Remember, if you don’t want to pay for your cds, steal them — don’t download them. It might feel uncomfortable when you get dragged out of the store by the local police, but it should pay off in the long run.
Related: I always feel like shoplifting tagging in Copenhagen — more on that story at Flix (in Danish).
The guys over at 37signals are spot on again; Getting Real, Step 1: No Functional Spec (Signal vs. Noise).
The “specs are really hard to make until you’re sort of halfway through the project” is a classic, and while the ‘just don’t do it’-idea sounds attractive, I’ve often experienced (as mentioned by others in the comments) that clients often wants some idea of scope (and especially price) pretty early on in the proces. So far I’ve managed to basically just drag the spec-writing by diving straight in to building interfaces and functionality that I know is going to be there anyway, which usually ends up being a far better way to start discussing the final details. On the other hand, not all clients allow this to happen. Either because they’re trigger-happy, basically not smart enough to be in the software-buying-business or whatnot. And while I usually have a pretty good idea of what not to accept with regards to the final pricing, I kind of like getting something down on paper so I don’t end up in the “well, we thought this was included in our agreement”-problem. Most clients accept that at some point, there’s simply not more money — but again, this is quite nice to have on paper…
Part of the problem definately has to do with the fact, that I’m a small player, working with clients more concerned with price and launch than a good, constructive process — and/or working on projects where the actual spec work takes up a substantial part of the total amount of work because of the project size. A good dialogue goes a long way, but what to do when you can’t aim for the ideal solution?
I really like the idea of ‘moving targets’ as mentioned in the comments; it’s the agile approach and often what every project ends up being anyway. Only problem is, how do you structure that process so everyone is happy and understands what’ going on?
I’d like to write more about work-realted issues as a free agent type of business; this is what this communication thing should be all about. And who knows, maybe some day I’ll even suggest solutions instead of just asking questions. What do you say, how about making it a bit more personal, share some of your experiences, see if we can become better at what we do by, well, doing some of tthe other stuff we do?
Also, Whitespace mentions another classic; freelancers tend not to spend any real amount of time on marketing. Which, when I come to think about it, is stupid. And boring. And I don’t like doing it. But I like when I have nice projects. Go figure…
Two things I really enjoy; Lego and iPods. And now it’s a limited edition art piece as well. And while pretty cool, I’m feeling that maybe the Apple craze has gone a bit over the top. Sure, we keep telling each other that once you get people to talk about your products you’re there, you’ve made it. And we try to sell them weblog solutions to make the dialogue happen and marvel at their coolness. On the other hand, we are supposed to be critical consumers as well — and maybe we’re not doing our selves any favours by worshipping every piece of well-designed plastic to come out of Cupertino. I don’t know..
But, it’s not all fun and games. This cute-looking piece of art might fuel an Apple-craze among some, among others I’m sure it’s just a matter of “yet another black guy stealing some portable playing device and parading it around in a park that used to be ours”.
I dagens Børsen kan man læse en anmeldelse af Dansk Industri’s På jagt efter iværksættergenet. Anmeldelsen og bogens indhold er ikke emnet her, det er derimod bogens titel. Jeg er træt, så umådelig træt, af at høre ‘gener’ lempet ind overalt. Det er udtryk for sprogligt armod, misvisende og irriterende. Og selvom det sikkert er opstået i et velment forsøg på at inkludere nyopdaget viden som vi alle sammen jo ved alt om, antyder brugen af ‘gener’ overalt noget lidt andet; man har ikke fattet noget som helst…
Den mindste psykiske skavank “ligger nok i generne” og lysten til at skråle med højt og længe, så snart en popsild bræger på en af de utallige kommercielle ‘flade’-orienterede stationer “ligger helt sikkert i generne”, siger man og fniser indforstået og trækker vejret gennem sin Look100. Havde salig Højholt lavet Gitte-monologer i disse dage, ville Susanne nok have fået en tilsvarende forklaring, og vi ville have grint og husket, at den vending skulle man nok holde sig fra, og hvor var det godt set og hvordan kan folk dog også finde på at sige sådan noget vrøvl, det har jo intet med gener at gøre.
Og når bøger om iværksættere, der forhåbentlig indebærer bare en smule opfindsomhed, så bærer titler spundet om dumheder, flagende med sin uopfinsomhed, så synes jeg måske godt lige man kunne…
A German (almost) history lesson for the weekend: Ein Colt für alle Fälle. When I was a kid, this guy and his two friends were on German national tv a lot. Big trucks (with a secret compartment for hiding the blonde girl during missions), rocket-backpacks, and lots of action — all of it with German dubbing.
The story of the stuntman (whose real name is Colt Seavers, but try telling that to kids watching the show every day in German) with a bounty hunter-hobby and trusty sidekicks is rumoured to be made into a film starring…George Clooney! More info in this Danish site — where the visitors seem to share my experience thatt good old Colt maybe is German.
