Freedoms & Lifestyle
Go to the Dentist
Hopefully you brush your teeth. You floss. You use anti-bacterial mouth rinse. You chew sugar free gum between meals. But if you don’t go to the dentist, you might end up having to get gum surgery like me. Go to the dentist regularly, it is worth the money even if you don’t have insurance.
As I did not have dental insurance, and personally have no love for the experience of visiting my dentist, I let it go for the first few years of running my business. I was broke after all. When I finally did get dental insurance last year and popped in for a visit, the hygienist looked at me with an aghast expression and asked how long it had been since my last visit. FIVE AND A HALF YEARS, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!? Needless to say, it wasn’t pretty. Two gum surgeries later, I am doing better. In retrospect, a $50-75 teeth cleaning visit, even just once a year, would probably have been wise.
Short blog, important thought. If you are running a small business or an independent contractor, make sure you fit in a few small preventative health care visits.
From the horses mouth.
Where’s the Freedom in Freelancing?
Wow. I’m hosed!
I spent the last 6 days phonecall-coding-QAing-designing-fatigueing. I probably gained a few pounds. Think i may have lost some eye sight. Definitely got some gray hairs. After a week like that, I’m sitting here trying to remember why I wanted to work independently in the first place.
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A Day Dream for a Day Job
The first time I ever talked to Peter was on the phone. He was interviewing me to work on a project already in development. I generally like interviews. It’s a chance to meet a new person, learn about what they do and show them what you’ve done. I was happy after talking to Peter. Not only because I was going to work with him, but from my answer to one of his first questions: “If you could do anything in life what would it be?”. I answered immediately: “I’m doing it”. Peter repeated my answer out loud. He was trying to come up with another question that would encourage me to be more descriptive. As we continued to talk, I realized Peter wasn’t only interested in my professional abilities, but was genuinely interested in my hopes and dreams. Continue Reading »
Save the World, Work from Home
In honor of the theme of this year’s Blog Action Day, we’ve decided to bring up the topic of commute reduction. After all, it is one of the reasons that drove most of our team to go indy. It’s as simple as this: we believe that a good number of people that work in the realm of technology can find ways to work from home and cut down on the number of days that they spend commuting back and forth to an office. Sure, this isn’t for everyone, but with a relatively small percentage shift towards this new trend, very real benefits could be reaped from the environmental perspective.
I’ve always thought it was ironic when smokers “go out for a breath of fresh air”.
Recently, I found myself sympathizing with the plight of the proverbial smoker when I came under heavy fire from my friends for answering my iPhone email in front of them. So I left the company of friends to go outside and communicate with people by myself.
Having skipped many of Shane’s important emails in my attempts to skim read, I came to realize that I need a better system for checking my email in social settings. Checking my email while in the presence of my friends, my family, or especially my wife is a great way to misread emails AND piss off the people I’m with. It’s like missing two birds with one stone.
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Coffee Shops are so 2005
It’s over. Word’s out: you can get online at a coffee shop for real cheap - lots cheaper than paying an office rent, and the drinks are better anyway. There are dozens of people with laptops in almost every place with a free wifi connection. Students downloading torrents, guys in suits tethered to their slogging, bandwidth hogging exchange servers, hipsters making music, yoga moms surfing web. I’ve seen homeless-looking guys seem pulling out beaten up old laptops and getting online. Yeah, our local shop Lulu’s is still fun, but you better bring your own cellular internet access if you want to do any real work - the network is too busy. If you can even get a table…
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Surf Forecasting
Wish you could see the future? So do we. The first night we got our iPhones, Peter decided what the world needed more than anything was a mobile surf predictor. Who could argue with such an impeccable understanding of human nature!
After a bunch of research looking for good prediction data, some math and homework, we realized that reporting the current surfing condition is fairly easy. On the other hand, predicting the future is a whole different story. Through his search for quality information, Peter came across a bunch of great public ocean data resources. If you happen to be as surf obsessed as we are and want to play the amateur oceanographer, here is a list of the sites we found with the help of our associate, Ben Porterfield.
NOAA | Storm Surf | Storm Surfing | Surfline: Pleasure Point | Buoy Weather | Wavewatch | Wetsand | Surfing Santa Cruz
In the Still of the Night
The All Night’er is something that all of us have dated at one point or another in our lives. Staying up til’ 3am running on nothing but coffee and the knowledge that any sane person would be sleeping certainly isn’t a rarity in any case. And heck, it’s a little romantic the first time you do it… like the first time you try to stay up all night when you’re a kid. Whimsical, sure, but for the design professional who gets his or her work from freelance contracts, the all nighter is more than an occasional date, it’s a long-term partner, and understanding it is key to conquering it and unleashing your true productive power.
Stay-at-Home Mom and a Freelance Designer
Staying at home to raise a child is one of the most important jobs you can do. But it’s not just one job. Apart from being a short-order cook, nurse, personal shopper, housekeeper, teacher, entertainer, photographer, family website blogger, and activity director, I also continue to freelance design for various businesses. I’m not the only one that does this either. In fact, there are many moms working AND raising their kids from home. It takes a lot of creativity, time management, and flexibility.
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The Best Office In Town: Firefly Coffee
We needed a public place to work where we could focus. Meet the people who work for us. That has free wifi. And if it could be, where we felt the camaraderie of Cheers. There are a lot of coffee shops in town we frequent and a few months ago we fell in love.
Solution: Firefly Coffee
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