Ryan Boswell [dot] com
Blackout SOPA
This thing is everywhere now. Almost literally. Today, what seems like half (or more) of the internet is staging a global protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and ProtectIP Act (PIPA) by “blacking out” themselves. Some websites are completely offline today and only show a message about what SOPA and PIPA are and how to take action, while others (like mine) are only showing an overlay to new visitors encouraging them to take action to stop these two bills.
I’m not going to go on at length about these bills, since there are plenty of other places you can do this. So if you haven’t already, read up and sign a petition at one of those websites, contact your representatives in Congress and lets protect the future of the internet.
#OccupyYOU
By now the you’ve no doubt heard all about the Occupy Movement. What started as Occupy Wall Street has now spread to hundreds of cities around the world and has begun to represent much more than the original Wall Street campaign did.
While individual Occupy events and actions have a more purpose and goal, if you look at the sum of them all, the goal of the entire Occupy movement is to stand up for what you believe is right for you and your peers and demand that change be made. While many people disagree on the final “right” answer to these problems, the important thing is that people are finally ending their complacency and doing something about their unhappiness with the status quo, and discussion is starting to happen among people.
Few people will argue that the majority of first world countries are run by a more elite class of very wealthy and influential people. They are referred to as the 1%, since they represent 1% of the population. Yet, they hold the most the wealth and power in these countries. The rest of the common population (called the 99%) has, to this point, gone along with the gentle nudging of the elite and allowed a frightening disparity in power and wealth to grow between the two groups. Fortunately, this has started to change. IN reality, this global movement has its roots in the political unrest in the Middle East over the past few years. It is they who began to Occupy their cities and governments and countries to demand change, and they achieved it. And now, more and more countries are following suit, with the common population rising up and demanding change in their governments and more. In the end, I can only assume that whatever changes eventually result from this movement will truly be for the more common good because it is coming straight from the people themselves.
But the most important part of this are the changes that are happening on a more personal level. As I’ve said before, people are now realizing that things don’t have to stay the way they are. This is happening on a very personal level. And it is this kind of change that is the most powerful and the most amazing. When people finally pull their head out of the sand and look around them it is a personal awakening to the world, they realize there are no limits to what they can do if only they put their mind to it, and seizing that opportunity is what creates new and fresh perspectives that will help shape the world for a better and brighter future for everyone.
Now is the time to Occupy YOU and make the changes necessary to make yourself a better person because only then can you make the world around you better.
You can find out how to get involved in local Occupy actions or get resources for how to occupy effectively.
USB Stick Computer
On GigaOM this morning, I came across an article about a prototype product that is probably one of the most exciting geek gadgets ever. While the article title says it is an Android computer, it goes on to say that many different operating systems could be installed on it.
Basically, this USB stick sized device holds all the important guts of a modern-day smart phone minus the screen and keyboard. In their place are USB and HDMI dongles. With simply a USB cord plugged into a power source, a HDMI display and Bluetooth enabled keyboard and mouse, you have yourself a full computer. Talk about portable computing. Granted, this thing isn’t going to encode HD videos or anything heavy like that, but it will be able to do any kind of processing that a smartphone can today. It also has a WiFi radio in addition to the afore-mentioned Bluetooth radio to give you network access (vital for any modern computing device), and comes with an SD card slot for removable storage.
Since it’s basically just a flash drive, you could in theory install any OS you like on it. Windows and OS X probably won’t work well (if at all) because the system requirements for these exceed what the device offers, but you can run a virtualization from it if you have another computer.
Moving forward, this is a huge step forward in mobile computing. Google has started pushing for Android-embedded devices everywhere, and this is exactly what can enable something like that. Given the size of the hardware (8cm x 2.5 cm), it could be embedded into almost any device and with the right OS configuration, it run anything/everything from microwaves to thermostats to picture frames to TVs, all connected to the cloud and communicating with all of your other devices.
Sadly, this is only a prototype at this stage, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see things like this in common use in another 5 years.
Profiles and Plus Coming Soon to Google Apps?
Google has said for a long time that Profiles and +1 will be available ”soon”. Well, it looks like it may finally actually be on the verge of launching. From the start of the big account transition, there have been a few things that just worked a little different under Google Apps accounts versus Gmail accounts. Earlier today when switching between accounts, I noticed that my real name appeared for all of my accounts. Previously all my Google Apps accounts were identified by just their email address and not my real name like Gmail accounts are. So far the account list shows up like this in everything except Gmail (which shows just email addresses and then sorts them alphabetically, not the order I signed into each account in). This may be an sign that they are prepping Profiles for release.
