EchoD

A website is a long-term investment. As a client you are investing in your company image and a global presence. Handled properly you can extend your target audience to an area much greater than what you could achieve through any other multimedia or print marketing campaign, and it will cost much less than trying to reach that audience through any other medium. Why is it, then, that small town businesses think $250 – $500 is a suitable price for a website?

As a designer, I also make a large investment in every website I create—no less than 40 hours of my time. Additionally I have four years of schooling, ten years of experience, and thousands of dollars of equipment and software. Oh, and I need to eat. I also wouldn’t mind living in a place of my own again. A car would be nice, too.

I can’t afford any of this on the $250 a week businesses expect me to work for. In fact, if I were an employee at a business—without any overhead for things like equipment, supplies, services, and anything else required for me to do what I do—I would be paid more. I would be paid more flipping burgers. So why is it that businesses expect me, an individual with marketable skills providing a service they desire, to work for less than minimum wage?

Ignorance is the best explanation I can come up with. Your average small business website can start around $5,000 and only goes up from there. Expect to pay more if you’re looking to hire a company. Some freelancers even turn down contracts less than $15,000.

Sure, you can find some kid to throw together a website in FrontPage for $250, but remember this: you get what you pay for. If you’re not willing to invest in your designer, don’t expect your designer to invest in you.

One year ago I made an entry bidding farewell to two-thousand and six. As I had hoped, I managed to drift through 2007. In fact, not much changed within me. Sure, I now work full time. But that’s little more than a replacement for school as something to do. I still, generally, live life vicariously. I fear it’s going to take somebody new to break me out of this shell. Here’s to you, whoever you are.

Looking back at that old blog entry, I made a few predictions for 2007. Amidst a product shortage, Nintendo has managed to sell near 500,000 more units of their Wii console than Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Of which I have contributed one purchase to each. Sony’s PlayStation 3 is still more than five million units behind both Nintendo and Microsoft. I’ll mark that as a prediction come true.

I also predicted that music would experience a revolution. It did not. In my opinion there were no notable releases in the past year. I am, however, looking forward to at least three 2008 releases: Disturbed, Slipknot, and Ra.

With Apple’s release of a new generation of iPods, the iPhone, and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), they are more in the spotlight than ever. Combine that with the flop that is Windows Vista driving customers away from Microsoft… I’ll give myself this one as well.
In fact, I’ve gone as far as to purchase a Macintosh for myself. To add more to that shock, after moving in early December I have yet to bring my Windows desktop to the new place.

The last real prediction I made was that there would be scientific breakthroughs in the medical field. While I’ve not followed this closely, I remember hearing of a way to create stem-cell-like cells without using embryos. I figure that’s fairly significant. I’ll mark that as true.

Three out of four isn’t bad. Now, I’m not going to make any predictions about 2008. Anything I could consider is so unstable it’s not worth the effort.

Good luck to all of you in 2008, I certainly hope it’s better than last year. At least for my sake.

Farewell and welcome, loss and gain, end and beginning. The year of two-thousand and six has come to an end, and two-thousand and seven is in its infancy. So much has happened, so much changed, and we continue our lives.In 2006…
I lost everything I knew, and found life in hope. I found myself engaged to be married and heartbroken. I questioned life, its purpose, and meaning. I opened myself up and withdrew in to a cell—my own little world. I lost a grandfather, and watched as the sorrow united a family once divided.

Most importantly, though, is that I found things within myself that assured me everything would turn out for the best. It’s not time for me to awaken yet, and it’s best if I just drift for now.

So it’s time for a new year, a clean slate. Time to be reborn. Who knows what 2007 is going to bring? Hopefully some good music and kick-ass games, if nothing else. For the most part, 2006 sucked in both of those categories.

Predictions: Nintendo’s Wii is going to win the third generation of console wars. The music scene will experience the revolution that’s been on the brink of exploding for the past ten years. Apple is going to set itself on the path for becoming a much greater threat to Microsoft as Windows Vista fails to deliver. Likewise, Linux will also become a major competitor in the OS wars. Major scientific breakthroughs are going to be in the Medical field, especially when it comes to cures and vaccines for disease and viruses. People are going to wake up and figure out that global warming is a naturally occurring cycle, even though it may have been slightly accelerated by greenhouse gases—of which cows are still a primary contributor to.

Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

I presented my portfolio ( edahlgren.echod.net ) to a panel of four instructors(grading) and a classroom full of students(watching) at 2:00 PM Wednesday. I bombed it. Stumbled over words, didn’t mention things I had wanted to, and completely forgot to pass around the three examples of code that would have pushed my number of presented pieces up to the minimum requirement of ten. I rambled on for half an hour like this, feeling like an idiot the whole time. But, I must have been having fun or something, because time just flew.

I based my presentation around the fact that many developers today seem to be more focused on functionality and presentation than the validity of code. Writing valid code isn’t hard, and if you think about it for even a short while, you can find a way to make it do what you want without sacrificing your function or design. Besides, what’s an extra 30 minutes on a project that is already 30 to 300 hours in the making?

After I sat down and had a chance to realize just how much I forgot to mention, and then how long I was actually presenting for, I decided… as long as I pass, I don’t really care what I get for a grade. I made mistakes, it happens. I’m not the greatest public speaker. I might be able to weave my tongue in small groups and one-on-one conversation, but I go retarded in front of groups. Especially when I’m asked to change some things about my presentation the night before I have to present.

Today Dave sat down with those of us who presented this week and went over our grades, the comments the panel of instructors made, and generally told us what we did wrong and what we did right. When he presented me with my 98.4%, all I could say was “That’s it?” to which he replied “Fuck you, buddy. You broke my record” —the previous record of 97.3% was held by Dave, with the current record by James Sek at 98.7%.

I may not hold the record for highest portfolio grade, but I’m still the first to present a full Web portfolio. It seems I’ve set a standard that’s above average. Well, my family is proud of me, I’m in shock, and I still don’t feel my work is all that great. Then again, it’s my work. I’m always my worst critic.

When it comes to my work, I know the mistakes I’ve made. By the time I’m half-way through a project, I have learned so much that I know there are much more efficient and faster ways to accomplish what I’ve done. It takes a lot of my strength to complete the project and not start it from scratch. I still end up tossing a lot of projects I do just for fun because of what I learn in the process. But, learning is half of the fun.

Anyways, it’s time for me to relax. I’ll be in Jamestown shortly after noon tomorrow, so call me there if you need to get a hold of me.

— Eric “EchoD” Dahlgren

I will be presenting my portfolio to a panel of instructors within the next twenty days for grading. It’s crunch time… This means that, very soon, I need to have ten projects finished. I need to have them presentable in a hard-copy portfolio and, to meet my own personal standards, I need to have them coded to a point where they’re at least functional.

At the moment, I have the following…
[Concept] EchoDesign :: http://www.echod.net/unpublished/
[Concept] First Covenant Church :: http://www.echod.net/designs/1stcov/
[Concept] Jeremy’s portfolio :: http://www.echod.net/designs/jdahlgren/
[Concept] Jeremy’s portfolio :: http://www.echod.net/designs/jdahlgren2/
[Final design, Content in Progress] Personal Portfolio :: http://edahlgren.echod.net/redesign/

Let’s just say that I feel I have a lot of work to do in a very short period of time. If only I were more confident with my work!
Oi!

Any feedback is much appreciated! You can either comment using the link below, message me on AIM (sn: e2pw ), or send an email to edahlgren@erieit.edu.

While this is not my article, nor does it concern EchoD.net at all, I did find it humorous.  The original headline I read was “Demon for sale… any takers?” — to which my first thought was “Hell yes!”, until I saw the price tag.

http://www.uk-bug.net/Article1348.html

Demon, once the largest UK ISP is up for sale by owners Thus.

Founded in 1992 Demon was acquired by the Scottish telecom in 1998 for £6.66 million (a unique number for Demon!) but has suffered in the broadband boom and saw it’s profits fall 15 percent last year. It’s home broadband business boasts 50,000 users which contrasts to the 180,000 subscribers when bought by Thus, but still managed a profit of £27.7 million.

Analysts put a valuation of £15m to £20m on Demon’s domestic business, as Thus plans to retain the small and medium sized business customer base. It’s Dutch counterpart, Demon Netherlands, was sold to KPN earlier this year for £47m.

Quoted from the linked article.

BSOD.  That was most of my experience.  Not only did Vista lock me out of my very own My Documents directory, but it crashed when I tried to copy a large directory from one drive to the other.  In fact, to get most of my files moved, I had to boot to a Knoppix CD.  Now, I’m well aware that I was running a Beta 2 copy of the software, rather than a Release Candidate—RC1 refused to be a bootable CD, so I couldn’t install from that.

Luckily, I had a Norton Ghost backup from which I could restore.  Five minutes later and I had a fresh install of Windows XP.

