I haven’t walked down the primrose path of freelancing bliss, and I have had my fair share of problems, and dead-beat clients. In fact one of the first gigs I had as a freelance designer landed me a low dollar, high output project where the first payment check bounced, and it took me more than 3 months to finally get paid for the completed site. Everyone has had one of those, and if you haven’t you are either lying, blessed, or haven’t been at that long.

Here’s the thing, if your relationship with the client breaks down so dramatically and to the point that you have to threaten, or actually nuke their site in order to get paid, it’s your fault – not theirs. Yeah, I know some people are just jerks, and expect to get something for nothing, but that’s why there are lawyers and these things called contracts. If you are a freelance anything and working without the umbrella of a contract, you’re asking for trouble. Contracts should be mandatory, especially when you’re talking about intellectual property, like design and artwork. They are pretty much the only thing that keep some people honest. A well drafted contract, and a little bit of public relations can go a long way to keeping everything running smoothly. That’s not to say it still can’t go south.

Using tactics like a CSS, PHP, or an AJAX Killswitches are underhanded, manipulative ways to blackmail someone into seeing things your way. Besides being unethical, they could very likely land you in court on the wrong side of things. There are security risks to consider as well, plus you have to remember to remove the code when the project is over. COnsider too, what might happen when a good client finds out you use this tactic; they might consider this a dishonest practice and bail on you to find someone who they can trust. There are better ways to handle your development process that could negate the need for a killswitch altogether. Besides having a decent contract to fall back on, why not keep a tighter reign on your development files until you get paid? Hosting is cheap, so there’s no reason why a clients site couldn’t be hosted remotely on one of your servers until the project is bought and paid for. Sure they could use a site scraper and get the files, but that doesn’t work for server side languages like PHP and .NET.

In the cases where I have had problems with clients, I can admit that it was 100% my fault. Either there was miscommunication, no or poorly written contract, no deposit, any number of things. Mistakes. Mistakes that I learned from, and there are a great many things I don’t do when I engage clients in a freelance capacity now.

Everyone makes mistakes, so why not work them out and correct the problems rather than compound it by backing your already problem child into a corner?

When I started looking around a few hours ago I did find some domains not in the top results when searching for things like WordPress, but just minutes ago it was the top result. I did run into an error though:

No results because of high load…

Due to excessive load, our servers didn't return results. Please try your search again.

This doesn't really bug me too much since I know 80 freakin' million other folks are doing the same thing I am right now on cuil. Running a search for a domain which I couldn't find in their listing. Granted this is a site that gets less than 1,500 hits a month right now. Google and Yahoo both find it right off the bat, but MSN fails to load it as well. They seem to be getting it under control for the most part, after all today was day zero. A couple of the things I don't like are the lack of being able to search for just images, and not being able to perform "site" searches like on Yahoo, Google, and MSN. These two issues may seem small, but they are two things I use quite often.

So rather than jump on the everything sucks until it doesn't band wagon, I am going to switch to cuil for the rest of the week, and see what happens and if I like it better or not. OMG! Get out! Really? How could I ever go a whole week without Google!? Easy. Besides, how can anyone make an informed decision and critique about anything after using for 3 or for queries? Leave that kind of one-sided, sophomoric decision making for ol' GWB; he's better at it than you anyhow.

I am sure Apple is happy about the problems the folks at cuil are having, since it takes the heat off of them for a while as the world takes aim at the fresh meat online.

I noticed that my machine no longer goes to sleep when I tell it starting about a week or week and half ago. At first I thought it to be that hybrid sleep mode was disabled and hibernation was enabled. Nope. I fiddled and I Googled for an hour to two, and finally chucked in the towel after a day of settings changes to no avail. Last night I found the solution. Resident applications running in the background.

I was looking at my System Configuration settings for Startup (found under Control Panel > Administrative Tools > System Configuration > Startup tab) and what I saw was a laundry list of applications. It didn't take me long to identify some I don't need: Adobe Gamma, Logitech Keyboard Mapper, and a couple others. After I turned these off in the applications settings, magically my computer would go to sleep again. Also given the last thing on the list that I installed before my sleep problem was the software for my Logitech G15 Keyboard, I am pretty sure that is the culprit. This isn't the first time I have run into issues with Logitech's keyboard software. I also have a Wireless Desktop (I forget the designation) that when they came out with new software for I had to revert back to an old version because the security of the application wouldn't let me use quick keys in Photoshop. There was some configuration process for it, but it always failed on the last step and simply hung until I force quit.

