oodavid... what a blog you have!

I love Thursdays, I love all days really; there’s always something happening to make you smile! Yesterday was no exception, after a good day’s graft (I must blog about this contract soon) I popped over to the Codeworks Ignite event to have my neurons tickled and tickled they were!

The first speaker Tristan Watson (a beautiful soul) talked about how an idea is only important once it’s been acted on and to my mega joy he used one of my sideprojects as an example!!!

he was so kind about it I did a little blush!

We then watched Dan Gilmore talk about immersive technologies, a new face to me but so passionate! Love it! He sparked the memory of a thought I had as a child; “what would swapping sensory inputs feel like?” - if there’s another Ignite event I may ask to talk about this cause it’s such a giggle of a thought experiment.

Let the truncation begin - I should be working!!

• We heard about finances from Jonathan Gold
  I noted that I need to talk to him about a concept business plan with a super-short-term exit strategy
• Peter Hirst talked about hidden gems and easter eggs in technology
  Sparked another weekend tinkering of an idea, maybe next month ;-)
• Dan Kolodziej (pronounced ko-lod-gee) went on a MEGA-TANGENT starting with shoes, onto Wi-Fi, cruised through Africa, financial institutions, and back to shoes again. DAN’S SHOES that is.
  Reminded me of frontline SMS - must see how that’s evolving soon
• David Erasmus (what a name!!) showed us some heart-warming holiday snaps then asked us about the nature of openness and friendship and why things happen the way they do
  I wrote - must buy a school bus

I had to cut the event short cause to cycle home and make SUSHI!!!! Yes.

I didn’t get a shot of everyone; there was no incentive to move away from the food. That’s just dumb. That last sushi was named “the loneliest maki”, we proceeded to make it some “friends” then eat them too. We all had to lie down and ride it out cause we made soooo much!

Don’t forget kids, every night is food night

Turns out I am not much more than a squiggle…

Might use something like this for my business card - I don’t have one yet y’see. Needs text though, how abooouuut:

• oodavid! what a nice business card you have…
  aka “the classic”
• David King - create problem solver - full service web development
  aka “what it says on my website”
• David King - STRAIGHT UP NERD
  aka “the reality” 
• David King - who ate all the π
  aka “welcome to my brain”

…who am I kidding, words aren’t really my strong-point, I’ll probably just go with a subtle off-white colour. a tasteful thickness and a watermark.

Fun fact: when I was 17 I learned from my brother that you can just walk into random lectures at University and people probably wont notice, I did that for a few months and it was awesome. If you’re lucky it will be a good lecture :-)

So anyhow, yesterday was rather epic - Richard Lane, sales-dude extraordinaire, got my little neurons fired up about how we communicate and think about sales and after-sales processes and logic. Frankly a lot more than I can cover here (I have work to do) suffice to say it was very insightful, go see the man if you can! Why? This is why:

My journal writings are often a bit odd, mind I can usually translate it correctly…

Richard’s language and presentation style is incredible, he has just made an example sales pitch for NOTHING and I want to buy it. Whatever it is.

Brilliant.

One of the things he presented was a concept for sales Qualification called The Magic 35 Qualification Toolkit™, which reminded me of my Leads Profile Radar Diagrams (earlier blog post). So last night with an hour free I decided to knock up a “radar maker” that we can use to generate Lead Profiling diagrams and Magic 35 diagrams.

• http://oodavid.com/radarmaker/ < wooo!

Ultimately I hope to add more presets for other stages of the sales process to make up:

• Lead Profiling
• Qualification
• Requirement
• Evidence
• Acquisition
• Closing

Hurray for brainwaves!

