In every project I have ever put my hands on, there has been times where I have gone, “Nah screw this, Let’s do something else”. It always happens. I don’t think it is ever because thing’s get “hard”. Infact sometimes it is the exact opposite. Things can get too monotonus, too “easy” if you will. Usually I lose interest in projects far to easily. I (Along with many others), call this point in a project, “The Wall“.

Well, The new 9-5 job is no different. Today, I have hit the wall. And all of the issues come down to me not being my boss anymore.

I had forgotten just how many steps it takes to get things approved in a business world. When I worked by myself, I don’t care about keeping others in the loop, or getting approval for tiny changes. But here, There is long discussions on the best way to add borders to images via CSS/HTML. I kid you not.. Even after I say “Yep, No problem, I’ll do it in 5 minutes”. There is always this need to talk about how we are going to do it. I just don’t get it. In my mind it seems like the biggest waste of time I have ever seen. When you look back on it, You just spent 20 minutes talking about a 3 pixel wide, Standard Gray, Square border.

I also think there is a massive mis-understanding of skills. Both over estimated, and under estimated, if that even makes sense.

The over estimation comes when people look at me, and other developers and say “Hey, they can program”. And then sign us on for some ridiculous project using languages we have never used. The other day there was talk of Facebook apps. And last week they were talking about doing stuff in Visual Basic. No one here knows either of those languages, But it’s the mentality that since we are developers, transitioning between languages should be a cake walk. Ok, so yes, It is easier when you already know one language through and through, but it doesn’t mean you can charge 30k for a project, when you have novices working on it. I mean, how can we honestly charge for a facebook app, when we are just googling and copy pasting code all day…

And then comes the under estimation. I have sat here since 9am today (Currently 2:17pm), Copy and pasting data from a clients old website, into their new one. I cant write any nice little scripts to port over the database either, Since the clients website is all static HTML. And all the data on their they actually wrote directly onto the pages. And they have something like 200+ pages, of data that I then have to disect, and then stick into our database. Talk about under utilization! We could pay some high school kid minimum wage to do this and he would be happy. Instead here we have incredibly intelligent developers wasting time doing it.

In a way, I probably shouldn’t be talking about this kind of stuff. My boss does know I have a blog (Although not the exact URL), and some of my co-workers do know the URL, although aren’t avid readers. But it’s frustrating leaving the IM world behind, to have your skills wasted.

I honestly cannot believe the amount of hooplah around the iPad. It seriously is an absolute joke that apple can sell this as the next best thing, when it has absolutely nothing new in it. It’s not even on par with say iPod trying to say it’s the one and only MP3 player. Apple saying the iPad is even in the slightest bit revolutionary just makes a complete mockery out of the whole technical world. People are lapping this stuff up and it is an absolute disgrace.

Maybe I’m a bit old, but back in my day, we had these things called “Tablet PC‘s”.

Now you could be forgiven for thinking this was an iPad in a new skin, but unfortunately tablets have been around since 2001. If you look closely, you will notice this particular picture i found has the Tablet running windows XP. Yes that’s right, it’s an actual whole computer within a tablet.

If you were to go and buy a iPad, you would have to run Apple’s crappy subset of features that you could expect on any iPhone. And what’s that? You want to play games. O sure just purchase them from our apps store. Instead of being a smart person, buying an entire computer and running whatever the hell you want to. Hell, If you’re buying the iPad, just forget about the rest of the computing world while you’re at it.

When you look at the actual computing stats of an iPad, It also all that impressive. The biggest HD you can get is 64gb. Mind you, you won’t need that big of one to hold whatever crappy apps you can grab from the store. And they get away with so much of this marketing bullshit, to make it out like you actually don’t want all those features. As if you can definitely do without. Much like their use of calling it a “smartphone” and yet you actually have to pay extra for it to even be able to jump onto a 3g network. How can it be part smartphone, if half the iPad’s out there don’t even connect to a cellular network…

It’s just instanity at the highest level. If you are even remotely interested in purchasing an iPad, Go look at your tablet PC options. Remember, the actual stats of the iPad aren’t at all impressive. And what you would get a tablet, with similar specs, for much cheaper.

