jonspenceley[dot]com

Daft Punk vs. Dope Zebra

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:13:38 -0400

Everyone should listen to this:

While watching this:

Monday Beats

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:05:14 -0400

Moving On From Sprouter

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:00:14 -0400

As you may or may not have heard, Sprouter and BetKit are changing. The Postmedia Network has decided to integrate these two platforms into their existing properties, and as such, the Sprouter and BetaKit teams are moving on to new projects, and new opportunities.

My time at Sprouter has been extraordinary, and I have gained a wealth of experience from my coworkers, and the community. We had the chance to profile hundreds of amazing founders, feature Hot Startups from all over the world, and run Sprout Up events in Toronto, and across Canada. I’m eternally grateful to everyone who gave me the opportunity to be part of the vibrant, global Sprouter community.

For the past few months, I’ve been on the hunt for a new challenge, and prior to the announcement from Postmedia, I had given my notice that I would be moving on from Sprouter. Starting in April, I’ll be joining the team at Vidyard as Community Marketing Manager. I could not be more stoked about this new opportunity, and I’ll be posting new details as I get started.

I’m always happy to chat about startups, technology, social media, and a host of other fun topics, so feel free to shoot me an email at jonspenceley@gmail.com if you would like to catch up. I’m also on the LinkedIn if you are feeling professional.

Thank you again to everyone who made my experience at Sprouter extraordinary! I’m looking forward to starting a new chapter of my life, and to working with the incredible team at Vidyard!

Editor's Note March 13th

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:00:20 -0400

If your startup is participating in conferences or trade shows, always make sure you are sending passionate, knowledgeable people to meet your potential users.

Rarely will a someone sign up for your product on the spot, so make sure your team is prepared to deliver your value proposition, and connect with users to create a lasting impression.

Every interaction with your company reflects on your ability to prepare, and a bad first impression can send a potential customer searching for something else.

Check out today’s issue of Sprouter Weekly.

Editor's Note March 6th

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 13:00:17 -0500

Don’t be afraid to share some news with your community every now and then.

Whether it’s a glimpse of an upcoming product update, or your team winning an award, sharing details about the inner workings of your company shows that there are people behind the product, and that you are proud of your team’s accomplishments.

Try not to spend all day tooting your own horn, but a little good news is always worth sharing.

Check out today’s issue of Sprouter Weekly.

Got Bored, Started Building Battleship

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:30:18 -0500

While I have been enjoying my pinball project, the space required to contain my random electronics experiments has become too much for my desk to handle, so I’m putting it on hiatus for the time being, and building a little Python Battleship game.

So far, I can store a game board, add ships using an x,y coordinate and an orientation (across or down) and validate whether or not that ship placement is allowed based on remaining space in the row or column, and conflicts with other ships already placed.

As an added bonus, this program doesn’t require me to plug it into an Arduino board, so I can work on it while I’m away from my desk. Looking forward to fleshing out the gameplay mechanics, and figuring out how to do basic, one-sided play.

My third-year university group project was to create a multiplayer board game, and we failed miserably because we picked a game whose rules were nauseatingly complicated.

Battleship is much…simpler. Thus, I try again.

Editor's Note February 27th

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:00:19 -0500

Startups helping startups is a two-way road.

For every person in your network you ask to try out your product, chances are there’s someone who could use your help testing theirs.

Not every app or service is going to be relevant to you, but chances are you know someone who’s got a problem to solve. Take some time to try something new, and help a fellow entrepreneur get real feedback on their startup.

You never know when you’ll find yourself an early adopter of the next billion dollar company.

Check out today’s issue of Sprouter Weekly.

Help Me Choose My Second Set Of Eyes!

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:30:28 -0500

I love my spectacles, but I’ve had them for a few years now, and I’m bored. Plus - if one doesn’t take advantage of one’s sweet health plan now and then, what’s the point in having one?

So I stopped by a glasses store yesterday and tried on a few pairs. Picked two that I’m very fond of, but I need some opinions!

The Light Pair…

And the Dark Pair…

They’re both matte plastic with a wood-style finish, which is my solution to the fact that giving real, fragile wooden frames to a person who still has the fine motor control (and common sense) of a toddler would be a recipe for broken glasses, and broken dreams.