In roughly chronological order, the most bestest food that I photographed in the past 12 months… Advanced apologies for ensuing hunger :-)

a mega pizza, with everything as a topping

breakfast in bed with a smile, I love you woman!

coast to coast midway treat, consumed with the appetite of a wolf

a Halloween hotpot, no “after” shot cause it got eaten too quickly!

pumpkin soup - this was EPIC, we’ll be redoing this as soon as I see a pumpkin in the market

a pineapple burger to fit the aussy film “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”

a tarragon / strogonoff hybrid or “tarragonoff” if you will - made this up as I went and have since lost the recipe :-(

waffles, lots of waffles. with bacon. and coffee. every other weekend

the finest soup in the world (I’m making that tonight actually, might post a recipe 2moz)

litres of stock! we don’t waste round these parts!

kippers with grilled tomatoes, my god are this good

and finally a truckload of sushi, thank you Roz for the introduction, I will always treasure the sushi

Nota Bene - Photographing food is a bit of an art, the good stuff gets a pic but the great stuff is so mesmorizing you forget to take a snap! There’s a few notable missing dishes here; all the desserts, roasts, marinaded meats, ducks, curries… I could go on…

With the recent passing of the inspirational and “unreasonable” Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg I thought that it would be good to share my sapling journey into literature.

I’ve had a recurring conversation with my programming peers that once you’ve finished your day of coding (aka, reading and writing) the idea of staring at a book for a few hours sounds too much like work. In the new year I made myself a promise; to start my journey reading “important” books; sure, knowing the latest trends in HTML5 is handy but being able to chat away with my friends and strangers about more popular books and topics is just epic.

On the recommendations of Roz and her family I started reading Jasper Fforde; he may be the perfect writer with which to start a journey into literature; he’s funny, intelligent, silly and the focus of his books is literature itself - I promptly read the entire “Thursday Next” series:

• The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde
• Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde
• The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper Fforde
• Something Rotten - Jasper Fforde
• First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde

Epic. After that I promised to give Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice a read, I now understand why Jasper Fforde writes them central to his novels - because they’re excellent! The stories are well known so I’ll skip those and just note that the writing styles of both are just beautiful, I really like the idea that a writer can skip over “obvious” or “banal” segments and just focus on the important bits - took that one onboard :-)

• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin
• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë

Next up was a bit of a read of necessity, those that know me personally will understand why I felt it was important to read about The Eden Project in Cornwall (lets just say that I visited recently with a “side project” in my pocket). This book was really insightful; I was hoping for a romantic story of flora and fauna but while that served as the preface and backdrop the majority of the book was about the unlikely people that made the project a reality - it’s quite astounding that The Eden Project exists. My hats off to them all.

• Eden - Tim Smit

My most recent read is Slaughterhouse-Five, a short and fragmented anti-war book written about (in a roundabout way) the Dresden Bombing in WWII. The one thing that I will take away from this book is the idea that all the moments in our lives will always exist, it’s simply our experience of time that makes us think otherwise.

• Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death - Kurt Vonnegut

So that brings us up to the now, I have quite a list of books I want to read but next up is one I read as a teenager on the recommendation of one of my favourite teachers, Mr Hunter (Physics). It’s about how we perceive dimensions and reality; I think it will be the right bedmate to Slaughterhouse-Five with it’s warped sense of time.

• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions - Edwin A. Abbott

Remember folks, if you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for Wild Bob.

An idea for a streaming music service (or maybe a mashup powered by their APIs); select a location and a time and be exposed to the “experience” of that era. Lovely

Idea - The Music of a Time and Place from David King on Vimeo.

An idea to evolve the way events work on social platforms like Google Plus / Facebook; to create a step before the event called an intention. These intentions give users a place to discuss the idea, to set a date etc.

The intentions could also act as a sort of “to do” list with people - it would be lovely to visit someone’s page and be reminded of the things that you agreed to do someday and be able to discuss them and make them a reality.

Idea - Social Intentions on Google Plus from David King on Vimeo.

