UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

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.

Yes, 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!

After seeing this, I’ll think twice before publishing anything I’ve translated with Babelfish. I think the ultimate lesson here is that the language barrier can be hard to overcome, and technology isn’t much help.

(Originally found here.)

A former coworker just tipped me off to this. You may have seen trailers for Tropic Thunder, the new… ermph… war comedy starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. (as Kirk Lazarus).

Well… it’s clear that building up the online presence of this non-existent personality is one of the film’s more interesting marketing tactics. And it’s extended to creating websites for other films he’s acted in, which of course don’t exist. The one my friend brought to my attention is called Satan’s Alley. Although it doesn’t exist, a Google search reveals another connection: it’s the title of the Broadway show John Travolta’s character Tony Manero stars in in Staying Alive, the 1983 sequel to Saturday Night Fever.

Yes, I realize I'm being as intolerant of redneck doofuses as the guy I'm complaining about is about Muslims. But most Muslims aren't doofuses, and all redneck doofuses are.

Today was not a great day, at least as far as the long drive through Wisconsin on I-39/90/94 goes. Although the trip was rife with mayhem, the most bizarre moment for me came at a stop at the Portage rest area. As I was standing outside the car, refilling my son’s milk cup, a yellow pickup truck pulled up behind our car, and the driver yelled something incomprehensible out the window. At first I ignored him, but when he persisted I looked up and dismissively acknowledged him. He still didn’t give up, and that’s when I realized that he was pointing at my Obama bumper sticker as he said “You know he’s a… Muslim, right?”

You don’t have to like Obama, and for that matter you don’t have to like Muslims. But to ignorantly regurgitate Fox News lies (simultaneously assuming “Muslim” is automatically a pejorative) just makes you look like a jackass.

About a thousand possible responses, from the rational to the incredulous to the withering (to the fact that I have already voted for one Muslim, thank you very much, and plan to again this November) ran through my head simultaneously, but given the state (mental, not geographic) I was already in, all I could muster was an enraged “PISS OFF!!!!” and furious waving of my arm. Luckily we weren’t back in Georgia, or I’m sure he’d have introduced me to his gun rack (or demanded that I squeal like a pig).

Certainly this Obama-phobe was not stopping to engage me in enlightened debate. The only possible outcome he can have been hoping for was for me to lose my shit, which I did, spectacularly. So I guess he won.