Category Archives: Computers & Technology

Time tracking methods for the freelancer

I’ve been a full-time freelancer for about 6 weeks now, and one of the challenges an independent worker faces is tracking time, most notably for the purpose of being able to bill clients for it! My business isn’t big yet, and the number of projects I’m working on is easily manageable with a few text files and a little dedicated mental real estate, so I don’t have a formal tracking system set up yet.

Since I’m a web developer, and in particular since I’m looking for opportunities to work more with frameworks (most specifically CakePHP), my intention at the outset was to devote my first couple of weeks to building my own feature-rich project tracking web app, but the real projects started piling on more quickly than I expected, and within a couple of days I had to set that project aside.

Today I was thinking more about keeping myself organized, so I took a few minutes to research pre-built, web-based (so I can work with them both on my iPhone and my computer) time tracking tools. I still haven’t found the ideal solution, but I did find a radically different approach that I find extremely compelling, especially since I already have a couple of buckets of Legos on my desk. Unfortunately I also have a couple of kids who are frequently in close proximity, and the risk of inadvertent data tampering is just too great for me to use this method myself.

The iPokédex is here!

iPokédexYes, I am into Pokémon. Way more than any 34-year-old could possibly justify. At least I have a kid I can use as my excuse. But it’s getting pretty serious. First the DS video games, now the trading card game, and of course I will sometimes watch the TV show and DVDs with him.

If you know anything about Pokémon (or, for those of you over the age of 10, who don’t), you know there are a lot of them. In fact, the sheer, staggering proliferation of them seems to be the main point, or at least a shrewd marketing tactic. As a result, there’s a lot of information to know about them, and thus arose the idea of the “Pokédex,” or Pokémon Index. The Pokédex is both an element in the games and the TV show, and a tool for fans, to store and retrieve information about all of the various Pokémon.

That’s all well and good, but what I really wanted was a version that was always at my fingertips, i.e. a version that works on my iPhone. Strangely there seemed to be no iPhone-friendly Pokédex out there. I can understand why an official one wouldn’t exist, what with Nintendo’s reluctance to license their brands to other hardware manufacturers (a smart move when you consider the disaster that resulted the one and only time they tried it), and especially when you consider that the iPhone is now essentially a competitor to the Nintendo DS.

Anyway… the point of all of this is that I’ve built my own iPhone-friendly Pokédex, which I am oh-so-creatively calling the iPokédex. Don’t bother going to ipokedex.com though. (Yeah, I have no idea either.) I may eventually register a unique domain name for it (assuming I don’t get sued in the meantime), but for now you can find it here at this relatively pithy URL:

room34.com/pokemon

Enjoy!

No, iPhone, my house is not located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean

Not the location of my houseIt goes without saying that I love my iPhone. I can geek out on just about any Apple device but the iPhone trumps them all. Yes, when I first heard the rumors circulating early last year that an Apple cell phone was in the works, I dismissed and denied them. “Impossible. That sounds totally stupid and Apple would never do something that totally stupid.” Of course, not only was I staggeringly wrong in my assumptions about the device, but by the end of the keynote I was already coveting one.

Fast forward to March of this year. Although no official word had yet come out that a 3G iPhone was on the way, it was fairly obvious. Nonetheless, the time was right, and I had to move on it, so I bought an iPhone while my window of opportunity was open. I certainly haven’t regretted it, and I admit I’m pleased that the 3G isn’t a revolutionary leap forward. That its most interesting feature — the new software — is fully compatible with the old iPhone means that not only did I not regret not getting a new iPhone this past weekend, it meant that in some sense I did get a new iPhone this past weekend. And it’s what I was waiting for since March.

But, sadly, the most peculiar flaw in the iPhone’s software, for me anyway, endures.

The Google Maps app has a cool little button that, when tapped, triangulates your current location from cell tower and public Wi-Fi hot spot data. Awesome. And it almost always works. But the one place I’ve discovered so far that it absolutely does not work is in my own house! For some reason, whenever I’m at home and I tap that button, I am dropped deep in the frigid depths of the Arctic Ocean beyond the northern coast of Alaska.

Now, given the fact that the map uses (*gack!*) Mercator projection, it’s darn near impossible to tell where exactly that’s supposed to be when you get that far up there. My guess is it’s simply dropping me into the default location it returns when both latitude and longitude come up null… probably 90 degrees north 180 degrees east (i.e. the “upper left” corner of the map, at least in terms of the coordinates they actually plot).

I am decidedly unhappy about this, far beyond any rational justification. That’s because it taps into my absurd and long-standing fear of blank spots on maps.

The reCAPTCHA Rorschach Test

Even if you’re not familiar with the contrived acronym CAPTCHA, you’ve probably encountered the concept from time to time online. It’s a reasonably reliable way for websites that allow user comments to distinguish a human from a spambot, and thus it’s one form of Turing test. So far so good. In fact I use one such CAPTCHA service, reCAPTCHA, for comments on this site.

I like reCAPTCHA because, aside from the fact that it works (most of the time, though you may guess that one of its failings has prompted this posting, and you may be correct), it is part of a Carnegie Mellon University project to digitize books. (You see, humans completing the CAPTCHAs help to decipher words that the OCR software chokes on.)

Tonight I was going over various pages of my site, attempting to apply yet another layer of polish to everything, and I discovered the most bizarre abomination of a CAPTCHA I have ever seen. I grabbed a screenshot, and here it is. Good luck with that.

reCAPTCHA Rorschach