I never did get the video drivers working.

I attempted an upgrade to Windows Vista Beta 2 Customer Preview yesterday. While I could have gone for Release Candidate 1, I went with what I had—RC1 comes next. I did this for a few reasons, the first being that I wanted to give Vista a try. However, I have also been needing to go through a reformat for quite some time, and keep putting it off. Since Vista isn’t quite stable yet, Windows XP is coming back before too long.

The first problem I ran into during the upgrade was Antivirus software. Windows Vista changes a lot of things, so I had to uninstall all of my Norton products. From there, the upgrade seemed to go smoothly, but I’m not sure. I set it up and went to school. When I came home, Vista was installed. So, the upgrade process is pretty smooth—or, automated, at least.

My second problem involved video drivers. I downloaded the ATi beta drivers for Vista and tried to install them. Actually, that’s as far as I’ve managed to get in 12 hours. I’m still trying to get Vista to play nice with my X800 and it isn’t happening. To make matters worse, my monitor refresh rate is stuck at 60Hz because of it. Needless to say, I’m not spending too much time in front of this flickering hulk. Hyper-sensitive eyes are bad sometimes.

The security prompts with Windows asking “Are you sure you want to do that?” are probably as annoying as Clippy from Microsoft Office. MS seems to know how to make things annoying, but I haven’t figured out if there’s a way to bypass this yet. I know under Linux you’re expected to provide a root password to make changes for security, and to make sure you know what you’re doing (and are authorized). This can be bypassed through running as root, among other methods. I don’t believe I can run as Administrator under Vista, but I have spent more time trying to get the video drivers working than convincing Windows it doesn’t need to nag me.
I see this annoying many an end user, but I also see it helping ever so slightly. If people have to deal with nag screens every time they go to screw up their computer, they might be less likely to try deleting the entire contents of their C:\ drive while the computer is running. Sadly, I can’t even open the device manager without a nag.

The new directory system isn’t bad. It’s very similar to what Apple has done with OS X. Actually, it seems that Vista has borrowed a lot from Apple and various Linux distributions. Too bad they didn’t borrow the Linux portion of it like Apple did.
Perhaps my biggest issue with new Windows releases is the bloat. It seems that, rather than starting from scratch, Microsoft builds on what’s already there. Sure, starting over takes time, but you can do things differently where you made mistakes before. When you just add steaming shit to a cold pile, you’re building on top of flawed code and several thousand patches. If Microsoft keeps this up, Windows is going to crumble under its own weight before too long. Come on, Vista requires 15GB of free hard drive space as it is. I have a copy of Linux that fits nicely on a single CD-ROM complete with an Office suite comparable to MS office—which can be run from said CD-ROM without installing a single thing. An OS under 700MB, and Microsoft is requiring 15GB.

Vista needs work, Microsoft needs to consider a few things, and people who want to give that Linux CD a try—to get a taste of Linux without making a single change to their computer—need to contact me.

So, final projects are over with. Procrastinating until the last minute kicked me in the ass again, but I managed to complete everything and meet requirements. The semester ended yesterday, so I should have only two more remaining. This gives Jimm and I a four day weekend, over which we work at least two of the days. We both began working at the Golf Pro Shop for the lower golf course at Peek’n Peak last weekend. A fairly mindless job, but it pays what few bills we have until something better comes along (see: http://www.echod.net ).

Which brings me to my next topic of rambling. There’s a lot of stuff I need to do, or would like to do. This includes creating the website for Echo Design Studio, acquiring a drivers license, finding freelance web design customers, and so on. There are also the long-term goals of finishing school, finding a decent job, having a family, helping design a video game, and having my own business to keep in mind.
For some strange reason I was under the impression that life would get easier as I got older, not more complex.

That’s not even half of it, but it’s nearing time for bed. I have to be to work at 7 AM, so it’s time to consider crashing.

Until next time, Come What(Ever) May.

It’s my server, and I’ll do what I want.

This blog is intended as a way for friends to keep up with my life—knowing that I dislike popular blogging tools such as MySpace—as well as a way for customers and potential customers to see that we at Echo Design Studio really are just a bunch of people who like to have fun and enjoy what we do. Thus, I offer to you a glimps into my life. I can’t promise it will always be happy. I can’t promise everybody is always going to like it, but I can promise honesty. That’s something that both friendships and business relationships can benefit from.

That’s it for now. Expect updates in the future—they may be frequent, they may not. You might find information regarding current projects, or my favorite beer. Who knows?