come. It was extremely scary – you’d be sitting eating lunch and a 5.5 would just randomly happen.. I’ve read about this kind of trauma on the news in countries like Turkey and China when they’ve had a lot of aftershocks. If you haven’t been through it, its hard to relate to.

Santiago was actually already destroyed in the 1500’s by an earthquake.

A piece of the wall from old Santiago which was destroyed by a massive earthquake in the 1500’s.

The tension has built up dramatically and there is a now major tragedy waiting to happen. I lived in Pereira, Colombia for a while and just after I left, a major quake took out Armenia, a nearby city. It was a real tragedy.

I prefer to be in Santo Domingo which while close to Santiago, is not on a major caribbean fault line. I noticed the earthquake affected almost everyone in the city at the time, we were all tramautized by so many aftershocks and the original quake.

I also just want to live in a bigger city with more services. My next move will likely be back to the US to join or start a startup, probably in 18 months. although I’m game to go anywhere for the right opportunity. I don’t need a job – i want to build a billion dollar company either as a founder or part of a founding team. Meanwhile I will stay in the Dominican Republic, using leverage working with other teams and not working with anyone locally.

As part of this move i have done my biggest ever life cleanup. I’ve gone through every single thing i own and tried to dispose of as much of it as possible, a little “tim ferris” style (although I think I was doing Tim Ferris type stuff before Tim Ferris was!). I’m moving to a furnished apartment so this meant I could really dispose of a lot of stuff. like to delegate as much work as possible, however this was something i couldn’t delegate and had to do myself. I now see why i never did it before ;-).

As I went through my filing cabinet it was shocking to see how many different projects and ideas i’ve worked on over the years. I’ve really tried a LOT of different ideas to try to find what would work. Most things didn’t and failed miserably. But a couple did. Its been a lot of trial and error trying to figure out what works for me and my strengths. Ihave a lot of respect for successful entrepreneurs, they aren’t just overnight successes. there’s a lot of interim steps to get it right.

And, I went through all the wiring i’ve had installed everywhere throughout my apartment. i hadn’t realised just how many different things i’ve attempted to get a good system for playing audio and video. finally i have it here: http://adrianbye.com/2008/11/03/a-breakthrough-my-new-home-audio-system/

As i discarded everything, we put it all in to the living room. then my maid got to work and started selling everything. Keep in mind these were things which have very little value for me; I just want to be rid of as much as possible. Well, i put her on a 20% commission for sales she made. I had no idea that my maid with an 8th grade education would turn into such a dynamo. It turns out that as of Sunday she’s made US$3000 in sales! This from all the stuff in the US that you’d normally just send to Goodwill. Dominicans LOVE buying used stuff. It was funny reading about black friday sales in the US and seeing just the same happening in my living room.

Its amazing getting rid of everything. I’m switched to mac, so all my PC stuff is now gone. i’ve switched to iphone so all my old cellphones are being sold. I had 5 cellphones and 3 laptops just sitting around which i’d never had time to get rid of. It feels good.

So now starts a major new phase in my life.. new place to live, running on mac, living in santo domingo, completely organized life, ready to work on exciting upcoming projects. i’ve delayed a lot of things to make this move happen and am really looking forward to getting going again.

I’ve noticed that 2-3 times a year I get an absolutely major breakthrough and it has a huge benefit to my life somehow. I’ve just hit one of those and want to share it with you.

Imagine if you had your perfect audio management system – one which would let you control it from every room in the house, take music directly from the internet, be wireless, and relatively cheap to roll out. Read on and I’ll tell you how to do it.

When I was about 12 years old I made a special audio system in my bedroom. I connected wires to lots of different speakers I pulled out of old radios and tape recorders. I probably had 7-8 different speakers just in my own bedroom. I had a music system that was REALLY surround sound. Back in 1984 for a 12 year old that was amazing!

I’ve always loved listening to music but have been frustrated in the past few years as to how to implement a good audio system in my house. The changeover from CD to mp3 is obviously happening – but how to implement it? I won’t bore you with the different things I’ve tried, you can just trust me that I’ve wasted thousands of dollars over the years on different things that don’t work very well.

