IE Voodoo Doll

Published • 20 Aug 2009

About a month now ago I began a podcast with the esteemed Andy White, focusing on the developments and whatnot of the web and tech scene from a web developer, designer and entrepreneurial perspective. The show, titled A Capital Duo Talk Tech now needs renaming as we bring on our third panellist, Teresa Watts.

Rather than going into further detail on the show and previous episodes, I’ll let the fourth episode do the talking.

IE voodoo doll

Show synopsis

We bring you episode four, where we welcome our third panellist, who shall be joining us in the future! After discussing Teresa’s awesome hand-made IE voodoo doll we move onto a good chat about our business endeavours and employment experiences. We cover Andy’s business and his lessons learned since closing it end 2008 (focus, cash-flow and buffer savings, the pros and cons of outsourcing, dedicated working positions) before moving onto Teresa’s and Pascal’s experiences in in-house and freelance positions. Issues here include focus and structure but restrictive and limiting in manner, becoming bored by working on the same thing long-term, though however how it was a good experience — we both learned what we did and didn’t like doing.

Finally we all shed our wisdom on the lifestyle that is freelancing. Here we go over the ability to vet clients (yay!), communicating with clients, the importance of networking and being actively involved in your industry’s community (Twitter, LinkedIn, SIGs, conferences, speaking, …), pricing, separating work environment from the rest of your living space, and having an active web presence. Oh, and as usual Pascal makes a fool of himself, but nicely gets a stab back at Andy.

We’ve got interviews confirmed with Donna Benjamin on open education and Ian Cairns of Development Seed on Open Atrium — stay tuned. On that note actually, Pascal has set up Open Atrium on open.klepas.org and has a guest testing group set up. Email or @ him on Twitter to get an account and have a play.

Recorded post-show, this week’s ‘fuck you of the week’ goes to Apple for it’s failings in saving and syncing voice recordings via the Voice Memo app properly and ‘the tip of the cap’ goes to Teresa for her IE voodoo doll — seriously, check it out!

Again, for ease of reference (in order of appearance):

  1. Teresa’s website
  2. Teresa’s IE voodoo doll tutorial
  3. Teresa’s blog
  4. WSG announce mailing list, to stay up-to-date with web-related events
  5. Nick Fink’s list of user experience events (world-wide)
  6. Open Source Developers’ Conference — Brisbane 25–27 Nov.
  7. UX Australia — Canberra, 26–28 August (registrations still open till the day!)
  8. AusTender gov’t website
  9. Australian Web Industry Association
  10. Port 80 — informal meeting of web industry folk
  11. Moo.com — custom business cards and stationery
  12. bicubic.com — wholesale print service

Closing notes

The intro theme is the opening of track 26 of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts III. It is licensed under a Creative Commons license and available from the NIN website and in full on various peer-to-peer networks (legally of course given its license). The show otherwise is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia license — take, share and be merry. That’s all this week. Stay tuned!

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