Three to One (Freelancing)
When you lookup freelancing, you always come across the comment that you need to figure your billable hours at a thee to one ratio to unbillable hours. Billable hours are of course the time you can charge your clients for. Unbillable hours are those you have to put in but cannot directly bill. In other words if you actually get paid 20 hours a week, you are working 60 hours a week. But how did they come up with that three to one figure?
If you are self-employed, you actually have three jobs.
The first job is whatever you are doing to make your money: writing, photography, webpage design, etc.
The second is all the time spent looking for those jobs: visiting potential clients, keeping up your webpage, making phone calls, job research, etc.
And the third job you have to do is run your business. Running your business is of course all those things you have to spend time and money on to be in business: Keeping records, doing your taxes, buying supplies, etc.
So you have three jobs, each of which takes up approximately one third of your time, but you can only bill for the first of them. So you have to bill three times what you want to earn per hour. It is simple arithmetic actually.
Writing
I thought I would write about writing. There is this blog that I try to write an article for at the beginning of each week. I am taking a Professional Writing class at the university. I often post on several forums. So ,I do do a bit of writing.
If I write a lot it is easy, but this past week was spring break at the U, so I have not done much of anything. That seems to make it very hard to get started. Oh, it was not entirely lassitude on my part, I was down with a pretty nasty cold the first half of the week and as a result my energy is still pretty low.
It was hard deciding what to write about this week because several things came up that gave me ideas for articles. Many people think coming up with things to write about is difficult. My experience is that I always have something to write about, too many things to be able to write about all of them. The hard parts are getting started, and editing the piece once it is written.
Now if someone would come along and pay me to do this…
Keeping track of tunes (Or what happened to honesty in advertising)
I used to catalog my CD’s with a freeware program, but that was back when I was running Windows 98. Moving back to today, I have been looking for that program, the name of which I do not remember, or another that will do what I want.
I found something that has the same interface that one did. It is called “Sundry Tools”. However, it is not exactly what I want. You see, while I still listen mostly to CD’s, over the years I have aquired a couple of CD Changers and would like something that would keep track of what is loaded in which slot of the changers as well as what is on the shelf. I would also like to be able to print out a list of what is on the changer including track information. Of course, cataloging the mp3’s on the computers would be nice. Especially, as it would let me get rid of duplicate copies, but there seems to be a lot of freeware that does that.
I have tried about ten, so called, freeware programs so far. None of them do what I want. I especially like the ones that tell you that you can only load 10 volumes after you have taken the time to figure out how to use the software and loaded those ten volumes. They are con-artists, but stupid ones, a smart one would let you load a couple of hundred volumes so you almost have to buy the program because you have so much time and effort invested.
The other type I really really like is the unlimited use free version; of course if you want to do anything but load your data into it, you have to send them money for the “Professional” version. There is one of those that looks like it will do what I want; but I will be damned if I will sent them my money. If they had made no bone about the crippled version being a trial version, I may have bought the real version, but after I already feel cheated?
We seem to live in a strange world. Nothing is what they say it is. They assume right up front that you are out to cheat them, so they cheat you first. Actually, the reason they assume you are going to cheat them is because they have no qualms whatsoever about cheating you.
RAID Failure
March 1, 2009
I had the RAID-5 array on my main computer fail. Apparently it dropped the zero drive from the array. Now the drive showed good, it just was not in the array. I could not rebuild the array from the Perc-5i’s BIOS for some reason, so I put in an old 40 GB drive with Windows XP Pro on it, and set the computer to boot from that drive.
Then I loaded the raid drivers and the Storage Manager software so I could access the array. I was able to rebuild the array, but it came up unformatted. Everything was gone from that 965 gigabyte virtual drive. Now that is not how it is supposed to work. You are supposed to be able to rebuild it back from a single drive failure to just exactly like it was.
However, either through my ignorance or something basically wrong with the expensive SAS raid card. As I am writing this I am copying files from the backup server to the new array. That will probably take all night. Then I have to load Windows XP64 and all the software I had on the system. That kind of grips me. I mean why should I run an array if I cannot restore it back to what it was without spending hours and hours reloading and restoring files and software?
If I had all that stuff on the three separate drives I would only have lost 1/3 of it at the most. Sure the array is somewhat faster than a single drive, but is that worth having to reload everything?
Hopefully the cheap IDE RAID-1 array on the backup server is more stable. I kind of think maybe the frequent restarts that I have been doing since I discovered I was using 200% more electricity than in 2007 last summer may have had something to do with the failure. I will start just turning the computer off at night again, I guess
On the other hand I have not had a computer failure in several months; it may just have been my turn. Very high tech computers like this workstation have a lot more things that can go wrong with them than simpler desktop computers.
The luckily I backed up all my critical data at noon and the failure was at about 2pm. So I guess I cannot berate the Fates about this.
March 2, 2009
Whew! I got everything loaded by 4am. Unfortunately there turned out to be something wrong with the XP64 installation. That meant I had to go back to start, and could not pass go on the way.
I fiddled around and produced a new nLite CD with the drivers for the SAS raid card, and unattended install. Once I had that CD in hand it only took about 15 minutes to install Windows XP Professional x64. Then I spent several hours reloading all that software most of which still needs to be configured the way I like it. I did get email and the browser up and running without losing too much. Actually the old set up was never a really clean install.
Anyway, it is 9pm and I am going to call it a day. Tomorrow I will have to run some errands and do some cramming for the midterm exam in my class at the U.