In between server crashes, I’ve managed to switch to Flickr for camblogging. So far, so good — expect possible camphone weirdness, site inconsistincies and layout trouble.
I’ve been watching the developing story on trackback-spam in horror (it’s in to be scared these days, remember) recently, thinking of what to do. I like trackbacks so the easy “just cut’em” solution didn’t seem attractive, however — this is what have been done. Not by me, but by my host. Ironically, the server crashed just as I tried to log in to close all trackbacks on old entries and set the default to ‘no’ on new entries. Ideally, you would have moderated trackbacks but this doesn’t lower the server load I guess…
Anyway, my host understandibly got really tired of having do deal with the MT-fuckers, so he just killed mt-tb.cgi — which seems to be the only decent solution for now. These days, when someone geeky enough to own a server uses the phone to contact you, you know something’s wrong.
What to do? Change of platform, new weapons to fight off the pings of evil?
Jesus, with an URL like this japanese-teens.netfirms.com/thumbnails.html, how can you expect to succeed with a traffic quota like this:
The website you have requested has exceeded its daily bandwidth quota of 56MB and has been temporarily de-activated.
[via]
Today’s lesson: When your latest phone won’t act as a bluetooth modem, don’t let that bug you for months while you take a shot at it once in a while, while thinking the son of a bitch will never work.
Instead, check with your operator what GPRS connection point you should really use (it worked with your last phone, but you know what: You probably forgot all about that) and then read the fucking manual for the modem scripts you’ve downloaded.
Sometimes it takes an upcoming 5h trainride to get stuff like that sorted out. Which reminds me: I’m going to Hamburg — something I should check out while there? Hints appreciated.
Efter at have set Krydsild på DR i går aftes, er jeg nu lidt i vildrede. Mens de Radikales valgvideo sikkert ikke var det mest gennemtænkte spinstunt (ikke fordi den var tåbelig, men fordi pointerne er spildt på den brede befolkning og ikke var præsenteret videre klart), undrer det mig stadig hvor meget tumult der kom i kølvandet. Jeg mener, DF’s valgvideo er da mere problematisk idet den ikke blot er en hån mod almindeligt tænkende mennesker på indholdssiden, men også er en god, gammeldags, syngende kindhest til alle, der nogensinde har sat fod i en biograf.
Ældre i fokus? Jo, tak. De har tydeligvis både produceret videoen og spillet musikken. Tag et kig — det er spas…
Update: Hos Pejk kan man læse, at valgvideoen ikke er lavet — som jeg troede — af et seniorhold i terapien, men af Casper Thorsøe. Pejk anbefaler man benytter tilbuddet om døgnservice til at fortælle, hvad man synes om filmen, men fÃ¥r kam til sit hÃ¥r over telefonen med beskeden “det er ligemeget om man kan lide poelsen eller ej”; produkter er pølser er ikke vigtigt, jo.
Great. Clagnut posts that Multimap now harvest geotag information and is adding blogs to its maps. Take a look at the bookmarklets at clagnut.com — nifty stuff; on a blog with geotags, click to see a map of the area with links to surrounding bloggers.
Den berømte 50-øre, valgflæsk, protestaktion, griskhed, flip-floppin landbetjent/økonomiminister, civil ulydighed, sjov og spas. Glem det: Bankerne er smartere (og, indrømmet, sjovere) end som så. Morten havde en særpræget oplevelse, da han forsøgte at gøre sit i den gode sags tjeneste: Se selv.
Er jeg den eneste, der ikke helt forstår formålet med ‘fjern lyden’-knappen på de Konservatives ellers fancy flash-banner annoncer? Indrømmet, de giver bedre mening på den måde, men kultur-brian ser altså skæg ud, når han i fulkommen stilhed blinker med øjnene og håber på min stemme.
Tillægsspørgsmål: Hvad er den midterste genstand på denne side? Det øverste er fine kuglepenne, det nederste restoplaget af ordensmagtens forsøg på at blive ung med folket med en ‘cap’, men det midterste? Læbestift? Camouflagestift? Peberspray?
It’s been a while since I’ve done a ‘it won’t be long before something amazing happens on this blog’, so to not disappoint anyone, I’ve temporarily redirected requests for my rss-feed to my FeedBurner–feed which is spliced with my del.ico.us-bookmarks.
I’ve mentioned it before and hoped that I got round to do some splicing of my own to get camblog/sideblog feeds in there as well, but for now I’ll settle with just taking a look at the statistics of the blog feed.
I’ve done a
Redirect temp /blog/index.rdf http://feeds.feedburner.com/pollasatom
which I hope is correct procedure (I’m a .htaccess amateur for those of you who haven’t guessed it). Don’t subscribe to the feed just yet, things might change.
