As promised, here’s some quick footage from the Sanyo camcorder I was banging on about. The embedded version is standard definition, but you can view it in HD by clicking through to the Vimeo site.
Quick example of video from the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 from Gary Marshall on Vimeo.
BSI British Standards has published a draft of the forthcoming BS 8878 standard on its website, and it’s keen to hear from interested parties. From the press release:
Julie Howell, Chair of the committee responsible for drafting DPC BS 8878, commented, “Once published, this standard will be a fantastic tool for organizations wishing to understand their responsibilities in enabling disabled people to use web content. DPC BS 8878 encourages the enhancement of the overall user experience – a much more holistic approach than we have seen previously and one that I hope will yield exciting results. Right now we want to encourage as many people as possible to read and comment on the draft standard to ensure it is as relevant as possible.â€
I interviewed Julie last week, and she means it when she says she wants lots of input from interested parties – not just disabled Internet users, but anybody with an interest in accessibility. The consultation period ends on 31 January.
Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Michael Wolff reckons MySpace could soon be worth absolutely nothing. Why? Because everybody on it is a “cretin”.
if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but for reasons that will soon be apparent it’s taken a lot longer than I expected.
As regular readers will know, I became a dad for the first time in October 2007, and since then I’ve had the joy of watching Baby Bigmouth’s first thirteen months. To say it’s been a learning experience would be an understatement, so I thought I’d share what I’ve learnt for the benefit of any other homeworkers who are about to become proud fathers.
Most of this, incidentally, is stuff you already know. But you don’t really appreciate what any of it actually means until it happens.
Oh, and: I’m writing this for homeworking dads, so let’s take it as read that what we think is difficult is approximately a millionth of a per cent of what our partners had and have to go through.
The good stuff
In many respects, being a freelance is the best possible job to have when you become a father. You’re still working, sort of, but you’re not leaving the house at 6am and returning at 7pm or later. You’re there for the first smile, the first words, the first steps – and because you’re freelance, you can sleep when the baby does. That’s a luxury fathers with proper jobs don’t have, although it’s countered by the fact that you can’t pretend to work late and go to the pub when you really should be going home to help your wife.
All things considered, I’ve been exceptionally lucky to have a job that means I haven’t missed all the cool stuff. And that more than compensates for all the gnarly stuff. But there is a lot of gnarly stuff, and it’s worth thinking about while your beautiful baby is still a twinkle in your eye.
Don’t stop work until you absolutely have to
Baby Bigmouth was due on the 6th of October, so I took that month off in anticipation and told everybody I’d be back at work on the 1st of November. She didn’t turn up until the 23rd of October, and didn’t come home until a few days after that. Oops.
Money, money, money
Your partner’s income will dwindle and then eventually become nothing until/unless she goes back to work. And so will yours. You can pretty much forget doing anything for the first month, and unless you’re exceptionally lucky the next couple of months will be difficult too. It’s particularly bad if you have a creative job, because you will be tired all the time. If you do work, you’ll find even the simplest thing takes forever. I spent two days trying and failing to write a 20-word photo caption when Baby Bigmouth was a couple of months old.
Despite what you might have heard, though, babies aren’t that expensive and child benefit is pretty generous. What is expensive, though, is wine. During the first few months you’ll get through a lot of it.
If you’re the kind of freelance who only gets paid after (usually, long after) you invoice, the money will start drying up a couple of months after you become a parent. Let’s say your baby arrives in January; you’ll probably get paid for the work you did in January 30 to 60 days after that. So expect the money to dwindle from March or so. This is why sensible people save huge wads of cash before the baby arrives. As you know, I’m not very sensible.
Writer’s (or Web Designer’s) block
The combination of lack of sleep and being broke – plus, quite possibly, the constant noise of a yelling baby and/or friends’ yelling babies, and/or children’s CDs, which are only marginally better than Nickelback; moving your office to a fall-out shelter buried deep in the garden becomes very, very appealing – causes a vicious circle of writer’s block. It’s like having the world’s worst cold, a head so stuffed with cotton wool that while you know there’s a brain in there somewhere, you’ve no idea how to contact it, let alone get it to do anything. This can quickly become self-perpetuating, so if you have the opportunity to get out of the house (to work, to get a break, or to have a sneaky nap in a car park) then you really should take it.
Pitching for new work
You won’t. With two-day jobs taking two weeks, you won’t have the energy – and in the unlikely event of you finding any spare time whatsoever, you’ll be having a sneaky nap in a car park. This stage, thankfully, is relatively short.
Things do get better
With babies, everything is just a stage. Eventually things calm down, they sleep through the night, they become wee people rather than screaming balls of fury and sick, and you’ll recover your mojo. You’ll pitch for and win new contracts, you’ll create things you’re happy with, and clients will stop shouting at you. And then you’ll contract the Black Death.
The Black Death
You thought you had an iron constitution, didn’t you? After all, you haven’t been sick for a decade. You have good genes!
