For the past week, I’ve sat in what would qualify as a Level 1 Biohazard suit, watching over my mom as she sat between life and death. Thanks to the grace of God, she’s going to make it.

Returning to my life, you can imagine what it’s like to leave for a week unexpectedly. Mountains of papers, paperwork, deadlines missed and deadlines looming. For people in the early stages of trying to start, or restart, a startup, this is a double punch in the gut. Not only are you worried about your family, you’re worried about your baby… what you’re trying to build back at home.

Obviously the first thing you need to do is update your team, if you’re lucky enough to have one. Don’t be afraid to ask for specific things outside their standard scope of operations. But, you should also expect failure. Plan for the worst, and hope for the best.

Second, your team does include your family. If you’re critical at a startup, you need to be prepared to tell your family they need to step in and take the reigns. In my situation, I didn’t have reliable Internet access due to poor coverage… and no laptops being usable in my mother’s hospital room. After four working days, I had obligations that mounted, and had to press the help button. It broke my heart to leave my mother’s bedside, but thankfully her condition had improved enough that doctors were telling me it was okay to do so.

Third, and most importantly, breathe. If you’re crazy enough, stupid enough, and passionate enough to even attempt a startup in this economy, a week of downtime is not going to ruin everything. People still have hearts even in the year 2012, and they understand what is going on. Privacy is important, but saying you had to care for a person in the hospital is a reasonable excuse. I’m tired of business titans who insist that excuses aren’t valid in business… and then go and ask for a multi-billion dollar bailout.

The important thing is to assure critical business contacts, partners, and team members that you’re going to keep them updated, and work passionately to pick up the pieces when you return.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of pieces to pick up over the next couple of weeks.

Their latest “credit fairy” ads argue that you can best improve your credit by “only opening new (lines of credit) when you need them.”

This actually is totally incorrect in the modern world of credit. Congress has banned universal default, which means that your credit scores (such as FICO) will improve by opening new lines of credit. Your debt to credit ratio decreases, and thus, your credit score increases.

With credit card companies closing cards left and right, be proactive. Don’t listen to the Ad Council, and find a new credit card with no annual fee. Listen to a real consumer advocate, and take some initiatve to improve your score.

Note that opening new lines of credit does cause a short term (and minor) reduction in scores like FICO, however, the long term benefit of having more available credit typically offsets (and overshadows) that within mere weeks. For example, opening a new credit card will usually increase your FICO score more than the ding for a credit check.

And yeah, we’ll have a guessing contest for what it is. So, you can save the “let me guess, it’s a…” comments (but I’m not going to delete them either).

What is an Emergency Mode? At first I wasn’t going to re-state this, but I feel it’s necessary based on the unawareness that I caught in this article’s comments. Essentially, this only applies to E-REV vehicles like the Volt. An E-REV is a car that is primarily electric, but can also recharge its battery via an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). You charge your car using a standard 110V or 220V outlet, and after about 40 miles… the car fires up its ICE and the battery recharges via gasoline, as you drive.

The moral hazard here is that, in order to ensure that the all-electric battery lasts a full 10 years, you never drain the battery down to zero. After about 40 miles, you still have (on a new battery) about half the capacity still charged. In theory, you could drive 80 miles without using gas… but that would do too much damage to the battery.

Well, what happens if you’re out of gas, and you’ve driven 40 miles. Let’s say there’s a hurricane bearing right for you… or a tornado… or some maniac that wants to kill you. Your car has the power to go another 20, 30, even 40 miles to safety… but it won’t let you. It’s designed to just shut down and sit there. And, you’re going to die in that type of situation.

I was pretty surprised the last time I talked about this, some idiots actually rationalized that “well, you should die in that case, it’s your own darn fault you got into that kind of situation.” There’s no getting through to those kind of people, much less trying to show them how a situation that could arise through no fault of your own.

Once again, as I’ve noted in the past, this doesn’t work with hybrids like the Toyota Prius or Honda Insight. Single-mode hybrids cars like these have very tiny batteries, that would only run for a very short distance without gasoline in the drive-train.

Some also complained about the potential for abuse, that some motorists would hit the Panic Button and engage the battery frequently… doing damage and voiding the warranty on the Volt’s battery. I showed GM how they could easily take advantage of the OnStar modem, inside every Volt, to send a signal to OnStar every time the Panic Button is pressed. After three strikes, the battery’s warranty would be voided. Plain, simple, and safe.

Unfortunately, few have taken up this cause, so here’s my call to arms. Tell GM you want an Emergency Mode on the Volt. Your safety in a dangerous situation is important enough to engineer this simple solution.

In case you’re wondering… what will I buy if the Volt lacks this option? Well, the Pontiac G8 GXP, as a pre-owned car is probably the direction I’m heading in. Half the price of the Volt, and twice the performance. Sure, it won’t be all-electric, but it is a Pontiac… and that’s better than the put-puts that GM is going to be churning out. I would have liked to buy a Chevy Caprice, but Bob Lutz didn’t get his way…

I did get better just in time for our first local meetup. But, I have relapsed.

The good news is that it’s a minor case of bronchitis, as confirmed this morning… caused by the cold I had last week. It’s being treated, and I should be over it later this week.

No, I don’t believe in giving five minute updates on personal health. But, any key person at a startup going MIA has an immediate effect. Controlling, understanding, and containing that effect with your team (and when it spills over into the public) is critical for any business.