My requirements are:
– 100% of my music should be digital, downloaded from the internet
– I should be able to listen to it in every room of my house
– when a new song is downloaded, it should be accessible from everywhere virtually immediately
– I should have one remote control which easily searches the entire music catalog
– I should be able to take my music collection with me on the road with me, to the gym and traveling or in my car
– It should be reasonably good quality. I’m not an audiophile, but I like good sound.

Finally I have this working! And its turned out to be trivially simple!

The key has been switching from PC to mac. I resisted this for a long time but finally decided to switch both my machines at once. Since switching, I’ve acquired some more apple components to my network such as a wifi network and and iphone. While itunes is ok on the PC, I’ve noticed on the mac that it just works better (I note that while itunes is slow on the PC, Microsoft Office is extremely slow to load on the mac. Coincidence? I don’t think so). Itunes on the PC felt a little like an install of AOL – it takes over your machine. It doesn’t have this impact on the mac, it just nicely fits in with everything else. What has been particularly impressive on the mac is that each new piece of hardware I buy seems to add additional, unexpected value to all the other pieces. I’m not mac fanboi yet, as my switch has been rather painful. But this has been an unexpected benefit with massive payoffs.

Anyways, on with how to set up this audio system which has worked so well for me:
1. Buy an Apple airport extreme for your network. This is apple’s long range wifi network device. Its just a white box which enables a wifi network in your house from your internet connection. ($150)
2. Hook up a couple of Apple’s airport express units to audio players around your house. The airport express is a smaller wifi receiver (relayer) unit. It provides 3.5” line out to audio devices. ($85/each)
3. Install itunes on your computer. It should work on PC and Mac (free)
4. Get an iphone or an ipod touch. This is a critical element – you need this as the remote control. ($200-$400)
5. Get some audio devices. I use the Harman Kardon Go+Play units – they cost around $350/each which isn’t cheap, but the audio quality is amazing. ($350/each or use what you have already)
6. Download apple’s “remote” software from the appstore and install it on your iphone or ipod touch. (free)

Now, you have a wifi lan in your house, which for starters is pretty handy if you don’t already have one. It runs very fast, since its 802.11N, so even if you have a wifi lan this may be faster. The Airport express devices act as repeaters as well as providing audio, so you end up with a very strong network signal through your whole house.. But, you can also stream audio through it using the computer, streaming out to the two airport express units. If you have a really small place or very thin walls you may be able to do it without the airport extreme, but its probably a good idea to get it (I have 2 so I can extend the signal further).

The audio quality is GREAT! I was concerned it would not be good.. but I am very happy with it, and I am quite picky. I have read that the airport express units actually provide digital out signal, which is bit for bit the same as the source audio, so if you have digital receivers you may want to consider this. I am using analog and it sounds great.

I’ve talked with some friends about this and apparently the iphone remote control software was initially not very good. As of now, as an overall setup this is basically perfect. When you have it working you can walk around your house, selecting music in each room, selecting the song and controlling the volume. It does basically everything you’d expect a remote to do – but its your CELLPHONE! And you have no music to move around – as soon as its on your computer its live in your kitchen, bedroom, etc, etc. If you want to take it with you, it syncs with your iphone or ipod touch, and then you plug it into your car using an adapter.

It also controls Apple TV, which I will be testing out next.

The only thing we need is for Itunes to become a service where we rent music per month, rather than needing to rip and/or download our own music collection. I’ll happily pay $20/month to access all the music that is out there. That should also include streaming audio so we can listen to the radio and streaming audio off the net such as Pandora. Sonos offers this today, but has an expensive setup cost ($350+ per room compared to $85 for the apple airport express units).

The great thing is I can add as many rooms as I want, just by buying more audio systems ($350) and airport express units ($85), or around $430 per room. There are also $100 audio systems which would bring your cost per room down significantly. I plan to add another 3 rooms shortly.

Go try it out and let me know how it works for you!