Christopher D Thompson

Over the last few years, I've been increasingly viewing myself as a business entity. Like any business, I have income, expenses, and cash flows. Since the goal of any business is to make money, I started to track my finances more closely using methods resembling business accounting. This has the added benefit of being good practice for when/if I am running a business myself.

I started out using Excel and slowly improved my form and data gathering over time. I now do the accounting at the end of every month, and it takes me about an hour to complete the whole process. Tools such as Quicken or Mint can be helpful, but I found the minimalist approach of a blank excel sheet a good starting place.

First, I wanted to create a balance sheet. This tells me where my money is at, what my debts are, and finally some measure of net worth.

Balance Sheet

I've made up the items and values here just for demonstration. Now I'll pick apart a few points.

• The dates are not exactly on month boundaries. I pick the first Saturday after the previous month has ended. For example, if Friday were 10/31, I would do it on Saturday 11/1. My banks will show me the balance at Friday close throughout the weekend so I'm not trying to hit a moving target. Also, my Stock investments can use price at close of market on Friday.
• I'm not a homeowner. If I were, the market value of the house would be under Assets and the balance of the loan under Liabilities.
• I like to make sure that large income and expense items are spread evenly. For example, since car payments are monthly, I would add the payment under Liabilities if it hadn't occurred yet this month. The benefit is that when comparing one report to the next, each one has the same number of paycheck deposits, mortgage and car payments, etc.
• Assets - Liabilities = Net Worth

Pretty simple so far. This is how I started out. Later on I added another sheet which is sort of a hybrid Income Statement which includes Cash Flow.

Since I couldn't find a "Christmas" category on Netflix, I decided to create this cross-reference using Wikipedia's List of Christmas films
Updated:Pulling out titles which aren't listed in Netlix database.
Updated 2:Finished with the Theatrical Christmas films section. I'm working on the rest, after which I'll sort the Instant play to the top.
Updated 3:I picked out from the feature films just the ones which are available streaming. This should also help the page load a little faster. Some new films which I found on Netflix, not listed on Wikipedia, were added to the end of the list.

Theatrical Christmas films

Films Related to Christmas

Other Netflix Christmas Movies I Found

Made-for-TV and direct-to-video Christmas films

Had an idea for a simple iphone app today. So simple i went and looked for it and it didn't exist. So my question started...

Why hasn't anyone created an iphone app which automatically "walks" through street view of a map route?

I found a web site where a guy has hooked up an exercise bike to PC via Arduino so that the bike controls the rate of progress. Fun! Great idea! Not unlike the Exerscape product I wrote about previously.

Neat stuff, but really complicated. I think a simple iPhone app which lets the user set a constant pace would be enough to get an audience. Folks already carry their device in the gym for tunes anyway.

Here's how it would work:

• Bookmarked directions in google maps would provide routes.
• Route is chosen when app is launched
• Pace is set after a route is selected
• Street view shots are successively displayed along the route mapped out
• Simple way to adjust the rate along the route. For example, swipe up to go faster, down for slower.

Done.

I just received my copy of Do More Faster, purchased after a recommendation by Fred Wilson.

Though I'll have to wait for the weekend before I can really get into it, I read just the first selection, by Timothy Ferriss of 4-Hour Workweek fame. In it he reminds us how worthless an idea is on its own.

...That is until it's executed upon.

I've been collecting my worthless ideas for a while now in hopes of finding one which stands up to to all my attempts to prove its lack of revenue generating potential. Here are a few of the ideas I have lying around which aren't embarrassing enough for me to censor.

• Cloud Filters

  This was an idea I had for processing data streamed to cloud storage while it was in transit. Processing nodes could be chained together and modeled after well known patterns in media streaming. I found that yahoo wasn't too far off with Pipes. s4.io looks even closer. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of the s4.io solution.

• Automobile Smart Power Meter

  Smart Power Meters for the home are starting to be more common, but they only measure the power that flows through the meter. It'd be nice to have this same information from our other primary power drain, our cars. Gas consumption information could be beamed by a parked car to a wifi connection, or to a bluetooth device carried to the house, and then aggregated with the home power meter data. The end result would be a complete picture of power consumption.

