It’s here. Yesterday a colourful box arrived that contained our new house pet. My daughters fell in love instantly, but my own initial joy was tempered somewhat by the fact that it took me an entire evening to get it online. As it turned out, the bunny uses a 802.11b network card (apparently, 11 mbit is sufficient bandwidth for the rodent). My router however was set to “g-only” because I ‘d never had a ‘b’ device before. Entirely my fault, and as soon as I changed this setting the bunny’s lights turned green and I was good to go.
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Last week’s Christmas celebration at work also marked my last gettogether with the people I’ve worked with for all these years. Saying goodbye to collegues I’ve come to regard as friends wasn’t easy, but the gift they got me really made my night. It will take a while to be delivered, but I can’t wait for my Nabaztag to get here.
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I wrote about this a while back, and it seems someone had the exact same idea. Brando just released a USB hub with switches that let you turn the connected devices on or off as you please.
http://usb.brando.com.hk/prod_detail.php?prod_id=00394
I’m not too fond of the design (which does little to hide the wiring and uses slide switches instead of more convenient push buttons), and a couple of more ports would have been nice, but this is a great device nontheless. Every time someone does not power up that little-used scanner and saves rain forests as a result is important.
I nicked the title for this post from my good friend Marco, who decided to quit his job and work as a freelancer a couple of years ago. Mostly because of Dutch tax law I myself am trying to avoid the term ‘freelancer’, but I did just quit my job. From January 2008 on, I’ll be focusing solely on my own web design business.
It’s been a tough decision, and one I’ve been struggling with for years. I love the people I work with, and will miss definitely many of them. But the direction my employer is moving in does not match my interests, talents and ambitions. Becoming an entrepreneur will allow me work with WordPress more, look into other CMSs, learn PHP and do way more design work. I’ve got plans for developing a Flash-based toolkit that will allow designers anyone to create cool websites with no programming skills needed, and tons of other projects.
Hopefully, I’ll also be able to devote more time to creating new WordPress themes and plugins and improving/updating the current ones. Marco has since his ‘plunge’ been tempted into not one but two seriously cool jobs, which goes to show that things always turn out how you least expect them to.
