Thr4shmetal.com will resume construction in January 2009.
What to expect from the website
More information to come soon!
Here’s a little story about my health over the past 2 years, and how one life style change, changed everything.
I am a programmer - I sit at a computer everyday, and I program. For the past two years I’ve been tired, exhausted, and unable to focus. I would eat a bagel for break fast every morning, a sandwich for lunch, and normally a pasta for dinner. So I was taking him a huge number of carbs. I would walk all the time, and drink plenty of water, but at around 9pm everyday, I would be completely exhausted. I was like a sloth. On weekends I couldn’t keep up with my friends - even with 12 hours of sleep, I’d wake up tired and I couldn’t get out of it.
I started drinking energy drinks to make for my sloth-like state of mind, and all it did was make me gain weight and possibly shortened my life. After nothing worked, I just gave up and accepted that I was just tired because I worked hard.
2 weeks Ago I started a diet, just wanted to lose some pounds, I didn’t really expect anything, I just needed to do it. I started eating small portions of lean meet and lot’s of vegetables. I’ve been eating about 1200 calories a day. There was an incredible transformation. I am awake, aware, and focused. I am able to stay up much later, and wake up feeling refreshed with only 5 hours of sleep.
I feel better now than I have in a long long time, so if you work at your desk, and you feel like a sloth, try eating healthier - if you like to eat a ton of food- try eating seasoned veggies - you can eat huge portions of veggies and still lose weight.
Anyway - Just thought I’d share.
Having trouble deciding what to charge your client? Here is a little guide that I made up to help out people new to charging for web services.
1. The cost of your past projects.
In your portfolio you will display past projects, they play a factor in price of future costs - Normally this works because - if you are working for “mom and pop shops” - they will pay very little - and the website will normally be simple, the more expensive sites, seem to be bigger and more impressive.
therefore you end up working uphill - the bigger the project is, the easier it will be to get another big project because you will have something in your portfolio that shows that you have experience.
2. Technology.
Depending on what the client wants, you can charge them more. A common example is charging larger amounts of money for flash elements, or if you need to write a custom ajax script for the website.
The way I handle this is by charging by time - and the cost is different depending on what technology I’m building in.
Here is an example :
The Client - “Build me a 5 page website, you need to design a logo and a template, a flash header, and I want to be able to update the page content.”
Basic Design - 9 hours * $20/hr = 180
Flash - 5 hours * 35$/hr = 175
HTML work - 12 hours * 15/hr = 180
PHP - 5 hours * $30/hr = 150
mysql - 2 hours * #30 /hr = 60
Documentation and client communication - 4 hours * 12/hr = 48Total Cost = 793
3. Bigger Clients = Bigger Money
Sometimes you get lucky and land a client that is huge. Bigger clients are trying to buy the best they can get and are expecting to spend a certain amount of money - Under charging them might even make them think less of you - so when working with a company grosses a large income a year, make sure you adjust your pricing accordingly.
4. Experience and Contacts
The more experience you have, the more you are worth an hour. Normally it is because you will be more reliable and have more capabilities than those less experienced than you are. Also having contacts and resources, that are beneficial to your clients, could also be a factor.
If you know a developer who has 4 years of flex experience - you could outsource to him for ( example ) 500, and charge the client 1200 - you get the project done - make money - and have a new technology on your portfolio.
5. New Clients with Long Lasting Projects
Sometimes you will get a client that is looking for a developer to fill a role in a long lasting project. Sometimes it’s appropriate to charge less on the first project for these clients - once the first part of the project you would charge them normally - this will help start a good client relationship with them that could last years.
I hope you find this little guide helpful - Good luck out there
I’m a huge fan of 300, so I have been really enjoying all of the parodies produced across the Internet, Here is a huge compilation of all the Sparta parodies that I’ve come across.
There is a ton more - But I think these are the best out of the ones I found. Hope you had a good laugh!
This guy is known on youtube.com as “Scary Dave” I don’t even know how I stumbled across this guy, but I found him quite entertaining.
This video is called “Don’t let the bastards get you down”. Under neath all the profanity and rough references is a good message “Don’t let others stop you from being creative and trying new things”. I got a kick out of this video so here it is.
In this review I am going to briefly summarize what to expect with this RPG. Star ocean has a considerable following, including myself. The animation and setting is done very well, and the voice acting is better than most PSP rpgs.
You start out in this little town as a blue haired guy (as usual) named “what ever you decided to call him” however no matter what you called him, all the voice acting will refer to him as “Roddick” or something. He has a purple haired girl and a blond boy as a friend. You end up running around aimlessly until you trigger an event. In this case people start turning to stone - so you have to go to some mountain and pick a flower that can heal everyone - well - then a space ship appears and your thrown into the space plot.
During the course of the game you find your self lost. I find myself running around talking to NPC’s that have nothing of value to say, not giving any hint as to what to do or where to go. On most occasions I would walk all the way to a town across the continent, buy the best equipment, then run all the way back to the first town, and stumble across an event that tells me to go to the next town again. It’s pretty much like this the whole game.
Leveling up is kinda fun. Lvlign comes easy, and you’ll find your characters rising in levels really fast. When they level you they get “skill points” and you have to go to these skill shops and buy skills. These skills are mostly crap like “dancing” and “determination” and just shit that you would use to form specialties, (another part of the game) but they each add to your characters status. It’s better explained in the game, but it does it make it fun to figure out how you want to shape your character through these skills.
I’m currently half way through the game walking around aimlessly as trying to trigger an event. That’s basically it.
Not a bad game, but prepare to be lost for long periods of time.