So tell me what you think! Light or Dark?

Sprouter Weekly Editor's Note - February 20th

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:00:37 -0500

Few businesses stay in one place forever.

Whether it’s moving out of the basement, or moving out of the country, it’s easy to fall out of touch with the friends and colleagues you’ve met along the way.

Try to spend a bit of time each week staying in touch with the people who have had an impact on you and your company. You never know when you’ll cross paths again, and the best cure for a strange place is a friendly face.

- J!

Check out the Sprouter Weekly Newsletter.

More Fun With Shift Registers

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:00:16 -0500

The past few weekends have been a bit hectic, but thanks to a few well-timed trips to Toronto, I was able to stock up on some more parts for my pinball project, and thus more things to experiment with.

I grabbed a few more of the 595 shift registers, and some proper 7-segment LEDs. I also needed a mess more wire, but it’s cheap there, so I stocked up. After wiring up the two 7-segments, I’m already low on blue wire:

I still have a fair amount of learning to do, as I still somehow bought the wrong type of 7-segment LED, and somehow got it working by hooking up the wrong wire. At the time I wasn’t in the mood to ask questions. Now I am.

Looking forward to learning more, stringing a few of these together, and building my proper scoreboard!

Pretty Proud of my #Guelph Photo

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 11:00:37 -0500

Testing out my 74HC595

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:30:21 -0500

As part of my pinball project, I’d like to be able to display the user’s score on a few 7-segment LEDs. Unless I want to use every pin on my Arduino to control two numbers, I needed to learn how to use a shift-register to store my LED values and display them. Because the 74HC595 can be daisy-chained together, I can use the same code to write to six numbers just as easily as I write to one.

The code for this project, and the layout of the LEDs was taken from an excellent post on Bildr called Can You Move Over?

I adapted their code to light up all of the LEDS but one, and shift this pattern to the left every 500 milliseconds. The result is this video here:

I had planed to use the 7-segment display I bought over the weekend, but in attempting to wire up the display, I learned an important lesson in the difference between common cathode LEDs and common anode.

Knowing that earlier would have saved me a dollar, but at least I know now for the future. And knowing is half the battle.

Starting to Assemble the Details

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 13:00:12 -0500

Although I currently lack a wood shop suitable for the actual construction of a pinball machine, work on the electronics side has been going well.

Since I’m kind of foreseeing this pinball machine becoming my forever project, infinitely built on and never truly named ‘done’, I figure it’s worth picking my battles, starting small, and working my way up in terms of functionality. In the interest of keeping things simple for my first time around, I’ve limited construction to three key pinball machine components. I’ll use snapshots from everyone’s favourite video-game pinball machine Space Cadet to illustrate my work.

The Flippers

Without these, pinball really would be a game of chance rather than a game of skill. Flippers are what let you control the pinball, and they’re a simple concept to design, but a deceptively complex one for my first hack.

Flippers are generally driven by solenoids, which push against or pull on some gearwork to make the flippers snap up and back. To keep my project from needing any higher power than the Arduino’s 5v supply, I tried purchasing a 5v solenoid, and was disappointed to find that it was remarkably small.

With intent to figure out the electrical requirements of a real, 25v solenoid later, I set out to ensure I had a program for the other important functionality of flippers, which was switches for a variety of user-controlled in-game stuff.

Here’s a video of me using my ‘flipper buttons’ to move an LED back & forth in a row. These will obviously have to connect to a set of gears & solenoids later, but for now I’ll just make sure the programming works.

Bumpers

Bumpers award you a tiny amount of points in exchange for shooting your ball away randomly at a high speed. These are powered by a solenoid, and a few pressure switches. The really ‘necessary’ ones are located at the bottom of the play field above the flippers, so that’s what I’ll work on first. Since they’re essentially some screws and a rubber band (at the simplest) they’re also the best ones to start with.

Lacking in both high-powered solenoids, and pressure switches, the only part of these I would be able to start working on at the moment is the code that records whether or not they have been tripped in order to award some points. This is, essentially, the same code as the flippers, so I’m not going to worry much about it until I have the technology, and a spare few pins on the Arduino, to help.

