I’m challenging myself to do an act of kindness everyday throughout the month of March. The purpose is to distract myself from my 27th Birthday (4th March) and bring some joy into other people lives.

The last few months have been hard, I’ve had money issues, I’ve had a few scares with my living situation and I’ve been overly stressed/underly appreciated at work. So instead of falling down into a web of depression and grouchiness I thought I’d set myself this mini-challenge and do some good.

I hope I have your support, I’ll report next month with an itinerary of my daily acts.

If you want to give your support why not join in? Why make March the month of positive thinking and acts of kindness, afterall, spring is the end of winter and a step towards summer, beer gardens and holidays in the sun.

In the early hours of Sunday, 22nd February 2009, a savage virus called ‘CSV’ began to infect millions of websites worldwide.

Originating from an unknown source in the UK at around 2am GMT, The “Comic Sans” Virus ‘CSV’ started corrupting the CSS files of websites through a server loophole, leaving them defaced with the “Comic Sans” typeface.

By 9am GMT, an estimated 10 million websites were infected with ‘CSV’, by which time the suspected ‘loophole’ in the servers configuration, at the originating London Exchange center, was plugged.

By 9:31am GMT, over 5 million websites were returned to their original state, leaving the rest still infected with ‘CSV’.

A patch download has been created to remedy any websites still infected. This patch can be downloaded at the bottom of this article.

Evidence of infection

Apple

Estimated infection time: 3 hours

Microsoft

Estimated infection time: 6 hours

UK newspapers

Times Online

Estimated infection time: 1 hour

Telegraph

Estimated infection time: 2 hours

Friends

Chrisg (Chris Garrett)

Estimated infection time: 15 minutes

Bronco (Dave Naylor)

Estimated infection time: still infected

Blog Storm (Patrick Altoft)

Estimated infection time: still infected

Reaction

Dave Naylor from Bronco: “I woke up to the news that the CSV infected our main website. After a few moments of deliberation, we decided to take action, much against the wishes of my wife who actually liked the change.”

Mogens Elsberg from Microsoft: “I see this little f***** has come back to bite us in the a**! Maybe we should have scrapped VINCENT CONNARE’s 1995 font for a less volatile alternate. Thanks for the heads up Frog”

John Smith, Chief Executive of BBC worldwide: “We think the British public will welcome the change, we may revert the fix in the next couple of days.”

The Patch

If your website seems to have been infected by the CSV you can manually patch your website by downloading the file below:

CSV patch 1.21, Multi-OS compatible: CSV patch.jpg

A stock photograph should be 1) cheap 2) royalty-free 3) usable

Check this photo out…

Photographers description

A husband reads his paper as the rain pours down on him from a leaky roof. The wife glares back at him for his lack of concern. There is no digital enhancement on this photo.

My thoughts…

Firstly WTF! Seriously W.T.F! Who in gods name would use this picture? Where would you use it? How would you use it??? The ‘photographer’ entitled this photo ‘Kitchen Rain’. Do people search for such an image? Oh I’m looking for a photo of a kitchen where in it’s raining!!!

“A husband reads his paper as the rain pours down on him from a leaky roof”
Does rain ‘pour’ down from a ‘leaky roof’? No! It drips!

“The wife glares back at him for his lack of concern”
No way is that his wife. She looks way too young, and may I say, way out of his league. She has an umbrella up inside, now that’s asking for the gods to come down hard on her, it’s bad luck! Plus, you can tell it’s not raining where she’s standing, and why doesn’t she do something?

“There is no digital enhancement on this photo”
I can believe that!

Downloads

This photo has had over 400 downloads – WTF!

Rating

Checkout these ratings of this photo:

WTF WTF WTF!

WTF!

I just don’t get it, I really don’t, I’m lost.

