Bonetree Blog

It’s been just over a year since I quit my high-paying but miserable desk job and decided to “do my own thing” and now that 2009 is coming to a close I decided to recap some of the lessons I’ve learned. Looking back now I feel like I’ve made some progress towards sustainable self-employment, but to be honest it wasn’t pretty. Call me negative, but here are 5 lessons I’ve learned:

1. People will try to take advantage of you. I think I’m a pretty nice guy. I like making people happy, and I enjoy what I do, and I regularly go out of my way to please people. Unfortunately, it appears that this trait is very obvious, and I’ve been burned a few times this year because of it. You need to understand what your time and experience is worth if you want to make a living doing this.
2. Sign an agreement. Don’t start any work until you’ve completed this step. It doesn’t matter who your client might be or how well you think you know them, it’s always a good idea to set out and agree upon the details of your deal. It doesn’t have to be complicated or full of legal jargon, but it should define things like payment schedule, deadlines, ownership and some sort of contingency plan. I found this excellent resource and based my own contract on its example.
3. Don’t put up with a double standard. It’s not ok for a client to consistently put pressure on you to meet an unreasonable deadline and then act offended when you ask for your money – 3 weeks after you’ve delivered the finished product and invoiced them. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me, but I feel like I constantly need to remind people of the basic premise behind our business transaction: I build you a website, you pay me. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for sticking to your guns when they haven’t fulfilled their end of the bargain.
4. Be honest. The truth can hurt, and your pride is always hard to swallow, but you’ll be better off if you’re upfront about what’s going on. If you’ve made a mistake don’t try to cover it up or make excuses. Explain the situation and if appropriate suggest a solution and you’ll more than likely be surprised with your client’s reaction. They might not be happy but now that everything is on the table you should be able to focus on fixing the problem.
5. Don’t sell yourself short. This is a tough one, and something that I’ll be struggling with for a while longer. Attaching a monetary value to my work is extremely difficult, but every estimate I put together gets me closer to understanding it. Set financial goals for a given period (month, quarter, etc) and when you put together your next estimate see how it fits into your timeline and price accordingly. Every project under your belt will give you experience, allowing you to make more accurate projections. Eventually you’ll gain a sense for how much people are willing to pay for your work and how much you can handle at once. You’re bound to screw up along the way, and it’ll be much better for you if it’s because your quote was too high – the worst that can happen is that your potential client turns down your estimate or counter-offers. On the other hand, if you quoted too low you’ll more than likely end up feeling like you’re working for free and losing motivation fast, which isn’t good for anyone involved.

This list is by no means comprehensive and I certainly welcome comments and/or additions from anyone reading this! :)

I went to Toronto Taste today, an annual fundraising event put on by Second Harvest. My old roommate and good friend is one of the coordinators for Second Harvest and she plays a big part in this event. Last year was my first year attending, and I was really excited to go this year.

I’m a huge fan of the Food Network, and my favorite personality is Bob Blumer. I love the Surreal Gourmet and especially Glutton for Punishment. One of the first episodes of Glutton for Punishment that I saw had Bob doing the Alpe d’Huez climb, which is part of the Tour de France. If you read my blog regularly you might know that I love cycling, and here was this guy combining two of my passions, cycling and food! After he reached the top of the climb, he ate an incredibly indulgent French meal. Anyway, I got to meet him at this event and he was a very nice guy.

One of the highlights of Toronto Taste was their live auction, and one of the items up for auction was a dinner party for 10 people hosted by none other than Bob Blumer himself. My two friends and I were enjoying some food and wine when we heard Bob Blumer come up onto the stage, and excited at the prospect of this dinner party, we quickly decided (mostly at my urging) that we should bid and split the cost in the unlikely event that we won. So we ran over quickly, I threw my hand up as they were calling for $500. I found it odd that nobody else was bidding, and was totally surprised when I won! Wow! I was so shocked in fact, that I didn’t realize that I had won an auction for something else entirely and it cost me $500. The auction that I had won was pretty much for me and one other person, so I would’ve been out at least $250, assuming I could find someone who wanted to participate with me AND donate half of the cost to Second Harvest. I went into this thinking that I wouldn’t even win, and that if I did I would be splitting the cost with 9 other people.

Anyway, the Bob Blumer dinner party auction ended up bringing in a whopping $12,000, only because Bob announced to the $4700 bidder and her two friends that he would do three separate dinner parties, one for each of them, if they all agreed to donate $4000 each. The ladies all agreed and everyone was really happy (except me).