Good genes my arse. You haven’t been sick because you haven’t been exposed to anything – and the bad news is that every form of entertainment for toddlers, whether it’s a creche or a musical group or anything else, is a front operation for the chemical warfare labs at Porton Down. Within seconds of arrival, your child will be surrounded by – and infected by – children with diseases we thought we’d got rid of in the dark ages. And then your child will come home, and you will get it ten times worse.
It’s a very good idea to build in some Black Death Time when you’re taking on work. That way, when you get infected – and it’s definitely a case of when, not if – you’ll still be able to hit your deadlines.
But even the Black Death passes, and you’ll find a rhythm. You’ll have fun with your child, and fun doing your job, and you’ll only have to deal with the odd banging on the door when you’re interviewing a CEO. So when older, wiser parents talk about teething, the terrible twos, having more children, fitting in the school run and all the other things just around the corner, you’ll do what any sensible freelancer does. You’ll put your fingers in your ears, wait until they’ve gone, and pour yourself another very large glass of red wine.
(Any other freelancing parents with useful advice? I’m all ears…)
“Hi, I’m Steve Jobs – and I’m bargain crazy!” Doesn’t work, does it? Anyway, the UK Apple Store’s one-day event is on, and there’s the odd discount – a fiver off an iPod, thirty quid off an iMac, sixty quid off a MacBook and a free horse.
I’m lying about the horse.
According to the latest bunch of government statistics, 94.1% of Brits connect to the internet via broadband – and the percentage of dial-up modem users has dropped below 5%. That means to all intents and purposes, dial-up is dead. Which in some respects is a shame.
Don’t get me wrong. Dial-up was desperately slow, horrifically expensive and hopelessly unreliable, and today’s net users would be flabbergasted by our excitement when modems went from 14.4kbps to 28.8, and then upwards to the dizzy peaks of 56kbps – so photos of naked people loaded almost immediately, and you could download an MP3 in about a week.
Of course, broadband is miles better. But there’s one thing missing.
Broadband doesn’t boing.
I loved the crackles and boings as my modem laboriously dialled my ISP, negotiated a connection and finally shut up. It was the equivalent of the HBO “waaaah” at the start of The Wire, or the “Previously” intro to NYPD Blue: a sound that told you something interesting was going to happen. And no matter how many times you went online and nothing interesting happened whatsoever, the boings never stopped having that effect.
For all its joys, broadband is just there, like a light switch. Dial-up was an adventure.
Forgive the self-promotion, but I enjoyed writing this what-if for PC Plus:
Of course, bandwidth isn’t controlled by sheikhs or delivered in trucks, and we’re pretty sure that the US won’t invade a sovereign nation to seize control of its cable TV network – but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t striking similarities between oil, gas and bandwidth.
While I’m thinking about it, dear readers, what’s your take on self-promotion? Would you prefer it if I didn’t link to individual articles? Should I do it more? Could you care less?
This brilliant website appeared via an ad on a journalism forum, which promised a sure-fire way to make money from freelance journalism:
as more and more companies and entrepreneurs have turned their attention to the Internet, the competition has made finding fresh, original content more difficult than ever before.Â
This situation has created a dire need for writers who can create content for various websites all over the Internet – and it doesn’t have to be great content, or even good content for that matter
If you sign up now, you’ll get other valuable tips:
I will explain what I do and show you exactly what you must also do to make more money than you probably ever dreamed possible taking pictures and uploading them onto the internet!
And:
Did you know that their are companies (large and small) out there that are willing to pay you to take surveys, participate in online focus groups, watch movie trailers, go shopping for products (you get to keep the products too), and even to drive your car! That’s right, there are even companies out there that are even willing to pay you to drive your own car with their advertisements on them!
If you order today you will get access to our comprehensive list of over 300 online companies that are all literately “begging” you to take surveys online for cash, drive your car for cash, participate in online focus groups for cash, and to complete simple offers for cash!
But that’s not all!
I’ll also tell you how you can make a very profitable living through the Internet’s hottest “new thing†– blogging!
As one delighted customer puts it:
The first 15 pages is worth the money!
My old Powerbook is knackered – six keys no longer working, and I suspect the culprit may be baby food – so I’ve dragged out my arthritic Acer Aspire, which “runs” Vista. It’s basically a desperately underpowered laptop that struggles to get out of bed, let alone actually do anything. So hurrah for Google Chrome, which runs beautifully on it.
Chrome isn’t perfect – it still isn’t extensible, and there’s an issue with Hotmail where you can read but not write emails – but it’s still a cracking wee browser. I’d definitely recommend it for everyday browsing on underpowered Windows kit.
Linking to defamatory material isn’t a good idea, and as Matt Wardman writes:
this scenario exists in the case of the BNP Membership List if a single person is on there by mistake: links will be to a post alleging that x, y or z is a member of the BNP. Bearing in mind that BNP Activists are posting that the list is out of date, and that the current membership is of the order of 6,000, linking to a posting suggesting that 10,000 people or so are BNP members looks a touch perilous.
Anybody else searched for namesakes in the list? Just me, then?