If you’re a freelancer these links might be of interest:

FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator
http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

101 Essential Freelancing Resources (Note creating a list for eLearning—should be published at Distance-Educator.com next week)
http://freelanceswitch.com/general/101-essential-freelancing-resources/

Creating Passive Income
http://notbythehour.com/

Over the years I’ve had many computers, so there are many hard drives and computer towers around the house. I’m working on implementing them, i.e., using them for interesting things around the house. Tonight after almost two years I have a desktop computer again. When my last desktop went out I bought a laptop and have loved it but thought it was about time to get a desktop up and running again since we have all this hardware around the house. So now I have the desktop and a laptop. Although I love all the technology the real challenge is to ‘use’ the technology to make my life easier instead of the technology burdening me, getting information overload.

Right now my plan is to use the desktop to stream live video of my office I’m putting together in my basement. Then I’ll do live video and podcasts too, so this was another reason for the desktop. Its important to stay focused in the information age, because if you’re like me you tend to get side tracked easily because everything seems to be coming at me all at once. I think I should have a technology free day, where I turn off all my gadgets to take a break. Its a great thought but for now it isn’t in my plans.

I’m rambling a bit but its almost 2:00 am, I’m a bit tired so I’m going to get some sleep and take this up again tomorrow.

Lifehacker: Upgrading Your Life: a book by Gina Trapani which compiles the best material from Lifehacker.com, an award-winning daily weblog on software and personal productivity.

Indexed.com – Jessica Hagy, a write and illustrator,keeps you laughing and sometimes thinking about life’s little absurdities. This is a must read if you need a smile, giggle, or laugh.
http://www.indexed.blogspot.com/

We’ve all heard of the Wii and some have had the opportunity to play with it. I’ve found some cool YouTube videos from Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon University that shows how to use
infrared (IR) light pens and the Wii Remote to create a very low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboard and multi-point tablet displays.

You can download the software from his site: http://johnnylee.net

Note, I haven’t created the whiteboard yet but hopefully will experiment soon, but in the meantime take a look at his video and if you give it a try let me know.

I didn’t think they did but a visit today confirms they are still around. Although, the guys didn’t get past the front door or even close to pitching me on the product. Who can imagine a single woman letting two men into her home with no one else around? I’m sure they are harmless but I certainly wasn’t going to find out, besides who buys a vaccum this way anymore? Its not the fifties when it was normal for people to knock on your door with the expectation of selling something. No one does this anymore—we live in the internet age—where marketing has moved beyond the door-to-door phase—where you get marketing messages delivered to your cell phone. Where you can go online and research the latest/greatest carpet cleaner instead of having two, not so well dressed, slightly disheveled guys knock on your front door without any warning!

Let me set the stage, I’m sitting in the living room, around noon, working on my laptop. I hear a knock on the front door, I look out the front window, see a van parked on the road and think, “these are some of my son’s friends coming by to go to lunch or something”. So without thinking I open the door, to my surprise it was two older guys, certainly not my son’s friends who quickly rattle off something about, ‘we’re not trying to sell you anything’ but can you try out this new air freshner—so I take the air freshener—spray a little—that was kinda stupid though, what if it was something that would have knocked me out (LOL).

So anyway, I hate air fresheners and I should have immediately refused but since I didn’t I opened the door to tell them I don’t use air fresheners and by that time they had brought up a carpet shampooer from their van.

The pitch now was something about showing me this carpet shampooer and before they had a chance to say much of anything I blurted out, “I’m not interested, I have a carpet shampooer”—he tried to get in another word and I said, “no thanks, I’m not interested” handing him back the air freshener, shutting and locking the door.

So yes, door to door salesmen still exist but I don’t think they make many sales pitches.

After saying all this, my experience today reminds me of the commercial where the guy is trying to scam someone sitting next to him face-to-face in a coffee house. Where the gist of the commercial is its harder to scam someone in person than it is do to it online. So call me a skeptic, I’m cautious not only when salespeople come to my door or when idiots try to scam me online. I guess the moral of the story is follow your gut, its still holds true, if its “to good to be true”, it usually isn’t. Its a good thing to remember in all facets of life, including online.