Last month I was doodling radar diagrams of people’s characteristics and trying to match them to personality types (interesting but maybe a bit odd), but regardless it led me to do the same for different types of freelance work. After a little Google Charts tinkering I now have a few for your viewing pleasure - they compare

• Safe Returns - are you gonna get paid?
• High Returns - are you getting paid a lot?
• Quick Returns - aka good payment terms
• Low Input - amount of “hands-on” needed
• Further Work - odds of a referral / follow up lead
• Likelyhood - odds of getting the work

Of course this applies to my own experiences of freelance and charts the criteria I deem important, hopefully you can see how data like this can help make decisions. In my case drive me to say no to certain types of work and hunt down others.

Get in the comments and with some feedback I’ll look at making a printable cheat-sheet for your wall :-)

If you want to create your own, and to save you reading (the rather excellent) documentation, this is the URL format I used to create these.

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=r
&chs=400x400
&chtt=Consultancy
&chxl=1:|Safe+Returns|High+Returns|Quick+Returns|Low+Input|Further+Work|Likelyhood
&chd=t:60,70,80,90,50,50,60
&chxt=y,x
&chls=2
&chco=CC3366
&chts=000000,18
&chxr=0,0.0,100.0
&chxp=0,0,20,40,60,80,100
&chxs=0,000000,12|1,000000,12
&chm=o,CC3366,0,-1,8

I’ve written a few jQuery plugins but most of them have been super specific to my needs; decided to tidy up one of last weeks tinkerings and publish it to the old ‘hub.

The jQuery Favicon Notifier

Push numerical notifiers to the favicon in your browser, change the font, position and icon.

• Demo on oodavid.com
• Sources on GitHub

Toodles for now!

If (for whatever reason) you mess up the CHMOD permissions for the files and folders, you can run these commands to recursively “reset” all files and folders to their defaults.

find /home/david/Documents/ -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755
find /home/david/Documents/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644

BING!

2011 has been a bit of an odd one so far; it saw the end of my startup phase and the rebirth of my freelance career. I want to outline the chronology of the year up to now, talk about the future of oodavid and work into a few “freelance lessons” blog posts, so without further ado:

5th January 2011

Following a few face-to-face meetings with the founder of happiest (whom I met at my charity event in 2010) it is explained to me that as 1DayLater is only 2-people it will only go so far, and that I should join his exciting new team as a Director. I wholeheartedly agree!

Over the next few weeks I wind down my involvement with 1DayLater so that I can get my teeth into writing an API for happiest.

January - June 2011

Fall into a nice routine in the happiest offices; start early, finish late, be punctual, work some weekends - usual startup routine really :-) Over this period I write the API that now powers the happiest platform. Not a lot to say that you can’t imagine; it’s a startup, we do startupish things, technical achievements are made, releases are pushed etc etc etc

23rd June 2011

After a short morning meeting, it is decided that I should leave happiest. I give my keys and say adieu. Why am I asked to leave? To this day I’m still unsure.

Over the next few days I mull over the situation and come to some realisations:

• I was in a perpetual state of being made a Director - “the lawyers are in next week” etc.
• I was only paid £500 twice - “startup survival invoices”
• I still had 2 unpaid invoices
• Nothing was in writing - every meeting was one-on-one with no witnesses, over the phone, never by email etc.
• All of my code was on their servers

Ultimately I deem the first half of 2011 both a success and a failure - SUCCESS! The work I did at happiest was some of the finest of my life - FAILURE! I was duped into giving away my time for essentially free.

Last week of June

I speak to several lawyer associates about my situation and they all have the same thing to say: firstly a sigh of “I’m really sad to hear that”, followed by “ultimately there’s very little you can do, did you leave a back-door in the system?” 

Apparently the legal recourse would be arduous and expensive, but anyhow I am a stickler for the Programmers Code of Ethics; even if there was a back door I wouldn’t use it (there isn’t so don’t try). Petty revenge vs. reputation?! I like my reputation thank you. You live and learn eh?

Next up I realise that time is of the essence; no point in thinking about happiest now, money is tight at this point and I need to get the word out that I’m back in the game! In 6 hours flat I design and upload a new oodavid.com, knock together a quick tumblr blog and start Tweeting and emailing again - it feels amazing :-)

After this I make a promise to myself - no more startups, time to be the finest freelancer I can be! The last time I was a full-time freelancer was in 2006 and I did very well for myself, but as a 21 year old with no real experience of the world my freelance career was held up by brute force, my technical abilities.

