Tag Archives: work

Places

Construction, people and traffic jams

For the past month, there’s been construction going on at the American Legion Memorial Bridge. I use it everyday to get to and from work. They’ve closed a lane on the right side, and that’s a huge inconvenience. So much traffic goes over that bridge every day, particularly during rush hour, that the single lane closure backs traffic up for several miles, all the way to Route 66.

Since no notice was given of the nature of the work, I thought they might be building an additional lane. But no, all they’re doing is cleaning and painting the bridge. It turns out that one lane’s going to be closed for 6-12 months, causing huge traffic delays for everyone. I have to file this one under really poor planning. For a road that important, they should have built a platform underneath the bridge and put the machines over there instead of inconveniencing everyone above with their work.

Things wouldn’t be so bad except for the rubbernecking delays. Everyone wants to look at the loud machines and the construction workers. They’re a sight to be sure, the machines noisy, big and smelly, and the workers sunburnt and stained all over with muck and grime — but that doesn’t excuse the traffic delays.

If some sort of wall were put in place to separate the construction work from the passing cars, people wouldn’t have anything to look at, and traffic would go much faster. But that wouldn’t be in character with the poor planning shown by blocking the full lane in the first place, would it? So my commute time (and that of tens of thousands of other people) is doubled, and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, since there is no other route we can take.

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Thoughts

How many of my photos were stolen?

For the moment, this is a rhetorical question. I’ve been re-thinking the way I publish my photos online in view of the recent and very prominent theft of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir‘s photos from Flickr. Call me naive, but I really believed, and still would like to believe, that people will wish to stay legal and pay for the right to use my photos, especially for commercial purposes. That’s why I’ve been publishing my photos at full resolution. I wanted folks who weren’t able to pay (developing countries, for instance), or only wanted a nice desktop background, to be able to download a photo of mine and enjoy it without financial obstacles.

But I talked with my brother this morning, and he told me some things that made me think twice about my approach. He’s a professor at a university in Transylvania (Romania), and he does a lot of field research in ethnology and religion. He takes a lot of photos, and shoots a lot of video. When people ask him for copies of his work, he’s very nice about it and does so, hoping they’ll respect his academic work and cite him or ask for his permission when they use it. But he’s been finding out that they don’t. They’ll reuse his photos and his videos, and he won’t hear about it until he sees his work somewhere else. Just recently, someone entered one of his videos in a contest as their own creation, and he found out about it only after that person won. It was very disheartening. He’s now thinking of watermarking both his videos and photos, and of only publishing lower resolution copies on the Internet. He’s tired of constant theft and no attribution.

So I had to ask myself: how many of my photos have already been stolen? I haven’t yet heard of or seen a particular instance, but I also haven’t really looked around to see. It’s probably just a matter of time before I start finding my work in someone else’s portfolio, website or printed materials. When you combine high-resolution photos with people that have no respect whatsoever for someone else’s hard work, you’re asking for trouble. As much as I’d like to believe otherwise, good people, those that respect other people’s property, are few and far between, and it’s best not to tempt the thieves or uneducated ones by making good photos easily available.

I’ve taken some steps already. I used to upload to Flickr at full resolution. Not anymore. Since they offered Rebekkah no help whatsoever, and even deleted the photo where she complained of image theft, along with the thousands of comments that she received there, I’ve lost respect for them. If that’s how they’re going to treat one of their best users, then I sincerely hope they get what’s coming to them, and I hope it’s a wallop.

I may also start to watermark my images. As much as I hate this (it uglifies an image, imo), I’ll do it, just to make it harder to pass my photos around without crediting them properly. I may also start to copyright my photography with the Library of Congress, and pursue damages to the full letter of the law (up to $150,000 per incident).

Finally, I may also stop uploading at full res to Zooomr. I keep waiting for them to push out the Mark III upgrade, and it seems that every time Kris is ready to do it, something happens to stop it. This week was the third time the promised upgrade didn’t materialize, and I’m pretty disappointed. Mark III is supposed to have this really nice image theft prevention built in, so I could continue to upload a full res, but restrict the sizes available to casual visitors or even my contacts at certain resolutions, and only make the full res size available to buyers. But if Mark III doesn’t show up any time soon — and since Zooomr has no photo replace feature like Flickr — I may just delete all of my photos, or make them all private. I do not want to see my hard work go to waste.

