May 16th was my last day at Amazon. After about a week of a half of vacation I’m starting all over today at blist.com, a small, early-stage startup in Pioneer Square, Seattle. My tentative job title is “Technical Project Manager”, but my actual work will encompass so much more. I’m looking forward to working with such a young, ambitious company and getting the chance to leverage my skills and experience in ways that will hopefully help make them very successful.

In my tenure at Amazon, I had the opportunity to work with so many awesome people that I can’t count how many people I need to thank. I still love Amazon and all it’s hard working employees, but this opportunity at blist was too good to pass up. They’re small, scrappy, and have a grand vision of the future, probably much like Amazon did when it was starting out. It’s a big jump, but it should be a great ride, and I look forward to being able to accomplish some great things.

Photo borrowed from TheMahers Seattle Lunch2.0 photoset on flickr

I have a few posts queued up about projects I’ve been working on lately, and I’ll be posting them soon. I promise.

And for general purpose bags, I’ve accumulated a couple messenger bags, namely a Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger and a Patagonia Critical Mass bag. The Critical Mass, by the way is a great bag - practically indestructible and big enough for up to a week long trip. Big enough, also, to often be too big.

But I’ve always been craving something a bit more unique. Sure, there are companies like R.E.Load (an awesome Seattle-based custom messenger bag company), but I don’t feel like paying $300 for a full-on custom bag. And it would be much cooler if I made it myself. And I just happen to own a sewing machine. Yes, I’m a straight guy who owns a sewing machine. Don’t mess with me or I’ll sew you a pillow or something.

Fortunately there have been a lot of cool messenger bag designs popping up on the Internet lately. I picked out one of the more popular designs which has also been featured on Make Magazine’s blog. I especially liked his last design, the one based on the pythagorean theorem. Ignore all the mumbo jumbo about “perfect ratios” - what you really end up with is a bag with a nice wedge shape that you can pack full of stuff but still close tightly. And it’s very similar to other bags that I really find comfortable, like my Timbuk2 bag.

Read on for more details.

For my first version, I wanted to spend little or no money on materials, since I just wanted to confirm that I liked the design of the bag and that my sewing skills were up to snuff. I’d already purchased some webbing and buckles from the awesome people at outdoor-oriented Seattle Fabrics (about $10 in total), but I still needed material to craft the bag out of. Luckily I just happened to have a couple blue plastic tarps from a recent surf trip. Blue plastic tarps are not only dirt cheap (about $8 for a 10′x12′ tarp), but they’re also surprisingly durable and easy to work with. Eventually my goal is to build a bag out of heavy Cordura or even better something like North Sails “Gatorback” for some bulletproof Kevlar goodness. I have a rough commute…

I won’t get into too much terrible detail, since if you own a sewing machine, you probably are at least as good at using it as I am. Which isn’t hard, because I suck, despite two years of Home Ec. And even if you don’t own a machine, you’re borrowing one from a friend who is also quite likely to be better than me.

Plotting out the design

Starting with the measurements in the Golden Mean design, I applied my awesome 8th grade algebra skills and scaled down the design to about 13″ high. Basically I made it just big enough to fit my 12″ Apple Powerbook and some other goodies. No sense in making a bag any bigger than it has to be.

Then I laid the pattern out with a yardstick. Three years of high school drafting came in handy.

Cutting

This step is pretty obvious. One of the cool things about the Golden Mean design is that, given a big enough piece of material (like a 10′x12′ blue tarp), the whole bag can be built out of a single piece. This reduces the amount of sewing you need to do, along with the number of seams you’ll later have to seal or finish. Basically you fold it up like a big piece of origami and stitch the remaining edges together.

Sewing

Stitching the actual body of the bag together was quite easy. Only four straight edges to stitch. Remember to stitch the entire bag inside out, so the seams are on the inside. If this was a real bag, I’d have stitched in a ripstop nylon liner to make it prettier, and put some trim on the edges. But this is not a real bag, and it’s made out of cheap blue tarp.

Finishing Touches

After the body of the bag was complete, I still had to put some finishing touches on the bag. After flipping the bag inside out, I “trimmed” the closing flap basically by folding it over about 3/8″ and then stitching the flap down. For a more final version of the bag, you’d want to add some webbing to the edge as trim for a cleaner look.

You’ll also, obviously, need a strap. For my strap design, I decided to dead-end the strap at one end, and finish the other end with a “flip-buckle” style strap. To provide strength to the strap, so it doesn’t rip itself out, I folded a scrap of tarp four times to create a backing patch, and then stitched through the strap, bag, and then patch.

As you can see, I’m not the best seamstress in the world.

At the other end of the strap, I secured the buckle by a short loop of webbing using the same technique as the other end. Then I looped back the free end of the strap and secured back to the buckle itself. The result is quite clean, and I’m very happy with it.

Final Results

As a whole, I’m pretty happy with the results. The bag design I chose has a great wedge shape that feels quite comfortable and looks quite good. And it’s super easy to make. I’m looking forward to making something more finished.

Stay tuned for further developments on this project. The next version should be coming soon.

