Argh, ShareThis!

Despite it's importance, this problem with ShareThis is almost totally undocumented: if you run your webserver locally and access it via "localhost"then the ShareThis widget won't work. You have to access it by an IP instead (127.0.0.1).

So if you get "SHARETHIS is null," "SHARETHIS is undefined," or "SHARETHIS is not defined," instead of spending an hour and a half pulling your hair out, just breathe deep and remember, there are still people out there who put all their code in a monotholic try/catch and fail silently.

Arron on...

Arron Washington on Twitter.

Arron Washington on a mostly abandoned identi.ca account.

Arron Washington on a definitely abandoned Plurk account.

I seem to be turning into one of those people that collect social networks like rare Indian coins.

Busy busy!

Good Lord, I've been busy all month long and it's only getting worse.

Hell, I totally forgot that I had yet to do my taxes until I got some kind of automated email reminder today.

Have. Got. To. Keep. Going!

How much did I make from oDesk in 2008?

I recently tweeted that I made most of last year's income from oDesk.com.

Well, according to my accounting, from oDesk alone I made just shy of $40,000 last year.

That's pretty good, considering I took a short break, and when I got back into the swing of things I decided to only work about 20/hrs a week (sometimes more, depending on client need). It helps that I get more things done in 20hrs/wk than some people do for 40hrs/wk, though. :)

Obviously I could have made way more.

But besides being a valuable income stream, oDesk has given me something much more valuable than that: freedom. Freedom to work my own hours, sure, but more importantly, freedom to do what I want. And what I've always wanted to do is be an author. Yes, that's right, Mr. Computer Programmer wants to be Mr. Writer.

Since I started freelancing, I've never really had the time until recently to unlock all the thoughts bouncing around in my head and unleash them on the world. When I was in college, there were huge gaps between classes that I filled with anime, video games, writing and code. But when I started freelancing, an incessant nagging in the back of my head ('money! money! money!') kept driving me to spend all my free time thinking about work, working on work.

My free time became a narrow slot that I could only fill with one thing. Should I play a video game? Read a book, watch an anime, rent a DVD or write? My free time was so thin I felt like I'd cut myself if I wasn't careful with how I used it.

When a long term contract on oDesk ended in 2008, I was between jobs with nothing much to do. So I wrote a little as I browsed for jobs; I had enough in my savings account to skate by for months without work, if I wanted. I went back and revisited old works, frowned at how bad they were and toyed with them in my spare time. I kept peeking at job openings, but my A-game was absent when trying to land a few big, "easy" jobs.

Then I realized something: with my skills and expertises, I didn't have to spend every waking moment working. After all, people always need something done. 

So I said to myself, "Why not split my time between writing and work?"

So I did.

Because with oDesk, I could, and with oDesk, it was simple: apply to jobs that would take less than 20 hours a week. That's it. There are thousands of those jobs on oDesk -- maybe even tens of thousands. When one job ended, there was no mad scramble looking for new work. The market place there is huge. If you have talent then you've got a job waiting there for you. And me? I've got it up to HERE, baby. I made a hand symbol just now; you know, the hand at the neck thing to convey how much of IT I've got.

So, thanks to oDesk I can continue to spend time making kick-ass web stuff for clients, and use the rest to pull out my hair out over my insecurities about my writing or smashing my head against the wall because of writer's block or whatever weird thing it is that week that makes me think that every word spilled from my fingertips is crap.

But hey, that's freedom for you.

Legal retainers: you never know how valuable they are until you have to use them.

To quote the title, "Legal retainers: you never know how valuable they are until you have to use them."

Seriously. For an LLC, it's much more cheaper and efficient then lugging around an attorney who just chills out all day until he has to write up a contract of some kind.

Slow going in the fjord of his mind.

If you look at my Spiced Incese Warehouse post below you'll notice that it has a few comments, probably by the owner or a shill perhaps. 

