Robert Small, The blog thereof.

I’m going to pass on a few things I’ve learnt over the years. I can hardly call myself a veteran contractor but I’ve certainly done quite a bit of it. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve accidentally done absolutely the right thing and then only realised afterwards how right what I’d done was.

Communicate

When working for someone you absolutely definitely must talk to them. Talk before you get the contract, talk while you’re working, talk when you’re finished. Many coders are the ’strong and silent’ type, this may work in bars but it doesn’t work on the Internet. People want to know what you’re doing, they want to be able to discuss aspects of the work, they like to feel that they’re paying someone who listens to them. I recently worked for one person in a situation where we exchanged just over a hundred emails before the funds even went into escrow, but this was good because we now both know exactly what is wanted and needed. Remember that it’s their money, they have a right to feel that it’s going to be well spent.

If you communicate well with people it often leads to follow-up jobs and good ratings on contract sites.

Be Positive

Use `I’m sure I can` instead of `I think I may`. Never lie. If you think you can’t do something admit it, but try to be positive. Make some friends who you can turn to and ask questions, if you’re contacted via email or a website then it’s rare you’ll have a time deadline which is shorter than the time you can ask someone in. IRC is an excellent resource for this, but don’t forget to google it.

Your time and experience are worth money

This is one that I have real problems with myself. I hate charging 70USD for something that’s maybe twenty minutes work for me. What you have to remember is that you’re giving them a bargain, they’re paying 70USD to have the work done in practically no time at all; if they didn’t pay you then they’d have to learn themselves, that could take year and hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get to your standard. They’re paying for you to learn (retrospectively) and for you to be as brilliant as you are.

Remember, your time and knowledge is worth what they’ll pay. If you think it isn’t then there’s always someone else willing to do it for more. If they come back to you then they obviously feel that they’ve had a good and worthwhile deal.

Suit your language to your client

If you wanted your car repaired and the mechanic first went into lengthy explanation as to what was wrong and what you’d have to do to make sure it didn’t happen again you wouldn’t mind much, on one condition. Presuming you don’t know anything about mechanics you don’t want to be told a lot of seemingly interesting stuff that makes absolutely no sense because he’s used words like ‘drive-shaft’ and ‘piston control’. What you want to know is that you shouldn’t turn right too sharply because the car is getting a bit old.

Apply this to your clients. If they know what you’re talking about you can give them some details, never but never make them feel stupid or try to show off. Never patronise, chances are if they own a multi-million dollar website they’ve heard the word script before and don’t need to be told that it’s ‘a part of the page that makes it work’. Keep a little bit of mysticism about your work, `script` has quite a technical air to it.

Don’t cook the goose

I’m guilty of this. It could be called over-communication, but cooking the goose sounds better to me. Never tell your employer how you’re going to fix something before they employ you. ‘I’m just going to edit this file to make this value correct so that it no longer causes your this problem.’ Google is as much their friend as yours, it’ll tell them all they need to know and all you need them not to know. They end up paying nothing for your expertise and doing their work themselves. Try to keep the balance between informing and losing.

In conclusion

These are the best tips that come to mind, there are certainly many more things that I’ve learnt and I would expect many more things to learn. Please feel free to comment here and add to my advice.

Contract work has it’s ups and downs, being your own boss is great as long as you know you’re definitely going to have work. At this point in time I’m not really having many problems getting contracts, but I can remember the days when I bid on a hundred and sometimes got one. I had to learn the hard way, please learn from my mistakes instead of your own.

Kind regards, Robert.

I’m currently sitting on the plane back home. This has been a so far uneventful journey with the exclusion of leaving a considerable time after we should have. There’s minor turbulence because we have a tailwind, however this does somewhat speed the journey up. The boys (and girls) in blue didn’t bother me at all at the gate which is nice considering the horror stories people keep telling me.