McDonalds got rid of trans fat in their breakfasts. Or, most of it at least (they can still slip in .49 grams per meal item, and call it “zero grams”). Great, but they still have 20+ grams in their meat-filled items (Sausage McMuffin or Bacon Egg Cheese Biscuit).

So, here’s a tip. Order the Bacon or Sausage Egg and Cheese biscuits, but swap out the biscuit for an english muffin. It’s a quick order change that can cut the breakfast’s fat in half. In fact, the biscuit has 12 grams of fat on its own… and nearly a whopping three times the salt of the muffin.

Yeah, the biscuit material tastes good. But a muffin tastes good too, and you can feel much better about yourself afterwards. Add in a fruit and yogurt parfait, as well as a coffee, and you’ve got a reasonably healhty fast food breakfast.

Oh, and if you think this is oddball, guess again. McDonalds offers this as a regular menu item in Europe and Australia.

One final thing… it isn’t always the easiest thing to order. Few at McDonalds easily grasp the notion of a McBiscuit with a muffin. As an alternative, ask for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin, substituting the sausage for bacon. This is actually a different item, as the McMuffin comes with trans-fat containing margarine shortening… but it is admittedly a small amount.

So, if you don’t like understanding code, or dense coding-related stuff, feel free to skip this post.

Apple has chosen (and someday I’ll go into the reasoning) to demand that we have the most fine-grained internet connection checking code possible. This is exactly why we don’t like the Walled Garden process that iPhone uses, because it lets one actor pick and chose who gets approved… and who gets denied.

Oddly (or, as I’ll explain, on purpose), Apple offers easy code to do something similar, that only requires a checkbox.

The SBUsesNetwork item can be added to an app’s info.plist file. Unfortunately, this only tells SpringBoard to check to see if Airplane Mode is turned on. It does not alert the user if Wi-Fi is connected to nothing, or if there is no signal on their cell phone.

People often mistake this, because Apple approves web-interacting apps left and right that only use SBUsesNetwork. Now we loop back to the third paragraph… Apple gets to pick and chose. I suspect that the implementation of SBUsesNetwork is to serve as a gatekeeper… locking out apps (which Apple classes under the Pandora’s Box realm) until they check off this barrier to entry. And there could easily be several more of these type of requirements, we won’t know until Apple either throws them out there… or MobileEdition gets approved.

So, I’m going to fight back on this one… we’re going to craft some modular code that can be added into any App Store app easily. It will quickly, on launch, check all available internet connections, and display an alert error if a connection can’t be made.

Yes, there are lots of code out there for doing that… but none of it is in a modular manner (meaning, lots of developers are having to reinvent the wheel, shoestringing old Apple sample code into their app’s interfaces).

Unfortunately, this means one more delay to MobileEdition (we don’t take the easy way out here, and there are a few). But, we really do hope this is the last of these kind of delays. The app is done, we’re not the one holding up its release…

And yes, we’re going to get the other two things out of the way first that I mentioned last week. Namely, PhoneCashback.net and a new initiative. And we’re all working non-stop until those are out the door…

Some have asked me if you should take a test-drive of the Cruise, as a means of getting acquainted with what the Volt will have. It’s a logical question, considering that GM has already announced that the Cruise and Volt are so similar, that the Cruise will likely be the first non-Volt model to inherit Volt’s E-REV (Extended-Range Electric Vehicle) technology. However, I don’t suggest using the Cruise to get acquainted with the Volt… too much. The Volt will only be a four-seater, but will have a lot of the external and internal features. Also, the Cruise will undoubtedly be more powerful, leading some to feel let down when comparing it to the Volt (and no, I don’t know what the difference on handling will be, sorry).

Anyways… I found this funny because MechaWorks just finished its first hardware prototype. Just a few months away from showing it off.

Not only did GM flatly tell me to drop dead by announcing that they had no plans to resurrect profitable Pontiac cars under another GM brand, but they just made an even more pig-headed announcement. They’ve stated that they won’t sell Pontiac, even in a Saturn-like deal where a consortium of dealerships buy out the brand.

Worse, such an offer was (and still is) on the table. A good one too, from what I hear. It appears that the federal government’s Auto Czar Committee doesn’t want to look bad, by having these brands spun off… and then watch them become successful under private leadership. I can’t see any other logical reason to refuse to sell brands that will be otherwise shuttered.

GM cites “brand identity” as being too costly for GM to deal with. Playing devil’s advocate (as best I can here), I guess their argument is that, unlike Saturn, most Pontiac dealerships sell other GM lines. But, even that doesn’t really hold water, since that’s something the Pontiac dealerships accounted for in their offer. I would assume that accounting entailed an agreement where Pontiac would adopt similar customer experience policies to GM, making customers feel transparent to the brands, regardless of owner.

Now, the last thing I want to do is call this deal dead, it isn’t… yet. GM says a lot of things, and has to go back and correct themselves later. That’s part of GM’s problem… and the Obama Administration is not helping by countermanding decisions left and right. The dealer (representing the group of dealers that submitted the offer), Jim Waldron has yet to receive a formal rejection… this is mostly PR spin from press people, and may even be grandstanding.

Why am I feeling it’s becoming more American, to buy anything but Chrysler or GM?