Lamonti…Entrepeneurial Ventures

In their February 6, 2009 blog posting supporting the book Communities Dominate Brands by Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore…

Understand why everyone wants to be Mobile.

Everyone you ask? Yes, 4 Billion everyones. As they say, there are only 800 million cars on the planet, Internet user equal 1.4 Billion, only 850 Million cable & satellite subscribers. So yes, everyone has a mobile phone.

Its a great read.

On last week’s Macbreak Weekly, Leo Laporte reported he liked Blogo. It is a blogging editor for the Mac.

I downloaded it, set it up in no time flat, and posted my first blog posting with it.

Slick interface and very easy to use.

I’ve been using my Livescribe since Christmas and have found adequate value so far. Adequate because I’m taking written notes in a notebook…big wow. Although I have been syncing everyday, I have not exported to PDF and have not really used the true power of the tool.

I view it as an insurance policy, meaning all my notes are backed up electronically and I can listen in at any point of a meeting’s audio. Although I haven’t used it for a CYA yet, I can see how useful it will be. I wish I would have had meetings recorded last year when we had a need to hold our incompetent CEO’s feet to the fire.

Here is a cool use for Livescribe. I listen to my voicemail on speakerphone and have the recorder turned on the Livescribe. I write down the person’s name and phone number and thats it. Later I can click on the person’s name and listen to voicemail. Its like a backup voicemail system. Pretty Slick.

Sometimes you come across things that you just can’t help but post.

Leigh Fatzinger, wanna-be beatnick?

I get asked a lot what Lamonti is. Most people think it is Italian. I found the word about 10 years ago while I was trying to find a name for one of my companies. Being from Seattle, I was looking at West Coast Indian words that would work out.

Here is the definition of Lamonti from a Chinook Jargon website (you can also find a Chinook Jargon entry on Wikipedia:

lamonti — mountain, from Fr. la montaigne (pron lamonTAI).Hyas lamonti — the high mountains, hyas hyas lamonti the deep mountains, remote faraway mountain country. Note alsohyas hyas stone illahee, meaning the “greatest and biggest land of stones” - the great barren high country (in Paul St. Pierre’s novella Breaking Smith Quarter Horse; the context is the vast and diverse inland alpine areas of the Coast Mountains, flanking the Chilcotin district where the action of the story takes place). (Stone in orthodox CJ is usually testicles, the possible subreference here may be to the power and ruggedness of the lands described by the phrase).

My wife rocks. I’m a gadget freak, so for Father’s Day she researched the best gadgets on CNET and found a review of the Flip Mino. As of today, August 17, 2008 it sells for $151.48 on Amazon.

Here’s the deal. We bought a camcorder 3 years ago when Lily was born. It was great, fit in my hand and took two hours of tapes. Here’s the problem: it sits in a bag downstairs somewhere, the battery always seems to be dead, the tape always seems to be full and its a bit too much hassle to get the video off of the tape and on to a format we will actually use.

The Flip Mino, on the other had, is a little smaller than a deck of playing cards. I just carry it around in my pocket. The internal memory holds about 60 minutes worth of video and the device has a built in USB connector. I simply plug it into my computer and copy over the videos.

Flip Mino

Here’s a shot with the USB Connector open:

Here’s how I use it:

1. Take as many videos as you want before it fills up (about 60 minutes).

2. Flip up the USB Connector and plug it into your USB port on your Mac [You're not still using Windows are you? If so then go here.]

3. Copy the files from FLIPVIDEO\DCIM\100VIDEO\*.avi to where ever you are going to store your videos. Yes, you read it correctly. Flip stores the files as an AVI file. Luckily you can convert it over (see below). I have a couple Western Digital Passport: 250 Gig USB external drives I use for my media files. Although I bought mine at Costco, you can currently get them for $95.99 at Amazon. On the Passport, I have a subdirectory called “Video_Flip”.

4. Once you confirm the videos were copied over, go ahead and delete them off of the Flip. If the little LCD light is blinking on the Flip’s USB connector, go ahead and leave it connected to charge the battery up. It will stop blinking when complete. NOTE: if you completely drain the battery, you can not simply plug it in and download videos. You have to wait until it charges up to some magic point. The documentation doesn’t mention this and I thought it was broken.