Targets

Pinball wouldn’t be much fun without something to shoot at, so some pressure sensitive targets that will incremenet a score when they are triggered are the way to go.

I’m going to model mine after the three gaps that usually sit at the top of most pinball machines, and make each one worth a slightly different point value.

In effort to maximize the amount of fun I can get out of a small number of parts, I’m going to add a popular mini-game to the targets in my pinball machine.

In addition to awarding points when the ball hits the target, it will also either turn on, or turn off an LED above each target. Lighting up all three LEDs at once will award a bonus number of points, and will turn all 3 LEDs off so that the process can be started again.

Hitting one of the flipper buttons will ‘move the line’ of LEDS in that direction, thus giving you the added ability to change the position of LEDs to make hitting one easier. Aside from showing the current score on a bunch of 7-segment LEDs, this was the most complex code to write, so I decided to tackle it first.

Here’s a video of the process, using two small buttons as the flipper buttons, and three other small buttons as the targets.

Next Steps

As you can probably see from the video, I’ve kind of run out of wire – there’s no rhyme or reason to the color of the wires used anymore, as I’m using all the ones my little starter kit came with. Creatron in Toronto sells a combo pack of all five colors of wire for $25 so that will have to be my next acquisition.

I also picked up a 74HC595 shift register and a 7-segment LED while I was at Creatron, so I’m going to start experimenting with driving the LED to show numbers from two pins on the Arduino, as I can daisy-chain the HC595 together and use it to show up to 6 digits, which is my end goal.

I Bought An Arduino

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 11:30:06 -0500

And I’m pretty excited about it.

I’ve been itching to start using my illustrious Computer Science degree for a while now, and while I worked on some pretty fantastic stuff during my collegiate days, I hadn’t found any programming projects that stuck with me until now.

I took home an Arduino from the office a few months ago to play around with, and loved the simplicity of programming it, combined with the hands-on opportunities to do cool physical things. I decided to pick up a kit this past week, and start working on a project I’ve had my eye on for some time.

It’s no secret that I have a healthy fascination with pinball, and now I’m going to try my luck at building a simple pinball machine. It’s not world-changing, but I’m pretty excited with it so far. It will have bumpers, and lights, and flippers, and if all goes to plan, it will even keep score.

I’ll post up some progress details over the next few weeks as I refine some of the basic code that drives stuff, but until then, here’s a picture of me controlling the speed of a blinking light with a potentiometer.

Because science!

Friday Favourites: Jersey Jack Pinball

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:00:08 -0500

In an effort to encourage myself to blog more, I want to make sure I post at least one weekly update on my life. In the spirit of sharing the things I enjoy, I bring you one of my favourite things this Friday.

Today I want to share Jersey Jack Pinball, and a little info on my relationship with this arcade classic. If you dislike pinball, or don’t care much for my life story, feel free to click on that link, learn about a really cool entrepreneur doing something pretty great, and enjoy.

I have a pretty deep love of pinball. I’m no Tommy, but I have seen the movie, and I do have Pinball Wizard on more than a few iPod mixes.

Flashback time.

I remember as a kid visiting a bowling alley with my dad, and playing the Elvira pinball machine there. I was too short to reach the buttons, but the alley had a step-stool in their arcade for just such reasons.

The video arcade in Union Station was a fixture of my trips back home during my University days. Seeing as the Greyhound bus never quite lined up with the GO train, I was usually left with an hour to kill at the train station, and the rotating collection of machines there were a great way to pass the time.

After I moved to Toronto, Jenn and I would visit every few weeks, she taking up her place behind the Lord of the Rings machine, while I stood a few machines over pumping quarters into the Sopranos machine. The closure of this space to make way for the new Union Station shopping mall was one of the sadder moments for me last year.

This morning I came across this article on Slate about Jersey Jack Pinball, a small startup in New Jersey run by an arcade gaming veteran that is trying to bring pinball back to the masses, and it really made me excited. For folks unfamiliar on the current state of pinball, one company manufactures almost all of the machines currently being released. Judging behind their quotes in the Slate piece, they are not optimistic for the fate of newcomers in the industry.