Some old co-workers of mine are now working at a studio out in Vancouver called United Front Games doing some pretty exciting stuff. My friend Jon just linked me to a presentation that Will did at E3 today for a pretty sweet looking game they’re working on called Modnation Racers. Check it out:

I have such a large collection of music that 5 stars doesn’t really give me the kind of granularity that I need to rate my music, so I started looking to see if there was a way to tweak that number. I came across this Lifehacker article which explained how to do it on a Mac, but that didn’t help me because my desktop runs Windows Vista (groan). After some more poking around I came across this helpful post and it worked perfectly. Here’s a quick summary:

If you’re on a Mac

All you have to do is run this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

If you’re using Windows

1. Make sure to close iTunes first, otherwise your changes will be overwritten when it shuts down
2. Search for the file iTunesPrefs.xml. If you’re using XP, you’ll find it at C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes. For Vista, it’ll probably be in the directory C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes
3. Open this file in your favorite text editor
4. Search for this block of text:
   

   <key>User Preferences</key>
   <dict>

   and just underneath it, add

   <key>allow-half-stars</key>
   <data>
   dHJ1ZQ==
   </data>

5. Close and save the file, then start iTunes

You’ll now be able to give your songs half star ratings! Note: you’ll need to click on the stars themselves next to your song; the right-click menu will still only show single star ratings as options.

Want to make your own iPhone ringtones and avoid paying up for content that you already have? This is a quick and easy tutorial on how to do so using iTunes. I’m using Windows here, but the process is essentially the same if you’re on a Mac. Before you start, you’ll need to set iTunes up to import music using the AAC format. Personally, I rip all my music to MP3 so whenever I do this, I switch to AAC and then back to MP3 when I’m done.

1. In iTunes, open the Edit menu and select Preferences… (or just press CTRL+,)
2. Under the General tab click the Import Settings… button
3. Set the Import Using option to “AAC Encoder”
4. Click OK to get back to the preferences window and then OK again to get back to iTunes

Now we’re ready to start. The first thing you need to do is pick a song. This part is actually really important because a) you don’t want to pick a crappy/annoying song and b) you need a song that you can get a good 30 second clip out of. For this example, I’m going to choose I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones. The reason we need a good 30 second clip is because iPhone ringtones run in 30 second loops, so we’ll need to create a short version of our chosen song that runs for that long. So, listen to the song a few times and watch the timer at the top of the iTunes window. I usually start right at the beginning and listen for exactly 30 seconds – if I like that chunk of audio then I’ll go with that, otherwise I’ll keep listening and make a note of a good start/end time. This might take a few listens to do, so be patient. Once you’ve decided on your start and end times, you’ll need to tell iTunes to start and end the song at those times:

1. Pick your song
2. Right-click on it, and select Get Info
3. Click on the Options tab
4. Check both the Start Time and Stop Time boxes (unless you start from the beginning, in which case you don’t need to check the Start Time box) and enter the appropriate times in the respective boxes
5. Play the song again in iTunes just to make sure it cuts off properly and runs for exactly 30 seconds

Note that doing this does not actually change your song – once you’re done this process you can simply uncheck the Start/Stop Time boxes in the steps above and your song will play normally.

Now that we have our 30 second audio clip set up properly, we need to create a copy of it. Because we’ve set up the start and stop times explicitly, the copy that iTunes creates will only be 30 seconds long which is exactly what we want for our ringtone:

1. Right-click on your song and select Create AAC Version
2. This process will take a second or two, and once it’s done, you’ll see another copy of your song pop up in your list
3. Make sure that the length of the copy you created is only 30 seconds

Now that we have our 30 second copy, we need to move the file out of iTunes and then reimport it as a ringtone:

1. Right click on your 30 second copy
2. Select Show in Windows Explorer
3. In the window that pops up, you should see a copy of your song with the extension .m4a
4. Copy this file to your desktop
5. Back in iTunes, delete the 30 second copy of your song (caution: make absolutely sure you’re deleting the copy you just made and not your original version!)
6. On your desktop, rename the file you just copied and change only the extension from .m4a to .m4r.
7. Once you do this, you should see the icon change so that the word “RING” is displayed under the iTunes logo

Our ringtone is now actually complete, and all we have to do is add it to iTunes and then our phone:

1. In iTunes, click on the Ringtones option under LIBRARY
2. Click and drag the new file from your desktop into the Ringtones window
3. Depending on your iPhone settings, you now have to either sync your iPhone or drag the ringtone onto your phone in iTunes
4. You’re done!

Your ringtone is now on your phone, and you can set it up as your default ringtone, your alarm, etc. What I like to do is set certain songs as the ringtones for specific people in my contact list. This is not only cool but it’s useful if you use the iPhone headphones a lot – now you don’t have to take your phone out of your pocket when your music is interrupted by a phone call, you can easily tell who it is just by what song is played! Now that you’re finished, don’t forget to uncheck the Start/Stop Time options for your song, otherwise you’ll only ever hear 30 seconds of it.

Here’s a screencast that I made to go along with this tutorial. It’s actually kinda funny, but making this stupid video was a huge pain in the ass. Maybe I should be doing a tutorial on how to create screencasts ;). It’s in HD, so make it fullscreen and hit the HD button in the Youtube player to get the full effect.