About a year ago I picked up a pair of Shure E2C headphones. Well worth their somewhat expensive price, I use them all the time. They provide a ton of isolation, so they’re great on the bus and when flying.

But, in my experience, the actual headphone plug leaves a lot to be desired. Within about 8 months of regular use, I started getting the traditional crappy connection problems you get with cheaper headphones. After a few months of constantly trying to tweak the connector in order to get a good connection, I finally decided to replace the connector myself.

The final product was quite impressive. For more details, read on.

Step 1: Acquire supplies

Obviously you’ll need a pair of faulty headphones. And a new connector. I picked up a gold-plated 1/8″ connector from Radio Shack for about $3.99. I could have bought the standard chrome one for a buck or two cheaper, but in this situation, “bling” is worth a few extra bucks.

Step 2: Strip off old connector

First step is to remove the old crappy connector and strip it down to it’s bare wires.

Strip off the main cover for an inch or so, and then strip the individual wires. They will be incredibly tiny. This is where it pays to be really good at soldering. I won’t elaborate, but I’m not that good at soldering.

Step 3: Solder on the new connector

Now solder on the new connector. This is where reading becomes important.

According to Wikipedia, the three connections on a headphone jack are as follows:

1. The “Tip” (the end of the connector), which handles the left stereo channel. For me this was the blue wire, which I connected to the shortest terminal.
2. The “Ring” (the first segment of the connector), which handles the right stereo channel. This was the red wire, which I connected to the middle terminal.
3. The “Sleeve” (the second segment of the connector), which is the common ground. For my headphones, this was the conductor with no insulation on it. This was the wire with no insulation, and it connected to the ground terminal.

It may or may not take you some experimentation to figure out what wire is which channel in your headphones. Once you figure it out, solder or screw the connections down to each channel.

Step 4: Reinforce the connection

This step actually came later for me. At first I just soldered up the connections and used the plastic sleeve that came with the connector, but after a week or two my connection was flakier than the original. The tiny wires were moving around too much within the connector. So I re-soldered my connections and then encased the whole deal within a protective layer of cheap two-part epoxy.

Afterwards I waited for the epoxy to dry, and then shaved it down small enough to fit into the screw-on connector.

I’m very happy with the final results. After the epoxy modification, I’ve got a connector that is rock-solid and as good if not better sounding than the original jack. And I get tons of great compliments on how cool the “bling” connector is.

There you go. About $5 and less than an hour’s work to save a $100 pair of headphones. I hope you find this as helpful as me.

Well not quite, but close. Given the fact that I’ve been running various websites for nearly 8 years without a single cent in funding, I’ve decided to start running some rather unobtrusive Google Adsense ads at the left-hand side of the page. I know that the decision to turn a site ad-supported is not usually met without controversy. I’ve just come to the conclusion that I’d like my blog to be at least self-supporting. All I really want to do is cover my hosting costs. I’ve got a perfectly good job and I don’t plan on supporting myself off of blogging (I’m amazed anybody can).

So, if you’ve got opinions, feel free to chime in in the comments.

And there’s nothing nearly as fun as waking up at 9AM to the sound of Zacki’s henchmen chipping the tile off the wall in the bathroom down the hall with an air-powered chisel.

So if you need some web design, administration, or custom software development, give me a shot. I’m cheap.

Now all I need is customers.

Thank you for your patience!

Update: All done!

So I check out my server logs. I find two referrals from blog.johnkerry.com:

172.144.61.107 - - [18/Feb/2004:01:13:28 -0500] “HEAD /blog/index.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 0 “http://blog.johnkerry.com” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.01 [en]” 206.65.72.35 - - [20/Feb/2004:23:59:07 -0500] “HEAD /blog/index.php HTTP/1.0″ 200 0 “http://www.blog.johnkerry.com” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004″

Hmm… Interesting. So I check out where those IP’s are coming from.

-=[krezel@metcalf ~]=- -=>resolveip 172.144.61.107 Host name of 172.144.61.107 is AC903D6B.ipt.aol.com -=[krezel@metcalf ~]=- -=>resolveip 206.65.72.35 Host name of 206.65.72.35 is bess-proxy.cajun.net

It looks like at least one of the hits came from somebody’s home PC connected via AOL, and the other seems to be connected through some sort of open proxy.

Next step, obviously is to do some googling.

A search for “StarProse Referrer” comes up with a few interesting hits. I get a couple of hits to actual software listings for “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004″:

Referrer Advertising is a new concept in which your website address is sent to thousands of public websites which publish there referrer statistics. Referrer advertising can be very successful and does not take a huge cash investment or take up a lot of your time to get started. Referrer advertising does not apply to Can Spam Act of 2003.

Lovely. Some googling on “blog.johnkerry.com” comes up with hit after hit after hit to other people’s referrer logs listing “blog.johnkerry.com”. And then of course lots of other bloggers also complaining about being spammed by Kerry.

I’m not going to say that I’m surprised by this. But I am very unhappy that in their quest to gain some “internet cred” (and increase their google hits), Kerry and his supporters have resorted to tactics only previously used by porn and drug spammers. Unfortuantely this is will hardly ever make the evening news, no matter how low I think it is.

Oh yeah… And Dean has been doing it too…