Jersey Jack Pinball’s first machine, The Wizard of Oz, is going to be making its way to collectors and arcades in March, and I think it’s a huge win for pinball fans. Jack has collected a team of industry giants to build the perfect machine, stepped up the back cabinet to include a large, high-definition screen allowing for rich visual animations, and really gone overboard on the details. The flippers are glittering, ruby-red slippers. Dorothy’s house spins, and when it lands, the wicked witch’s feet pop out from under it.

There is a lot of innovation coming in the entertainment space – especially if one focuses exclusively on gaming. Kinect turns your entire body into a controller, mobile games companies have leveraged the success of their $0.99 iPhone games into entire ranges of movie tie-ins and consumer products, and handheld consoles have reached the same graphical and immersive gameplay level of their televised counterparts.

With all this new development in personal entertainment, it would appear that arcades are slowly slipping into oblivion, and that’s what makes Jersey Jack Pinball special to me. You can play pinball on your phone – I do it all the time – and you can download arcade titles to most consoles for home enjoyment, but there’s still no substitute for the social arcade experience.

I hope Jersey Jack can encourage existing arcades like Dave & Busters to embrace pinball as something worthy of a coveted strip of floor space. While their focus is more centered on redemption games that turn high scores into long strips of tickets, social arcade games still fill a big portion of these arcades, and I think an ambitious, engaging, and well-built pinball machine would be right at home next to air hockey, and the alien hunting sim du jour.

Tragically, I have neither the space nor money to have a pinball room in my own house. If I had a spare $7,500 I would grab a Wizard of Oz machine for myself, but there is hope for my future collection. The company recently announced that they had scored the license for Peter Jackson’s new blockbuster The Hobbit, and are scheduling a late 2014 release for their next machine, to coincide with the release of the final film. Maybe it’s time to start saving.

Why MySpace Still Matters (To Me)

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:00:24 -0500

I remember MySpace. I imagine a lot of people do, especially those who had a LiveJournal account. I also remember both networks slowly fading into oblivion as Facebook began its meteoric rise to center-stage in my life. I do remember MySpace holding on to a strange niche among musicians, as it was essentially a free place to host and share music without having to let people download your tracks for free.

I had really all but forgotten MySpace as anything more than a strange and confusing part of my digital life, punctuated by the “uh oh” of a new ICQ message, until a bit of holiday nostalgia and light Googling made MySpace a strangely important part of my week.

A good friend of mine passed away a few years ago. He helped me weather high school and a somewhat tumultuous time in my life and walk out unscathed. His name was Glen Bensley, and he was a musician in Oshawa. He ran open mic nights once a week at a now defunct bar called the Velvet Elvis, which was really the only bar I’ve ever had the classic Cheers experience.

In a moment of nostalgia, I decided to see if any of his music was still lingering online. iTunes turned up nothing, as I predicted, but after some searching, I discovered his MySpace page was still up. Last updated in 2008, he had uploaded six songs in total. I listened to all of them. Twice.

While MySpace may have faded somewhat in my social life, it’s moments like these that the lasting legacy of our online properties come into focus. I can write-off MySpace because I don’t use it anymore, but when I was longing to connect with an old friend, it once again took center stage.

Two Weeks in Guelph

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 10:12:22 -0500

Living in Guelph for two weeks is a far cry from the five years we’ve spent here in the past, but it has definitely given me the opportunity to experience all the city has to offer, and all the headaches that come with it.

That should not be misinterpreted as dislike - far from it - but there are a few little quirks of this lovely town that I missed more than others.

Commuting so far has been relatively easy. Spoken as someone who has done it for (at best) a week, that’s not a terribly convincing statement, but if I get the necessary amount of sleep, and I remind myself to focus in the mornings, I can open my laptop at 8am, just as the train starts slipping into Georgetown, and be at “inbox 0” by roughly 9, when the train is starting its slow movement into Toronto. There’s a nice feeling that goes with taking care of most of the pressing issues before one sits down at one’s desk.

I’m privileged to have friends that also take the train in the mornings, and although we don’t always connect for the ride home, it’s very uplifting to have someone to converse with in the morning, and catching up on their lives has been very rewarding.

We’ve made our weekly sojourn to the Farmer’s Market, and I’ve been reunited with one of my favourite Guelph consumables - deep-fried donuts. Jenn has also sampled Feng’s Dumplings, which should not be a breakfast food, but just handle it so well.

