Brian Jepson’s Weblog

The Providence Geek Dinner returns this month on Wednesday September 19 at the usual time and location. Check out the Providence Geeks blog for complete details and RSVP!

No matter where you live, there’s a built-in bias against homegrown events, a widespread assumption that they can’t be world-class. If you’ve never been to any of the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF events (BIF-1, BIF-2, and now BIF-3), you might be tempted to give into this bias, but that would be a big mistake. Last year, I attended BIF-2 under a BIF N-GEN scholarship, so it didn’t cost me to attend. My blog coverage of the event last year earned me a spot as a member of this year’s blog-jam. But it would have been well worth the cost to me. This is an innovative event with top-notch speakers, and co-hosted by a Rhode Islander (Walt Mossberg) who has become a giant in technology through his Personal Technology column in the Wall Street Journal and the D: All Things Digital conference.

BIF-3 has an amazing lineup of speakers; here’s a list of a few:

BIF -3 will be hosted by Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg and Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor. The duo will guide participants through a program that includes Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, UnderSecretary of Homeland Security Jay Cohen, Ghost Map author and co-creator of outside.in Steven Johnson, 37signals founder and CEO Jason Fried, Providence Police Chief Colonel Dean Esserman, architect Chris Benedict, Studiocom chief creative officer Juan Fernando Santos, information architect Richard Saul Wurman, BzzAgent founder and CEO Dave Balter, IBM VP of Innovation Irving Wladawsky-Berger, author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Made to Stick author Dan Heath, president of Stanley Bostitch Denise Nemchev, author and founder of The Hybrid Vigor Institute Denise Caruso, founder of the gethuman project Paul English, Linear Air president and CEO William Herp, author and associate professor UC-Davis Graduate School of Management Andrew Hargadon, Icosystem CEO and Chief Scientific Officer Eric Bonabeau, TopCoder founder and chairman Jack Hughes, founder of Zipcar and GoLoco Robin Chase, Director of the MIT Agelab Joe Coughlin, and former head of Knowledge Management for the BBC Euan Semple.

At the admission price of $1,000 this is a very good deal, especially compared to other events around the world. And if you’re local, it’s even cheaper because you’re not paying for air fare to the San Francisco Bay Area or a hotel room (and I’ve heard a lot of folks in the northeast complain there are no good conferences here!). But it can get even cheaper. Here are two ways:

• When you register, mention that I sent you, and you can get in for $800.
• If you’re a Providence Geek, check out the even better offer (half price, but limited to five takers) over at the Providence Geeks weblog.

Office chairs are hard to shop for online. If you use Google to search for “office chair”, you’re in for a chaotic collection of search results and sponsored links. What’s worse, many of these links don’t offer specific suggestions (which I can understand; chairs are very personal). Nevertheless, I was able to sift through some of the mayhem (and a search on Mahalo, which I had never used before, helped me out a lot).

In the end, I decided on an older model: the Steelcase Criterion. My reasons were simple:

1. I could get a (slightly used) leather model cheap: $250 on eBay with reasonable (under $100) shipping
2. Many, many useful adjustments
3. It has an articulating seat depth, which should allow the same kind of forward/reclining movement of the higher-priced current Steelcase models. It hasn’t arrived yet, so I don’t know.

In the hopes that this link will rise to the top and help out other people after this same info, here is a rambling recollection of some of the things I learned along the way:

Good chairs are very expensive, and the leather option adds a lot to the cost. As with many big-ticket items, the gulf between MSRP and street price is huge, and basically a joke–I didn’t find anyone charging MSRP. However, some chair dealers do have deals. Sit4Less has a clearance page with some pretty good deals. I almost went for a loaded Herman Miller Mirra chair that was $575. CSN does not list their clearance items on their web page, but they do advertise them on craigslist, and if you’re in New England, they have a warehouse in Massachusetts. See this link for more information. If you know of more, post ‘em in the comments.

If you have a choice between basic and loaded, you need to know that basic means there are few, if any, adjustments on the chair.

Even if the chair is described as full-featured, dig up what you can. Use the model number, if available, to do a search. For example, the Criterion chair I ordered was described as having fully-adjustable arms. But according to the Criterion specs, the model had almost fully-adjustable arms: height+width, but not pivot. I went into the purchase knowing this, though.

If you’re buying a used chair and slightly obsessive compulsive like me, you’ll probably take more comfort in a leather chair because you can clean it to within whatever your personal comfort zone is. If that doesn’t work, just put it in the sun for 3 hours and tell yourself it’s “refurbished”.

Mahalo led me to a roundup of office chair roundups on ConsumerSearch, which ended up being the most helpful single resource I found. The Consumer Search web page design is cluttered, so give yourself some time to check it out and pick out the info from among the ads.