However, not everything is good, although I’m pleased to be returning home with the view of working on some new projects, seeing my parents again and enjoying some - hopefully more productive* - fishing; I’m not pleased to be leaving my girlfriend and she’s not pleased to have me leave. Luckily for her I left some chocolate and most of a pack of digestive biscuits, luckily for myself my mum sent me a text saying she was making cake. My mum’s cake is good. I predict the next few weeks being taken up solely with comfort eating and work as I did far too little while I was on holiday.

A friend of mine has told me that while going through regular separation I’ll love every little thing that reminds me that we’re together when we are. then when we’re permanently together they’ll start to annoy me. The example she gave me was snoring, my girlfriend doesn’t snore so I’m sure I’m safe from this problem.

(A break of a few hours.)

The plane continues to be involved in quite some turbulence, I don’t mind turbulence unless I’m trying to drink at the same time, then it’s just annoying. One of the things I really enjoy about KLM is the service, I actually get a decent meal with real knives and forks. The dinner was a nice Italian pasta served with cold chicken and rice salad and a nice chocolate cake.

‘Oh the weather outside is frightful,
but the fire inside is quite delightful,
and since we’ve no place to go,
let it snow, let it snow’

This song will definitely bring memories for the next few months, it seems a popular one on US radio and with those creating Christmas CD’s; fortunately I like it. It has a lot of good times from the last month attached to it and I will find it a pleasant trigger to remind me what fun I’ve had.

It’s always sad to leave somewhere you’ve really enjoyed being, I never knew how bad it was to know that you’re leaving someone behind. The last time wasn’t quite so bad, I’d spent a lot less time with her, this time it was every minute possibly. The lesson I’ve learnt is that it’s very important to scope your view on life. You can waste your life looking forward to something which lasts for a few minutes or you can enjoy every moment as it comes. There’s always a silver lining.

Watch The Shawshank Redemption, he crawls through a long pipe of sewage and other undesirable muck and as he exits he raises his palms to heaven basking in the rain and the storm. He is free. If he’d not had that to look forward to he’d never have done that fete of human persistence and perseverance.

What I’m attempting to show is that all the time there’s something to comfort yourself with and drive yourself forward with. Whatever your lot is you have to extract the good bits out of it and live them up. If you don’t scope your life to the good bits and be very careful to always check the bigger picture then you will waste days sitting staring at the wall. I know, I’ve been there. Life is always worse when you don’t have perspective on it, Looking in the short term today I was leaving the arms of my closest and best friend, but put into perspective it’s a brighter day than it may seem. When I return I can contact the American embassy and start applying for a Visa, I can start working harder and get some of the big projects I’m working on up and running. So by going through the tunnel to the light I’m giving myself the ability to stay for more than 90 days and to earn the money to make my stay more enjoyable than it might have been otherwise.

If you ever have anything you want to talk to me about or you’re feeling a bit down in the dumps then please contact me. A lot of people have found it very helpful, but don’t expect to hear what you want because I have no problem with telling you what you need to hear instead of what you want to hear.

I’ll be announcing a few new projects and possibly even some milestones soon, I’m sorry that I’ve neglected nearly everything over the last month. At least I can return to my work totally refuelled and ready to create some great things. I expect the Linux GPS site to be off the ground soon, get your content ready!

Those of you who know about openhardwaredatabase, John has done some incredible work on it. Kudos and a very big thank you to John for this. I’ll be publishing some more about this soon and showing you how it (hopefully) will transform the way you decide which hardware to buy for whatever machines you have. Again John; thanks, great work so far!

One thing I’m loving is having a laptop sitting here running at 600MHz with no fan activity, very little disk activity and averaging just over 7W power usage! Having 1GB RAM does help this, having a system I’ve tuned finely to do this also helps, but I think that my choice of hardware has really helped too.

I’m flying just below the eastern tip of Iceland at the moment, It’s dark, It’s been dark over most of the journey because I’ve been quite northern and it’s winter. Although my ticket says that it’s a windows seat there was someone already in my space so I’m sitting by the aisle, I’m not objecting as my cabin luggage probably weighs about three times the prescribed amount.