So I make myself another promise - become a master of law and finance as a freelancer, for my health and wealth!

July

After putting the word out in June that I’m available for work I am inundated with offers, leads and even requests to join some other startups. I politely decline the startups and get talking to the offers and following the leads. In the between time I research and write up terms and conditions, legal timelines, cashflow logic, monetary projections and the nuances of dealing with bad customers. I must say that they are beautiful; a little symphony of documents that (when used as intended) sing a most calming harmony :-)

By the end of the month I have signed a 1-week-per-month retainer with one of my old clients - this seriously stabilises my cashflow for the foreseeable future. I start, complete and get paid for 2 small jobs which stabilises my current bank account a little.

August

The start of August is primarily concerned with a 3-week job; to create an easily-integrated ”Job-Bag-System” for local Ad Agency AdMast. This is a most enjoyable project; essentially a fancy online file manager with multiple file upload, drag and drop functionality, previous versions and the finest feature of all NON-BREAKING-FILE-LINKS. Meaning if you update, rename or move a file, your application will still have access to it via a bridge table. AWESOME.

The second half of August is spent in Devon with my gorgeous girlfriend and her family. There is no signal or internet. Life is beautiful.

September

Returning from Devon I hit the ground running: follow some leads that appeared while I was away, clear the email backlog and almost immediately take the reins for my Dad’s company for the duration of his honeymoon (2 weeks)

Sadly I have my first encounter with late-payments which harks all the way back to June, and that was an invoice with… sure you can guess it… not to worry though, my journey has since showed me something called the Late Payment Legislation, and it’s statutory! Ahhh, the law; you are most excellent :-)

Now and the future

Well here we are: I am 5 days into a very lucrative project which has a great potential for further work; I am working with my Dad and brother again, my finances have been balanced in a manner that will see me out of debt in about 6 months; my legal situation is much better; I have a new flat that has a view of my favourite part of Newcastle; I live 200 metres away from the girl I love. Quite honestly, I’m not sure if I’ve ever been happier - and I’m one of those stupidly optimistic people!

Edit - pretty sure that’s a self-fulfilling feedback loop of optimism and goodness

Blog Posting Uncertainty

I wasn’t entirely sure whether to publish this article but I concluded that if one person can learn from my mistakes I’ll be a better person for it :-)

An idea to add wishlists to your savings accounts to act as an incentive to save. As you deposit money into the account and pass over monetary thresholds, text messages are sent to you saying something like:

“now you have £40 in your account you can afford a new Jumper! Reply BUY to purchase :-)”

Idea - LloydsTSB Savings Account Wishlist from David King on Vimeo.

For years I’ve kept “ideas books” as a place to jot down my observations on how to improve things, create new scenarios or even just little thought-puzzles and whatnot. Looking back over them is always quite amusing; some have aged really well and some I’ve seen come to realisation at the hands and minds of others - awesome!

Flicking through the first few pages of the filthy one (2005-2008 I think) I see:

• Home energy monitoring kits
• Kinetic mice
• Cashflow projection software
• Super-SImple-Phones
• Stockmarket ideasAn idea for a heist (yes really)
• Audio synthesis interfaces (I have a real big soft-spot for this one)
• Laptop “unfucker”
• A page entitled “when I go to the pub I want to see tea and coffee on draft”
• A game concept called “life” which starts as a sperm-based scrolling shooter / race and evolves with each stage of life
• Artificial Intelligence in Audio Production
• A logic game called cub3
• Open-Source music (applied to a business model)
• “A time and a place” idea to traverse music throughout time
• Charity concept called “giveback”
• Etymological language browser

and then some

I’ve come to the conclusion that some of them will likely be unattainable by me and so have decided to find the right company for the idea and will pitching it to them in a short video. I shall immediately write another blog post for the first “pitch”…