Category: work

I started my first day of work as a mud mixer today. (That’s the common term for brick layer’s assistant). I’m now fully aware of why I went to university.

The guys I work with are nice enough though and the money’s good, so until I build up a little nest egg that I can use to move on to bigger and better things, for the next little while it’ll be hard labour.

I’ve been working on a hockey fan site for the Halifax Mooseheads—http://halifaxherd.ca. When I started, I was a little worried that I might be overdoing it with the amount of red and black that I was putting in the design, but I think it actually turned out quite nicely.

Not only did I come up with a standards compliant design that fit with the motif he was looking for, but I also set him up with a copy Word Press so that he is now completely in control of his content. WordPress is great because of the amount of customization available through plugins (and brute coding—if you’re into that sort of thing). WordPress also makes it extremely easy for updating and modifying your site. It’s hard to believe something so valuable is available as a free download. Sometimes the free choice, is the best choice.

The site owner still has a couple of things he’d like me to help him with, but Moose Crossing is up and running and (in my opinion) it looks pretty sweet. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.

I had an interesting night out last Wednesday evening. I met a potential client to discuss a potential web page project. It started off a little rough with me heading to the wrong Boston Pizza (there are two on the South side but it wasn’t specified which one) anyway when I figured out where I was supposed to be I had an interesting time chatting with a couple of guys from the prospective client company.

I don’t want to get into too many of the details of the conversation but there were a couple of things that hit me the wrong way. They asked me what if I was LDS to which I responded in the affirmative. Technically this is true. They laughed and said something along the lines of, “Good, you’ll fit in perfectly at work—we’re all LDS. We even start each work day with a prayer”.

Fit in perfectly? Somehow I doubted that but I nevertheless nodded and smiled. I thought he was joking about the prayer but as the conversation continued I realized he was completely serious.

The product they are pushing is some kind of natural health supplement. They raved about its amazing ability to cure various mental illnesses including bi-polar and ADD/ADHD. My main contact explained that he believed the primary cause of mental illness was purely not getting the right natural nutrients into the body. He mentioned his strong belief in following the Word of Wisdom (the Mormon doctrine of healthy eating and living) and how their supplement was designed in the spirit of that doctrine. Even as he was extolling the virtues of healthy eating a giant platter of chicken wings materialized on our table. Then another one; then a third one. For someone like me — I don’t eat a lot of meat — it seemed like a rather unhealthy choice for dinner. I suppose ignoring the rule “eat meat sparingly” might not seem at the surface to be extremely unhealthy but it certainly is hypocritical.

I had lots of questions for them about their product and what they wanted me to do as far as their webpage was concerned. I got a fairly bad taste in my mouth when I heard that they had about 50 different sites all designed to help increase the search results of their main page. The image went from bad to worse when they started discussing how there were people out there whom they believed to be connected with the pharmaceutical industry that were trying to give them a bad name. This in itself wasn’t so bad because it made sense that when a company selling a natural supplement encourages someone to go off their prescription medication and take their “natural” product instead, you’re going to upset the pharmaceutical fruit-basket. Not to mention potentially putting someone in serious risk—a thought that caused me to raise an eye-brow.

But what really bothered me was how they reacted to the supposed slander — they fought back with a fax and internet smear campaign painting their accusers as child molesters!

Woah! Hold the phone just a minute guys. Maybe you guys need those morning prayers after all. I honestly don’t know the truth behind any of the libel directed against you, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. However I can’t see how you can feel justified in accusing someone of abusing children when you don’t know straight up about where those stories started. Frankly the whole story sickens me.

I’ve now found myself in somewhat of a moral dilemma. I could really use the money right now, what with being short on roommates and having student loans to pay back but I certainly don’t want to be associated with this hypocritically religious company. The question in my mind now is do I stand up for my integrity or do I help promote a company which operates in such a sleazy manner just for the cold hard cash?

Ironically it’s the Mormon in me that says stick to your virtues and gratefully decline their offer. It’s the greedy bastard in me that says, well just charge a little bit more and if they take the offer then it will be worth it, but if they don’t then I can tell myself that I didn’t really want the job anyway.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Will I be joining them in the hand-basket? I think not.