I found the next big hint through the embedded +1 button on a GigaOM article I was reading. When I accidentally hovered over it, it displayed a tip box suggesting I +1 the post publicly as Ryan Boswell (which linked to a Google Profile URL). I’d never noticed this before so I clicked through to the Profile only to discover that it was an invalid link. I went and checked the URL for my Gmail account’s Google Profile and found that the two are different, meaning that the link is likely for what will be my Google Profile for one of my Google Apps accounts.
I’m excited for this update, and I really do hope that these two are signs of its impending launch. I’ve wanted to start using a Google Profile tied to an account I actually use and get into Google+ since it launched, but I’ve been left out in the cold thus far. I can only hope that once it does launch they will start letting people into Google+ again.
Farewell to Freelancing (For Now)
This summer is the 8th anniversary of when I started freelancing and landed my first client. It’s an interesting thing to look back at 8 short years and realize just how long I’ve been doing this. It’s also an interesting thing to realize that I will no longer do freelancing work anymore. At least, no more new clients or projects, and at least for the foreseeable future. At the beginning of this summer, I was hired as an Information Services Technician at a local company here in San Luis Obispo. My freelancing work wasn’t quite bringing in enough funds for me to live on anymore and I needed something a bit more. Plus, I felt like it was time to change things up. Ironically, that’s the feeling most people have when entering the freelancing world, not leaving it.
My job with Abraxas Energy Consulting is technically my first real day job. I’ve done consistent contract work for companies, but I’ve never really been on payroll as an employee before. It is an interesting experience to say the least. I really enjoy my job and the people I work with. To be honest, I was nervous about working in an office with a lot of other people. I’ve never worked in that kind of environment before, and I wasn’t sure how well I would adjust to having a more set working schedule. But as it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. I am surrounded by really intelligent and interesting people all day, and while the days can get long sometimes, it’s nice to actually have my evenings and weekends to myself for once in my life.
At first, I thought that I would be able to have my job and still do some freelancing work on the side for a bit of extra spending money. But these past two months, I’ve had so little time to myself it’s scary (my excuse for the lack of activity here). After working long days and volunteering with the local SARP Center, I just want to eat dinner and relax when I get home, not sit at my computer for another few hours and work on client work. It’s been hard enough to keep up with my existing clients for maintenance work, there is no way that I could handle any new clients. So I’ve decided that I am no longer accepting new work, and most of the rest of my summer will be spent re-evaluating which clients need me to stay working with them, and which clients I can help to better manage on their own so that I can lighten my load just a little more before my classes start-up again in September.
With that said, it is a bitter-sweet transition. On the one hand, I’m really enjoying my job and working with other people every day and I’ve learned a lot already. But on the other, I’m really starting to miss waking up when I felt like it and having the freedoms that come with being your own boss. C’est la vie.
My GoDaddy Gripes
Disclaimer: This is more or less a small rant on some things about GoDaddy that have bothered me for a while, feel free to ignore it.
GoDaddy.com is one of the most popular domain registrars and probably web hosts. I used to use their domain registration service until I switched everything to my current provider, Dreamhost, about two years ago. Since then my GoDaddy account has been more or less dormant. I figured I wouldn’t worry about deleting it since I may use it at some point in the future. Today I decided to go ahead and cancel my account since I still hadn’t used it and I don’t see myself using it anymore. Long story short, I spent over an hour scouring their help section to try and find out how to cancel my account after spending nearly half an hour looking for it somewhere in my account settings. A quick Google search revealed that it is impossible to cancel a GoDaddy account completely, but there are steps you can take to more or less strip it of most of the important information.
It bothers me that I can’t just cancel my account completely and have my information removed from their systems permanently, but I could live with having an account floating around if I could completely strip out all of my personal information. You can remove all your payment and credit card information, which is the most important stuff, but you are still required to have a full name, street address, and various phone numbers associated with your account. This bugs me to no end.