I don’t know what it is about people who work online, but when you talk about the dreaded 9 – 5, they freeze up and claim how working for the man is just another way of the government oppressing you. Whatever.

I, on the other hand, like working all day for low pay. It’s hard to explain the feeling. You will know what I mean when you sit up all night watching campaigns closely, stressing yourself out over little drops in the EPC. It’s like paranoia gone mad when it comes to working with CPA networks. Any little drop in revenue ofcourse can’t be explained by just pure luck of visitors, it just HAS to be the network screwing you and stealing your leads. Well… Anyway. Sometimes you just want to escape all that and go work for someone else.

To be perfectly honest, I always go for jobs that I would have been doing the same work at home (More on that later). So for example if you were a web designer, and you went and got a job as a creative director at a local company. You are doing basically what you would have been doing normally, only all the pressure is off you. If you stuff up, then sure you may get a slap on the wrists, but you won’t be seeing it in your back pocket.

Anyway, I’ve secured a job as a “Web Developer”. Actually it’s a “Junior Web Developer”. I hate being called a “Junior”, but gotta start somewhere. I wouldn’t say that I have a junior set of skills when it comes to C# development. But unfortunately I’ve been away from the working world for too long so have to start again at the bottom – again. It also comes down to developing too much automation tools. I mean it develops my logic skill set way beyond a regular C# programmers. But then when I have to go back to basics, and develop just a simple business application that is pulling from a MSSQL database using LINQ etc, it all becomes foreign to me. I know it atleast, but it’s just been so long since I used any of that stuff.

The job itself is working for a small Web Development company that builds fairly large business websites. I don’t like giving out exact names, but they developed the website for one of the biggest car manufacturers in the world, and plenty of well known brand websites. I will be just developing the backend for them, so far what I’ve heard about the job is that they use some sort of CMS behind their websites. Kinda like Joomla, but for ASP, and then we build the website on top of that. In a way I think it’s cheating starting off with a CMS, but it becomes alot easier when the client can just modify the website themselves.

I haven’t quite started yet, I will be doing so after Easter. But I don’t intend to let this blog just go. Infact I think with a salary behind me, and something to fall back on. I’m going to be much more likely to take risks, and be almost more entrepreneurial. I think that was one of my biggest problems this year, Is that everything I do has to make money. I wasn’t able to create the next Twitter Ad Network, or a Digg clone, because in the short term they aren’t bringing home any money. But now, I have all the time in the world!

Don’t know what SQL Command Mode is? What! Have you been living under a rock?!

But in all seriousness. Someone is spamming Twitter so hardcore right now…

Times infinity as it looks now. All with the same spammy username. I guess this is why we cant have nice things huh?

In anycase, I’m watching it with interest to see if anyone else joins in tweeting SQL Command Mode. As it looks now, there is usually 1/20 natural people talking about it (Usually by saying WTF). And the rest is these spam accounts. Which is pretty darn impressive for just a bunch of accounts to get together and make it to the trending list this easy.

I’m also watching with intent to see how Twitter reacts. So far 20 or so minutes in and they still haven’t stopped it (I don’t know what time it is in their offices, I guess they will get a nice surprise when they wake up). Twitter does have a few things in place to stop this kind of spam, most notable if you look at the tweets, the last two letters are random letters. Easy as you like to get around the duplicate tweet filter it seems.

To be honest. I’m slightly hoping people claim responsibility for this, just so I can see how much traffic they got…

Anyway. Ill update this post when I hear the cause/who’s responsible.

A few weeks ago, i went to the casino for the first time. Although its a local casino (Sky City Auckland if you care), and aint exactly Las Vegas., most of the marketing principles are the same. These guys literally are doing everything within their power to get you to sit down and play games non stop, without thinking about the money, without thinking about the time you spend in there.

The first thing you have to know. Is that of all the casino games available, Slots/Pokie machines have the worst odds for the general player. Just for the record, I stuck in about 60NZD into those things and didn’t win once. No free spins, not even like winning $2. Although by law over here, Slots have to pay out around 70% of what they take in. I think it could be lower, and in places like Vegas it is far lower then that. So if you stick in $100, you are expect to get out $70. Although that usually wont happen, and it will all be pooled till some lucky SOB wins everything that the suckers put in.

