Working – Genesis One | The Studios' Blog

Free training – from Microsoft

I have been enjoying my class – ITNW 1425 at HCC. This is an online class and at this point it seems pretty much ‘teach yourself’. So I READ and RE-READ a lot!

Apparently, after taking this class I should be ready to take a CompTIA Network+ exam prep class. Perhaps the certification exam itself.

One of the resources provided to us is this class, Networking Fundamentals (mva.microsoft.com/en-US/training-courses/networking-fundamentals-8249) taught by Microsoft professionals Christopher Chapman and Thomas Willingham

The complete list of course can be found here: Microsoft Virtual Academy

I have read the first sets of chapters in our text book. I admit, it’s overwhelming especially in an 8 week course. This Microsoft class really did help me sort out some confused points in my understanding. The instructors are easy to understand and seem relaxed and comfortable which lowers the stress level a lot.

I ended up with 3 pages of useful notes from this 1 hour 13min lecture.

Worth the time!

What ya doin’? – Nothing

LOL.

NOT. TRUE.

I was just looking at the blog and realized I had no posts since July of 2015. Wow! That’s more than a year ago. Now, that doesn’t mean that I did not do anything to the blog. I did. I swear!

What ya doin’ – Refreshing php

The web – technology as a whole – takes massive leaps ahead. One day you’re happily coding in PHP5.X and the next you hear – PHP7 is out!

Wait! What?! What happened to PHP 6?!

PHP 6 was tabled as a version name/release candidate because it failed in its mission to bring native unicode support to the language. Apparently, doing so made PHP 6 a memory hog and a bear to program in.

Oopps.

Marking Time

How do you keep time?

Count Up timer — A Count Up Timer is a must!!

I had a very interesting interaction with a client this week that had me thinking:

What?! My time is worth SOMETHING!!!
I need a new gig!!!

This particular interaction was all about time with a subtle inference that I was not accurately billing the client.

Subtle.

But this was the third time in about two months where I was pulled into explaining how I keep time. I have been at this long enough that I no longer DEFEND how I keep time. It is what it is. But now I am tired EXPLAINING it.

So this blog post and the accompanying contract addendum are going to help me NEVER to have to visit this again.

Hope springs eternal.

I have two types of projects – fixed price and hourly. No surprises there. Du jour for freelancing.

I am not going to talk about how I set fixed prices. I am going to explain how I track time for my hourly projects.

For hourly project :

Proposal Writing

I started writing this and thought, “Whiner!” But really I a noodlin’ and leaving this here in the hopes some enterprising person will drop some information in the comments (would beat all the stupid spam…)

Proposal writing is hard.

It has to look professional
It has to cover what the client asks for
It has to say enough without giving away the farm
Legalese (it’s the devil!) Continue Reading