On top of all of this, it took me 10x longer to get through the processes of effectively ‘deactivating’ my account than it should have. The GoDaddy website is a mess. And I mean a real mess. Everything looks shiny and there are gradients to the sky, but so many of the graphics and design elements clash with everything around them. To be honest, the site looks like the internet version of Frankenstein’s monster, with patchwork pages and mismatched design elements. It looks more like a 12-year-old took a professionally designed template and made his own changes to it without knowing anything about HTML or CSS than the website of one of the most prominent web companies in the world.
As I mentioned briefly, I spent an inordinate amount of time searching through the site to find things I was looking for, and I know what I’m doing when it comes to domains and web hosting. Everything on the site is buried beneath mountains of menus and sub-menus and sub-sub-menus. The navigation is split into more places than there are mistakes on Wikipedia. I also count at least 6 different fonts being used on any given page. Even elements and text that are on multiple pages differ in appearance from page to page.
It seems that if there is a general rule or accepted custom within the web design world, they not only broke it, but beat the poor thing within an inch of its life.
Of course, this is all very unfortunate because the service that GoDaddy offers is world class. I’ve worked with them for just over 6 years and I know many others who have worked with them for longer and their Support team is one of the best I have ever experienced (except maybe Apple support, but it is still a close call). Their pricing is very reasonable and in some cases a steal. But the design and flow of their website just gets in the way of all of that and ruins the experience for people like me.
Freelancing as a Student
One of my favorite websites to follow right now is FreelanceSwitch, because I get a lot of great tips on how to improve my freelance business. A few days ago they posted some questions about student freelancing they received for their advice-column series of posts. Being a student and freelancer myself, I thought I’d throw in a few extra tidbits that weren’t brought up by the questions. A few of these things may even be useful for freelancers already out of school.
The Hard Choice
Since I began my freelancing career 8 years ago, I’ve had a constant struggle internally with my commitments to my clients and my commitments to academics. Deadlines for class projects and client projects often coincide with each other and it can be hard to decide which takes precedence. On one hand, my client work actually provides me an income to pay the bills, which is important (especially in my current life as a college student). But on the other hand, if I neglect my class work, my grades will drop and I could risk endangering my academic future, which can mean not getting a degree (which is also important since it will ensure that I have an income in the future, and hopefully a *slightly* higher one than currently).
It’s important to have your mind made up on this one before you even walk into the business. Getting your priorities straight on this will save you hours of agonizing indecision, take it from me. As to which you choose to take priority is up to you, I can only say that in my experience the vast majority of my clients that was aware of my student standing were understanding of my academic commitments and were not as harsh when I occasionally missed a deadline by a day or two.
Use Your Academic Connections
You’d be surprised just how many people are looking for people to do work, whether it’s web design and development in my case, or anything other service you might offer as a freelancer. Especially in today’s times where a cheaper and more mobile workforce is becoming increasingly important and prevalent. More employers are hiring contract-based employees more, and so there are way more opportunities for freelancers to get work. With that said, one of the most diverse pockets of connections anyone can tap into is their local academic community. Get to know people in your classes, not only will you be able to use these friendships for study buddies, but if you talk about your business, you could get a referral out of them. I’ve gotten over a dozen referrals this way in the past two years alone.
Another area of campus community that you can tap into are clubs and other social groups. Universities often have hundreds upon hundreds of student clubs and groups covering almost any interest or discipline imaginable. Find clubs that relate to your business offerings and get to know people. Sometimes, the more professional clubs will refer members to community businesses that are looking for freelance workers. You can also use the connections and friendships you make here similarly to students in your classes.
Collaborate, Collaborate, Collaborate
Being a freelancer in college is a valuable opportunity. Get to know people that maybe have their own freelancing business, or even simply don’t mind doing a little extra work on the side of a more “regular” job. Especially if these people have complimentary skill-sets to your own. Consider partnering with them on projects where you both can do a part of the work that you are more specialized at.
For example, I have a good friend that does a lot of graphic design work, and is much better at it than I am. I’ve referred some of my clients that had graphic design jobs they needed done to him, and he has done likewise. I’ve also contracted out parts of a few of my own projects that needed a more refined graphic design skill-set than I have.
If you can build up a few of these relationships, you’ll have a strong base of colleagues you can rely on to help you out in a pinch, or to send you work when they spot it. These connections can be invaluable even beyond college into a more professional freelancing career by using the same relationship and dynamic that you built and fostered while in college.