What was that? You want to download it? …… grrrr fine! Here >

Finally you launch a website, the client is over the moon with the way the project went (due to your expert project management) and you have a few celebratory jars down at the local. Life couldn’t be better… until…

Time passes…

Time passes and you’re really benefiting from these new processes you introduced. Projects are running on time, you’re sustaining a healthly cashflow and you even catch yourself finishing early on a Friday, safe in the knowledge that you have everything under control. Then you get an email out of the blue from that client those website launched 6 months ago. Without opening it you know it’s bad from the subject line…

‘A few tweaks to my website’, or ‘I’ve noticed a bug on my website’.

You open the email and surprise surprise it’s from ‘that’ happy client you worked for 6 months ago with a list of 25 changes they want applying to their website!

*Explicit explicit… not fit to print… * f*** s*** b******

‘Unfortunately’ you may be obiliged to carry out these changes because you promised an ‘error free’ website or even a ‘100% satisfaction guarantee’ when you initially pitched for the work.

Inevitably this is work you can’t charge for, work you’ll have to squeeze in after work, possibly late on a Friday! So what do you do? Cry? Just do it? Well yes you don’t really have a choice do you.

Learn from your mistake

One thing you can introduce in your contract is a 14 Day Grace Period. A 14 Day Grace Period gives your client 14 days to test their website to the hills, report any bugs and get it exactly how they want it, without incuring additional costs.

The advantages of a 14 Day Grace Period can be

1. Signoff - Giving the client a limited time period in which to report errors back to you enables you to get any changes completed quickly. Once done it can be archived and you can forget about it.
2. Extra revenue – Once the 14 Day Grace Period has elapsed it’s in your right to charge the client for any changes they want making.
3. Stay on schedule – Your current work commitments don’t get affected and you can stay on schedule. Incuring these unforseen changes to old projects can have knock-on effects on current projects.
4. Improve client relationship and retention – These things happen in every project, something gets missed and it needs doing. Laying out the rules at the beginning can help to prevent making a relationship from turning sour. If your client wants something doing on the website they know they have to pay for it.
5. Prevent Scope Creep – Scope creep is hard to prevent, but this at least this enables you to get paid for the extra work you do.

This ‘14 Day Grace Period’ can be flexible in duration if you wish but we have always worked to this time frame as it seems to suit both parties best.

Do you enforce a ‘period of allowable changes’?
Do you suffer from clients squeezing extra work out of you for free?
Do you find yourself bending over backwards to service a low value client?

Then let us know, we’d love to hear you stories, and even your solutions if you have any.

Here’s the challenge, the image of the frog on the right isn’t coloured in. The trick here is to use the Magenta shape on the left to colour the frog in, only, we need the frog to appear GREEN!

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Stare at the Magenta shape on the left for 60 seconds
2. Then stare across at the frog on the right.
3. Voila!

Click on the image below to view an enlarged version as this makes this experiment easier to complete.

This is a simple experiment to show the phenomena called Qualia.

Also Magenta isn’t a colour.

Several million dollars, and almost half a year later the new Pepsi logo was finished by the fine designers at the Arnell Group.

Time to mock

Personally we think they have failed in their attempt at a “Quantum Leap” in their new logo and branding for the drinks industry, so we feel it just deserving that we gather this funny collection from around the web to indeed ‘mock them’.

Pepsi logo blow at life

Copyright: Lawrence Yang

Alice in Pepsi land

Psilocybe

Pacman

Credit: All illustrations and Pepsi logo copyright to their respective owners.

Currently we have around 200 genuine followers and contacts through Twitter that we communicate with frequently. Today we heard of this new pyramid-style Twitter scheme that can potentially bring in up to 15,625 new followers to your account without the need to follow them back, all within a month.

You can see how it works by visiting http://tweetergetter.com/thefloatingfrog (don’t sign up unless you want to follow loads of strange people).

Bethemiddleman.com is a project we’re currently working on to provide the housing market a FREE option when selling and buying. Read more about it here.