There are some deleted ones: two were posting someone's phone #, address, etc, and two that were just pure spam. Well, not pure spam. If you've been around the 'net long enough you'll occasionally find people who are essentially being paid by the hour to 'attack' a site in an attempt to render it unusuable. It never works, of course, but it's still kinda funny to watch.

Anyway, it's a classic case of not knowing how the Internet works. By commenting repeatedly and shilling in an attempt to sweep whatever under the covers, I don't think he's realized that he's raising the popularity of the articles in question. The blog post, for instance, fell off the front page for awhile, then suddenly found itself ranked 4th or 5th for the search term "spiced incense warehouse." It'll probably outrank his site in a few days if he keeps up the pressure -- I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Good in the sense that it would be hilarious, primarily because he did it to himself, and bad because then my blog post turns into one of those little battlegrounds where everyone with a keyboard converges and argues -- same thing happened with my 'oDesk vs RentACoder' review, which I won't link to since its mostly obsolete and I haven't tried RentACoder in forever.

Plus, I think he underestimates the intelligence of his potential customers. I showed some non-tech friends the original blog post and the comments, and they totally lol'd their eyes out (or so they assured me).

So, it made my ask myself, you know, what exactly is going on in this guy's mind? Is there some part in the back that tells him that making a fool of himself is the best course of action? Or, does he think he's not making a fool of himself at all?

I sat down and thought about it for awhile -- I had just finished playing two crappy rounds of Halo Wars and didn't have much else to do until She Who Is Unknown returned, so, you know, why not? After a bit I came to the conclusion that he's one of those types who gets red in the face and acts irrationally without thinking. That probably explains the sudden quiet-time that occured while I was waiting to be served (which apparently isn't going to happen).  I've never worked a salaried job in my life, so I've never had the great misfortune to be exposed to those kinds of people, but I've read about them and of course I've had the usual antecdotal "you wouldn't BELIEVE what this bossy motherfucker did today!" story from friends.

On the plus side, his annoying behavior spurred me to change the way pages are cached on FearlessBlogging, which is neither fearless nor, technically, blogging. I actually had an entirely different concept for the site, but then realized it would be redundant and more-or-less worthless in the grand scheme of things.

The caching changes I made were to localize all of my caching logic in a cache sweeper. Oh god, I know what you're thinking, and no. Caching was implemented initially as a *very* quick (talking, 15 minutes) hack, which involved a lot of cut-and-pasting of code everywhere. Things got messy fast, and as a result somewhere along the lines, during a random site upgrade / bugfix, I broke the admin panel. I could mark posts as disabled, but particular portions of the cache wouldn't refresh, so they'd show up in the sidebar but still be unviewable. Yeah. Stupid, I know.

I also re-learned one important thing that I forgot: Never. Use. Page. Caching. In Rails. Ever. That shit causes boatloads of problems. Page-level caching in Rails is the goddamn devil. And there's no easy way to clean the cache, either, except to "manually" remove the files, as far as I know.

The moral of the story?

That stories don't have to have morals to be stories.

(oooh, yes I did just go there).

Hotmail login doesn't do HTTPS by default. ^.^?!

So, I almost never use my Hotmail or Y!Mail accounts anymore.

Too much spam, obviously.

So, today, I did my monthly email check. Nothing but spam in the both of them.

But I did notice something funny.

Logging into Yahoo! Mail took me to an SSL protected page, where-as logging into Hotmail took me to a regular HTTP page.

Now, I was extra concious of where I was on the web because this morning my Mom got scammed; she followed one of those 'reset your password' emails and lost a couple hundred dollars from her Paypal account.

So I gave her a 20 minute lecture (again) on not following those links. Frankly, she got off real lucky -- as far as I know he only took money from her account, and not a lot at that. The scammer could have done way worse.

So, after my high-and-mighty lecture, I notice that Hotmail doesn't do HTTPS by default. I totally lawl'd.

I've become used to seeing the SSL certificate in the browser bar as a way of verifying I'm where I meant to be, even though that's not exactly what it means. So I found Hotmail's lack of security on the login landing page very... unusual.

That's the end of this blog post!