People will always ask me - unless their name is James** - what the differences are between England/Europe and America. There are a lot of small ones, all of which seem to boil down to a very close score if someone were to be keeping count. One big difference I’ve noted is that Americans seem to generally be far more patriotic and of the opinion that there’s nothing too interesting out there, Europeans and the English seems to be generally more metropolitan; we realise that there are other currencies and that the world is not completely contained within our country. Please remember that these are generalisations and not stereotypes.

Another difference seems to be the environmental orientation, it could be due to the greater price of fuel or the greater media coverage. This seems to cover cars, lights, heat, and flying.

In England we have pretty boring coffee, it could use some cheering up, some excitement. In fact, the best coffee I’ve had in England would be one I’ve made at home using a percolator or maybe one Lloyd gave me a while ago - Lloyd being rather a coffee nut. American coffee is far more interesting and enjoyable, you can have far more than coffee, weak coffee and milky coffee. I’ve never really bought coffee in Europe, nor have I discussed the practise, it may be different in other countries. Still, I like American coffee.

Clothes are in general somewhat cheaper, however, they don’t come with free medical insurance and all the rest that we get from our heavier taxes. They’re generally the same quality and a reasonably compatible style.

The way that we pay for our medical care is another big difference, I think the standard of care is probably pretty similar, the only difference is the method of payment. In England most people pay for their care from their taxes, in America their insurance. I do like the concept of public health care, I believe that it should be a common human right to receive reasonable medical care, whatever your health or income. One area I can see that this might not be entirely applicable to is cases where people are smoking or drinking and it’s making their condition worse while they’re refusing to be involved in any plan to remove them from their addiction.

I arrived safely at Norwich airport around 9:30AM GMT0 DEC3, this was as far as I’d got writing so I left it as is.

Kind regards, Robert.

* Two fishing trips got nothing.
** James recently asked me if they had eggs in England.

“Blaming the wolf would not help the sheep much. The sheep must learn not to fall into the clutches of the wolf.” Mahatma Gandhi

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has his foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Archbishop Desmond Tutu

In my belief it’s one of the great paradoxes of life. However much you blame the oppressor the oppressed are often still somewhat to blame, sometimes even when they’re trying to do something to stop this state of affairs. So as one would not like to take the side of the oppressor taking a neutral side becomes your only option; but as Archbishop Desmond Tutu says, taking the neutral side is as good as taking the side of the oppressor.

I see this often in every day life, people who for some reason are being bullied or *attacked* by others but seem unable to change the aspect of their behavior which brings this on. Sometimes they can even tell you what the problem is, but rarely can they fix it. They must learn to avoid the wolf, but maybe also we should protect somewhat from the wolf.

The real world and the Internet are very different places. If I walk into a job interview knowing everything about the subject and being fully equipped to do the job but without a degree and five years below the age they were expecting I’d probably be thrown out or laughed at. Online few such prejudices are present, if you can do what you’re needed to do then nobody will complain about you being 15, or having many years of school left. The Internet is not a replacement for real life, but it is very real; if I were to count the number of times someone has said to me ‘but that isn’t real’ (and I haven’t complained about the conjunctive at the start of the sentence) and I’ve challenged their concept of reality I would get very bored. The Internet is real, but it’s a different and rebellious cousin of reality as we know it. The money I earn is certainly real, the people I talk to are certainly real, the phone calls I make involve real voices and the work I’ve done at the end of the day is real.

Even though the Internet is real, I don’t think that it can be considered a legitimate replacement for face to face communication. I can work all day, speak to hundreds of people but find a conversation with someone in the flesh far more satisfying.

So in this safe haven which is the Internet there should be less prejudices, less cause for wolfishness and for the victims. I believe this is true, but only to an extent. There are still trolls, some of whom worm their way into authority to gain themselves some level of diplomatic immunity, and they’ll attack the weak. Often they’ll blame them for all the ills in vicinity but when the target leaves or is removed they’ll change to another target.

