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Yes, I should be finding serious work to do, but there’s nothing more fun than bastardising something traditional, here’s my effort for 2007

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the Valley
Not a startup was stirring, no deals in back alleys

The business plans were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Sequoia would soon visit there

The founders were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of term sheets danced around in their heads;
At Google, Larry and Sergy met secretly in a loft
2008 is the year they might beat Microsoft.

Out on the Bay there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the cubicle to see what was the matter.
In the reflection on my monitor it flew like a flash,
Opened Google and searched for it, it wasn’t a mash
Yahoo Photos pointed to Flickr page listings
2 girls and a cup, Oh My God, realistic.
When, what in my Flock sidebar should appear,
But a company founder, and fifteen billion tiny reindeer,
With a youthful appearance, so wanting to be heard,
I knew at that moment it was Mark Zuckerberg

More rapid than Everest upward valuations they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and taunted his competitors by name;
Oh MySpace! oh Orkut!, Bebo! and Ning!
I will crush you all, and soon you will sing
That I have more press mentions than you, and I am the king!

As the children in the Valley suffered from Facebook App spam
another company could not even afford ham
Technorati struggled through yet another year
Running out of money can be known to cause fear.

And then, whilst surfing Porn 2.0, I read a new Tweet
Sequoia wanted to party and meet
As I drew in a breath, the money was found
Down the chimney Roelof Botha came with a bound.
A sack full of terms sheets he surely did carry
And mine was all signed and we were ready to marry

Like any good marriage it came with a cost,
“Go To China” he said, but don’t get lost.
But Botha, I said, I’m American and I’m funny
Foreign laws I don’t like, for love nor money
He turned to me, smiled, and said these three names
Google, Yahoo, Cisco are a few of our games
Secretly subverting the Chinese is another,
we create wealth, then surely the Chinese will bother;
about democracy, freedom, and Chelsea Clinton’s mother

in a graveyard near Facebook a ghost did stir
Ask Jeeves said the butler, and this is what’s more

“Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good startup”

Unlike the long northern autumn of discontent as unsuspecting iPhone customers bricked their unlocked iPhones by updating to iPhone OS release 1.1.1, I was smart enough to turn off the auto-update feature in iTunes, and my iPhone has never skipped a beat, running 1.0.2 unlocked using the Optus network.

There’s not a lot of changes in the later versions, iTunes on iPhone is neither here nor there for me. But there was one feature in 1.1.1 I was longing for, and that’s a louder external speaker. You see I don’t own a bluetooth headset (although I’ll buy one the next time I’m in the States: $139 for a Jawbone in the Apple Store Palo Alto last time I was there) so I use the speaker function for handsfree when I’m driving, in the exact same way I did with my Nokia before it. The problem with the iPhone is that the speaker volume is dismal, and it’s unusable at speed; I can converse on it at 60km/h but not 110km/h for example, the ambient noise is too loud.

So today I took the plunge and upgraded to 1.1.2. Here’s how using a Mac.

Time: approx 1 hour, it took me 3 hours.

Starting point

download iNdependence for iPhone here.

Now here is where the fun part starts. If you’ve got a virgin iPhone running 1.0.2 it’s easy, if you’ve got an unlocked (say anySIM or similar) iPhone you have to “revirginize” it.

For instructions (and files) for revirginizing your iPhone go here. The short story is that you can’t upgrade without doing this because it simply won’t work, and worse still could actually damage the phone.

Follow the instructions. There are a couple of so-called automated scripts you can use, but you still need to be fimiliar with terminal/ ssh to use them, where as the instructions for doing it manually using terminal are straight forward.

Download the Virginizer Pack, open terminal and copy and paste the various parts. One word of warning if you’re not familiar with command line on a Mac, you need to have your download in your user folder (yourname), not the desktop or elsewhere. I took me a few minutes to work this out.

Next step

So you go through all of that and you’ve got a virgin phone. At this point I thought I was being clever and installed 1.1.2…then got completely stuck again. You need to strictly follow the instructions from iNdependence at this point. Short story is that you have to do certain things to the phone prior to the upgrade. There are full instructions in the iNdependence help file, including how to downgrade from higher version as well. The key point: you have to downgrade to 1.0.2 and do stuff first to unlock a 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 later.

The rest was fairly easy. You press some buttons, get iTunes to install the update, press some more buttons, you shut down and open the phone maybe half a dozen times, then done.

Australians beware

Really strange thing: with my unlocked 1.1.2 iPhone the keypad for dialing numbers didn’t work. You’d dial one number then the screen would disappear. I looked everywhere for a solution and didn’t find one, aside from a guy on YouTube who solved it by hacking the country code on the iPhone. Turns out my iPhone was set to Australia on the International region screen, for what ever reason this causes the keypad to play up. Turn it back to United States and bingo: it works.

I think I may have mentioned this here before, but I’m involved (as a contributor, or “founding Gooruze”) with a great online marketing site called Gooruze run by Vibe Capital (from WA’s glamour couple Rachel and Clay Cook). It’s a social networking come sharing site where you can contribute or read about online marketing advice and news. The participants are quite literally from a broad church of internet marketing so you get perspectives on all sorts of areas, some of which I didn’t know an awful lot about before starting there.

I’ve been remiss in not spending enough time there lately contributing, side tracked as usual but I’m trying to get back there every day to take part. If you’re looking for something fresh, something that isn’t just the same regurgitated posts you see on some of the so-called make money from blogging and similar sites, Gooruze is worth a look.