Posts made by Deleted74295

Spent quite a long time sitting with a drawing package, eventually drew that. Fairly pleased with it.

What do you think about content?

Had a re-think.

Changed a few things, let me know what you think.

Oh I feel so young reading these comments...

Just out of curiosity for us on the side-lines.

What happened in the end?

What a load of rubbish.

The very idea that hard work and effort can outweigh a degree is insulting and is typical of someone who clearly never went to college. I shall shake my fist you! the sheer level of ignorance that only a non-degree individual can have

Seen the above attitude quite a bit, I then sit back and revel at how happy I am to be debt free, doing what I love and have a path to where I want to go that is not dependant on a piece of paper.

Really helpful write-up, I guess if anyone else needs convincing just google "Is college worth it"

Better known as the Hin-Fy shirts

@scottalanmiller said:

@Breffni-Potter said:

Just did the currency conversion...

Did you do to USD or CDN? He's in Canada.

WOW.

I'd need 160 dollars just for my starting rate.

In the times that you are doing a favour or charity, Note the actual rates on the invoice, Then mark a substantial discount so that it is clear. When you are billing $100 for what should be a $500 job, you should make a note of how much of a saving they are getting, If they ask you to do yet "another" thing and query why the rate is so high the second time, you can point them to the favour you did. Though in some cases you might decide to donate the work completely for free, still send them the invoice with the payable total as $0. Just make a note of what you did and the list price of each time.

Think of the soft hours, the phone calls, the email answering, time that you effectively lose and cannot bill for. The paid work needs to account for this as well. The math can get a bit scary when you dig deep into it.

Be very careful about time, treat it as the biggest expense and asset you have.

I can spend 8 hours on a job for $80 an hour = $640
Or I can spend 8 hours on a job for $130 an hour. = $1040

The number of hours I can work will never increase. There are only so many hours in the day and you need to be properly rested to deliver a great service which justifies the price the client will pay. I cannot work every hour I have on site making the money, I need to be in the office doing the less than fun stuff as well OR I need to hire someone to do that. (I've suddenly doubled my annual over-heads. Yikes.)

@scottalanmiller - Note the bit about your time per hour above, I treat freelancers/consultants as one cost, my time as another.

Now your time per hour WILL be higher than the actual hours worked. So do include the cost of that.

Also include buffer time for when it hits the fan. When it does not hit the fan you have some cash-flow for when times are tough, It also means that if you need to work extra hours because you screwed up, or call in another freelancer, the sting is not as big as it could be.

To help you out, because I'm in the exact same boat.

My process for any job/task is a spread-sheet with macros, the fields are.

Freelancer cost (Am I paying someone else)
Travel Costs
Misc Costs
My cost of time per hour
Hours needed
Current costs
Sale Price
Gross profit
Minus overhead percentage costs
Minus unforseen expense costs
Minus tax
= Net Profit.

It does the hard work for me, I just need to get the figures correctly, then I can price up an entire project.

Just did the currency conversion, yeah the $80 is insanely cheap. I'd go bust at that. Mine is $130 for comparison as standard, discounted if it's bulk hours project work but for a one hour drop in and fix something it's $130.

@thecreativeone91 said:

What did the shirts look like?

"artistic"

Some will love em, I'm in the camp of ewww.

It's not my host, vanilla WP sites run fine. It's just my theme.

@thecreativeone91 said:

It's not as bad with C5, but I think they might review themes. Wordpress is prone to having poor performance. Using Cache and CloudFlare is a must.

My own site is pretty crap out of the box. Even with Cloudflare and caching enabled to fix it, it's still not fast.

You look at other WP sites that load almost instantly, 90% of the time it's the theme rather than something else.

GTmetrix.com is pretty helpful as a benchmark tool to see what they have done.

@scottalanmiller said:

If hack does not involve social engineering. Paper records are the easiest for the FBI to get if they are on US soil.

In a safe, in a field, with no paper trail.

If things are so easy to find, where is Jimmy Hoffa?

@IRJ
But how do we prove it when everything is wrapped up in secrecy?

How do we know that a major landmark was saved by security, or 100s of people did not train due to a bombing on a train, we just don't know.

@handsofqwerty - We all know that even visiting a website about the topic of Encryption will add you to a watch list. I'm sure @Aaron-Studer knows this.

The day we stop asking questions for fear of the man, is the day Big Brother has taken complete power.

A proper security bod might be able to suggest various options, but once an attacker has unlimited physical access to the server, you have had it.