• Today I quit driving. It costs 3x and saves me at most 45 minutes per day. Not worth it. Shopping for a folding bike! #

• @techcrunch tweeter IM is back #
• @adamostrow Happy birthday And Twitter via IM is back #

Welcome,

The site is spartan, but the service is not. Please take advantage of our current special offer $200 flat rate carry-in/take-out data recovery. This is for overnight service! You save an enormous amount of money by letting me work in my lab instead of traveling to you (my hourly fee is $150/hr and so is the trip charge).

The service is COD upon completion of recovery. We prefer cash and credit cards. Checks will be subject to the usual fees in the event of NSF.

There are limitations on this offer:

1. RAID rebuilds are not included. I can fix them, but that kind of work typically requires access to your server’s unique hardware or a reasonable facsimile.
2. This offer is limited to drives that can be imaged. In other words, if I have to do component-level repair, I will probably refer you to a larger facility. However! I referred zero such cases in 14 years of doing this.
3. Data reintegration is not included. If I recovered an Exchange database or an SQL database, I can help you reintegrate it into your environment. I can do things that Microsoft will officially call unsupportable, but then I can bring the environment back into a supportable state. This really is much like a puzzle. If you are an IT consultant, I will not approach your client directly unless you choose to invite me into that relationship.
4. You will pay for the new hard disk. I will figure out which disk you need. Cheapest options cost less than $100, but we can upgrade all the way to top of the line, if that’s what you desire.

I recorded a quick youtube video outlining my process here:

• If you enjoy http://www.di.fm sign up for their premium service… simply awesome #
• @techcrunch - your desire to inflict self-punishment is astounding. #

• Traffic courts… this will be so much fun… #

Can you feel the buzz of subwoofers and music in the air?

When I signed up to go to Startup Camp 2008 I had no idea what I was getting myself into. You see, I came up with this cool concept of a dance video social network and a catchy name Hot Club Dancers and the Head Counselor David Berlind thought it would be fun to mention it and repeat my elevator pitch a few times. I believe, although I may be delusional, we were the most mentioned company of the conference, even though Chictopia was the winner of the best startup contest.

So I’d like to thank David Berlind (link to his blog) and Fritz Nelson (link to his blog) for shining the spotlight on my startup.

It really pays to be a good public speaker

Thanks to Toastmasters International and my home District 4 (for those of you in Bay Area), I became a pretty good public speaker in the last 18 months or so. For those of you interested in my particular club, you are welcome to visit ICC ArtICCulators. We meet every Thursday at India Community Center in Milpitas, CA.

As Startup Camp is an “Unconference”, attendees had the opportunity to create their own sessions. I saw an opportunity to teach some people presentation skills. With that in mind, I signed up to present “Presentation Skills for Introverted Techies” and I had a small audience of about 20 listeners who hopefully learned something valuable. This was especially timely because we had a best startup contest. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to compete due to being on the waitlist. Nevertheless, I helped at least 5 contestants to improve their elevator pitches and to refine the value proposition.

Startup Camp session recordings

I recorded that session, along with a lot of other parts of the conference on my trusty little Zoom H2 recorder. As soon as I post-process it, I’ll post the links here and on the wiki.

Networking for success

I talked with many fellow entrepreneurs and walked away with more business cards than I have of my own, so I have my work cut out to make the Hot Club Dancers site the success it seems to be destined to become.

Sun heats up Hot Club Dancers

What was also interesting is that I realized my need for a high performance computing render farm. Conveniently, Sun had a hardware expo. There are some REALLY good toys available now for unbelievably low price. I also had a good chat with Sun’s network.com people and how they can help me with my rendering needs.

Unexpected events

OpenSolaris had its release launch party. I had my video equipment. The results will be posted on Hot Club Dancers.com.

• Just got confirmation that I am in the Startup Camp. The following two days will be exciting! http://wiki.startupcamp.org/wiki/StartupCa … #

• What a highly productive week it has been… enjoying taking a lot of rest on the weekend… #

• Mob wars is starting to be back to normal… no longer invincible #
• Here comes the new day… Just about done with the videos backlog at least. #