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I need my batcave!

I love telecommuting! I’m a huge advocate of telecommuting. I think we will find great societal benefit to having a group paradigm shift and having at least half our workforce work from home. Imagine if suddenly companies only needed half (or less) of their existing infrastructure needs. Less electricity spent heating, cooling and lighting them. Fewer monolithic roads needed since fewer people are commuting. Who can telecommute? Accountants, lawyers, sales people, technical people, IT people, customer service, technical support, and so many more. Basically if you work from a desk, all your collaboration can be done online or in weekly onsite meetings. If you have to lay hands on materials like at an assembly line, then unfortunately that is more difficult to do remotely. Barack Obama encourages telecommuting and so does the US Patent Office. Ask your employer to let you work from home to save the environment, make you a happier more productive employee, save the company money, and spend more quality time with the family while simultaneously getting more work hours in for the boss.

Now, the downside! To be a successful telecommuter, you need a batcave; complete with a secret passage. The kids and animals cannot know about your batcave. Nor can the wife! It must be impossible to find. Now where’s my butler?!

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Pet Projects

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.

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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!

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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.

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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).

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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).