GetGeekStrong.com

Since adopting, I’ve started to freelance again to help offset some of the new expenses. It’s been going well. I have no shortage of work to keep me busy. Unfortuneately work has come so quickly that I have not had time to update my portfolio site. Well, I’m happy to announce that tonight my new site is up. The portfolio is a little sparse while I catch up adding new stuff and some older stuff, but I’ll be adding regularly.

I’ve also got a fun list of all the side projects that I’m involved in. So if you want a peek at what keeps me up at night, have a look around.

I am happy to announce the latest addition of websites that I build to put food in my kids’ mouths, buy a private island for Hannah and maybe, someday, put an iPod touch in my pocket. The website is called StopForwarding.Us and it exists to let people politely and anonymously email their friends who forward meaningless and irritating emails a letter asking them to stop the practice with a link to the website which includes email etiquette tips.

If you have a crazy family member or friend who sends out crap, you can try sending him or her an email and maybe it will work.

Collis Ta’eed of Eden (which runs PSDTuts and Freelance Switch, both of which I subscribe) recently made a post on PSDTuts explaining why they have started charging for premium content. The post provides a great glimpse at what it takes  to build and, if you’re lucky, run websites like these for fun and profit. Judging by what I read, I swear Collis and I could compare blogrolls and find a lot of common ground. If you’re into this kind of thing, read the article.

Here’s an inspirational look at how a few young people managed to make some mad scratch before drinking age (USA).  Most of these businesses rely on the internet and/or advertising revenue. All of them hit a niche and do it well.

How To Make A Million Before You Turn 20 - Forbes.com

Today I stumbled across the work of Johnny Chung Lee. Specifically his work on the Nintendo Wii remote projects. This guy has done some amazing stuff with his Wii including finger tracking (think Minority Report), interactive white boards and head tracking. You have got to watch the video for head tracking and what it means for interface immersion. It blew my mind!

Johnny’s ability to take a technology that is already very cool and make it do things that the original developers may not have thought about is inspirational to say the least. While looking at his site I discovered that Johnny and I had ‘met’ before. His $14 Steadycam project is something I looked at years ago while studying video production.

A few weeks ago I was quibbling to my dad about the failed state of a project I was working on. A couple days later he sent me the following email:

I was cleaning out my e-mail and ran across this short story that I think is great.

“Here’s a story I heard from Alexander Kjerulf, who was talking about David Bayles’s book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking:

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.

His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A.

At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.”

What a great lesson and an interesting look at the quantity vs. quality concept that more produces less quality and less produces higher quality.

So what is there to benefit from failing? I have decided that it is better to produce failed projects than none at all. At least that way I have the opportunity to learn from experience.

There is a great article with the above title over at trizle.com. In particular, the part about “serial entrepreneurs” struck a chord in me. From the article:

Contrast serial entrepreneurs with those ‘long-term’ ones.
Who’s thriving like a mofo?
The ones who built on top of their experiences, then exploited those advantages every-single-frickin’-day.

Oh snap! Could I be one of these guys who starts something new every six months, sees little to know success and then spends blood, sweat and tears building another failure instead of building on top of the hard lessons I’ve already learned?

Take a project of mine for example, drinkshirt.com. This project is all but a wash at this point. My tendancy is to throw a wake for it, say some unclean things about why it did not work out and then move on to something else. But what if I looked back at this and gleaned from the wreckage some much needed education? I might learn stuff like:

• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (or API in beta)
• Outsourcing development can be affordable and fast
• Your intended audience is not always who you will attract (Japanese coffee drinkers in this case)
• Quality referal links are way more effecteve than advertising

These ideas and more would be applied to my next project. Having learned these lessons already, I can focus more time on innovation and less time on the nuts and bolts of the above issues.

This article has also got me thinking about how quick I am to shelve projects. Sure, some are ideas that just never got off the ground, but in cases like drinkshirt.com, have I done everything I can to make this project a sucess? Is there any way I can adjust even the model of this project in such a way that makes it profitable to me and the community? These, friends, are the questions that plague me. Now go read that article.