Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

Yes, so I’m one of those really lame people that doesn’t have an iPhone. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I finally discovered how to do this somewhat easily.

I usedAudacity to shorten my MP3′s. Like most things open source, it doesn’t really work like a Mac app. You have to copy the entire contents of it’s dmg into a folder, otherwise nothing will work.

Also, you can’t drag-drop into Audacity. Once you get beyond that, it’s pretty easy to trim your MP3 into the correct size.

Trim Command

When it comes time to export back out into an mp3, you have to point it to the library for LAME. I installed this through ports.

The next step is using The Missing Sync to put your new ring-tone sized mp3 file onto the Q. Once it’s on the phone, open the file browser and move it to the /ApplicationData/Sounds folder. It will now show up in all ringtone lists.

It’s not hard, but somewhat un-fun to figure out.

It’s been a long standing dream of mine to have some remote control stream music from my computer to a device in some other room. After a lot of waiting, a failed rails project, and a few years, the answer finally came in the form of the Airport Express, iPod Touch and iTunes.

Unfortunately, this was not the smoothest install ever. I was completely unable to get my AirPort Express to join my wireless network. My network uses a Linksys WRT150N as it’s access point. When the AirPort was on the desk, next to the Linksys, it would connect, but refuse to acquire an IP. When it was in the workout room, it simply flashed the error light. The logs showed that the AirPort was connecting, but not staying connected to the AP. A little bit of trial and error exposed that the auto-band selection on the Linksys was throwing the AirPort off. Which is completely not what I expected, since no other Apple product that I own has experienced this problem. Once I selected a specific channel for my Linksys AP, all has been well.

I’ve now got my iPod Touch with the remote control app to control my iTunes, which can stream to the AirPort in the workout room. Since this works, I’ll likely add a few more AirPorts to get the rest of the rooms online. This is where the iPod Touch RC app really shines. It allows you to remotely select which remote speakers are connected to the current library. It’s nice to finally have this, under budget, and only requiring one evening of clueless tinkering.

Sonali won tickets to the Nine Inch Nails show last week for being an absolutely horrible bowler. Another one of her friends won the other set, leaving me reunited with the group that kicked me out of my own house only a few weeks ago. I was extremely excited to go, since I’m not only a huge fan of the music, but also the way Trent Renzor’s been going about his business. If you haven’t been paying attention, his last three albums have been distributed free in some form and you can buy DRM free music direct for really low cost. His willingness to treat his fans like fans instead of potential criminals was enough to make me buy a T-shirt.

My dates for the concert (my real date is on the right)

The show it self was terrific. Things lead of with Deerhunter, a post rock local band. The tickets we had were in a suite, which rocks for the free food and drink, but is not so great for sight lines and the sound mix. Even so, I was reasonably impressed with them. I wouldn’t mind hearing more of them.

NIN on stage

Around 8:45, NIN started and kept rocking past 11:00. Probably the most important guy not in the band was the roadie whose job it was to replace the microphone stand every time Renzor chucked it across the stage.

The concert itself was a three act production. The first and third acts were NIN’s industrial and extremely energetic. They played their standard hits. I was somewhat amused by the girls in the suite cheering wildly for the opening lines of Closer (“I want to violate you…”). The place rocked during these sections, but crowd remained well behaved. I guess that’s a side-effect of having a concert out in the middle-of-nowhere.

For the second act, NIN transitioned to the Ghost’s phase. This involved some very cypherpunk visual effects. This whole section was a musical imagining of a William Gibson Novel.

NIN going cypherpunk

Trees

Blue

This was the most visually interesting section, but it didn’t work to well in this environment. I was transfixed, but I like the abstract rock stuff. However, you could tell that a lot of the fans were getting a little bored. I get the feeling that this section is the band’s version of intermission, since it takes a lot less energy and is a bit of a physical breather.

Eventually, they got back to their roots and rounded out their collection of hits. They closed the set with Head Like a Hole, which is still one of my favorites.

