Today, I replaced my b0rk3d hacked iPhone with a new one from Apple. Here’s how I did it.

1. Put the AT&T sim card back in the phone
2. Restore the iPhone to 1.1.2
3. Get pre-auth code from an AT&T store (if needed)
4. Activate on AT&T
   
5. Whoops, it looks like the phone functionality needs to work to activate
   
6. Make an appointment with the Apple Store
7. Say something like – “I bought it a while ago but it’s been in the box”
8. Get replacement phone (now activated)
9. Return home with new iPhone

At this point, you can choose whether or not you want to stick with AT&T, or go back to your old provider. I decided to give them a shot and port my number over. Here’s why:

• There is a delay in getting new features on a hacked phone
• Recracking the phone after each update is a pain
• Visual voicemail seems cool?
• The cost saving on t-mobile was $10 a month (after the $175 cancellation fee).
• The hassle factor of being wholly responsible for the well-being of my phone is annoying.
• I can always crack it again if I want to use it overseas on someone other than AT&T

Time will tell if this was the right decision!

On Tuesday I was thinking to myself that I should really get an iPhone. I get annoyed trying to sync my Blackberry to my Mac. Not everything transfers properly. With the iPhone, everything will be smooth. I enviously gazed at Dan Choi’s iPhone during the day and thought about getting one in the next few days. I gave my roommate Ben a call as I was leaving work. He said “Guess what?”. What? “I got an iPhone! It rocks.” I thought to myself “this is meant to be. Im getting one now”. I told him I would be home in a few and swung by AT&T – just steps from the office.

$399+ tax later, I walked out with my iPhone.

Before there was a snazzy installer, Ben and I spent the evening going through the step by step process to unlock our iphones

5:45 pm – I arrive home
6:45 pm – I purchase an unlock key from one of iPhoneSimFree resellers
6:47 pm – Ben tells me we’re on the verge of a free alternative!
7:30 pm – We throw on James Bond – Live & Let Die
7:56 pm – Sim unlock source code released
9:00 pm – Application released & Ben and I start looking at how to do it
10:30 pm – I copy a file over that causes my iPhone to freeze!
11:05 – I fix it
12:15 pm – My iPhone unlocked

I’m now running the iPhone on t-mobile using my blackberry unlimited data plan (wap.voicestream.com , no user / pass to get on the data network). It rocks. Is anyone else out there running an unlocked iPhone?

If I ask you about women. You would probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You’re a tough kid. If I was to ask you about war you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? Once more into the breech dear friends. But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap, and watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help.

Nothing beats experience.

As much as we can learn from books, they cant replace experience. Im an impatient person. I left my job and thought “Im going to go and become a successful tech entrepreneur”. Ambition is great, but I’ve learned something since leaving. Unless you have $500,000 to burn on making mistakes, work for someone else to learn the ropes. It is faster.

Starting a business is like skydiving. However, instead of a parachute, you jump out of the plane with fabric, a needle and thread. Learn to sew first. Otherwise, good luck!

Internet start-up PrayAbout.com marries the ultimate in user-generated content — people’s deepest prayers — with the collective empathy of the crowd, in a variation on the social dynamics that have become common on secular sites.

“I was tired of seeing a video of a grandmother falling down or someone recommending a news story — this is trying to add some real value to peoples’ lives,” said Rodger Desai, who helped develop PrayAbout.

Read the whole Boston.com article ->

Think on your developers wavelength. Read Slashdot. Make sure to check out the comments. You’ll start to learn how geeks communicate. Make small talk with developers about the cool things you learn.

Earn your geek stripes on the command line. If you’ve got a mac, great! Just fire up Terminal, and do a search for commands to try on google. Otherwise, get even geekier. Download Vmware and install linux!

For the more adventurous, set up your own development server running linux, subversion, trac, RoR. That’s what I’ve been doing over the past few days.

Shed your old skin. Be a bizveloper!

