Every developer needs a pet project. In a decade of writing code for other people I have had some fantastic ideas and even a couple of false starts but never truly had a pet project. My excuse has always been that I was waiting for a lull between projects to be able to write my own but there is no such thing. Either you jump from one project to another or from a project to marketing for another project. I’ve decided that I will steal away 15-30 minutes a day, no more, to work on my own pet project. For the project, I have chosen The Perfect Job. This evening I will take 15-30 minutes and simply decide between custom coding all functionality of the site versus incorporating it into a CMS such as WordPress, Joomla, Django, or Drupal. As I work through the build out of The Perfect Job, I will blog each 15-30 minute session here.
Category: Daily Life
Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.
From the mouths of babes
Amy: "Tinker Bell is named Tinker Bell because she’s a Tinker Fairy. Leprechauns are fairies…in Ireland. They make shoes for other fairies."
Bureaucracy R.I.P.
An easy mistake as a freelancer is to get behind on paperwork. Maybe that paperwork is balancing your checkbook or sending invoices or mundane like writing up postmortems for projects and filing the supporting documentation or something more evil like IRS filings. Whatever it is, I’m caught up on all of mine!
Today’s Word
Peptobismo
From the mouths of babes
Amy, 6.5 years old: "Dad, what’s a death threat?"
Dad: "What did you just say?!"
Amy: "What’s a death threat? On the show iCarly, they talked about death threats."
Dad: "A death threat means I’m going to have to have a talk with Nickelodeon."
From the mouths of babes
Evan, 3.5 years old, comes down stairs with his picture in one hand and a Rockband drumstick in the other. He points to the picture with the drumstick and says: "We go here now."
He was pointing to the picture of the Midway Drive-in. I’d say we’ll be there for opening night as soon as drive-in season starts.
Of Grasshoppers
Student: I intervened.
Master: Did you help?
Today
I have so many deliverables due today that I feel like the pregnancy ward on a full moon.
Btw, if you unplug your harddrive to be able to replace a stick of memory, your AMD-K6 2/400 will report "Primary Hard Disk Fail" upon trying to boot and give you a mild heart attack.
Things to add to bids
In today’s economic times, people love to talk about pork in budgets, ridiculous bonus programs, or over the top salaries. Some items are just plain necessary! I think from now on, all my quotes for projects will include a line item for coffee, a line item incense, and a line item for iTunes. That may sound frivolous but if you want me at maximum productivity, I’ve got a keyboard in one hand, a cup o’ Joe in the other, headphones emanating tunage into my ears, and lovely scents wafting all about. That said, I’m burning my last stick of incense right now. I may have to make a foray to World Market, Green Earth Emporium, or Earth to Old City today (well..tomorrow).
Hardware/Software Support
A service I provide to friends and family is cleaning up their computers when they start reporting, "it’s moving so slow!" or "I keep getting these popups." or error messages or whatever. Usually they are having a virus, spyware or malware issue. I’ve published my trade secret on how to fix this yourself. It takes me roughly 5 hours to clean a machine thoroughly. Granted, I usually do it overnight by sitting the computer beside me and taking breaks between programming tasks to evaluate the problems. You take smoke breaks; I take computer repair or social media breaks. For the service of cleaning a machine, assuring it has adequate virus protections, and making sure all the latest security patches are in place, I charge $135. In addition to software/hardware upgrades, I have replaced keyboards on laptops and even re-soldered a power connector on a laptop to its circuit board.
Yesterday a friend brought her computer and speakers by the house so I’ve added a service…speaker repair (I’d recommend just buying new ones).
Wifely Secrets
My son just brought me a book I didn’t know we owned. Hmm.
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterli. Replies.
And then his brain melted…
This week was ridiculously hard. No. "Ridiculously" is wrong. This week was f*#%ing hard. This week was not hard in the sense that I lost time to scheduling debacles or being constantly sidetracked. No, I worked my tail off! I’m exhausted but want to keep going.
From the mouths of babes
Evan, 3.5 years old: "Zoooombie! Zooombie!" *bump* "Ow!" *thud* *knock* *thunk* "Oh ow!" *bump* *klop* "Ow!" bump! bump! bump! "oh. I oookAY!"
Evan: "I come down stairs to scare you!"
Dad: "Well you sure did that!"
That’d be Evan wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy accidentally rolling down the wooden staircase steamroller style. It was almost in slow motion. It was one of those parent moments where you are hoping the child is fine because you really want to bust out laughing.
From the mouths of babes
Every morning I do 3 sets of 25 push ups and 3 sets of 25 sit ups. I rotate so I’ll do 25 push ups, turn over, do 25 sit ups, turn over, do 25 push ups, turn over, and so forth.
Amy: "Daddy. Every time you turn over I heard this noise like a wooden spoon hitting the floor." (that would be my back popping)
On the Internet Nobody Knows I’m a Dog
I regularly talk to someone on Skype. He almost passes the Turing test. That second sentence should bother me.