Building Your Portfolio
College is a great time to flush out your portfolio. Don’t be afraid to highlight class projects on your portfolio if you have them (just make sure it’s your own work, or you at least credit others that may have helped you). Anything you do while in college can be used as an example of your skills; just write up a little blurb explaining what you did, maybe a little bit of how you did it, and possibly throw in some marketing language to make it sell.
Your Resume
One important thing I’ve noticed in my time is that some freelancers that have portfolios of their work neglect to write a resume. It is true that more and more people are less concerned with resumes and more concerned about portfolios, I have come across clients that want to see both. While your portfolio may show specific examples of what you’ve done and some of the people you’ve worked with, your resume should be like an “abstract” of your portfolio. Include a list of your specific skills relevant to your career path, what you have experience with, and list any non-freelance jobs you’ve held as well as mention that you are self-employed doing such and such work.
Don’t Be Afraid of Internships
A lot of people think that because I’m a freelancer, I don’t need to worry about getting internships in my field because I already have a job. That couldn’t be further from the truth. While a lot of the things I’ve learned and use in my work are self-taught, if you get a good internship where you do more than secretarial or grunt work, you’ll often learn a lot more in a shorter period of time on a job than you would otherwise. Also, having internships will look good on your resume, and it is worth asking your employer about projects you worked on that you may be able to include on your portfolio. But be careful of the last one, ensure that you have permission from your employer because anything you do while working for them can be considered their intellectual property and they may not like you claiming partial credit for it, but its always good to ask just in case.
But also be careful of what internships you take and what other obligations you may have with current clients on the freelancing side of things. Make sure that you’ll still have the time and energy to fulfill any ongoing or pre-existing commitments with your clients while on the internship. Also be aware that some companies may have you sign an agreement not to work on anything else while you are under their employment.
Experiment
Another great thing about college is that it’s a great place to experiment with new ideas. Try out new business management tactics and procedures. Take the time to look at your processes and think about how you can refine them. It is a lot easier to recover from messing something up while in college than when you’re out in the real world.
Relax
As a freelancing student, you’ll probably be spending a lot of your time working. Maybe even more than you would if you had a more “regular” job. Between academic commitments and your client work, you may have little time to spend on yourself, and that is one of the important benefits of freelancing as a whole. Plan at least an hour or two a day where you just relax and not do any school or client work. Maybe even plan an entire day or two a month (or more often depending on your schedule) where you just have “me” time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone for 3 weeks or more without taking time for myself and it’s almost always ended up in burn out, which can be dangerous, especially if it affects your academic work.
The Chromebook and Chrome OS
Just as expected, yesterday at Google I/O, the elusive Chromebook was announced. Samsung and Acer are launching the first two such devices, available this summer. The biggest drawback for me is the price. Both Chromebooks are priced just a little on the expensive side for what they deliver. Both will come in WiFi and 3G models (Acer’s 3G model will come later than the rest at an as yet unannounced price), and start at $349 (Acer WiFi) to $429 (Samsung WiFi) to $499 (Samsung 3G). The pricing on the Acer is closest to what I was hoping for, but with only 6.5 hours of battery life and the very clunky almost 90s-era laptop design, I’m hesitant to drop the money. The Samsung model does much better with it’s design (similar to the Cr-48 Google has been shipping to their pilot program participants) and boasts 8.5 hours of battery life, but it’s still a little on the pricey side for what it really is. I guess we’ll see how I feel when the devices actually ship, but I think I may wait for another Chromebook to launch before I get one.
Another huge announcement that came from yesterday’s event is full offline support for Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. Previously there was a sudo-offline support through Gears, but Google itself abandoned that a while back because it didn’t quite work as well as it should have. Google has apparently been using this offline support internally for months now, and this summer the rest of the world is going to get it. This is a huge win for Google in their quest to get more people to use their services. I’ve been hoping for something like this for a long time because I really do want to use their suite of applications more, but I require offline access to my stuff since I don’t have connectivity all the time.
With that said, I am interested to see if there will be distributions of Chrome OS (or Chromium OS) that will be available to install on non-Chromebook machines. It seems like Google is putting a lot of effort into working with their hardware partners to make a seamless hardware and software integration, similar to what Apple does with it’s own machines. It’ll be interesting to see how officially they will support installing Chrome OS on other devices, since that is something that I’d be curious to try out on my MacBook Pro, especially since Chrome OS is pretty lightweight, it won’t take a very large partition to run on, and it would be nice to have the option to boot into a very lightweight OS from time to time to do things that don’t require a full, desktop application oriented OS.
