I just sized the photo above like I usually do but when I typed the dimensions for the crop tool in Photoshop I wound up with 450 inches instead of pixels. The progress bar started its thing and I spaced out for a few seconds before I realized I was creating a file big enough to eat up my hard drive. Stuff like that happens all the time but I thought it was worth noting on a slow news day.
We’ve had three pretty big jobs to deal with in the last month or so and of course a bunch of little jobs. I’ve noticed an inverse curve between the amount of money that a job pays and the degree of satisfaction we get from doing them.
I upgraded my brother’s computer so he can run automatic backups and I helped Anne Havens determine that her dvd recorder had died. I was unable to help another one of brothers open WINSCP files on his Mac. As far as I can tell it’s just another program to keep PC people from getting viruses when they download files but when you put files in there, Mac people can’t get ’em out. He was trying to download some plans for a building. And then my dad called and wanted to now what Bing was and why he was suddenly doing searches in Bing. He wanted his Google back but he had inadvertently selected Bing as his search engine of choice so I helped him reset it. These of course were all free jobs, on the very low end of that curve but they were all satisfying. Doing multiple rounds of design-by-committee revisions for a company that pays pretty good is grueling. I’m filing this in the “We Live Like Kings” category.
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Interesting- Mike and I were talking last night about how the small jobs are typically the most troublesome. They count every penny, even when it is being penny-wise pound foolish, they waste a lot of time relative to what they’re paying and they haggle over everything. People with larger budgets tend to value higher quality work. The sweet spot is to be higher than the people who charge too little and lower than the agencies who basically screw clients who don’t know how much it costs to do things. I recently saw this range of quotes for an e-commerce site that was already architected and written: $3000, 9000, 27,000(!).
The 9000 was the right number, imho.
honk if u love paul dodd’s photos.