Game’s like Roulette or Blackjack, although still fairly shitty odds. IMO, they have a better chance of winning for a casual player. I played Blackjack for a bit, and gained like $100 in the 10 minutes i played. And then i walked away happy. The main difference is that Blackjack, you have small wins and loses, and you can play there for hours holding about even. But slots will chew $20 up in 5 minutes. So with that being said, the casino managers want as many people playing slots as they can.

So as soon as you walk into the casino, the first thing you notice is all the lights are dimmed. Its almost like a dank place. Hardcore gamblers will tell you its to do with people gambling away their families home and not wanting to be seen, but in all reality, its to brighten up the Slots. You see the slots have neon lights all around the things, and they are crazy bright. Not only that, but when you walk in, there is walls and walls of slots before you can get to the regular gaming tables. They are literally trying to force you to play a couple of games.

I ofcourse avoided these and kept walking to the tables, but after a few games i decided to get something to eat. Now here is the thing, the casino has like a fully functional restaurant RIGHT in the middle of the slot machines. You can buy things like mashed potato, steak, sausages, anything that you would cook at home, to feel at home, you can buy here. There is two reasons the restaurant is in the middle of the slots.

1. You don’t leave the casino to get food. Seriously the amount of choices (You could get chinese, indian and italian food) you have you would never leave the casino. Leaving the casino at 3am, would usually mean your not coming back. Even if you thought you were, by the time you get food in you, usually you cant be bothered walking back to the casino/bar (Trust me!).

2. You can hear “Cha-Ching” all around you.

That’s something else about slots. They are quiet as hell when your playing them. Just the ticking noise of the bars rolling over. But when you win, even if its only $2. You and everyone else within a 20 foot radius of you knows about it. And so while your sitting there eating, all you can hear is “winners” all around you. Making you think that it is the easiest game to win and play.

Ofcourse there is the usual ploys aswell. There is obviously no windows in a casino, they don’t want you knowing how long you’ve been there. So when you see the sun starting to rise your like “O shit been here too long”. And ofcourse no clocks either. Ontop of that, they do little sneaky things. They have TV’s all around (albeit no sound), so if your bored and want to have a beer, you can sit and watch a sports game. But the channels shown are ALWAYS non time specific. By that i mean, that you know the News is on at 6pm every night. So if you saw that, you know what time it is. Obviously they wouldn’t be showing the news in the casino. But they make sure that the TV channel gives no indication of what time it is.

What’s this all got to do with landing pages? Well two things really.

1. Dont give any reason for your visitor to leave your site/landing page. Just like the restaurant in a casino, they make everything available so you don’t have to leave. Hell they even have cheap cheap hotel rooms so you don’t have to go home.

2. Always funnel your visitors to your most profitable package. Give them the choice of the most profitable first, and then give them cheaper packages. You still want to get a sale of any type, but the more you focus on them buying the most profitable, the better off you will be.

If you really want, head over to your local casino and check it out. Don’t go in there to gamble hard, just to take a look around and see how they maintain/control their customers actions extremely well. There is a bunch of smaller things that i haven’t written in here that are still integral to a casino’s profitability. But check em out for yourself.

As most of you know, I’m in the process of finding a job to expand my knowledge in the C#/.net development area. The job hunt is going semi alright, well, i still haven’t found one yet. Which for the most part isn’t that worrying because i’m getting one to expand my knowledge and work on larger projects, not because I’m sick of Internet Marketing. With that being so, I haven’t really busted my balls applying for jobs that don’t really suit. I’ve only really applied for ones that i think I would really really enjoy working for. As a side note, I’ve had an interview + communication with a Paypal like company that operates in New Zealand. They are basically an online payment gateway, and apparently (From people I’ve spoken to), easily the best in the country. I don’t really want to name them, but anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

One thing I’ve known for a long time, is that some of the best jobs don’t get listed online. Recruitment companies have hundreds of CV’s on file, and usually call existing clients rather then go through a bunch of interviews with no hopers. With that in mind I’ve been calling them directly, no more BS waiting online for things to get listed.