Google’s Cloud Music Service
Yesterday at Google I/O, Google announced their Music Beta service, which is a direct competitor to Amazon’s recently launched Cloud Player. There are a few important differences at launch between the two services that will definitely affect how widely the two are adopted and which one will catch faster.
Limits
Amazon’s Cloud Player has a free limit of 5GB of storage (although purchasing one album from Amazon MP3 gives you a year subscription of 20GB, which is cheaper than spending the normal $20 for the upgrade). Google has taken quite a different approach on this, and rather than giving a hard limit on space, they limit by the number of songs, capped at 20,000. That is quite ambitious, considering that the average MP3 file is between 5 and 8MB each, if someone were to upload 20,000 songs, it would easily reach or surpass 100GB. But then, relatively few people have more than 5-6,000 songs and would be far under that limit. So in that respect, it’s like wireless carriers and their “unlimited” data plans. Yeah, technically you’re unlimited, but so few people actually go above a certain amount that they’re able to offer it without worry that everyone is actually going to reach a usage level that threatens the network stability (of course AT&T might disagree with that philosophy now). It’ll be interesting to see how and if Google’s limit changes over time as more and more people start using the service.
In this category, I’d call it a win for Google.
Availability
To start, Google’s service is currently an invitation-only beta, which severely limits the reach for the next few months as people as slowly let into the beta program. But other than that, Amazon’s service is available through their website (using HTML5 for the vast majority of the website, Flash is only required for uploading), as well an Android application. Google’s service is available online (Flash required; interesting considering Google’s obsession with HTML5 and desire for things to work on any browser available) and through an Android application.
The commonality between the two so far is the absence of an iOS application. Amazon does get around this with their web player, which can be used just fine using a browser on any iOS device. But Google gives no options for iOS devices to access the service, without a native app and with the web player running entirely on Flash, these potential users are left out in the cold, having to either choose Amazon’s Cloud Player or wait for Apple’s rumored cloud music service.
I’d call it a narrow victory for Amazon here since it is 1) widely available to the public and 2) in a backwards way, it supports more devices.
Integration
Since both services have an Android app, it is fair to compare how well integrated they are to Android. As a small disclaimer, I do not have an android device and since Google’s Music Beta service is invite-only, I wouldn’t be able to test that out myself at this point even if I wanted to; I’m only going off of what I’ve read from other tech blogs about their thoughts and what they’ve gathered from Google about the service. On this front, Google seems to have the upper hand with their Music Beta application being better integrated into Android as a replacement for the stock music player than Amazon’s which seems to be just a secondary music player. I’m sure that with time this will even out though.
Overall
I’m still on the fence about what I will eventually use. Partly because I like that I would actually be able to use Amazon’s service while moving about on my iPhone, I would prefer to have Google’s massive song limit. And partly because I’m still holding out to see what Apple announces in a few weeks at WWDC and just hope that their service meets my needs better than the other two. If I had to choose one over the other, I would go with Amazon’s service, mainly because it’s the only one that I’d be able to use away from my computer (where I have iTunes anyway).
Chrome OS Launch Soon?
It seems that Google may be gearing up for a public launch of Chrome OS tomorrow at Google I/O. If so, this would mean the end of a six-month delay for the OS, which would be much welcomed. I, for one, am pretty excited about this launch, since I’ve been wanting to get my hands on Chrome OS for quite a while, but I’ve never felt comfortable running anything from the Chromium repository. Whether I try to install Chrome OS on my MacBook Pro or get a dedicated device will mainly depend on whether the Samsung event also slated for tomorrow evening is to announce a Chrome OS netbook.
I do hope that both of these rumors are true and that by Wednesday night we’ll know all the details about Chrome OS and the first publicly available Chrome OS netbook. The biggest factor then in determining how well it’ll sell is price. If Samsung builds a true netbook, I don’t see it being very expensive, or at least I would hope it isn’t. If it’s not in the $2-300 price range I imagine that a lot of the general public would feel a little uneasy about dropping that much money for such a lightweight device. Considering that netbooks are basically portable web-browsers and the idea is not to have much actually happening on the device itself (as far as processing and local storage), there isn’t a whole lot to raise the price for and it’ll be hard to justify spending more than $300 on one, even for me and I’m a pretty big geek.
I guess we’ll just have to wait for the truth in a few days.