Hal Steger - A Man in a Million

What honesty! This guy deserves a medal:)

I once read a novel in which I remember "All of us have friends who are richer than us and they, you can be sure, have richer friends of their own."

Fascinating. Even deserves a mention on my blog. As you know, not everything I come across makes it there :)

He's done well - this update is from 2022 :

Four major hits

1. Co-founder/VP Marketing Rubric, pioneer of marketing automation, sold for $370M in 3 years
2. Sr. product marketer @ Uniface, leader of developer tools, sold for $433M in 3 years
3. Marketing and group product manager for #2 product @ Oracle (dev tools), product sales grew from $10M to $100M+ in <3 years
4. Pioneered personal clouds for smartphones, positioned company as leading white-label cloud provider and helped company acquire top customers in mobile

Presidian Lite Up Message Fan

Leaves some to be desired. Take the batteries out and you lose your messages unless you're quick to put in new batteries. Damn - I want to take the batteries out to keep the charge. Why not have a USB update available? Then it wouldn't be a $5 gadget would it?

I like the user interface. Takes me back to the days I put a 200 byte program on the boot sector of a disk for RKK's class. It would tell you what programs were on the disk and you would use the cursor keys to pick the one to run.

Simple improvement to be suggested here - how about some way to keep moving from one message to the other.

Construction is super simple - three contact buttons - button is conducting and shorts out an open - on one small board with three leads coming off it. How does that work? They have 4 resistors on the board. Does the microcontroller look at resistance or voltage? Hmmm... If it was voltage, wouldn't they need 4 leads atleast? Anyhow, here's the neat part. I can't even see the microcontroller. It looks like it's under the push button on/off switch.

This is terrific. First, you have to control the speed of the motor to be able to get the pulsing of the display right to get the message stationary in space.

Looking closely, it looks like the supply lead goes to the contact-button board, so there's probably a crude ADC looking at the other two leads. I think I could do better - how about just one lead - save on labour. And the resistors? You want as many components as possible to be the same so that your inventory is simple - and so the assemblers have less chance of messing up.

I wonder how I could hack the program on the MC? First, I'd have to get the switch off the MC, then find out the type, then order the development kit that goes with it - if I built my own board, I'd still need a socket.

Need to find the equivalent of ACK (Atlanta) in Dallas. They might make life easier.

Here's one no-brainer hack I should be able to do - put in a male power connector that sticks out on the outside and hooks into the power terminals on the inside so that I can leave it on my desk and power it off an AC adapter - so I don't have to worry about charging batteries.