devangoldstein

I’m no Doctor: Why I Work for Free

February 24, 2011March 26, 2015devangoldsteinLeave a comment

In an old episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry’s changing in a country club locker room and asks a doctor there to check out some spot on his back. When you work in the web, this kind of thing happens all the time. Just about everybody you know will come to you at some point with questions on web projects, presences, and possibilities: What do you think of my (or my organization’s) website? Why is my designer telling me that I shouldn’t have Flash on my site? Should I be on Twitter?

The doctor sets Larry off by telling him to make an appointment instead of taking a quick look at the thing on his back. I understand professional boundaries, but I’m just not like that. In fact, I may be on the other end of the spectrum: I spend between two and ten hours a week, perhaps, either giving people advice on these matters or actually working on their websites—making emergency content changes, getting them set up (and comfortable) with WordPress, and so on.

Once in a while, when the questions are big, complex questions that most non-professionals don’t understand are so big and so complex, I’m tempted to act like that doctor and say, “Hey, if you want to talk, let’s set up a time, get on Skype, and I’ll see when I can do for you.” Mostly, though, I’m pretty good at remembering why I give away so much of my time to so many different people:

I love these people. As often as not, they’re family or very close friends. For example, I recently set up my wife’s website, helping her figure out what content she wanted and how to present it, doing some light image searching and manipulation, and finally building the site out. When it’s your wife, it’s an easy decision, but I’ve done the same thing for maybe half a dozen people in the last year.
I love these organizations. I’m consulting pro bono with the excellent D.C.-area nonprofit Arts on the Block as they get going on a redesign project. Why? Well, yes, my very cool aunt runs the place, so see #1, but also, I love what they do (in brief, introducing creative youth to the worlds of art and work). It’s a great cause, and I’m happy to help.
I know what’s in it for me. When I do right by somebody, my name travels. Sure, it’s rare that I end up with paid work based on my unpaid work. But it has happened. Other intangible benefits include broadening my audience for this blog, for example, getting put into contact with interesting people I wouldn’t otherwise have met, and feeling a little better about asking for help from others who can give it to me. (If I weren’t doing so much work for free, that is, I don’t think I’d feel okay about putting somebody out like that. But if they needed me and I had the time, I would do the same for them, and knowing that makes me feel fine about asking.)
I know what’s in it for them. Helping feels good—even when I’m helping somebody I don’t know all that well. I’m not likely to spend too much unpaid effort on a stranger’s project, should I get cold-called about one, because I like to be able to keep the people and organizations I do hold most dear at the top of my list. But I do find myself spending a lot of time in correspondence with friends of my friends, people who know what I do but don’t know me until our mutual friend says, “Hey, you know Devan? You should ask him about that.”

The world I live in demands from me a certain amount of money, so of course I have to spend most of my time working for pay. But I do try to make time to give the proverbial milk for free. I suspect I’m far from the only one, too, given the web’s crucial role in just about every industry.

That’s the most relevant difference between being pixelworkers and doctors: On any given day, few of us really need to talk to a doctor, whereas tending to our (or our companies’) little corners of the Internet seems to be something a lot of us think about an awful lot of the time.

Macchiato Cowboy: Starbucks & the Gourmet Movement

February 17, 2011April 18, 2016devangoldstein4 Comments

starbucks_mugs — Starbucks’ Tribute to Itself

This morning, hat in hand, a cowboy ordered a drink: “Two-percent espresso macchiato, ma’am.” The honorific belonged wholly to the cowboy, but the precious phrasing came right out of Starbucks’ own system of signification, according to which the default milk is whole and the default macchiato includes syrups and flavorings and, as often as not, whipped cream.

To order what you might call—or might once have called—a “real” or a “proper” macchiato, Starbucks requires cowboys and the rest of us to throw “espresso” into service as a qualifier. An espresso macchiato, we are told, is a “European-style beverage” whose “just enough” may satisfy us—”sometimes.” (After all, any American who spurns sweet, sweet caloric density must be doing so only as an exception.)

This morning, to recap, I heard a cowboy who had some familiarity with the language of a coffee-shop chain’s menu ordering a European-style beverage using once-foreign words with no shame. Forty years after the opening of the first Starbucks, I should not have been surprised, and perhaps it wasn’t surprise that I felt, but the shock of recollection, of the past intruding on the present.

Notwithstanding our brief, post-traumatic regression in the “Freedom Fries” years, we have grown more accepting of foreign foods. I was raised vegetarian, and my childhood memories are pock-marked with incidents of derision over tofu, over aloo palak, over falafel. I grant you that we warm to European influence more readily than to Asian or Indian or Middle-Eastern, but still: To hear this macchiato cowboy place his order is my vindication. It is the moment when my inner Carrie burns down the whole fucking gymnasium.

This morning, on hearing the macchiato cowboy speak, I wondered whether Starbucks is not merely one beneficiary of this movement (as David Kamp might have it), but is rather the social lubricant that made possible its most recent incarnation.

Strange words make us feel strange, at least until some force comes along and rubs our bellies until our nerves subside. Our perception of French culinary superiority intimidated us until Julia Child made words like bourguignonne sound as familiar as they do now. Likewise for Martin Yan and wok, and James Beard and barbecue, perhaps.

