Figured things out I am happy

[badbass]

Okay something about computer people getting abused by customers. Then having the the company you contract for screw you. I had a customers laptop to fix. No sound from the speakers inside. Headphones jack issue. I tried to convince the customer to get a usb Sound bar or external speaker. She wanted it to work like it does before. I call the company i contract for they said. Open the laptop up and find out what's wrong. Most of the screws are missing underneath. If another problem comes up with the customer or laptop it goes back to me. Most of the time these items are soldered to the board. This is the same company that wanted me to use my o/s cd to fix a pc.

The receivable thing sorry forgot i am dealing with computer people not business people. I was hinting about what to do if a custome or business screws you.

The arp spoof and drifted thing was using master Google and YouTube to have fun in my lab. There are lots of good copy and paste things online bad. ya don't learn anything . hope this helps.

Edited August 13, 2014 by badbass

[cooper]

If you didn't have 300+ posts to your name I'd be thinking this post was spam.

Maybe you could elaborate a bit more on what you're saying because as it stands, your post makes very little sense to me.

[badbass]

I hope re writing the post helps and I know talking about arp spoof or dns spoof in a public forum is just wrong.

There were other problems with the laptop I can only imagine. I will accept no more work orders from this company. P.S when does NFL football season start. Fill the fridge with cigar city, sam adams,and yuengling.

Edited August 13, 2014 by badbass

[cooper]

I had a go at contract work once and I can confidently say that I absolutely, completely and utterly SUCK at that.

Two co-workers had an idea: ebay for odd job labour.

One of the guys was a sales guy (the type that makes you check if your wallet's still there when he walks away) and the other a decent enough project manager. They'd started a business on the side within which they would develop the idea into a working concept, get some advertisements going and expand from that point on. It naturally all centered around the website that would need to be created and they asked me to do it for them. Initially they wanted me as a partner in their business but since their goal was to really do fuck all and get filthy rich in the process (yes, those internet days) I figured I'd do better to just get some money for the work and then walk away if I wanted to.

We agreed upon a fixed price based on the rough outline of the idea and I got to work during my off-hours, using PHP and a PostgreSQL database. I was (and still am) a great fan of PostgreSQL. Back then everybody loved MySQL (and for some unfathomable reason many still do...) so finding a hoster that provided PostgreSQL was a bit of a challenge and, of course, it had to cost next to nothing and since MySQL hosting could be had for much, much less this was a bit of a fight but I held firm. Something like 75 euro per year I said wasn't a lot to pay for a real database and if this thing took off the upgrade to Oracle would be much easier. That turned out to be the clincher. :-)

Things progressed quickly and soon enough we were talking in detail about layout, format, how to work with the screen realestate and of course the creation of the payment module to hook up with the banks and paypals and such of the time. During development I noticed that when I asked them how they wanted something they really didn't have a damn clue just what they wanted - a massive disappointment to me since these guys being in the software development industry should know better. So I pitched a few possible ideas for them to mull over (which cost me time) and of course they wanted the most elaborate version of something (which cost me even more time).

A few weeks further down the road they started to demand that I connected with some payment processor called Wally. At that point I told them to stop and I gave them a spreadsheet showing how many hours I'd spend on the project so far, the amount of money we'd agreed upon and how a quick devision of those two showed that I had in fact dipped under half the legal minimum hourly wage by now. The cause of that was me constantly thinking up new possibilities which they would then demand in the website and consider part and parcel of the original idea.

We'd originally agreed on something like a simple format 5-page website (browse, search, payment, login/registration, about & disclaimer or some such) and a background process for the emails of the thing. We had multiple payment options, the most elaborate search page I've ever seen to this very day, a karma-style system for putting trust into employers and employees (for lack of a better word)... the list goes on. To top it all off the barrel scraping hosting party decided to call it quits (more likely, they didn't/couldn't pay their own hosting) by simply yanking the power from their server rack. The two co-workers blamed me for forcing them to choose this company and not use the hosting services of some 'friend' of theirs who only knew how to run MySQL (and himself dropped into bankruptcy 2 weeks later, as they were trying to convince him to do their hosting where as a one-off their instance would come with PostgreSQL).

It was a non-stop stream of drama over an idea I quite frankly never figured would take off anyways. I wanted out.

So they doubled my fee and accepted that I would do any follow-up work on a paid-by-the-hour basis on the condition that I would integrate this Wally payment scheme. This was important because the wally thing worked using cards that would be sold via supermarkets Really Soon Now and doing payments via them was much cheaper for the business than Paypal and to an even larger degree banks, especially when it came to smaller sums which was of course what this site was pretty much all about. And of course that wally service was a complete and utter lump of shit. Good concept, flawed API, horrible execution. You'd process three payments and the last would fail because its transaction id was identical to the first, it was possible to start the payment, get the money off the card, have the transaction fail for some strange reason within their system and the money would simply be gone. Oddly enough, they don't exist anymore either.... funny that...

When I got it to mostly-work I delivered, wished them the very best of luck, told them what my hourly fee would be if they needed anything else (and I should note that that hourly fee was about 70% of my normal hourly wage - I wasn't bitter or angry at them as much as I was disappointed in myself) and went on my merry way.

To their credit, they tried to get the site going by themselves and asked about how certain bits of the site worked so they could tweak it a bit which I answered for free as it wasn't that much trouble or time consuming. During the next 6 months I got put on some disaster project at work that ate up all my work- and spare time (travel time was a nightmare) and by the time that was over the two co-workers had left the company in search for greener pastures. Their website was still around, but still only contained test data.

Interestingly, I did a Whois query on it and it's still parked on a server somewhere. Apparently someone's still interested in it somehow.

In the end I learned a lot, so it was worth it overall. I really got going with PHP which I'd just been dabbling with when we started, I learned a lot about how NOT to do things, I learned that I have a hard time doing things adequately when I know how to do things perfectly (which still bites me to this very day) and I know that I simply am incapable of selling myself. I can quite comfortably get people excited about wanting to hire me, but I can't negotiate when it comes to me - everything's a 1 or 2-hour job, I normally charge X but since we get along so well let's just make it half that... still to much? Well, think of a number while I get started. I've got this massive gun aimed at my foot and I'm literally itching to pull the trigger and worst of all, I'll be convinced that That Will Never Happen .

So I simply don't freelance. I'm thinking of creating something and licensing it off to whomever wants it, but other than that I think I should just leave that field to the pro's who know what they're doing there. Coz I most certainly don't.

Edited August 13, 2014 by Cooper

[badbass]

Side business makes my stomach turn. When you find clients that find you decent work stick with them. My stomach turns when I see the pc support contracts pc users get. It is like bad health insurance. Again you hit the nail on the head good man.