To hopefully satisfy some curiosity about where your donations go, I want to include my monthly budget that I have to earn each month to stay out of debt. Here is my list of monthly expenses.
Rent - $435
Gas/Electric - ~$80
Internet Service - $30
College Loans - $500
Food & Transport - ~$400
Monthly Total: $1,445 (i have already spent more than this developing vidz bigger)

I’m not sure what you think it would take for me to earn that much per month (or more than that) on my own but I’m open to any suggestions! I am thinking about providing incentives to donate or other ideas such as donation levels that optionally remove ads for a month or a year or more depending on the level. I was thinking that the donation process should be more like one of those games you put a quarter in and it does some type of trick for your entertainment. Ideally that’s how you can think about it. The more support I can achieve, with just a little bit from everyone, the more stuff I can do to enhance and flex the global intellect and provide a more clear picture of the world and what’s at stake every day, to make this life richer experience for everyone and everything involved.

I’m open to other ideas as well… T-Shirts, Mugs, Pens, Whatever you want, I can dream up. I’ll even do contract website work for you if you want. There isn’t a code base or DBMS out there I can’t find my way around comfortably. I can work on just about any project on any time frame if its big enough or quick enough to be worth my time estimating it for you. I get results pretty fast, in college I would always race everyone to get done with programing practices and finish first with a result I knew was perfect before submitting it. I’ll always work with you to achieve the results you are looking for, and I dare you to try to offend me with feedback or criticism, for these are the fruits not the pits of labor, because ultimately its very important to me that I know that you are getting exactly the solution you are looking for. There are people out there who may have more facts memorized than me but I can accomplish anything I put my mind to on a specified timeframe and the intuition to take approaches that lead to solutions in the least amount of time with the least amount of extraneous calculation or over engineering or guessing. I go straight to the source and get results right away, and find bugs in code without even looking at it, and solve difficult programing problems in my dreams before I wake up in the morning. Ideally I prefer to work flexibly however with plenty of time for feedback and review, and letting the client perform testing themselves if desired to further reduce cost to you. I prefer to do all my work over email since I think its simple to point out changes and new text to copy and paste or any specifics digitally, plus it takes the least of my time to process. It seems foolish to me to even attempt to do web work via phone, when copy and paste is what saves you the most time of all! If your a phone type person who really needs it I may allow one phone call if its a particularly huge project, but do not plan on managing projects with me this way! Thinking that saying something on a telephone somehow creates a more permanent or real reality than email are completely insane. You can’t go back and read your phone conversations later, so they are practically useless wastes of time to me without any visual reference point in space at all. Anything that you think is worth saying that you can’t write down and take seriously wasn’t worth saying in the first place! It frustrates me greatly when people think they can say something on the phone that they can’t just type the same exact thing, then they call and say it and it didn’t merit a phone call, but enough of my ranting… be detailed as possible and I will be as accurate as possible! I’ll worry about imagining every possible inflection of what you are trying to say and computing the correct solution, this is all part of the fun, and certainly no cause to include a telephone. If you must then record your words and email them to me and I can play them back at any rate. Do not worry about overwhelming me with details or emails. If you enjoy describing things in words then I’m definitely your person (and I’ll keep practice to type good :p ). Let me know your big challenging Ideas and I can come up with a simple cost effective solution! I’ll very gladly do any of the following, but I can do a lot more than these, these are just my favorites! Please contact me for:

  • Firefox Userscript Development and or other browser extensions
  • CSS Template Creation from raw graphics (any template system or custom) Graphic Creation or graphic improvement from a basic sketch layout you provide - adding that professional touch.
  • PHP Website Development (Perl,ASP, ASP.NET, VB, C++, Java ect are OK but less fun, but it depends! some projects are cooler than others!)
  • Database - Experience with MySQL, MsSQL, PgSQL and various other DBMS, any complexity of joining or query and code optimization for heavy load. Finding, tracking, and improving slow areas.
  • JavaScript Development - Any kind of cross browser compatible custom JavaScript functionality or installations… compatibility is number one goal! Any AJAX type functionality you can dream of.
  • Site Level SEO - I don’t paste links around the web promoting your site for you… but as far as making sure the site itself is readable and followable by search engines and contains the correct metadata is a high priority.
  • Flash Development - AS2, AS3, Anything that can be done with flash (custom components from scratch) or just throwing stuff together or updating that which you already own.
  • PDF File format - just recently getting to know this monster, its not so bad as people make it out to be
  • DirectX- can you believe I actually know all about 3d matrix transformations and mesh tessellation! I feel like I couldn’t exist without them. iPhone app development is certainly within my capacity but my mac is offline now
  • Integrating any 3rd party toolkit or API into your website - Most anything like this is probably trivially simple unless a lot of customization is required.

I guess sorry about the whole phone rant…. but you seriously have no idea how many days of my life I’ve wasted on the phone when clients call unexpectedly and want to just chat about everything unrelated and not billable. I do not like to divulge information for free, since I am still (very clearly) paying for this information myself (via college loans above)! People extract all sorts of crap on the phone and I dislike it severely. What I will provide given a detailed estimate, with my questions answered, a base price level we can discuss, and if it sounds reasonable, then we can go into details and work out a complete estimate breaking down time into project tasks. I’ll either work on a fixed budget and deliverable we agree to or flexibly based on number of hours. I will need a portion of payments upfront before beginning work, anywhere from 25 to 50 percent per our arrangement.

So yeah if you have any other suggestions for additional real life donation incentives or you would like to get the web working for you, I can probably help with or simply just about anything, but I can’t do it for free! Please contact me if you would like me to take a look at a project you are working on and estimate the cost of a solution!

I also have experience posting soap or xml data to the following: Reply.com, DTX, LeadPile, and many more

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