Quite a mixed bag
Mar. 20th, 2011 22:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mapsedgeQuite a mixed bag of a weekend, but ultimately it ended up on a good note.
Side Work is a bitch, sometimes.
I'll try to keep this story brief. I've been doing the website for The Stage Coffee House & Deli. It's not a huge money maker - hell, neither is the coffee house - but it's a few extra dollars here and there in cash. Grocery stores don't mind cash.
Mine is one of two. The other was created out of the blue by one of the coffee house patrons. We'll call him Bob. Bob is a bookish dude, always put together but always wearing at least one item of clothing that's a hundred or more years out of date. Think Rennie/Lost Child, but 19th instead of 16th century. He's mid-50's, I'm guessing, someone less at home PCs than with mainframes and the early-1990s way of doing things, when the web was still new: do what you do whether the client wants you to or not because you're The Man and you know what you're doing and they don't.
Dave, the coffee house owner, told him he intended to merge the two websites, to take the content from Bob's volunteer site and use it on mine, the "official" paid site. According to Dave, Bob was cool with that, so that's what I did. I scraped Bob's site, loaded a few images and some of the verbiage to fill what few holes I had, and called it done.
Saturday morning, I got an email. It was long, rambling, and angry, and boiled down to this:
"If you're going to use my images on a commercial website without permission, the least you could do is pay me for them."
I agree in general principal, but if he wants to be paid for work he did (out of the blue, for free) for the business, I should think he needs to talk to the business owner, not the dude painting the signage.
He got personal and snarky, going so far as to criticize the design choices I made (which I didn't - I built what Dave wanted.)
I mea culpa'd myself and apologized for the slight I wasn't aware I'd committed, and promptly removed every graphic and bit of verbiage. It wasn't much, a dozen pictures taken of the artwork for sale on the walls, a musical performer or two.
He and I have had a casual and friendly association for more than a year now, a "nodding acquaintance" I believe is the phrase, and In retrospect his response was far out of proportion to the offence. Instead of finding out what was going on, he just assumed the worst of me, that I'm a criminal devoid of ethics and originality, and stomped on he. (He found out I don't squish easily, if at all.) Now that I think of it, it kinda pisses me off. He is a regular customer of The Stage, and since I have no wish to bite the hand that feeds me (tidbits, but still), I can't burn that bridge like I'd like to.
I'll say it here: Fuck you, Bob, you're a shmuck. Your website is the worst kind of early 90's dreck - the kind of website that all professional designers put to bed years ago, that one can't edit without a special editor and class in HTML, clunky, ugly, flavorless and beige. The kind of website you write when you want to enslave your client, and it is worth every penny you were paid for it.
There, I feel better. (No, not really.)
Seamlyne
It's been very quiet, and I'm kinda glad. Flu-B (yep, officially) makes it tough to keep up on orders, so I'm heartily glad there haven't been any. There were two to finish up, and they're a few days further out for shipping than I'd prefer, so I finished both up today.
True to past experience, as soon as I made some decent progress, another order came in. It's weird that way.
Both pairs were ecru, which is my least favorite color to work with. It's like beige, only less-so. The next order is for black. Much more work (you have to cook it within a 10° window) but also much more interesting.
I put the Spring logo back online, which makes me happy.
Home and Family
We all seem to be over the flu. I never really got it, but I've felt like I had a mild sinus infection. Now that St. Patrick's day is done and I feel like I have the opportunity to breathe, I actually feel a little worse. Michelle is still very tired, but otherwise is functioning normally, if sleepily.
Tech
Was able to accomplish two things for my father-in-law: re-establish wireless networking and set up a back-up plan that wouldn't completely trash his external drive.
The former was really nothing more than diagnosing a dead router. He ran to Target while I messed about with the backup: new router was just the ticket.
The backup issue was fixed by installing Cobian and disabling Windows Backup. Windows Backup puts a timestamp on every backup and doesn't do differentials, so it filled up his external drive after two runs. I cleaned the drive, set up Cobian and that was that.
Actually, this was a technologically good weekend. I made some modifications to a calendar plug-in on Wordpress that drastically speed up handling repeating events. I fixed a friend's Wordpress theme so it works in IE. I finished setting up The Stage website.
Not at all what I planned on, but I feel accomplished.
Music
Had a wonderful time on St. Patrick's Day night. Lezlie Revelle joined me onstage, and although we haven't performed together in several years and practiced all of two hours, the show flowed like we'd been working together without a break for years.
I've got my audio rig set back up, with the exception of the MIDI workstation. There just isn't room for the thing right now. I need some serious cleaning before I'll have a place for it.
Unfinished Business
The one goal I didn't meet was finishing a woodworking project for a friend. She's been waiting patiently while my life has been on hold with a sick family, and she's waited long enough. It's just a box, fer cryin' out loud, but I want to do it right. I hope to have it more or less put together in the next couple of evenings, ready for stain and finishing. I'm looking forward to it.
