Dont Trust This Guy why not take my word for it? A blog by Jim Jeffers

Last week, at my dayjob, I was asked to share some of my own predictions for the coming year. I’m no fortune teller by no means. But I do follow a lot of trends online, so I’m not going to tell you what I think is going to happen. Rather, I’m going to share with you, six technologies, platforms, concepts, or discussions that I think will become significantly more important this year.

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If you went to my blog and noticed things were funny or that I’m missing a post you aren’t imagining things. Earlier this week my site got hijacked by some sort of spammer that installed a backdoor in my wordpress install. For a while you could see all of the files on my site including my configuration files tied to the database powering this blog. Bad news.

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I run my own personal business and have a day job. So I have double the fun when it comes to monitoring my checking and savings accounts. On top of that I have credit cards for myself and my business, an auto loan, and a student loan. Managing all of that can be pretty hectic. Fortunately, I’ve discovered an awesome free web 2.0 service called Geezeo and all I can say is this thing frickin rocks!

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There are many tools reserved for the lucky few who have the luxury to afford and use Adobe’s Creative Suite. One of them is the livetrace tool in Illustrator. Using livetrace a photograph does not always work out quite that well, it also eats up all of your system resources to perform traces on highly detailed images. To that point, when I first saw Vector Magic, a project from Stanford University, I didn’t think much of it at first. But after using it I can’t help but highly recommend it!

Here’s why

• It’s completely free.
• The software is web based so there is no installation and more importantly the processing is done remotely from my machine.
• It’s incredibly easy, the process is straightforward and the UI guides you through every step clearly.
• Most importantly it works GREAT! I think it can trace photos better than illustrator’s livetrace.

You can even share your images if you’d like. I tried it on one of my photos. You can see the results of a photo I took last week at Harvard Square.

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If you work as a designer or a developer you might be frequently bombarded with requests from potential clients that go nowhere. The conversation starts out promising, but you soon realize they want to you to spend a couple weeks to develop a custom website for a measily $500 budget. When you return with a realistic number above $500 to say the least your point of contact lets you know “they’ll get back to you on that.” And that’s that. A rather passive aggressive manner of parting ways. The price they can afford is not worth your time, the value you offer is not conducive to what they can afford. What win/win solution can you create in a situation like this?

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My little company Sumo Creations is in need of massive help I’ve got several commitments on my plate and a biggie next month! Right now I’m literally a one man show I can’t keep it up I wish I could or else I’d be rich. I’m focused on building a simple company that produces high quality results however with that being said let me explain my offer.

What I’m looking for…

I’m not looking for a lot of people just a handful of skilled individuals. Here are the ingredients to my cookbook:

• CSS/XHTML Guru

• Much of my work always requires this. I’m very good at CSS/XHTML so I have high expectations here. If you’re comfortable converting PSD’s to CSS templates let’s talk.

• I don’t care how glossy or web 2.0 you can make a page look. I care about how usable it is and functional it is. I’m looking for someone who has a good eye for font, placement, and structure. You should have a good eye for detail. If you are interested reply to this post via comment.

• I’m looking for a quality rails developer. If you love ruby and you can fly on rails I just need to see a couple of snippets and may ask you for a work sample.

Compensation

I honestly dislike people asking me what my rate is as a designer/developer. I understand as a freelancer you typically make more money on a project per project basis where I can know clear in advance I can a lot this much to an individual to perform a given task. This often works out in the contractors favor where I might offer to pay you $550 to do a PSD/XHTLM conversion that might take you 8-10 hours as opposed to me paying you $40/hr. If you do prefer hourly don’t bother submitting bids. I have predefined rates for you if you are interested let me know:

• CSS/XHTML Guru: $35/hr
• Web Designer: $40/hr
• Ruby Developer: $45/hr

Contractors Only

I’m not at the point yet where I’m ready to take on full on employees.. I need to restructure my tax status from an LLC/SP to an LLC/S-Corp so until then I’m only hiring out via W-9 but you will be well compensated just be sure you save a good amount to cover your self-employment tax.

Telecommuting is totally cool!

I don’t need to meet you in person. I got my first job as a Flash designer when I was only 15 working for a company in Texas while I lived in Arizona. My only communication to the company was over the phone! You are welcome to meet me in person anytime though!

All in all.

I’m really pleased business is going well for my company. All of my work has been through word of mouth and personal selling. I have always been so busy I never even had time to build the site for Sumo itself but if I have a few good people this won’t be a problem and I expect business to boom even more once our site is launched and after I wrap up my projects for this next month.

I’ve been doing this work for a LONNNGG Time. I expect quality! Show me you know your stuff. I might request a short work sample to see how you tackle a task. If you are interested just drop a comment, express your interest, share any links, and include your email address. I’ll get in touch.

I was just browsing around and noticed I finally come up first and fourth for my own name on Google! Now I have some SEO results actally worth bragging about right?  I mean it’s gotta be a popular search term.  On another note I have totally discredited my name to the world.  I doubt the sarcasm initially registers as well.. sarcasm across Google.  What do you think?  Now I just need to claim Jimmy Jeffers and James Jeffers.  Then I’ll have all bases covered.
[ Check out my search results ]

Everyone is raving about the RAZR these days. Despite the fact that the initial version was first introduced to the market over a year ago, today it is the new trendy phone. It’s stylish thin design caught the attention of most cellphone geeks who paid extra to order the RAZR unlocked and become the only person they knew who had one. But it’s really nothing special today. After all, I have one. I got it for free. Now everyone is starting to have one. So what’s the cool new phone for 2006?

Take a close look at the Samsung Serene. This phone is unique not because Samsung builds it, but because Bang & Olufsen has designed it. If you take a look at the phone it’s a completely unique design, something I would have expected to come from the lack-lusting Motorola ROKR (iPod phone). The user interface is unique in that the screen is intended to be the bottom of the phone with the keypad representing the top half. Why flip the screen? Because by placing the screen on the bottom the user no longer places his or her ear onto the screen causing it to become greasy. A significant problem I’ve noticed with my RAZR.

Bang and Olufsen’s minimalism is present throughout the design. There is no screen on the outside, the keypad is circular like b&o remote, and the ring tones are noticeable yet unobtrusive pings which make the phone all the more elegant. The Serene’s unique design comes in a small package. When the phones are closed side by side the Serene appears to be about half the size of the RAZR but not quite as thin.

Indeed it will be nice to see this phone in person. I’m doubtful this one will pick up and become mainstream like the RAZR. If it did it may be disastrous for bang and olufsen as their brand is intended to be an exclusive product only for the privileged. I don’t own any b&o products, and I certainly couldn’t imagine getting one for free. For more information on the serene visit: www.serenemobile.com. You can also check out the detailed review from Mobile Review.

I recently became aware of extratasty.com; a website that is basically the flickr equivalent for drink recipes. The best part about the site is how well done and professional it is. The company developing the site, skinnycorp, has done an extraordinary job illustrating how you can create an extremely valuable resource for pretty much any topic of content matter.

My favorite part about the site is the quote in the top right corner: “You’re watching skinnyCorp make this site LIVE! Email us with your wtf’s.” That’s classic.

Well now all of my current sites are hosted on Dreamhost. The only way to go from here is to get my own box later on down the road. Since I had to upload some files all over again I figured I’d install a new version of the textile 2.6 plugin that allowed support for the Geshi syntax highlighting engine. Let’s do a quick test to see if it worked.

def hello
  puts “hello world”
end

3.times do hello

Update

Obviously the Geshi system is getting cleaned up by the Textile plugin. I’m still confused as to why but at this point I may just have to live without Geshi becuase I already know I can’t live without Textile!