Andreas informs us that TV2 will be airing reallife.log, a two-minutes-per-head-a-day type show with personal stories soon. I think he’s absolutely right, that videologs on tv is a strange concept, that the personal publishing bit is interesting and that most of it will be talking heads on tape.
What’s interesting about weblogs is not that people all of a sudden can publish on the web (they’ve had that possibility for years), but that it got a whole lot easier when blogging tools emerged, that blogs share a format, that there’s no limit and that it’s easy to subscribe to — and consume whenever you want. The personal aspect (which TV2 emphasizes) is the only bit left and while definately interesting (DR has done it several times, handing out DV-cameras and using the tapes as an ongoing ‘while we wait for the next show’-thing) it doesn’t really do justice to the blog format and the commodity hardware fuelling the scene.
Enough bitching. It’s practice-what-you-preach-year: How about the Danish blogosphere did a competing show, ‘aired’ at the same time, but with a slight change in concept. No airing, no rules, no limits in participants or posts per day. Just one single site picking of all the stuff, podcasting it to the people. Maybe the two-minute format could be interesting (similar shaped chunks), I don’t know…
I don’t even have a DV-cam, but any camphone should work…
Uha. Af grunde jeg ikke kan forklare (gætter på fordomsfuldhed og angst for det fremmede), bliver jeg lidt bange, når jeg læser Pia Kjærsgaards tyske udgave af partipræsentationen (DF bruger frames, who would’ve thought):
Ich freue mich, Ihnen das Grundsatzprogramm der Dänischen Volkspartei vorzustellen.
Unser Grundsatzprogramm basiert wie bisher auf unserer warmherzigen, durchaus national geprägten Gesinnung.
Wir von der Dänischen Volkspartei sind stolz auf Dänemark. Wir lieben unser Vaterland und empfinden eine historische Verpflichtung, unser Land, unser Volk und das dänische Erbe zu schützen und zu bewahren.
Zu dieser Verpflichtung gehört die Notwendigkeit des Vorhaltens wirksamer Streitkräfte wie auch der Gewährleistung sicherer, geschützter Grenzen. Nur in einem freien Dänemark kann sich die Nation im Sinne des Volkes weiterentwickeln.
Den findes på en del andre sprog også. God stil. Sære tegn klares pr. pdf.
Bedst som man tror Ekstra Bladet har fået vinklet en historie lige lovlig meget — og ligegyldigt (rygtet vil vide, trods solid intolerance, at ikke alle DF’er er skingre racister med angst for brunt) — får Hans Kristian Skibby (med neger-blod i årerne, forstås) udtalt:
Det ligger i generne. Og jeg har fået at vide, at vi helt ud til 1/32 del kan få børn med negroide træk. Men jeg synes ikke, jeg kan mærke det i blodet. Jeg er sund og rask.
Pyha. Reddet fra den brune syge med nød og næppe. Selvom man er stolt og ikke spor flov over at have eksotiske forfædre, er det nu meget rart man ikke ligefrem fejler noget. Få ham nu lige DNA-tjekket alligevel. Sådan bare forebyggende. Det ligger til dem, det der kriminalitet.
Man aner chancen for et ekstra mulepose-design.
SÃ¥ er den der: Mulepose, Limited Hans Kristian Skibby Edition.
Fra Ud & Se:
Alle dem jeg har spillet håndbold med, de er stadigvæk i miljøet. Så skal de lige se ynglingene spille, og så skal de lige have en toast, og så bliver de, for nu løber herrerne på banen. På den måde, selvom de er på min alder eller ældre, går de stadigvæk til håndbold uden at gøre det. [Rene Nielsen]
Lige i skabet.
Ville det ikke bare være super, hvis unsignede bands og musikere kunne blive podcastet til den brede danske befolkning? Jeg får sjældent tjekket op på de forskellige sites med ny musik til download, men en ‘nyt fra danske upcoming acts’-playlist ville jeg med glæde synce med min iPod. Hvem ved, måske kunne man opdage noget godt.
Det er næppe nogen ny ide, men jeg kan ikke finde noget nogen steder. Forskellige typer kunne være ‘virtuelt pladeselskab podcaster alt hvad de har’, ‘musikskribent laver et rigtigt program/sammensætter sin podcast ud fra en ide’ osv.
Anyone?
Live from Cafe Lucca, Kolding: My recommendations for CampaignMonitor.
One of my clients wanted to start sending out newsletters, 4–6 every year, showcasing their work and products. I’ve been in trouble with newsletters before; homemade systems have crashed, actual listservers seemed a bit tricky if the client didn’t want to manage stuff via email etc. etc. Everything below 500 recipients should be possible to do using Outlook or something along those lines, but then you have the whole unsubscribing issue, lack of stats and difficulties creating the content properly.