In this context, it seems possible that had we not ordered espressi and cappucini and macchiati at the Starbucks counter in the very early 1990s, would we not have been prepared, a few years later, to watch a man swish his ponytail — not judging; I’ve had one, too — and tell us how to procure fennel pollen, which Batali introduced to his viewers in 1995 or 1996. Without being forced to learn the language of ventis and talls and grandes, which Starbucks has smartly memorialized in recent months (as in the photo above), I cannot imagine us supporting the rise of arugula—also featured in Molto Mario‘s first few episodes—let alone those of chipotle, kimchi, rooibos, and hummus.

It seems possible, in other words, that those of us who prefer things as they have become owe Starbucks gratitude for more than just the spread of decent coffee (if not so much their own), that we owe them for their influence on the boundaries of our everyday language, for insidiously softening American masculinity just enough to let gourmet food in the door.

Time Edition vs. Stone Hill Time Card

February 11, 2011March 26, 2015devangoldstein2 Comments

My phenomenally bright and talented friend Nathan Peretic, of Full Stop Interactive, recently got caught up in a fit of uncharacteristic zeal and described Stone Hill Time Card as “a flawless time tracker.”

The contrarian in me bristles at such all-or-nothing language, but I swear that’s not why I’m writing this post documenting the flaws I see in Time Card—or at least, the ways in which the software seems not to be designed for me.

I’m writing this because I started to leave a second comment on Nate’s post, then started to compose an email to the developers, then decided to write the whole thing up here instead.

I want to admit quickly that TimeEdition, which I will continue to use, does crash too often, for example (though I haven’t lost any data), and has interface oddities like a mostly invisible, wholly undocumented AM/PM selector that can take days, nay weeks to decipher. I’m no fanboy, or whatever “fanboy” is in German, the native language in TimeEdition’s place of birth.

But I digress. As I mentioned in my comment on Nate’s post about Time Card, there’s a lot to like, and Nate covers that topic so well I won’t rehearse it here. In the comment, I go on to point out what I’d thought was “the one dealbreaker for me”: the lack of ability to specify separate projects for the same client.

Nate describes Time Code’s primary point of interaction—the “What are you working on?” field—as employing a magic ‘task for project’ syntax, though the help file suggests it’s actually intended as “task for client.” Either way, the lack of ability to specify both project and client for a given task—and to have that specification backed up by a data structure (just as the stuff that comes after the word “for” currently is”)—seems like an oversight.

It could be that, as a freelancer who works largely with agencies, I have a greater need than many to specify different clients as well as different projects. Still, I’m not the only one, and it seems to me that anyone who gets repeat business—either working on staff at an agency or freelancing with “direct” clients—would have the same problem I do.

As I acknowledge in my comment on Nate’s post, there are obvious ways around this problem, like creating and using your own syntax (e.g. “task for project—client,” “project: task for client”), but again, without the data structured behind the scenes, I can’t see using Time Card.

Here’s another issue: When I leave whatever coffee shop or ’40s-themed cocktail lounge I’m working in, I’m often in some kind of hurry, and sometimes I forget to stop my timer. Likewise, at home, I sometimes take a long phone call or have to change my work plans when I’ve just stepped away from my computer for a few minutes, and then I don’t typically go back to my machine to stop the timer. So I regularly have to edit entries after the fact.

In TimeEdition, editing an entry means editing start and end times—easy, since that’s pretty much how most humans keep track of their days. In SHTC, editing an entry means editing start time and duration (in minutes), which seems a needlessly complicated way to go. I’m not into having to figure out how many minutes have elapsed between the time I stopped working and the time I stopped my timer—some number of hours, typically—or how long I worked for based on. That’s the whole reason I use a time tracker to begin with: so I don’t have to do that math. Not that it’s running derivations or anything, but it’s some amount of hassle that I want to avoid.

As an aside, I can’t figure out the use case for the start-time/duration model. Somebody who just needs to fit their schedule to their budget or something? Seems a little shady to me, though it’s common enough in agency environments. And again, I’m probably missing the real purpose of this particular design.

Heavy:Weight::Dense:Deight?

December 11, 2010March 26, 2015devangoldstein2 Comments

After reviewing the comments on my post about the opposite of the word dense, I began to think more about the possibility of a word like weight to describe the spectrum dense <=> rare. (Weight, of course, describes heavy <=> light.)

It occurred to me that dense is probably a latinate word while weight should come from the German, and a bit of research confirmed this hypothesis. Weight comes from the German Gewicht (adj.: wicht) and dense from the Latin—say it with me—densus, meaning not only dense but also close, crowded, and frequent (or so I hear).

Looking up density in German to find an analogue to Gewichte led me to Dichte, with the adjective form dicht. The parallel to the German words concerning weight is quite close, though I should say I don’t know the language well enough to deal with that Ge- prefix.

At any rate, the symmetry between wicht and dicht makes think that a word looking something like deight ought to be in place to describe the spectrum along which things can be relatively more dense or more rare. I think I’ll use it from now on, as clumsy as it sounds.

Incidentally, in a classic case of the English language’s notorious hodge-podgery, although light comes from German as you might expect, heavy arrives in our language by way of Old Norse.