Month: June 2010

Categories
Development Indie Mac

Pay it forward

A wonderful bouquet of flowers.Mac Indie: “One of my primary goals in starting MacInde last year was to catalog and recognize all the tools that are available to Indie Mac/iPhone developers that can make your development life easier, faster, more efficient, etc. I’ll bet that if you tried to re-create all of the production quality code out there that we’re all using in our OSX and iPhoneOS apps thanks to this community, there’s probably 5-7 man-years of effort that you’d need to spend in doing it.”

Support your local Mac Indie! There’s a lot of really great free, and open source, Mac/iPhone/iPad source code floating around out there. Help these guys out if you can. I know I need to.

Shameless self promotion: Need Objective-C/Cocoa code to shorten a URL, or communicate with ping.fm, click here.

NOTE: I haven’t built that code in a LONG time, in fact, I haven’t built it for Mac since upgrading to Snow Leopard. It built without error for iPhone OS and Mac OS X the last time I did build it. Your mileage may vary. I definitely need to spend some quality time with it.

Categories
Business Indie

The Joys of Freelance

Brian Hoff: “This might sound familiar to some most of you: I received an email from a potential client inquiring a new website. After a few emails back and forth, the talk of money came into the equation, only to have the client question why my rates where so high as “they too were freelancers or small businesses.” They also asked if I’d consider slashing my rate by two-thirds. How about this one: I received emails looking for a $1,000 website because large firms I’ve contacted charge in the six-figures.”

I’ve heard from indie designers and developers that tell this same story. Because they’re small people believe they’ll cut a deal. It’s hard to make a living cutting deals to every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the block. You have to learn how to say one little word, no. I’m sure it’s tough to do, but you have to do it for the sake of your business, otherwise you’ll get buried in work you don’t want, and when something good comes along you’ll either have to pass on it or you’ll kill yourself trying to get it done.

Pick your battles. Easy to say, hard to practice.

Categories
MLOTW

Movie line of the week answer

We have a winner!

Congratulations to Mr. Steven Vore, who correctly guessed…

Mr. Baseball

See you next Thursday.

Categories
Life

Armando Galarraga, class act

Detroit Free Press: “‘He feels so bad — really bad,’ Galarraga said of Joyce, more than a half-hour after the game. ‘He hasn’t even changed out of his uniform.'”

He really is a class act. He knows he got a perfect game, and he seems to be happy with that.

Categories
Life

Just sad

Mother Jones [via Bradley Fitzhenry]: “Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge, even after all the warnings, looks worse than I imagined. Pools of oil black and deep stretch down the beach; when cleanup workers drag their rakes along an already-cleaned patch of sand, more auburn crude oozes up. Beneath the surface lie slimy washed-up globules that, one worker says, are ‘so big you could park a car on them.'”

Man. I just don’t know what to say about this stuff. It’s tragic on so many levels.BP, and you thought Katrina was bad.

Categories
Life

Junior Retires

Seattle Times: “So it was Wednesday as Griffey — the greatest player in Mariners history and one of the greatest in the history of the game — said goodbye to baseball.”

We lived in Seattle during those early Griffey years, it was an exciting time in Seattle baseball history, THUNDER DOME! I’ll always remember the run in 1995, and that team. First class guys like Jay Buhner and Edgar Martinez. It was a great time in Seattle. Too bad they couldn’t manage to win a World Series with that group.

Happy retirement Junior.

“Hey rookie! You were good.” — Shoeless Joe Jackson (from the movie Field of Dreams)

Categories
MLOTW

Movie line of the week

And.... ACTION!Good morning movie liners. It’s been a strange week, let’s get the show on the road. Good luck!

Actor #1: Just let them have a little fun.
Actor #2: Baseball is work. Not fun.
Actor #1: Baseball is grown men getting paid to play a game. When you were a kid, I bet you didn’t pick up a bat and ball because you were dying to work. A player’s career is short enough. Let them enjoy it.

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.