In real life you get similar problems, in a group of people there always seems to be someone who doesn’t entirely fit or is used as a general target, someone is always the joker and someone always the target. It never ceases to amaze me how cruel people can be, civilized people who you’d never dream have a nasty side can release the most vicious and vindictive attacks on others. If someone just really pushes a button which causes you discomfort it’s surprising how much you’ll begin to hate them. This is almost illogical hate, you don’t really hate them, you hate their actions; yet soon everything they do will become abhorrent to you and you’ll take any action you can to degrade and deface them.

This, of course, is if you’re the type of person who lets this get to you. Some people will teach you that all of life’s events are built up from energy/energies and that events and people leave energy/energies behind them. Furthermore they’ll tell you that keeping anger, resentment, angst, or whatever you want to call it will cause damage to yourself. I believe this to be almost entirely true, people who become angry and hold resentment against others seem to become eaten with this emotion and crazed by a desire to outlet it. When they do vent it doesn’t seem to do anything for them because they don’t seem to release any of the emotion permanently but purely expose it to the view of all and sundry.

But those who annoy can avoid it, for example I could have used better grammar and not started with a conjunctive. I’ve never tried the art, but I’m informed that it takes two to dance the tango; this is a very apt illustration for anger. If someone gets annoyed with you then avoid speaking to them or being around them, when they challenge you back down and avoid confrontation. Less bad energy will make you feel better about life and I believe it may eventually lead them to even like you. On the other end of the seesaw those who are annoyed by people should avoid them and attempt to not take the bait when they proffer something which normally would give you reason to provide an outburst. Often these outburst are disliked by more people than will admit it.

So, we have decided that both ends are partially to blame for most conflicts but what should the third party do?  Archbishop Desmond Tutu will tell us that taking neither side and turning a blind eye is the not the best thing you can do. I admit that I try to take the side of the oppressed whenever possible, the only time I avoid this is when I believe the aggressor is in the right; however if I see the aggressor is stepping over the line then I may switch sides. I find this very hard, especially when both sides expect me to be on their side as I’ve befriended both of them at some point.

I think that where you stand in any argument should depend heavily on your morals and how you feel, what you believe and not who your friends are.

Your opinions please. Kind regards, Robert.

This is what I like to call a new shoes post. It’s a post to state that I’m in office as owner and blogger. This is going to be a strange site for me as it’s the first time that I’m doing something about me, with the exception of the odd social site profile. It’s my personal soap box, my little platform in front of the crowds; and I’m still getting used to this.

It’s strange, when I first started with the internet I never thought anyone would care about me, about what I had to say and wanted to tell them. For several years I was quite correct, I was simply another nobody on the ‘net, we all start that way. With the success of the V8d Project and my interaction with various FOSS (Free Open Source Software) projects I became something of a leader to some people, those who know me well will probably agree that I both enjoy and hate this role. People have since started to ask me questions about various things, mostly of social context; this brought me to realise that some of you might just be interested in listening to the inane ramblings of a young man.

I do not only intend to use this as my personal and private soap box; I also have plans to use it for releasing information about new project and ventures, various milestones in projects I’m connected to and anything else I see fit. With this I would like to make the qualifying statement that my views are not the collective views of the company or any project mentioned. So, if you’re interested in having a personal insight on my plans and my hopes for various things then please continue reading.

I am (or at least pretend to be) a busy man; I can’t promise you a daily blog, I can’t promise you a changelog of everything I do to BottleCap or any other project. I will do what I can to give you something interesting to read about on a weekly basis, I may even let other people blog here too so they can provide something for you to read as well. Failing that there’s a wikipedia, if you’re bored on the internet then you just haven’t discovered much of it yet.

So, that’s the end of the new shoes post. Kind regards, Robert.