Side Work is a bitch, sometimes.
I'll try to keep this story brief. I've been doing the website for The Stage Coffee House & Deli. It's not a huge money maker - hell, neither is the coffee house - but it's a few extra dollars here and there in cash. Grocery stores don't mind cash. Mine is one of two. The other was created out of the blue by one of the coffee house patrons. We'll call him Bob. Bob is a bookish dude, always put together but always wearing at least one item of clothing that's a hundred or more years out of date. Think Rennie/Lost Child, but 19th instead of 16th century. He's mid-50's, I'm guessing, someone less at home PCs than with mainframes and the early-1990s way of doing things, when the web was still new: do what you do whether the client wants you to or not because you're The Man and you know what you're doing and they don't.
Dave, the coffee house owner, told him he intended to merge the two websites, to take the content from Bob's volunteer site and use it on mine, the "official" paid site. According to Dave, Bob was cool with that, so that's what I did. I scraped Bob's site, loaded a few images and some of the verbiage to fill what few holes I had, and called it done.
Saturday morning, I got an email. It was long, rambling, and angry, and boiled down to this:
"If you're going to use my images on a commercial website without permission, the least you could do is pay me for them."
I agree in general principal, but if he wants to be paid for work he did (out of the blue, for free) for the business, I should think he needs to talk to the business owner, not the dude painting the signage.
He got personal and snarky, going so far as to criticize the design choices I made (which I didn't - I built what Dave wanted.)
I mea culpa'd myself and apologized for the slight I wasn't aware I'd committed, and promptly removed every graphic and bit of verbiage. It wasn't much, a dozen pictures taken of the artwork for sale on the walls, a musical performer or two.
He and I have had a casual and friendly association for more than a year now, a "nodding acquaintance" I believe is the phrase, and In retrospect his response was far out of proportion to the offence. Instead of finding out what was going on, he just assumed the worst of me, that I'm a criminal devoid of ethics and originality, and stomped on he. (He found out I don't squish easily, if at all.) Now that I think of it, it kinda pisses me off. He is a regular customer of The Stage, and since I have no wish to bite the hand that feeds me (tidbits, but still), I can't burn that bridge like I'd like to.
I'll say it here: Fuck you, Bob, you're a shmuck. Your website is the worst kind of early 90's dreck - the kind of website that all professional designers put to bed years ago, that one can't edit without a special editor and class in HTML, clunky, ugly, flavorless and beige. The kind of website you write when you want to enslave your client, and it is worth every penny you were paid for it.
There, I feel better. (No, not really.)
Seamlyne
It's been very quiet, and I'm kinda glad. Flu-B (yep, officially) makes it tough to keep up on orders, so I'm heartily glad there haven't been any. There were two to finish up, and they're a few days further out for shipping than I'd prefer, so I finished both up today.
True to past experience, as soon as I made some decent progress, another order came in. It's weird that way.
Both pairs were ecru, which is my least favorite color to work with. It's like beige, only less-so. The next order is for black. Much more work (you have to cook it within a 10° window) but also much more interesting.
I put the Spring logo back online, which makes me happy.
Home and Family
We all seem to be over the flu. I never really got it, but I've felt like I had a mild sinus infection. Now that St. Patrick's day is done and I feel like I have the opportunity to breathe, I actually feel a little worse. Michelle is still very tired, but otherwise is functioning normally, if sleepily.
Tech
Was able to accomplish two things for my father-in-law: re-establish wireless networking and set up a back-up plan that wouldn't completely trash his external drive.
The former was really nothing more than diagnosing a dead router. He ran to Target while I messed about with the backup: new router was just the ticket.
The backup issue was fixed by installing Cobian and disabling Windows Backup. Windows Backup puts a timestamp on every backup and doesn't do differentials, so it filled up his external drive after two runs. I cleaned the drive, set up Cobian and that was that.
Actually, this was a technologically good weekend. I made some modifications to a calendar plug-in on Wordpress that drastically speed up handling repeating events. I fixed a friend's Wordpress theme so it works in IE. I finished setting up The Stage website.
Not at all what I planned on, but I feel accomplished.
Music
Had a wonderful time on St. Patrick's Day night. Lezlie Revelle joined me onstage, and although we haven't performed together in several years and practiced all of two hours, the show flowed like we'd been working together without a break for years.
I've got my audio rig set back up, with the exception of the MIDI workstation. There just isn't room for the thing right now. I need some serious cleaning before I'll have a place for it.
Unfinished Business
The one goal I didn't meet was finishing a woodworking project for a friend. She's been waiting patiently while my life has been on hold with a sick family, and she's waited long enough. It's just a box, fer cryin' out loud, but I want to do it right. I hope to have it more or less put together in the next couple of evenings, ready for stain and finishing. I'm looking forward to it.