It’s a real shame that we can’t function equitably as a society, at the local, state, national or global level. If only everyone would respect other people’s property (physical or intellectual), things would work a lot better. One would think the concept of property has been around long enough for most people and cultures to grasp it…

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Thoughts

When co-workers attack

I felt a bit like the guy in this ad before Christmas. The SharePoint farm at work was down, and I stayed up for about 76 hours to bring it back up. Thankfully, I did my work remotely, so short of guided missiles, they couldn’t touch me… 🙂

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Exercise

Flabbier by the day

I used to smirk when I heard the excuses I make now. I used to feel superior. What me, ever get flabby? That’s for losers who can’t find the time to visit the gym, right? Well, here I am, thirty, and getting flabby. Sure, you can’t see it yet. If you saw me, you’d say I still look fit or even thin. But that’s not the picture I see, since I’m privy to more revealing details…

It’s ironic, finding myself in the same situation as the people I used to deride. I went to the gym regularly, obsessively, one could say, from the start of college to my mid-twenties. It was easy. I was driven to get big, and I got big. I wanted strength and muscles, and I got them. Then, complacency set in. That, and the fact that I got tired of homosexuals trying to pick me up during my workouts… I tell you, those were traumatic experiences for me, because I started to associate the gym with being harassed by homosexuals, and how much fun are workouts going to be when that happens? But let me focus on the things I could have changed instead.

About 25, I got a job as a director of IT at a hospital. The responsibilities were huge, and given my young age, the pressure was on to deliver results. I stopped working out as I worked long and longer hours. When I did manage to go to the gym, my mind was on other things. My workouts were sporadic. And as we all know, consistency is key to most things in life, including exercise. I couldn’t exercise consistently, and a trip to the gym here and there wasn’t going to cut it. I’m a naturally thin person, so my muscle mass kept dropping, along with my weight. I’m now somewhere between 155-165 lbs (haven’t weighed myself in a while), and this seems to be my natural weight. My body tends to stay there no matter what I do. At 21, I was 195 lbs at 7% body fat. At 18, I was 135 lbs at 4% body fat. Yes, that’s a big weight difference. No, I did not take steroids. I did eat like a horse though, and worked out a whole lot.

Given that I exercised regularly for such a long time, my body stayed together and looking good for a good while after I stopped. I swam in high school and worked out regularly for seven years, almost every day, so I was in great shape. For the sake of those numerous workouts, I managed to get through the two years in my stressful IT job without showing much damage. Then, I had another computer job for a couple of years, implementing a complex new system for a university. Even though my office was right next to the gym, and even though there were no homosexuals to harass me there, I couldn’t bring myself to go regularly. I always found excuses, usually work-related.

So here I am today, in another computer job full of responsibilities, having turned thirty some months ago, and getting flabbier by the day. After five years of practically neglecting my body, it’s starting to show. It’s amazing I’ve lasted this long, and it only goes to show how resilient the human body really is — but I can see it won’t work anymore. My bones are starting to make cracking sounds when I get up or exert myself. Physical effort tires me out. If I go up two flights of stairs, my breathing will noticeably increase. I get a lot more headaches nowadays. If I don’t consciously tense up my abs, my stomach bulges outwards, just enough to scare my wife. When I sit down, I can grab the fat layer on my abs in my hand. I’m starting to get love handles, and no, there’s nothing love-ly about them. Instead of pectorals, I now sport two soft placeholders, sad reminders of what used to be there. My shoulders have rounded out and my biceps, once the size of baseballs, have turned into golf balls. My strong back muscles, once able to squat and deadlift hundreds of pounds, have now flattened out and gained the consistency and firmness of sponges. My quadriceps, once rock hard all the time, are now soft, and jiggle like jello when I walk. I can feel them doing that, and it’s really sad. I’m ashamed of my calves once more. And of course — the most telling sign — when I wave my hand, what used to be my triceps now flips and flops worse than some current-day politicians. It’s really depressing, so I won’t go on.

Here’s how my typical day goes, and I’m sure it’s like this for many, many people. I get up from bed, where I’ve been lying down, and sit down to have breakfast. Then I sit in the car on the way to work, where I sit in my chair for 8-9 hours, only to walk out and sit in my car on the way home, where I sit down for dinner and sit at my desk for another 3-4 hours, working on consulting and personal projects. When my wife and I relax or visit with friends, we sit on couches. During the weekends, most of our time is spent sitting in church on Saturdays, or at home, with friends, at the movies, in restaurants, etc. There’s always something to do, but most of the time, it involves sitting. And it’s really easy to make excuses for not exercising. After all, there’s always something pressing: a deadline, an email, a project that needs finishing, a movie we’ve really been meaning to see, fatigue from overwork, malaise, etc. The reasons keep coming, they never stop, and that’s just it. We need to stop them! I need to put a stop to them! Because if I don’t, life will go on, and I’ll get flabbier and flabbier, till pretty soon, I’ll be a sorry shadow of what I once was, worn out and exhausted, dysmorphic, continually making excuses for something I could have changed a long time ago.

