When you are freelance designing, the soundest approach is typically to charge an hourly rate. The better you are, the more you charge per hour for your work, it’s an increasing scale. But what happens when you are competent enough to no longer need many hours to complete the work?

I went to the National Symphony Orchestra here in DC. They played 90-minutes of intensely complicated music from three symphonies. In the talk-back session that followed, their conductor Maestro Slatkin, noted that they only had three days to prepare and five rehearsals. That means these professionals, the elite in their field, spent approximately 20 hours of preparation to learn and master three symphonies.

When you are that proficient, at the top of your game, charging by the hour starts costing you money. I can’t fathom the exorbitant hourly rate these musicians would have to charge to be properly compensated?

As we get closer to the holidays and the shopping gets crazy and tensions get higher, it is important to step back and remember that it’s really all about being together, like Chewbacca reuniting with his family for Life Day, and enjoying the times we share, like Bea Arthur and Snaggletooth at the Cantina bar. If this all sounds very confusing and bizarre, then you are probably not familiar with the 1978 Star Wars Christmas Special. Fortunately, someone was kind enough to edit that train wreck of a two hour program down to 5 minutes and post it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnVcbWQ2cg

I think the lesson learned from this special is all too self-evident. Taking risks is a part of growth, but you must be very very careful with the choices you make, especially when they impact your brand.

Anyone who designs emails knows that the current landscape of compatibility and rendering from the many different email clients makes the Netscape/IE browser wars of the late 90s look like a sandbox skirmish. Many of us have come to terms with having to continue to use antiquated <font> and <table> based HTML to get a consistent rendering in email, and with the regression of Outlook (now using MS Word for rendering instead of Internet Explorer), that consistency is becoming less and less reliable.

Thankfully, someone has stood up and said enough. An advocacy group has just launched a site to follow in the footsteps of the Web Standards Project, to try to educate designers about best practices and to reign in the multitude of email clients (Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, YahooMail, AOLMail, etc.) to agree to support these common standards and practices.

Best of luck Email Standards Project, you have my support.

I had two cards with points from the ESPNZone, one with one single point, the other with 74 points. I asked the clerk to merge the two cards together. He stated that was impossible. I submit that that is technological impasse is rather convenient for ESPN.

Because, I can not move that one point onto the card with 74 points, there are only two options:

1. It is never used, which means a small profit for ESPN Zone, or
2. I add points to the card to bring it back up to the level where I can play off all the points, which is new profit for ESPN Zone.

I recognize that a great deal of the gift card value for businesses comes from the small change that gets left behind, and if I, the customer, neglect to zero out the card, that is my own doing. But at least the legitimate retailer provides the opportunity to zero out the card. Every major retailer from clothing to bookstores to supermarkets will let you run off the remainder of a gift card and subsidize the remainder with cash or charge. ESPN Zone, on the other hand, does not give the customer any options, it just takes our money. When I asked for a clarifying statement, the clerk at the Washington DC ESPN Zone simple said, “This ain’t the Metro, you can’t trade in your cards here. What you got is what you got.”

I got hosed.

The founding brothers where I work used to have their own weekly call-in show on NPR where they learned the art of answering the caller’s question:

• Keep it brief,
• Answer the question and
• Move on.

Their reasoning was that whatever question a single individual brings to the table is typically relevant only to that person and a handful of others. Therefore, to avoid losing the majority of the group, you address their question, but not expand or pontificate, just answer it to the best of your ability and move on to the next question.

For years, my Delaware Shakespeare Festival had a central phone number, but did not have a central office or operator. So many calls got lost or responded too well too late. It was an unfortunate shortcoming that we could not find a (cost free) means of forwarding that one number to a different or even multiple other phone numbers to actually answer.

A few years late, here is GrandCentral.com. This service does exactly what I was looking for five years ago, it will give me a phone number to give out, and that number will ring any or all of my other phones (home, cell, work, wife’s cell, etc). I can program which numbers to ring and when. I am still kicking the tires on this service, but if it works as well as I anticipate, I think this is the death nail for my home phone, which I pay $35 a month to essentially have a non-cell phone number.

They are only in Beta, but I have a few “Recommend a Friend” opportunities available if you are interested.

Those were the odds stacked against the Phillies winning the pennant going into mid-September (according to Baseball Prospectus). Just when the Eagles are becoming unwatchable, Philadelphia sports fans get the rare treat of seeing the home team play some October baseball.  Thank you Phillies for displaying perserverance and determination and a semblance of a legitimate pitching staff and giving us fans a (regular) season to remember. 

I have been tempted recently to shake things up and start driving into work instead of taking the Metro.  On empty roads, it would take save over an hour of commute.  The problem is there are never empty roads.  The Texas Transportation Institute reports that Washington DC has jumped up two spots past San Francisco and into a tie with Atlanta for the 2^nd worst traffic in the nation.  Combine that with a report from last year stating the 270 spur, a necessary part of my drive, as the 8^th worst traffic spot in the nation, and I will be continuing to add money to my Metro SmartCard, at least until the rate hike.

In Macy’s at closing time, I headed for the exit that goes directly into the Metro Center station, only to find a locked door and a guard telling a confused tourist “The Metro’s closed.”  ( I assured the now frantic woman that the Metro was actually still quite open, that this guard had simply locked this door). 

How much would it cost Macy’s to keep that same guard (or one better at communicating with customers) stationed at that same door, but leave it unlocked until the store was emptied? Wouldn’t that simple act provide the convenience of allowing Metro customers to use the exit they are familiar with?  Instead Macy’s forced this tourist, and I and all their other paying customers out onto the streets of downtown DC at night to find our way back to the Metro ourselves.

Has no one ever wanted to display a slideshow in the order they choose?  This can’t be a new idea.  Yet, unless you are uploading your slideshow onto the web or importing it into Powerpoint or Flash, this is unachievable.

-Windows Explorer will not save your custom order, once you leave that folder it reverts to the sort by name or date.

- Picaca 2 will allow you to create an album and set the order, but does not provide a means for saving that album.  Trying to export the album will result in a new order that is not only not your intented order, but not sorted by date or name either.  It’s a completely random new structure.

Perhaps one of the Apple apps has a solution, but for me and my PC, we are left with having to rename every picture (A001.jpg, A002.jpg…) so they will be forced to keep the intended custom order.

This can’t be the best approach.  What have you discovered?