This also reminds me of something Seth Godin was talking about in his blog, meatball-mondae about marketers having a new toolbox filled with technology goodies—but the reality is you can have all the technology, that is the easy part, the hard part is changing the organization—this is the key. Technology is the easy part, its applying the technology, changing your business practices and becoming something different is hard. Most companies get the technology—but are still using door-to-door salespeople to get the word out about their products!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reminded we have daily opportunities to build our negotiating skills even in small situations, i.e., everything is negotiable! And everyone who knows me, knows I love a good deal so when opportunities to negotiate come around I’m willing to take a shot, so the other day when I was looking at Home Depot’s clearance patio furniture, an opportunity came around.

There was one patio set that caught my attention, it included 4 swivel, rocking chairs, a tiled table top and base. The original price was $599.99 and it should have been 50% off so the sale price would have been $299.99 but it was priced at $399.99. So I asked the sales person about the issue she said I should talk to a manager. But I thought before talking to someone I should make sure they had all the set pieces because the box I saw said, 2 of 2 so we needed the 1 of 2 box. So we looked and we couldn’t find the first box—so I thought well I could offer to buy the chairs. It’s always easy to find a table so this was the plan—additionally I found out if the top was available at any other store because this would give me better leverage when negotiating the price.

So the salesperson called the manager to ask how much they would sale the chairs for—she came back with $175.00. I thought, sounds like a good starting point but I didn’t want to pay this much. So I offered $150.00—with the note that there wasn’t a table for the set and these were the last set of chairs. So the salesperson asked the manager if he would be willing to take $150.00. He said, “yes” so—it wasn’t a huge savings but it was $25.00 in my pocket. Note, I got the four chairs and table bottom for $150.00! I was able to use my old table top from my previous set so I made a good deal!

The moral of the story, always ask—all they can say is ‘no’ and it’s true everything is negotiable!

I’m not sure how I feel about this law but I thought it was interesting and wanted to share with my readers. First I would like to ask you to remember being a teenager. Think about what your parents hated about your hair, clothes, and music. Then fast forward to being a parent today. What do you hate about your teenagers hair, clothes and music. Most of us can agree the baggy pants fashion that teenage boys wear today could be one of the most annoying things around. Yes, I agree but I’m not sure if outlawing the fashion is useful or will even do anything to curb the fashion. But some towns in Louisiana are trying, see the article, “Alexandria considers ban of saggy pants that expose underwear.”

Comments are welcome.

It was recently brought to my attention some videos on SpikeSource where Kim Polese is talking about the business model of Open Source. It’s interesting since we’ve been closely involved in OS for six years. But what I see happening with SpikeSource and other similar companies is they are “monetizing” community projects without giving back to the community! It’s a bit disconcerting, companies like SpikeSource, to see these companies taking without giving back. The SpikeSource business model is take the ‘source’ from the OS project, certify it according to their standards (i.e., maintain their version of the software, single stack install, automated updates and patches), then push it out to their ‘partners’ i.e., solution providers (integrators) and solution distributors (bundle hardware/software). Note, you can only get their software through their providers and distributors—I wonder how this ‘breaks’ the GPL license—but note once it’s out there then anyone can redistribute it under the GPL.

Kim Polese talks about how they participate in the community—they fix bugs, provide the patch back to the community, the contribute back through their test framework, giving back the projects the results. OK, these are all great but what about “money”—they aren’t working on goodwill with their customers. They aren’t giving the green backs to the community.

She talks about that Open Source is not just cheaper or free but the quality is good. But how is she giving back to the developers/programmers/maintainers of the software?

Monetizing open source—support model has been scalable and profitable—Redhat, JBoss, MySQL have all been successful. Open source is layered on top as a commercial option, then there is the model where you have a professional/enterprise version then an open source version. Free Software can support a business model.

Models to think about: subscription model or on-demand models to pay as you go for software.

Small to medium size markets are ready to use the products but right now there aren’t channel partners ready to maintain and support the software at the customer site. Because they are comprised of many different modules and or changes within the software. So then you have companies who are taking up the slack in this area—interesting business model here because it is a great opportunity to new business. So SpikeSource is playing the support partner role for these companies. One call supports the entire stack—so the channel partner doesn’t have to create a relationship with all the OS companies/developers. There is a web or eco system in the development and making the software available to the small to medium size companies.

More to come . . .