The first job I had as a developer was working for a company called Exerscape in Sandy, UT. The company consisted of the single founder and me. The idea was pretty simple, varying the speed of a video playing back on a PC in-step with the speed of exercise equipment. We added other features like varying resistance on a stationary bike to emulate the elevation changes on the route. We stopped short of adding a fan to blow in your face and a hose to simulate rain.

The experience was great and fun for anyone who tried it out. Ultimately we had only moderate success, we ended up doing a short run of consumer products with a partner which I don't think sold very well. I moved on to other projects soon after.

Wondering the fate of the technology, I looked around and found that Virtual Active Fitness currently licenses the technology we had come up with 13 years ago. I even found a demo of an installed system on youtube.

The smartest thing the founder did in that year or two we worked together was to get a patent on the technology. I doubt the Virtual Active system actually uses code we wrote, but the experience is exactly what we had created. It makes me proud to know I helped create something which has so much longevity.

So here are my takeaways from those experiences so many years ago.

1. The patent is surely the most valuable asset the company has today. The technology could have been reimplemented on countless platforms over the years, but the patent reaps rewards 13 years later without late nights fixing bugs.

2. Some markets move very slowly compared to pure tech. To implement this technology today isn't much cheaper than it was in the late 90's (ok, maybe lcd screens are more handy than a 30-inch CRT), so cost wasn't a sales inhibitor. I think the technology was so far ahead of the state of fitness equipment that it just took time for the industry to move forward and embrace it. Why the fitness industry moved so slowly is a separate discussion.

I had just fallen down and broken my wrist before passing the camera.

For the last 8 months, I've been working with the group at Symantec Health. This is a new initiative within the company whose aim is to target the technology needs in the healthcare space. See http://symantechealth.verite.com. In that 8 months, we've gone from prototype to full GA of our two solutions, Health Safe and Health Share.

The broad goal of these products is to ease the burden of IT on hospitals with respect to image archiving and sharing. For those who follow technology trends, healthcare can be surprisingly behind the times. I think this group is on track to place Symantec as a trusted name within healthcare IT, and I'm proud to be part of it.

On a more personal level, my wife, Kelly, has been hard in training for the upcoming Escape From Alcatraz triathlon. The course winds through downtown San Francisco, which we have been able to enjoy during our weekend training. I say "our" training since inevitable I'm along for the ride. The race is this coming Sunday and I'm sure she's in a great shape for it. Go Kelly!

As of mid-September, I've started on a new project 3000 miles away from New York! I found a great team within Symantec , mostly with backgrounds in web and other tech startups, who are working in health care services. You can have a listen to Gary Sevounts talk about the solution here. I'm really happy to have found these guys; I have a lot I can learn from them.
As far as West Coast vs. East... California is nice. It's like being on vacation, with the weather nice all the time. My wife and I still talk about how we miss New York, though. Right now we could be ice skating at Wollman Rink, or seeing the fall color at a cabin up in the Catskills. Perhaps again some time in the future, but for now I'm gonna soak up the sun and enjoy CA!

As it turns out, the state of TTS on Android has tended to what I proposed in an earlier post. With limited resources on handheld devices, TTS libraries had to resort to solutions other than a straight port of existing Java TTS libraries. The eyes-free project resorts to some offloading to a web server, while a more official solution comes from SVOX. See the announcement here. The SVOX solution is what Android really needs to make TTS a reality. The product is embedded and has been proven in other limited resource environments such as automobiles.

For those who don't know me personally, I have spent the last 2 years working with a great team at MarketFactory. I was fortunate enough to meet the 3 founders via an online ad in summer 2007. It was a great opportunity to work with the founders establishing the core technology. It's really quite an experience to start at nothing and see a product ship.

When we started MarketFactory, we had no office, no infrastructure, no code, and only a vision of how we could make the world better. Though the CTO had the final say, I was given freedom to choose most of the development solutions: languages, libraries, development and support tools. Usually when someone in my position is faced with these choices, it's best to pull from what you know, because it's what works. I was also fortunate that I was trusted enough to be allowed to research new unproven technologies as well. Open source is still a relatively new philosophy for the financial world though there is much out there that can be leveraged.

I've worked at a few startups before, but this is the one I put the most of myself into. It's also the one I'm most proud of out of all my past experience.

I've decided to open source the Text2Speech project for Android. The code can be found at http://code.google.com/p/android-text2speech/.