I picked up some contract work tonight revamping a private company’s web page. They want a complete redesign, including an embedded shopping cart system. I’m pretty excited to be creating their site and I know they are elated.

I went over and talked with the proprietors tonight and we discussed everything from colour schemes and design to user interfaces and secure ordering. Good-bye hot pink table based layout, hello… well something CSS based anyway — I can’t give everything away now, can I?

The thing that was most disturbing was their horror story about the trouble they’ve been going through trying to get their site online. It sounded like there were several overlapping problems which I helped them sort out today.

Now their DNS service (provided by register.com) has totally screwed them over. They insist that they are entitled to put a giant banner ad on the bottom of my client’s site. Of course you’re wondering, did they tell my client up front about the obtrusive ad? Or is this particular DNS service free and using the ad to make back their losses? No, it wasn’t free, and no, they never mentioned that as part of the cost for the overcharged $35 DNS service. Who would expect that their DNS service would put a big banner ad on the bottom of their page? I recommended moving to a new DNS service but my client tells me that register.com claims it will take at least 3 months! for the change to happen.

Whatever you do, don’t buy anything from register.com!

In the meantime I’m going to try and setup their site to forward itself away from the crappy register.com ad.

I’ll also keep readers here updated on whether things really are as complicated as they claim. I’m thinking the three month claim is just a scare tactic to keep my less technically savvy client suffering.

I started my new job on Monday. It involves teaching 11 to 17 year-olds how to create a movie from script-writing and storyboarding to burning the final DVD and creating a fancy package for that DVD to reside in.

In some ways teaching a movie making camp is a lot easier than you might expect. Basically you just tell the kids the basic structure of a movie and tell them to get at it. The hardest part is keeping them on track, writing their scripts or what have you and not playing flash based Internet games all day. It gets progressively easier the farther away from the classroom they are. Once they are out filming you can practically leave them on their own.

You can’t actually leave them on their own though. Oh no. Oh no, no, no.

For one thing, there are these people that work at the University. I use the term work loosely. Basically they show up in the morning, drink some coffee, visit with their friends in the office, and then look for ways of disrupting any movie making from happening on campus.

We were just outside the residence area of the University (the residence is built right into the building), when we became aware of our first complaint. All of a sudden a lone security guard showed up and asked us what was going on. I looked up at the kids filming their mob movie each armed to the teeth with a massive armada of toy guns. Flashbacks of the Medicine Hat Police cocking their shotgun and yelling at me to hit the ground flew through my head. (I’ll share that story some other time).

Nevertheless a little confidence can take you a long way. “Just filming a movie for our New Media Movie Making Camp,” I explained with a smile. I turned away from the guard and instructed the kids to get ready for their next scene.

He just stood there. I asked him if he needed anything else. He repeated back to me who we were trying to get the story straight so he could report back to his supervisor. I could tell he didn’t have the killer instinct that security guards usually exhibit upon receiving their walkie-talkie’s on the first day. Furthermore I was happily surprised that despite his obvious desire to tell us we were doing something wrong, he wasn’t able to compose a reason why the kids’ toy guns posed a security risk.

Later that day, an acquaintance of ours, that works at the University, came to tell us what a ruckus we were causing around campus. Apparently there had been several complaints about our kids and one specifically about their use of guns. But seeing as security didn’t do anything about it, I’m guessing that it was one of the rare occasions when common-sense trumped power mongering and know-it-all attitudes.

We wondered what we could do to prevent any further problems. That same friend suggested (perhaps sarcastically) that we create a couple of signs explaining that the 11 to 17 years olds holding a video camera and pointing caps guns at each other were just taking part in a University sponsored camp and that their weapons are only “props”. She also added to keep up the good work because the disruptions were likely an indication that the kids were having a good time, and besides — they made her day more interesting.

I got the job working as a New Media Movie Camp Instructor. I’ll be working at the University for the month of July giving four, week long camps. I’m pretty excited about it but because it’s still almost two months away I don’t have much to say about it yet.