Archives for 2010

A couple of months ago I decided I’d take a stab at this freelance consulting thing all my techie and communications friends have been raving about for the past decade. The conditions were right – my full-time employment seems to be falling apart, I’d just won a major award from SoftwareVendor who provides services to a huge slice of the progressive non-profit community, and the idea of flexibility seemed attractive enough to offset the uncertainty of the income stream.

So with some help from the folks at the vendor’s shop, I started circulating my name as an “outside partner” and I redid my professional web site to better showcase my achievements and make me seem, well, sane and hirable. And I started thinking about rates.

Given that I have more than a decade’s worth of experience in my field, having dealt with other vendors looking to work in the same realm, and knowing what SoftwareVendor’s shop charges for custom work on their platform, I settled on $90 per hour as a base rate with the idea that I would be prepared to offer discounts in certain circumstances.

One of those circumstances is not when you’ve sat on a proposal for nearly a month, call me up, and ask me to cut my rate while simultaneously asking me to do your work in less than two weeks. Here’s how the timeline of our relationship looks:

October 6:
I get a blind e-mail contact from ProjectManager with no indication of where they got my name telling me about their new site in SoftwareVendor’s online community, letting me know that they want to “use your service to get up to speed quickly,” and asking about my rates. I replied the same day indicating that I’d be happy to chat with her about the scope of work to determine what the best arrangement for them would be, hourly, by project contract, or a block of support hours.

When I don’t hear back for a day or so I call and leave her a voice mail message explaining that I’m working with a new e-mail client, which I was, and wanted to make sure she’d gotten my reply. She replies the same day that things are busy and she’ll get back to me shortly. [Read more…] about And you will be slow-pay too, won’t you?

“The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
– Chris Hedges, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

I remember Veteran’s Day as a child. I remember going to school. It was always hot and stuffy, and the classroom had that particular industrial paint over cinderblock smell characteristic of schools in the 1970s. I also remember sitting quietly for two minutes at 11:11 a.m. It was never a burden.

According to the Department of Veteran’s affairs, Memorial Day is older with claims of first celebration dating back to May 1866. But Veterans Day, or Armistice Day as it was originally called, seems some how more significant to me. It was a specific recognition, however tacitly, that humanity had finally achieved a capacity to do violence to each other that we found subliminally terrifying. After all, World War I was dubbed “the war to end all wars.” Little did we know what was coming in less than 50 years.

In 1954 after much lobbying by veterans’ groups, Congress changed the official name of the holiday in the U.S. from Armistice Day to Veterans Day in recognition of American veterans of all wars. And here is where the celebrations get muddy in the United States.

Armistice Day was originally declared in 1919 by Woodrow Wilson “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…”

Memorial Day observances were expanded after World War I from originally commemorating those who had died in the Civil War to honoring casualties of all American Wars. In 1971 Memorial Day was made a national holiday by an act of Congress.

So which is the more solemn holiday? Do we honor our dead in May and celebrate those who survived in November? Or is it just all about death? It’s confusing for those of us who remember sitting quietly and contemplating for those two minutes what it meant to be free.

People who serve in the military, for whatever reason they entered, engage in a necessary evil for the good of their country. While I’m not sure I always agree with how necessary what they might be doing is, I can’t help but appreciate the sacrifices they make to do it.

I don’t get out much socially any more. In fact, most of my actual friends don’t even live in the same time zone I do, and a couple of them don’t even live in the same country. While this lack of socializing can be a drag sometimes, and does lead to friendships that are more distant that I would either like and that psychologists would say is good for a person, the one advantage is that I tend to stay healthy during the winter. But right now I’m fighting a cold and it’s all thanks to my cousin’s 6 year-old.

How do we know this? Those of us who spent the least amount of time with her are the least sick. the child’s grandmother, my aunt, is sick as a dog. My mother recovered from “having a nose” in under a day. My Sunday was blown and I spent Monday jacked up on decongestants, worked half a day, and spent the other half lying on the couch unable to sleep. Yesterday I worked and, so, I figured, if I’m well enough to work, I’m well enough to curl in the usual Tuesday league I play in.

And this morning I have more snot and a scratchy throat, so it’s back to the decongestants and being well enough, with luck, to play in the Saturday Breakfast Extravaganza this week.

As such, I’m not feeling quite up to a sterling analysis of journalism and politics, nor am I up to discussing why the flat tax is a bad idea, though both of those things are on the block for the next 20 days. But I did commit to 30 days and 30 blog entries so, until I get my brain back, check out the iRock I built as part of my effort to finally actually learn JavaScript. The iRock is an exercise from Headfirst JavaScript which is the only book in the more than a decade I’ve been working as a web professional that has managed to make JavaScript even vaguely learnable.

The great folks over at The Story of Stuff project released a new film today, The Story of Electronics, which looks at the environmental damage our addiction to new gadgets causes both at home and in developing countries.

The videos do require Flash/access to YouTube which is a bit of a barrier to communications but otherwise, these videos hit all the points a good campaign should:

• They’re short: each of the four spin-offs from the original Story of Stuff film is less than 10 minutes long and the original movie was broken down into three, approximately 10 minute segments with a clear message.
• They’re engaging without being preachy: one of the biggest problems the environmental movement has in this country is that that it patronizes the very people it needs to convince to change their behavior to achieve the goal.
• They’re simple but not simplistic: the visual style of these movies promotes easy to understand explanations of complex concepts.

Check them out if you want to spend your YouTube time on something more interesting than a cat eating spaghetti.

A glorious thing is happening in the eastern sky as I type this: the sun is rising. I know that doesn’t seem like anything special. After all, the sun rises in the East every single day and were it to do something different humanity would probably drop it’s collective brain right on the ground.

No, this is amazing because it’s the first time we’ve seen the sun here at approximately 40°N before 7am in nearly a month. Ever since Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided to extend daylight saving time, those of us to get up early have had to scurry around in the dark until we can find a lamp to turn on so we can find our shoes and our clothes and see what we’re having for breakfast.

Of course, the downside to falling back to standard time is that it was dark, I mean midnight pitch black, by 7pm yesterday. For me, that means it’s time to break out the blinky bike light to make me more visible as I walk to and from the subway (because yes, it’s important that winter coats only come in dark colors ’cause everyone lives where there’s enough snow that a dark colored coat makes you more easily visible to search and rescue teams).

Personally, I wonder what it would take to get national leadership to just abandon the whole idea of daylight saving time. It’s not as if we’re a nation of yeoman farmers any more who need that extra light in the evenings to tend to our crops. Though, the way things have been going economically, that extra light to work in the garden might just be helpful.

And yes, this is short. I picked up an icky little cold at my cousin’s wedding (yeah for socializing with big groups of people you don’t know!) and do not claim to be vaguely coherent at this point.

On other notes: Google is celebrating the 115th anniversary of the discovery of x-rays. Kinda cute as Google doodles go.

If you want to take a look at the Internet Archives Wayback Machine you can even find the day when Google celebrated curling during last year’s Winter Olympics.