CampaignMonitor to the rescue. They claim to focus on web developers wanting a good feature set for their clients and they’ve got an interesting deal going on: You pay $5 as a startup fee for each campaign you send out and one cent per recipient. First of all, it’s a good product and easy to manage even if you’re not a web developer (the thing here is simply that it’s easy to offer this service using their web application), but the pricing structure is kind of interesting as well. Obviously, if you have thousands of recipients and send out stuff frequently it’ll quickly get rather expensive. But for the small company wanting to focus on content and not paying for something they might not use, it’s a sweet deal. Especially because of the features.
The interface is simple and elegant (Basecamp style), you can give your clients (if you run them through your account) access to the detailed graphic reports via your own subdomain (Basecamp style), put signup forms on your own page (Basecamp style) and you always have detailed information on click-rates, unsubscribed adresses, bounces and statistics over time at your hand. Powerful shit. A day after we sent out the campaign, we can track down important recipients and see how they reacted to the campaign, see how many mails are opened at this time etc., giving my client a solid knowledge base to build future campagns on.
All in all a great product with good possibilities for previewing your content, test send the actual campaign and export the reports. I’ve mentioned Basecamp a couple of times which isn’t a coincidence; I only know of CampaignMonitor because of a product plug over at Signal vs. Noise. Oh, the power of sharing.…
And now back to real life in Kolding where the weather’s horrible, the wifi-access expensive and the girls far from pretty — but where you can charge your laptop while sipping coffee.
“Du styrer Mogens Lykketoft med piletasterne” — I KNEW IT!
[fra de slipsebærende ynglinge ovre hos VU] (ok, det var umodent, men jeg stemmer lissom noget andet, mkay?)
While lunching I watched the 12 o’clock news from DR and suddenly discovered some of my work. I’ve been helping spinnesiden.dk, trying to clean up the horrible GoLive-generated tag soup, ajust the layout a bit, setting up WordPress etc. It’s nowhere near perfect as we didn’t have much time (and I’m buried in client work), the point however, is that I just managed to persuade a diehard GoLive user and a web publishing newbie to create all new content using a text editor. Clean code coming up. On the downside, no form of CMS is used, leaving the blog as the only section with rss.
The feature on the news started by mentioning, that two websites are monitoring the spin during the Danish election. Unfortunately, for some reason the never got around to mention more than one site. As a service, I’ll take a qualified guess at spinkontrol.dk. They are the ones doing the monitoring bit, while spinnesiden.dk are more focused on the communication aspects, a lot of it on a theoretical level. Or so I hear, I’m just the ‘I’ll code for double espressoes at weird hours’-guy.
Also: Lisbeth Klastrup is blogging on the weblog aspect of the election and got picked up by Politiken. Yay!
This is cool: Skate video ‘Adapt’ from Stolen Moments; a 23 minutes DVD-quality free download. Which you should go download. Right now.
Beautiful imagery, great music and trick skating I’m not sure I would even have the guts to watch in real life. Great quality, crisp cutting — obviously a lot of attention has gone into making slick connections between image and sound; tricks are executed on the beat, replays are artisticly done using overlays, reverse play etc. and the sound of wheels on asphalt and whatnot is present throughout, giving a good feeling of texture while listening to the nice music.
I have no idea what the average quality level is in prodctions on this scene, but I have a feeling this is pretty damn good. The chances of me buying a skating video are pretty low (as my brief affair with inline-skating turned out to look like a rolling death wish), but there you go; the wonders of the interweb — I’ve just spent hours downloading the beast and 23 minutes watching it. So I imagine the creator reaches a lot of people he wouldn’t have otherwise.
One major complaint, though. Adapt is waaay to short. [via LoudThinking]
Clearing up confusion about the Mac mini (the Unofficial Apple Weblog :
Yes, it will boot headless, meaning with no display or video device connected.
While it is strongly recommended that you only have an Apple Autherized Service Provider crack it open and
install RAM, hard drives, Airport and Bluetooth, it will NOT void your warranty if you do it yourself. As is standard operating procedure, however, anything you break while attempting anything on your own is not Apple’s responsibility.[…]
The reason the TOP of the Mac mini doesn’t glow and pulse (this is my only gripe so far) is that there wasn’t
enough room to light it once the optical drive went in :)
Which concludes today’s lesson: Go get one.
Good stuff: A nice conference featuring good speakers, a relevant focus (to people like me) and it’s not that far away. @media 2005 in London, my favourite city. It just might be an oppurtunity to get some business travelling under my belt.
Other Danes are contemplating a regular outing (via k9k) — sounds good (not sure about that boat-thing, though — it’s two additional days of work lost to a tacky bar). Anyone wanna come?