Having read your blog article on the topic, I’d suggest against a mediocre job delivering mail or working at a coffee shop.

You might want to consider some type of internship with a startup or other hi-tech company. This won’t pay that much, but should be more interesting.

Thanks for the advice!

Im now working with a seasoned veteran, Greg Gibson as an entrepreneur apprentice. Greg’s latest venture is PrayAbout.com.

What is PrayAbout.com

PrayAbout.com is a community driven, non-denominational site for prayer requests. People of all religions come to submit their prayer requests about that which affects them deeply. What makes the site sticky is candles, a reward for action on the site. You start with none, but invite a friend and you each get 20 when they sign up. When people light candles for your prayer request, you get some of those. When you light candles for someone elses prayer request, you get some of the candles lit after you.

Some of the things Im interested in learning with this position are:

• How google adwords works and how to get great results from online advertising
• How to grow from startup to successful mainstay on the net
• How to do business with angel investors and venture capitalists
• How to stay on task with the things Im working on while holding a part time job

Wish me luck!

What is Co-Working?

The co-working wiki has the following definition

Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.
Or, it’s like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture. Which is the opposite of most modern cafes.

Im going to define it as: Like minded people sharing office space to accelerate productivity and maximize sanity

I was intrigued by this concept. Sticking a bunch of web startup entrepreneurs in one place. Brilliant! I decided that I had to get involved. After a rigorous interview process, I was accepted into the Co-Working Loft on Magazine St.

Im now spending my days at the loft working hard on a multitude of projects. Being here has given me access to expertise and ideas that sitting at home did not. It has also opened up opportunities for collaboration (more about that in a few days). I’d love to hear if you’re co-working. How has your experience been?

Here are some pictures of the space:

London’s entrepreneur scene

London’s scene is full of activity, and talking with people at the Open Coffee Club, it seems it’s getting better. The main problem with London is the cost of everything here. My train ticket in from Ascot during peak time was $45. It’s cheaper for me to take a 4 hr bus ride to New York and back than it is to get into London for the day!

Since the internet levels the playing field, this means that the hurdles to getting an internet business off the ground are much higher. With current exchange rates, your idea basically has to be twice as good!

People whom I met

In no particular order:

• James Mawson – Private Equity News
• Pip Bennett – Unearth Travel
• John Wilson – Folio Partners
• Luke Razzell
• David Terrar – Business Two Zero / Blognation
• Jof Arnold – Brain Bakery
• James Aitken
• Anish Lakhani – Pratisoft
• I also met a few other people whose cards I unfortunately didn’t get!

• Because of my lack of money, I can’t justify getting in a long term lease which means I have to endure the stress of moving around a lot. (I’m trying to get that fixed by September 1st.)
• Because of my lack of money, Im screwed if something in my house in Houston breaks, and I need to find new tenants!
• Because of my lack of money, Im constantly having to figure out how to move around funds to make sure my bills get paid
• Because of my lack of money, I have to spend time doing less convenient things to avoid spending more.
• Because of my lack of money, Im distracted from doing what I really need to be doing.

I can’t stress to everyone out there enough, that if you decide to bootstrap, pay off everything first… and I mean everything. What you have to realize is that once you leave your job, your cash-flow shrinks to a crawl. When I was working, I was buying things for the company, going on business lunches. My income was somewhere around $4000 a month, but my revolving balance on my credit card was more like $5000 a month on average… I always had a lot of cash coming in and going out which meant that when I had a bill to pay, I more than likely would have that cash. Now, I’ve got 0 (or close to that) coming in every month, so if I get an unexpected bill (like an old $300 dentist bill from 2006 that my insurance didnt pay), it means I have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to move money around to pay it.

You’ll always have old dentist bills and the like creep up on you. I really can’t stress it enough: Don’t try to be clever and move debt to zero percent (for one full year) credit cards like I did, just pay the stuff off before you leave your job. Bootstrap first, then quit.

Lesson learned.