At first I have to admit, I was pretty nervous. There is lots of talk lately about “Blacklists“. Which basically means that if you go to an interview, and BS your way through it, or you are obviously a dickhead. You get placed on a blacklist which is shared around between companies/employers/recruiters. So that when you apply for jobs later on, they don’t bother getting back to you cause they already know your a retard.  In New Zealand its actually illegal, much like discriminating against looks and race. I mean your not supposed to, but if your running a call center, can you really afford to “not” discriminate against another race if their accent is going to get in the way?   Your not supposed to, but it happens.

I thought for sure that if i call them and either sound real cocky, or come across as too confident, that I might have one of those black marks next to my name. But to my surprise when i called them, they were really bending over backwards to accommodate me. I think I had forgotten the most important thing, these people are making a living off me. Matching me with a job could earn them thousands. And by talking to me on the phone, they aren’t losing anything…

Forgetting about the blacklists for a second, if i call them and it doesn’t go well and they say “sorry, nothing matches your profile”. Then what have i lost? 10 minutes later someone else will call them and probably get the same reply. These guys do it for a living so it all mashes into one and they will never remember your name.

This is super true for one recruitment company that i think almost all of my friends have been through. Years ago when i finished my System Engineering qualifications, i was applying for a tonne of jobs to do with Microsoft Networking and Administration.  It was almost a running joke between me and my friends, that this one guy from a rather large recruitment company, would always call us and talk to us on the phone. And then say the infamous “Ok will get back to you” or “I’ll forward on the details”. Ofcourse that never happened. And it wasn’t just me, everyone got the run around from this guy.  I’m sure he did put notes down for our calls, but so often he would call us up for other job opportunities, or we would call his company and get him, and he wouldn’t recognise us at all.

Funnily enough I even got this same guy, that i had spoken to all that time ago, on the phone a couple of days ago. And once again, he didn’t remember me (Not that i prompted him or tried to remind him). And he forwarded me on a job profile that he thought fitted well with what i was after. (Although i’m just waiting for the “Ill get back to you” line).

It reminded me alot of how online, people seem afraid to contact others to do ventures together. Or to co-promote. Ofcourse things have to be win-win for it to work. But most of the time people are more then happy to gather another stream of income.  Personally, people have come to me with an application idea and said, “I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, but I didn’t want to just come out of the blue to you”. Why not?

Chances are I’m going to tread on you for all of 5 seconds and tell you your idea is hopeless and wont work. But that will seriously only be a moment in time, and then I will forget about it. You think people haven’t come to me with piss poor ideas for applications before? I get tonnes, but sitting here right now writing this post. I couldn’t tell you the names of the people at all. Hell even the ideas are pretty vague in my head right now so I cant even tell you what i turned down.

But there is always a small chance that ill say “hell yeah! lets get going”. And we go on to make a successful venture together.

Once again, don’t be afraid to contact people straight off the bat with ideas you have going.  It does not hurt one bit, and your embarrassment for being turned down will only be a tiny smidgen in your life compared to how much time you will devote when you find that guy who will help you.

As the title says

I cant tell you how many people contact me about my products and try and get me to give them a free review copy. And to be honest, its getting dammmnnn annoying. heres a tip : Reviews are for new products, not ones that already have brand awareness and market share. Well in my opinion anyway. You dont walk up to a retail chain like walmart and ask them for a review do you? But you could possibly get away with doing it with a smaller chain of stores, or a boutique store that is just starting out.

On top of that, people come to me and say, “I have XXX amount of subscribers on my list, and i get XXXX pageviews on my review blog everyday”. Well thats just fantastic! Then just sign up for an affiliate account and sell the product to your readers. It never makes any sense to me, why people try and scrounge around for a 20 – 50 dollar product. In the time it takes for me to troll you and possibly pretend im going to give you a free copy (Only to snatch it away last second), you could have bought the application, posted a review, and make affiliate commission totally more then what you paid for the product anyway.

