The things I do for free

Why are the things I do for free so much more frustrating to do than the ones I get paid for? It's a mystery I've been unable to solve for years. I've made websites for people who have paid me good money and they had every right to bitch about every single visual aspect of the site but instead they let me do my job and respected it. Conversely, when I do something for free people abuse it, they tend to make themselves the designer and put me in the form of a tool that they use to get what they want. I don't mind people saying that something I made isn't good, I've made tons and tons of stuff that's crap. But what do you expect when you're not paying me a single dime for it. In the last couple of weeks I've felt torn apart from everyone demanding something from me. Either it's help with a computer, or just some "small thing" that needs to be done in Photoshop. In the entire process my wallet got empty and now I'm forced to be the asshole that says no since the kind words don't pay the bills. There are only so many things which I can do for free. And the fact that I will maybe play some games instead of working doesn't give anyone the right to say that they can use me. People seem to think that every computer I fix for them suddenly becomes my responsibility and I'm the first person on their speed dial in case it breaks down again. As if I have nothing better to do than go around installing windows, trying to figure out which drivers I need since no one really keeps those handy little driver cds around. N00bs are a plague, a disease that needs to be cleansed. The more you give in the more they take. I don't enjoy fixing someone's computer, if I did I wouldn't have a job related to web design, I would work in a hardware store with a screwdriver.

Now that I've let of some steam I should focus on some positive stuff. I finally passed one of the hardest exams in my college and now it's just one more before I can finally get rid of it. On a completely unrelated note you might have noticed that I opened up a twitter account and set up a feed at the bottom of my website. The first time I heard about twitter was through Penny Arcade, namely this comic and it seemed to very accurately describe what it is. Although at the start I thought it was pretty useless to me I liked the idea of it being very easy to customize, update and most importantly, use on my site. I don't intend to keep you updated on the size of my dumps but somehow the thought of being able to go to a festival or travel somewhere and send a tweet every now and then from my mobile phone seems very appealing. I also like that fact that Twitter focuses on this one simple task and nothing more. It's the sole reason why I enjoyed opening an account and customizing it. Whereas on Myspace and Facebook (I don't have the latter) you have a ton of features you'll never use and it takes ages to customize it Twitter is down to earth simple and I was done with the entire implementation in 15 minutes. Of course I probably wouldn't have opened an account and started using it weren't it for the fact that the entire Piratebay trial translation was going on live in a Twitter chat channel. I've been listening to the Swedish audio stream and reading the Tweets from people at the same time and it's been one interesting drama. In case you're interested head on over to the pirate bay and click on the spectrial link.

I got another gig coming up soon, this one being a trance one and I've thought about how to approach it since I haven't listened to any 4/4 music for around 4-5 months. I just get so much more positive energy from Trip hop nowdays. So I promise a fresh mix is on the way.

Posted on February 27th at 16:11 by Dovla Previous entry | Next entry