We’ve also experienced the one hazard of living downtown, which is the relatively difficult access to grocery stores. The bus ride to No Frills wasn’t a massive undertaking, but it’s still unfortunate. Jenn has located a FreshCo a similar distance which seems to have more reliable bus service, so we’ll be setting our sights there for this week’s trip.

We also ventured out to Walmart, and found that it seems strangely more expensive than its Toronto counterpart. Given that it’s the only one for miles, I wouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still disappointing. Thankfully our dear friends Amanda and Anil gave us a ride back, so we stocked up on the heavy necessities, and grabbed a few other things that were simply not bus friendly.

We also stacked our moving boxes outside of the house for garbage day, only to find them all left behind, as apparently I had not bundled them properly. This city has a strange relationship with garbage collection that feels even more draconian after experiencing Toronto’s “just put anything on the curb, and we’ll take it” mantra for waste management.

All in all, however, I wouldn’t trade this view for the world:

I’m going to do my best to document our life here through Jenn’s handy point & shoot, and now that we have a bird feeder in our front yard, expect a lot of pictures of our winged friends. Here’s one to get you started:

Coming to you live, from the Royal City, this is Jon’s Adventures in Guelph.

Settling In

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 13:37:38 -0500

Home, sweet home!

After a few speedbumps, and a pretty disappointing experience with Discount Truck Rental that led to us renting a truck last-minute from the wonderful team at The Car Rental Place, Jenn and I made our journey to Guelph.

We arrived at around 4pm, and were unpacked by 6:30. Huge thanks to my dad, and my friend Mike, who came all the way to Guelph with us in my dad’s car, and drove all the way back to Toronto again. My dad had a bit further to go, so it was a tough day for both of them, and I truly appreciated the help.

We’re still finding nooks and crannies for all of our belongings, but it’s not an exaggeration when I say we have double the space. The extra bedroom, monster living room, and the ample storage will likely leave our space feeling a tad empty.

Today I got most of our furniture unpacked, and put together the gorgeous antique dining room table Jenn found on Craigslist, It weighed several tons, but it’s worth it - this thing is swanky.

I’ll post some pictures this week, but I appreciate everyone who was super supportive of our move. I was truly sad to leave Toronto, but I’m excited at the opportunity this apartment holds, and what the swanky new job means for my lovely fiance.

- J!

Apparently I forgot to mention I'm moving to Guelph

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 08:38:47 -0500

Moving to a new city is a big undertaking, and apparently I was so caught up in the details I neglected to…tell anyone.

So! Here’s the story - my lovely and talented fiancé has been offered a stellar job with the City of Guelph, and we’re moving into a sweet apartment in Downtown Guelph as of December 1st.

What’s changing: I won’t live in Toronto anymore. I may become a hippie again.

What’s not changing: I will still have the privilege of managing the best community ever with the team at Sprouter. I’ll be in Toronto 3-4 days a week. I will have chops, but I won’t grow a lumberjack beard.

We’re pretty excited about the move, but since we had to pull it all together in about three weeks, I’ve been a bit hush-hush about it. Now that I’ve called Rogers to move our Internet, I
think that makes it official.

More details on our apartment coming soon! Sorry if this is a total jerk surprise. I’ve been lame at communicating this.

Early

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 07:40:54 -0500

In preparation for our move to Guelph, I’m forcing myself to wake up slightly earlier each week so that when I start riding the GO Train in the mornings, it’s not a shock to my system. I’ve been told building up to this in 15 minute increments is useful, so that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

I will admit the added free time is nice, although I haven’t adjusted my sleep schedule to accommodate for it yet. If I’m getting up at 6am, going to bed at 10pm would give me my full 8 hours of balanced breakfast that I’m supposed to get, but yesterday I crashed at 11, and haven’t felt any ill effects for my 6:30 wakeup. Yet.

We’ll see how that goes on the long term, but I’m optimistic that getting up a bit earlier each day won’t kill me. If anything, maybe it’ll force me to be more cognizant of going to bed when my body is tired, rather than going to bed when I have exhausted my (seemingly) unending stream of funny cat pictures.