5. If you are like me, you probably have a week or so worth of videos stored up on the Flip. They always are named incrementally starting at 001. So when you delete them off the Flip, the counter starts over. If you are always copying the files into the same subdirectory on your computer, you will have file collisions from files with the same name. Instead, every time I copy something over, I rename the files with the date I took the video (ie. 20080817-001). That way I also know when I took the video.

6. Fire up iMovie and import a clip. Create a new project and name it. I use the following naming convention: YYYYMMDD_description (ie. 20080621_sacramentors). That way I know when the video was shot and I have a fighting chance of knowing what it was about.

7. Drag the clip into the project, or edit the clip to your hearts content. I put a title clip at the front with both a name and date.

8. Under the Share pull down menu, select Export. I save it to the same subdirectory as my .avi files on my Passport. You can select the file size and attributes. I save it as a Medium (640×330) size so I can play it on my Apple TV.

9. Add the file into iTunes and you’re set.

Here is what a quick video looks like:

We headed down to Goldendale (Google Map) last weekend to visit Grandpa and Grandma Wilson. Here’s a look at the views I grew up with:

Mt. Hood from Goldendale

Mt. Adams from Goldendale

There’s not many options for places to stay in Goldendale. The best, if not the only, bet is what used to be called the Far Vue Motel, but is now the Quality Inn. To be fair, there is also the Ponderosa Motel, but I wouldn’t stay there. Your only other real option is to stay a 1/2 hour away in the The Dalles, OR (Google Map).

Lily got to ride on the tractor with Grandpa and both kids got lots of play time with Grandma.

Tractor Ride with Grandpa Wilson

I also ran into Doug Loomis, a high school buddy. His son Cody just turned Pro with the Professional Western Rodeo Association and is on the Bull Riding circuit [didn't know they had such a thing]. Doug was heading down to Long Beach, WA to watch him ride. Turns out he took first place.

Overall a good trip.

Haystack Rock in the morning

We took a long weekend in Cannon Beach (Google Map) in July. Its one of our favorite places, but after 15 years its beginning to feel a bit fatigued. Part of the problem is we had a bad experience at the hotel we’ve always stayed at…the Tolovana Inn. In fact, we will never stay there again. We booked an Ocean Front room, we confirmed it 3 times (even as we were leaving Seattle) and when we arrived the only room they had was an Ocean View room. That’s to say, an ocean view over the parking lot of Mo’s restaurant. Of course, the hotel was completely booked and the town was completely booked so we were stuck. We felt they pulled a bait and switch.

We spent some time looking at other hotels and next time we will either stay at the Stephanie Inn (not kid friendly) or the Ocean Lodge (kid friendly). The downtown core business area was extremely packed, as was the beach directly in front of the downtown area. We think its better to stay on the south end of town and only visit the downtown area.

As we felt fatigued with Cannon Beach, we also explored some of the surrounding areas. Seaside is a non-starter…it is cheap-touristy, crowded and dirty. A much better bet is to head further south. Manzanita is about 15 minutes to the south and is a wonderful, quiet village. We will probably stay in Manzanita next time we head to the Oregon Coast.

Our 2-1/2 year old daughter, Lily, experienced wading in the surf for the first time. The very first wave caused her to run about 50 yards back towards the hotel. Once we got her to stop and come back, we couldn’t get her out of the water. Pictures of the adventure can be found here.

I bought a great book Wordpress for Dummies written by Lisa Sabin-Wilson (no relation). After a few days of reading and a short couple of hours of configuration, my blog was properly configured. This blog’s current theme is one she designed.

Although I have an Apple me.com account (formerly .mac account), I wanted iWeb to post directly to my Lamonti.com url instead of the me.com URL. That, amazingly, worked out just fine. All you have to do is publish the website to a subdirectory and then FTP it up to your site.

I spent last night moving my domain over to Media Temple. These folks do hosting well. For an advertised $20 / month ($16.67 monthly when paying for a year) I was able to move all 6 of my domains over, setup email (with Spam filtering) and one-click Wordpress setup for my blog. Everything was automated and the help files contained my config information. It was the easiest migration I have experienced in my 15 years on the Internet (ok, compuserve wasn’t “really” the Internet, but what did we know back then).

Leigh Fatzinger gave me a great FTP recommendation for Cyber Duck. Media Temple gave me the config info and after a small bit of wrangling I was up with a new Blog theme.