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For those times when Skem9 goes down and we need a back-up plan....

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Permalink Reply by Brandon P. on April 16, 2012 at 3:57am

I don't really like the way oDesk handles contracts. If you get picked for a job, you get an email that says "Contract for $job Started on 04/16/12," and there's a link that takes you to a page with the same thing. This means I have to manually get in touch with the person who posted the ad. It's almost as though oDesk expects there to be no communication between contractor and contractee, like I should just get to work with no information, and eventually get in touch when I'm done.

Also, if anyone were to start a freelancing site that blocked non-American traffic, American developers would be very pleased. But contractees probably wouldn't.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 17, 2012 at 12:35am

Barbara Mc said:

Sorry. Hope this one will be better. Mine has just been one of those frustrating, can't accomplish anything or do anything to please anyone weeks. What's up, anything I can do?

AnGella said:

It's been a hell of a week.

Apparently I can't trust my husband.
I'm kinda depressed.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 17, 2012 at 12:36am

Brandon P. said:

I don't really like the way oDesk handles contracts. If you get picked for a job, you get an email that says "Contract for $job Started on 04/16/12," and there's a link that takes you to a page with the same thing. This means I have to manually get in touch with the person who posted the ad. It's almost as though oDesk expects there to be no communication between contractor and contractee, like I should just get to work with no information, and eventually get in touch when I'm done.

Also, if anyone were to start a freelancing site that blocked non-American traffic, American developers would be very pleased. But contractees probably wouldn't.

I never tried one of those sites. I'm not much use for anything other than design tho.

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Permalink Reply by Brandon P. on April 21, 2012 at 3:34am

AnGella said:

I never tried one of those sites. I'm not much use for anything other than design tho.

Don't bother trying them. It's generally attracts cheap people who lie in their ads and don't want to pay you for the work you weren't told you would be doing.

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Permalink Reply by Brandon P. on April 21, 2012 at 3:57am

I'm playing around with Django and PostgreSQL. I'm relatively familiar with Python as a non-web-programming language. I use Python for things like data-mining and automation and whatnot.

I'm starting to get into Awesome Window Manager. I can control it almost entirely with my keyboard, and tile windows really easily, which is convenient when working with a bunch of terminals.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 22, 2012 at 1:21am

Hehehe, I get those types now and then without a middle man site. lol

Brandon P. said:

AnGella said:

I never tried one of those sites. I'm not much use for anything other than design tho.

Don't bother trying them. It's generally attracts cheap people who lie in their ads and don't want to pay you for the work you weren't told you would be doing.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 22, 2012 at 1:23am

Maybe I am just tired... Tiled windows? What language are you speaking? lol

Brandon P. said:

I'm playing around with Django and PostgreSQL. I'm relatively familiar with Python as a non-web-programming language. I use Python for things like data-mining and automation and whatnot.

I'm starting to get into Awesome Window Manager. I can control it almost entirely with my keyboard, and tile windows really easily, which is convenient when working with a bunch of terminals.

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Permalink Reply by Brandon P. on April 22, 2012 at 1:56am

https://www.google.com/images?q=tiled+windows

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Permalink Reply by Brandon P. on April 22, 2012 at 3:50am

AnGella said:

Hehehe, I get those types now and then without a middle man site. lol

I'm typically pretty good at spotting and avoiding them. But...

I answered an ad on oDesk last week saying they need some CSS/layout bugs fixed in their Wordpress ecommerce site. I should have ran when I saw "ecommerce" and "wordpress" in the same sentence. But I figured, it's just front-end stuff, I won't even have to look at the abomination of PHP spaghetti that it's all running on. Sure enough, I get accepted on the ad I tell them to email me details of what they need done. There's a list of about nine things. About three of which were actually CSS/layout bugs like the ad claimed. I, always the optimist, assumed they looked me up and noticed that I also develop in PHP and whatnot, and figured they would just use me for that work rather than posting another ad. So, I began working on everything, with the clock ticking at the hourly rate I have on my oDesk profile.

I'm just about finished with everything, and I send an email basically going over each problem, and what I had done, so on and so forth. I said "I know this is over the budget stated in the ad, but most of the things you wanted me to do weren't encompassed in the ad and require considerably more time and effort than CSS bugs, so... Even Steven nanner nanner boo boo" These extra things include, but aren't limited to:
- Repairing a botched Wordpress upgrade
- Resolving conflicts between several plugins (the ecommerce plugin was one of them... Exactly what I was trying to avoid)
- Fixing a bug in a plugin that, upon Googling, has been around for several years. (I'm going to see if the plugin owners have a way to contribute patches)

They email me back like "Yyyeahhh.... I don't pay extras." As though I, unsolicited, made a bunch of changes to this site and said "I know you didn't tell me to do this, but I want to be paid for it." I'm having trouble differentiating malice from stupidity.

I don't even care at this point, I'll just accept it as a loss, and they can enjoy the free repairs to their site.

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Permalink Reply by Brandon P. on April 22, 2012 at 3:51am

Well, that's a long post.

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Permalink Reply by AnGella on April 22, 2012 at 4:17am

Wow, can you file a complaint with oDesk? Undo the work?

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Permalink Reply by Brandon P. on April 22, 2012 at 5:04am

I doubt a complaint with oDesk would do anything, since I did the extra work under my own accord, and it isn't in the contract to which we both agreed.

"Undo the work" would be an understatement for what I would normally do. But I have plans of making a career out of this field, and I don't want the reputation of "difficult to work with" or "bad temper" or anything like that. It isn't worth what little money this is for.