Closing (before encores)

If they ended the show on that note, I would have been pretty impressed. However, they played some more tricks with their lighted screen and got going again. All told, they were on stage for almost two and a half hours. I left more impressed with the band than when I entered.

I’ve got more not-very good pictures.

Something that I find incredible tedious and boring is managing money. My philosophy is that if I wanted to look at numbers all day, then I would have become an accountant or an applied mathematician. Thankfully, I have a wonderful wife that keeps me debt-free and makes sure the bills get paid on time. However, even she struggles when it comes to getting a bearing on our entire financial outlook, a struggle that compelled us to join Wesabe when it first launched. We’ve been casual users since joining, but this morning we decided to give the better hyped Mint a shot. This is my rundown from using both services.

Wesabe

I started using Wesabe a few weeks before Mint’s big launch at the Techcrunch 40. We’d always gut feel that we were spending too much on eating out or electronic gadgets, but the actual numbers were hard to find. Wesabe gave us deep insight into how our money was being spent by allow us to tag each transaction. For instance, Wesabe can tell you exactly how much money you spent on tacos last month, if you tag your transactions right.

The other big feature of Wesabe is the focus on community generated content and suggestions. The system tracks your tags and transactions and suggests tips that you might find beneficial. It also has discussion forums where people talk and trade tips about personal finance.

Wesabe isn’t perfect. Until recently, you had to us a relatively flakey desktop uploader to keep your information in sync. The site now includes on online uploader, but in keeping with the teams (quite understandable) paranoia, they only use banking interfaces they have written themselves. Unfortunately this means that most banks still require a manual upload, thereby reducing the usefulness of central account tracking.

The other major drawback is Wesabe does not support loans or brokerage accounts. This wasn’t a big deal when we signed-up, since all we had was a checking account and some credit cards. A lot has changed since then and our personal finances have gotten far more complex and Wesabe’s inability to track these accounts have made it almost useless.

Mint

That force us to take the plunge with Mint.

Mint’s interface is super slick. Not only are there fun ajax-y effects, but it’s functional, too. Adding your accounts to auto-refresh is simple and trivial. Mint supported every account where we have online access, right out of the box. With that, we get a dashboard that shows exactly where our money is (or isn’t). What required 8 visits in the morning (most of which never happened), is now a 30 second activity. A time-saver and reality dose all at once.

Even better, once it loaded my transactions it matched them against similar transactions and automatically labeled each one. I spent hours tagging transactions in Wesabe. Mint leveraged the power of the community to categorize everything for me. It’s such a good idea, it’s hard to believe nobody did it before (and that Wesabe doesn’t do it now).

Both services have neat charts, but Mint’s got one that compares your spending habits to people that live in your area allowing you to see where actually are in relation to the Jones’. Also compared to Wesabe, Mint’s site is far more responsive. Pages load fast on Mint, but Wesabe feels like it’s running on the Twitter infrastructure.

However, Mint’s a beta product and crowds aren’t perfect. The transaction for my wife’s tag (license plate for you non-Georgians) was categorized as a Doctor’s expense, which left me scratching my head for a bit. Some of the interface is a little quirky and un-intuitive. The way multi-select works, for example, is just weird. The spending chart that fascinated me earlier doesn’t account for household size, making it all but useless. But these are small issues compared to the vast benefit the service provides.

The Bottom Line

It would seem that Mint is the hands down winner and it is, with one caveat. It integrates with more types of accounts, it takes less time to set-up, the site is more responsive, the interface is slicker, etc. If your time to budget is tight, Mint is the way to go. It’ll get you much farther, faster than any other solution that I’ve seen.

The Caveat? If you’re willing to spend the time to diligently track each transaction, Wesabe is a far more compelling service. It’s ‘savings tips’ aren’t just advertisements in disguise. Mint tells me to switch banks and credit cards. Wesabe tells me to split portions and order lunch entrees to save money. Mint tells me how much I spent on restaurants. Wesabe tells me that I spent more on Pizza than Mexican. Mint feels like a utility, Wesabe a community.

I really like those things about Wesabe and am going to miss them. A personal finance tool needs to be able to manage your finances and today the tool that does that is Mint.