When we left off on Part 1, Dan and I were heading west from Chicago into corn country, Iowa. Upon entering the state I boldly predicted that there would “most likely be little stands on the side of the highway selling fresh corn on the cob to weary passerbys.” This would prove to be incredibly wrong. Not only were there no stands selling corn on the side of the highway, but there was no corn to be seen anywhere! In movies, Iowa’s highways are lined with endless stalks of golden maize. But in reality, it’s just a lot of dirt.

The highlight of Day 2 came when we actually stumbled upon the University of Iowa (our Big Ten rivals!) for lunch. We found a great little restaurant, The Summit, with views of the campus where we ate delicious blackened chicken calzones (see Dan’s pinkie finger for perspective).

After lunch we took a quick tour around the elegant campus, passed out some Ignighter flyers, and explored an intriguing street nearby.

I’m not sure if there was something in the calzone or maybe just too much time spent in the car, but after we left the University heading toward Omaha, we really started to lose our sanity.

Dan, having recently watched Transformers for the first time was convinced that there were Decepticons on our tail. And as crazy as it sounds in retrospect, at the time I was in complete agreement. Below are a couple of the Decepticons we eluded along the way. The second one was amphibious.

When we weren’t outrunning villainous robots we were chasing storms to occupy the time. Fortunately there were so many storms that we were able to just go straight on Rte. 80 the whole time and still claim to be chasing storms. However after sashaying around the U of Iowa together, and witnessing first hand what real men from the heart of the country actually look and sound like, we knew that if were going to attempt to chase storms (or even if we were going to attempt to say were chasing storms), then we’d have to assume alter-egos.

The new identities were basically just manly names draped over our nebbishy personas. We chose names that we felt evoked hardened cowboys, real men, the kind of guy who instinctually knows where the power box is when the electricity goes out. I became Jerry Rig and Dan was Alan Wrench.

That may look and sound like Dan, but it’s actually just Wrench (real men, we learned in Iowa, don’t use first names).

Wrench and I arrived in Omaha, Nebraska in the early evening. Although the hotel had an exotic name, it didn’t exactly feel like Cabo when we got inside.

We explored Omaha a little bit and then hit the hay early.

Check back in for the shocking final installation of the road trip, coming very soon. A dead car, an incident at a fast food joint, and so much more.

We Ignighter folks really enjoy reading Roger Ehrenberg’s blog, Information Arbitrage. Recently he posted this poignant piece, The Halcyon Days of Entrepreneurship about the rise of (and the importance of) entrepreneurship in today’s struggling economy.

He points out -among other things- that we can potentially turn a negative into a positive by thinking outside the box. And he’s not just talking about creating ideas that come from outside the box, but even the act itself of thinking of an outside of the box entrepreneurial idea is outside of the box behavior for many of the mature, smart professionals who have recently been laid off after years of corporate employment.

The importance of this rise of entrepreneurship, he says, is that it “can help spur innovation, solve seemingly intractable problems and help energize the economy both today and tomorrow.”

I don’t really have much more to add because Ehrenberg’s post is comprehensive and well-written, and I’m starting to confuse even myself by writing about it. It’s definitely worth a read though, really good stuff.

Yesterday TechCrunch posted this story about the potentially treacherous future of many Facebook Apps. The blogger, Mark Hendrickson, discusses the “rough road ahead” for what he calls “low engagement apps” like SlideWall. He also quotes Naval Ravikant of Venturehacks as saying that the apps with the brightest future are the high engagement ones like travel, dating (right on!), book, and game-related, whereas “everyone else is kinda screwed”.

I guess we should feel pretty damn flattered because this is exactly what we predicted three weeks ago in this post. Now granted instead of “low and high engagement” apps, we were referring to them as “passive and active involvement” apps. And yes, it’s true we didn’t cite quite as many “figures” or “experts” to come to the same conclusion.

But it’s the conclusion that matters. So we’re certainly flattered that TechCrunch is hopping on the Ignighter bandwagon.

We’re also happy to hear that they’re still truckin’ along over there…Don’t forget to breathe!

Just last week we reconfigured the design of the Ignighter Weblog and added a couple new posts. At the time it seemed completely harmless, what could possibly be dangerous about spending 4 hours playing around with WordPress blog templates and typing into a box? Apparently, everything. Little did we know that we were skating on ice thin enough to beat out Keira Knightly for the part of a waifish Shakespearean boy. In retrospect, spending that much consecutive time on the blog was one of the most foolish, utterly idiotic things we’ve ever done.