Consequently my machine boots a little faster now, but it is still slow as hell to boot up – especially after installing SP 1; which overall has improved the performance.

I still have 24 other apps running resident on my machine, some of which are going to get the boot here soon. This is something that most folks don't really think about and maybe they should. These applications can suck a lot of memory, like Adobe's Acrotray which just waits for you to open a PDF file, and helps it along uses almost 3 mb of RAM – to do nothing 90% of the time. Buh-bye.

These types of problems, memory leaks, over CPU utilization or whatever with these little apps is just poor development. I know Software Development can be hard, I know its hard to build to every possible PC and hardware variation – but these in particular deal directly with the OS. Maybe if all these companies weren't always in such a hurry to get on to the next latest and greatest they could spend the time needed to make a solid app, rather than a mediocre app that needs 15 patches in it's lifespan.

And Microsoft is already talking about Windows 7….

Where it works

I particularly enjoy how it handles the various sounds emanating from my machine. Having the ability to control audio levels from every device connected to it, as well as individual applications is a bonus. This keeps me from being blasted out of my chair while wearing headphones when someone logs in on Google Talk or Messenger.

I would say it is just as fast as my XP desktop too. With a 4 gb thumbdrive installed as RAM Boost, the machine sails right through large Photoshop files and plays all of my favorite games (except one, Halo 2). If the rumors about SP 1 having a performance and memory management gain, Vista will be quite fast. All of the built-in tools I have used perform well, and there seems to be genuine improvements within the operating system itself. I have run into many fewer inherent glitches within the OS; in fact I can’t really think of any. All of my USB devices hook right up and are easily accessible, save one – my Western Digital 500 gb drive. Every now and again it falls off the world and I have to unplug it and turn it off to get it back; something it has never done on XP.

The majority of the applications I use work just fine under Vista as well. WS-FTP hates Vista, and will not run. I initially had trouble with the entire Adobe CS3 suite on an install of Vista Business Ultimate, as well as Flex Builder 2 not working. Those are the only ones I have had trouble with though.

Where it fails

Driver compatibility. Probably 80% or more of the trouble, headaches, and unplanned rebuilds have been due to drivers that flat-out do not work in Vista. I recently made the rookie mistake of updating my audio device drivers through Windows Update – boy that was just dumb. Even though device manager said the device was "working properly", I had no sound. So I rolled back the drivers, and then had to unplug the plugs and rearrange them to get the 5.1 surround to function again. I had to do this originally too, when I first installed it so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise….

I still have no RAID support, but that’s more on ASUS than Microsoft.

Then we come to Halo 2. WTF!? Microsoft sells this game under their own moniker and it hardly works right. Half the time I would get an error message that some Halo app was running and the game would need to be reinstalled; and the other half would work fine 80% of the time or just randomly quit. The I tried to use a LIVE account and hehehe… yeah right. What a joke. Halo dies every time I try and login in to any real or fictional account. After installing the latest patch, the game doesn’t run at all. Way to go guys!

The biggest disappointment is how many incompatibilities in general there are, and when it comes right down to it there is enough blame to go around. It’ snot completely fair to blame Microsoft because every Tom, Dick and Harry is incapable of writing solid drivers for their new OS. Especially an OS so plagued with set-backs and postponed releases; it’s hard to believe that all of these other guys didn’t have adequate time and resources to get their code solid before release time. What lands squarely in their lap is when their own products don’t act right, and fail. Halo is one example, Office 2007 is another. I have fought with Office 2007 and Visual Studio in particular throughout my recent life as a developer. Both products are top notch unless you have trouble. My advice? Clean install. Period. Don’t ever upgrade anything.

All of this garbage combined has led me down the path of deciding if I really want to switch to the Mac platform entirely. I so very seldom have problems on my laptop it’s almost non-existent. The stopping point is the price, but what I guess I have to decide is Microsoft and Windows worth the trouble?

:: side note ::
Maybe your Vista woes are actually nVidia’s fault?