Currently the project is in full flow and it looking fantastic. Whilst we wait patiently for it’s arrival, we have launched a new holding page to enable users to pre-register and get FREE access to the site and all it’s features.

The new page gives an immediate look and feel as to how bethemiddleman.com will look like. Features on the page include:

Member signup

I simple signup form that will alert users once the site goes live.

Beta users signup

To enable a bug free, feature rich website we want beta users to signup and help us make bethemiddleman.com to best it can be.

Press signup

We are encouraging any press interest to contact us directly about the project with this signup.

Information

Simple targeted ‘thickbox style’ popups details what the service offers to the different user groups.

Twitter feed

Bethemiddleman.com is twittering updates on the project and related news with the latest twitter featured on the page.
Simple targeted ‘thickbox style’ popups details what the service offers to the different user groups.

Commission saving calculator

A simple calculator that shows you roughly how much commission you’ll save with bethemiddleman.com by not paying estate agent fees.

Screenshot

My agency 9xb recently moved premises and required a full refit. Part of the existing setup was a rather blank white wall with a red fire alarm top center of it. This area was to be the reception wall that clients and guests would see when entering the building so we decided to go crazy and generate some artwork to fill the space and brighten the room up. The simplest thing to do would be to paint it, but we’re not like that here, we don’t mind taking risks and thinking outside the box.

Before the refit started we took a couple of shots of the wall from different angles and mocked up a few ideas.

Options whittled down

Option 1: Millions of sheep

An illustration of hundreds of sheep with one cheeky-chappy chilling out.

Option 1: Millions of sheep – closeup

Option 2: Crazy phychodelic sheep

Seriously bright, seriously mental.

And the winner is…

The crazy phychodelic sheep of course!

Another angle mocked up

The final file ended up being 1.4gb in size, measuring 3.5m by 2.2m. Sheep image from istockphoto, printed out and an industrial high res scan created, merging a phychodelic rainbow as a Photoshop Smart-Object then sent to printers who came a week later to fix it to the wall. I’ll get a real photo uploaded asap.

Previous digital art for 9xb

View 9xb digital art post here

Scope creep (also called focus creep, requirement creep, feature creep, and sometimes kitchen sink syndrome) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence that is to be avoided.

Typically, the scope increase consists of either new products or new features of already approved product designs, without corresponding increases in resources, schedule, or budget. As a result, the project team risks drifting away from its original purpose and scope into unplanned additions. As the scope of a project grows, more tasks must be completed within the budget and schedule originally designed for a smaller set of tasks. Thus, scope creep can result in a project team overrunning its original budget and schedule.

Source: Wikipedia

Write a specification

An important part of any project. Include the features they’re going to get and the features they’re not. We’d recommend a more detailed specification for larger projects and a summary style specification for smaller projects.

Set realistic timescales

In our experience projects can take up to twice as long to complete as you original planned for. Cater for unforeseen factors on top of the estimated project timescales. Meetings, technical delays and general unforeseen circumstances inevitably extend timescales.

Milestones

Large projects require milestones to be implemented. A milestone help a client digest bite sized chunks of a project to cast feedback at that stage to ensure the specification has been adhered to. Staged payments can also be part of these milestones to help cashflow.

Managing eager clients

If a client is constantly on the phone to you, or a member of your development team then this will have knock-on effects to the project timings and the deliverables. Politely advise them that this time would be best spent on the project and to put any RFC’s (Request for Changes) in an email.

Request for Changes (RFC’s)

A major component of Scope Creep is a client micro managing their project. Simply, if it’s not in the specification then tough. If they have changes that can wait, and are extras then instigate a RFC document. At the end of the project, or a milestone, you can assess the RFC document and charge the client extra according to the requests. This saves time, earns you extra revenue and keeps the project on track.

Wrap up

Keep things tight and professional, while being flexible and personal. A client wants that personal touch, you want to get paid. Follow these simple procedures and your professional relationship will prosper.