Our newfound appreciation for life comes In light of this New York Times article from Sunday. The article goes into detail about the intense stress that frequent bloggers – most notably Tech Bloggers – undergo as a result of trying to cover as much web news as possible and to be the first to do so. According to the article, constant bloggers have been gaining and losing large amounts of weight, not getting nearly enough sleep, and two prominent bloggers have recently died from what is suspected to be an indirect result of blogging too much. I’m not kidding. Bloggers have actually been dying.

At the outset of the Ignighter Weblog, I wasn’t so good about blogging frequently. Maybe I could inherently sense the dangers associated with a hard-blogging life. But recently I’ve seemingly thrown caution to the wind as I’ve been hitting the blog sauce pretty hard.

So from now on if a couple days go by and I haven’t zealously blogged, don’t think of it as “oh they’re being lazy bums again”. Instead try to take the approach of “ahh those poor guys must be too scared to blog today”. Because the truth is, we probably are. It’s not that we don’t love blogging. In fact, that’s just the problem.

Now that dangers are being associated with the blogger life, I predict that many will have a new found respect for them. Insiders are even saying that on next year’s list of the world’s most dangerous jobs, it could actually come in at number 3; Just behind deep-sea fishing and coal mining, but a hair ahead of Olympic Torch carrier.

In fact I’m feeling like a bit of a daredevil myself, and I love it. Little things like redesigning the blog layout now seem way more exciting, kinda like the modern day equivalent of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But also not entirely like that at all.

I guess the real lesson to be learned here is that blogging, like most things in life (alcohol, extra virgin olive oil, books), are great in moderation but fatal in excessive quantities. The Times quoted Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of Tech Crunch as actually being surprised that he’s physically alright (despite gaining 30 lbs. in the last few years), “I haven’t died…At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen….This is not sustainable.” These people seriously need to cut back. I mean we all love hearing about what new languages Facebook is now available in, but do we really need to hear about it at 4am?

Maybe for the sake of these bloggers and their families we need to take a stand. If we make a concerted effort not to read their blogs in the middle of the night, then I predict that they’ll stop the nocturnal postings. In the article, Arrington jokes about how it would be great if all bloggers could reach an agreement to not post in the middle of the night, but he knows this is an impossibility. What they’re missing though, is that the power to save these croaking bloggers lies in the hands of the readers. You know what I’m sayin’?

We were impressed by this list of “15 Startup Commandments” from the Web 2.0 Entrepreneurs Group:

1. Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.

2. Stealth startups suck. You’re not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.

3. If you don’t have scaling problems, you’re not growing fast enough.

4. If you’re successful, people will try to take advantage of you. Hope that you’re in that position, and hope that you’re smart enough to not fall for it.

5. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that’s really the case, you shouldn’t be doing your startup.

6. Your competition will inflate their numbers. Take any startup traffic number and slash it in half. At least.

7. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Leonardo could paint the Mona Lisa only once. You, Bob Ross, can push a bug release every 5 minutes because you were at least smart enough to do a web app.

8. The size of your startup is not a reflection of your manhood. More employees does not make you more of a man (or woman as the case may be).

9. You don’t need business development people. If you’re successful, companies will come to you. The deals will still be distractions and not worth doing, but at least you’re not spending any effort trying to get them.

10. You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.

11. Starting a company will teach you what it’s like to be a manic depressive. They, at least, can take medication.

12. Your startup isn’t succeeding? You have two options: go home with your tail between your legs or do something about it. What’s it going to be?

13. If you don’t pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?

14. Startups are not a democracy. Want a democracy? Go run for class president, Bueller.

15. You’re doing a web app, right? This isn’t the 1980s. Your crummy, half-assed web app will still be more successful than your competitor’s most polished software application.

Ok, so maybe a couple of the points are a little goofy, but in general it fits our M.O., especially 1, 2, 7, 8, and 9. We’re just 3 people (2 of whom are n00bz!) without any funding (yet!), trying to realize this fine idea that probably countless other people have had.

In the spirit of #2 and #7, we’re trying hard to get Sparkker out there about a week from now. It may not be the most polished web app ever written; every pixel may not line up perfectly; and you may get an occasional error message (hope not.) But, it should work and should help people meet people better. And, we hope to keep learning from whoever’s using it to keep improving it.

We could have taken the time to raise the big bucks, to hire a big team, to polish all the rough edges. But, then you wouldn’t have Sparkker for a few more months. (Though you probably would have some other similar service before then.) And then we wouldn’t be able to learn and improve on it for a couple more months, etc.

We hope you’ll appreciate our trying to get it out sooner rather than later, and we hope you’ll let us know if something doesn’t feel quite right!

Peter
Chief Nephologist & Code Monkey