Epis­ode 4 (“IE Voo­doo Doll”): Play Now | Play in Popup | Down­load

(Pod­cast will be up on iTunes, or you can grab it here)

We bring you epis­ode four, where we wel­come our third pan­el­list, Teresa Watts 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 — srsly, check it out!

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

The intro theme is the open­ing of track 26 of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts III. It’s 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 as usual 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!