The point is, I did it to myself. Outside of a couple of things I had no control over, I am responsible for this. And I’m also responsible for turning things around. I can do it, but I need to stop making excuses.

As I write this, my sorry substitutes for pectorals and triceps are sore from a workout I did last night. My abs are still sore from a workout I did two days ago. Yes, it’s sad that it’s taking so long for my muscles to recover, but that’s a hole I dug for myself. I made a promise last night that I’m not going to let myself slip into pudginess and dysmorphism, and by golly, I’m going to keep it! Say it with me people, it’s not cool to be flab-ulous! 🙂 From now on, I’ll push work and personal pursuits aside for the sake of exercise.

The truth is, and it’s taken me a while to realize this, life gets busier as we get older. And if we don’t make time for exercise, if we don’t consider it as important as sleep, food and water, we’ll never be able to do it regularly. And when we don’t do it regularly, we get flabby, fat, overweight, obese, etc.

I’ll post updates from time to time on my progress. And if this inspires any of you out there in the same boat as me to start exercising, that’ll be wonderful!

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There's hope after all for independent web developers

Three weeks ago, I wrote a post describing my thoughts on the web development industry, and things looked pretty bleak. I did promise a brighter outlook in a short while, and this post is the fulfillment of that promise.

So, what can we do to ensure that we’ll continue to have jobs? Well, we can do any of the following, and these are loose thoughts, in no particular order:

  • Develop our skills even further, and become more specialized in the new and cutting edge technologies, that aren’t yet offered by the “masses”. Make a living from that, although we’ll live in constant stress, always re-learning, always jumping on the next “hot” technology.
  • Form networks of peers, and work together on projects while maintaining our cherished independence. I’m not talking about cheesy networking, I’m talking about finding people who are really good at doing certain separate things, and sticking together in teams, then bidding for projects and sharing the revenues.
  • Who says we can’t lead? We can form our own companies, and hire specialized developers for the projects we have contracts to do. But that would mean we wouldn’t be by ourselves anymore, and I for one like being by myself.
  • If you can’t beat them, join them. We can seek employment with the larger companies that will gobble up the market, or are already doing so. Or, we can seek employment with already established brick and mortar companies that need web developers as they realize more and more of their technologies will need to move from the desktop to the web.
  • Develop free or low cost turn-key solutions, and hope we make enough money from donations or from the sales volume to sustain our efforts and allow us to make a living.
  • Develop systems that fill specific needs, and support those systems. Sell them to niche industries. Question is, how do you gain credibility as a one-man team when companies are looking for long-term solutions where support can be provided indefinitely? If you’re gone, what happens to the system? Those are real questions that demand good answers.
  • Move offshore and do our work from there. I would imagine there’s an offshore market for Americans who understand American business and the Americans as a people.

Furthermore, we can differentiate ourselves on service, on approachability, on geographical closeness, on people-to-people relationships, through networks, because of no language barriers, through innovation, truthfulness, and trustworthiness. Those are all very, very real and tangible assets that we can develop and possess, to our most definite advantage.

I think nowadays, by far the biggest differentiator is innovation. Just look at the slew of Web 2.0 companies that have sprung up, and they’re all getting funding! It’s shocking, even to me. But while innovation opens doors, good work, reliability and good customer service keep people coming through those doors. And the great thing is that while not all web developers are innovators, all web developers can and should strive to do good work, create reliable products, and provide good customer service.

You may think I’m being dismissive, but it’s true, and I speak from personal experience when I say this. Treat your clients well, make good products, and they’ll keep coming back. Not only that, but they’ll recommend you to others. You want to know something? I have never gotten a client solely through my website. It’s shocking to say that about a web development business, but it’s true. My clients may have used my site to research me and to read more about my services, but I get clients after personal meetings with them. And they usually find out about me not from my website, but from my previous or existing clients. Or, they’ll have interacted with me in a completely different setting, like my community or my church, where my occupation didn’t matter that much, they liked what they saw in me, then contacted me for work-related purposes. That’s important to remember!

Another important aspect is trustworthiness, and I can’t emphasize this enough. You’ve got to be credible. Your clients need to be able to trust you. My clients trust me with their SSNs and credit card numbers and passwords to various accounts. I don’t ask them for that information, they give it to me and ask me to help them conduct transactions related to the projects we’re working on. It goes without saying that I do my best to delete that information from my mind and computer, because I don’t need to know it beyond the project itself, but if that’s not trust, I don’t know what is. And that’s the sort of relationship you need to establish with your client. When they trust you like that, you know they’re going to stick with you. And if you continue to be honest and hold to your promises, that relationship will only strengthen.

So it turns out that the secret to a good career as a web developer is no secret at all. It’s simply good business, and that’s a relief! Here’s to our collective entrepreneurial success!

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