A while back i wrote about having faith in your own products. The same rules still apply here. If someone comes to me and says, if you give me a review copy, i will make you atleast 10 sales. I immediately have to ask myself, why do you need me to give you a $40 product, when you can make 10 x $25 = $250 commission back. Obviously these people don’t have faith in their own readership and selling ability, so they want me to fork out and we can both roll the dice together.

Anyways, should probably go full circle and say. If you want free affiliate marketing products, just start a review blog. Even though ill decline you, taking a look at some of these blogs. Other product owners do get sucked in.

This is probably something you never hear from Internet Marketers, “Im looking for a job”. But im going to buck the trend!

So yes, as you may have guessed (Just maybe), im joining the work force again shortly. And there are many reasons, but for the most part. It all comes down to what i want to do in life. And where i want my time focused in on. I really enjoy developing applications. And when i say developing, i dont mean developing a small automation tool that can run some small task for you on the web. Im talking huge database backend applications that are both time critical, and have to be of the best standard.

I can build large applications like this already. Well, to a degree, Im certainly not going to be working for Microsoft anytime soon. But there is both time, money, knowledge and audience limitations to anything i build by myself.

Time
With one developer (me!) working on everything. There is only so much i can do. And something that may take me a year to do on my own, i could build in a couple of months in a team. I mean time is really limitless at this point, but i certainly dont know everything about developing in my chosen language (C#). And thus i cant always be the fastest either.

Money
When your working for yourself, you have to work on the things that make you the money. Even if they arent the most enjoyable tasks in the world. I have little side projects that i love working on, love tinkering with. But i can never really develop them because any spare time i have, goes back into developing my money applications/websites/campaigns.  It isnt that im not making enough money, its just i dont have the money to waste a week mucking around with an application that i never intend to release/sell.

Knowledge
Anyone who tells you, that they became a master of C#.net by reading articles/tutorials online is talking plain BS. Or atleast there level of “mastery” is not up to the same standard as the industries. Some of my best learning experiences have come from asking/;earning from others. My university lecturer is super knowledgeable and always has an answer for one of my questions. Google doesn’t solve all problems, and it doesn’t always solve them in a way that you can understand.

Audience
I can guarantee that 99% of people reading this blog and/or running my apps couldnt care less about me developing the greatest courier tracking system out. All the masses want is for me to create some awesome little automation tools. And while i thats cool, and i like developing those. I want to think big!

I have to say, the biggest thing for me is knowledge. I enjoy doing SEM/SEO work, but it doesnt really light a fire within me to get going. Developing does.

I certainly wont stop doing SEO work, but it will be more in my spare time. In actual fact, you guys probably wont notice at all. Tools will probably come out at the same rate, and same with blog posts.

So by for now, wish me luck in my hunt

It never ceases to amaze me how much i always seem to have to dumb down my applications for people. Now i dont want to be rude here, but…. its holding the rest of us back.

Think about my biggest free application, Phoenix Twitter Desktop. I could certainly add a bunch more options for adding friends, including probably a location finder which Twitter caters for. The fact that twitter offers a Geo IP so you can target people right down to the city they live in is amazing. But there is alot of options that go along with it, and also a few options for longitude and latitude. But lets be honest, if i stuck longitude and latitude in their as options, i would be inundated with emails asking me how it works, or maybe even people who dont know what longitude even is. And thus, im sorry to say, you wont get it. And its a shame because i know plenty of people that could utilise this sort of thing, but i just dont have the time, nor the will, to sit at my laptop answering questions via email.

Dont think im the only software developer facing this, i mean, look at Microsoft/Windows. If we take the Control Panel for instance. From XP onwards, there was a “Category” view. Which in my mind (And every other intermediate+ computer user on the planet), was a complete balls up and you couldnt find anything. Luckily there was an option to switch back to classic view, which i think the majority did. But, there is still users out there, infact a large chunk of users that use the Category view.

There is a bunch of other things within XP and up, especially Vista and 7, that try and make the life easier for the user. But just annoy the hell out of anyone who has used a computer for more then checking email via outlook express. I should know, when i worked for an ISP years back. It was absolute hell trying to navigate away from Windows o-so-helpful wizards, and trying to just do things the old fashioned way.

So for advanced users, you have the beginners moaning to thank