My political platform typically consists of the word “Meh”. I like to pat myself on the back for being too pessimistic to believe in anything except individual human responsibility. Governments shall rise and fall, shit shall happen, life shall go on. But the more I hear about SOPA and the Protect IP act, the more I sense my withered inner activist shaking off the coils of eternal slumber.

If you’ve never heard of SOPA or Protect IP, here’s the skinny:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Sad thing is, I think it’s only a matter of time before a bill like SOPA or Protect IP is passed. If it doesn’t happen now, it’ll happen when some unfortunate event occurs that opportunistic legislators can use to make everyone who opposes the bill look bad. The comments section of a website will spark a celebrity suicide, or some kid will download a pirated slasher movie and kill his parents or whatever. Name your tragedy. “We have to do something,” legislators will bluster, and they’ll set about happily paving the road to hell. What’s really kind of amazing is that it hasn’t happened sooner.

So yeah, I think it’s inevitable. But I’m not willing to see it pass without at a hefty dose of public ire.

What is happening in the U.S. right now is vastly egregious. A body of people who can’t answer the question “what is DNS?” are toying with the idea of making fundamental changes to the core operating basis of the net, changes that would effect everyone, every day, in ways that, if you’re a nerd, should certainly scare the crap out of you. If you’re not a nerd, try this on for size: the people responsible for building and approving the IRS website want the power to decide what should and shouldn’t be available online.

And now a quick break for this message by your congresspeople:

Look, legislators, nobody is blaming you guys for not reading the whole bill or doing your research. A) the internet is complicated, b) the Appalachian Trail is really lovely this time of year and c) most bills are thicker than the Wheel of Time series, and God knows when I got to page 5000 of that, it was like, “Call me when Rand picks a girlfriend and let me know how the final battle goes, mmkay?” But here’s the summary: This one is over your head, let it go.

Truth is, Washington, I’m tempted not to give two fucks what you do. Beijing has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into a similar scheme, they have a rumored staff of 50,000 working round-the-clock to stamp out and track down any offenders, and yet it took me 45 minutes to set up a permanent path around the blockade. Most people know how to, as it’s called here, “climb the wall”.

So good luck with that. It will take your 10-year-olds approximately seven seconds to figure out how to create or log onto a distributed darknet and download or share whatever pirated media they want. You will still be paying $1000 a ticket to attend conferences about the exciting new world of social networking. By the time you hear about said darknets – or whatever alternative work-around everyone’s using – and whip the tut-tutting mothers of America into a tizzy of terror about them, everyone I care about will be communicating through telepathic bio implants. In the meantime, you’ll continue to flail around in increasing frustration as you throw untold amounts of money at turning site administrators into criminals, and making technology that much more of a pain in the asshole to use for only those Americans who don’t understand it – including yourselves.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

So, on one hand, your little regulatory commissions are kind of sad. But this isn’t about my ability to figure out how to ignore you. This is about my clients, who want to build their businesses by using their own websites as platforms for open communication, without being afraid of some lawsuit-hungry psycho with an internet connection. And this is about you taking all those good intentions and sinking them into a solution that doesn’t do more harm than good, instead of kissing special interest RIAA butt.

The internet, in its current lightly regulated state, is preciousssss to me. It’s the only wonder of the world that anyone can take a chisel to, participate in, and make their own. Yes, it comes with risks, copyright infringement, and really gross porn. But if you take the one, you take the other. Sorry – that’s how the First Amendment works.

Scarily, the right course of action here is the one thing that makes legislators feel powerless and grumpy, which is to do nothing. The solution is to do nothing. Quietly and without ruckus check the “veto” box, and then refuse to entertain even the suggestion of altering the fundamental ways we share information. Tell the RIAA to stop whining for government intervention and change their business model to fit the modern world like everyone else. Do not create a consolation-prize type bill that says basically the same thing as SOPA, but is called something else. Do not become politically skittish in the face of some horrible accident. Just do what a good government is supposed to do, which is facilitate smooth trade, increase the quality of life for your citizens, and foster innovation and peace.

But if you must legislate about something tech-related, why don’t you talk about allocating some funds for state governments to conduct and implement usability studies on their DMV websites. That’s something Americans could get behind.

Everyone else, if you’d care to tell your representatives to back off, you can do it here: http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

I spent the better part of Christmas Eve morning sitting in an empty concession stand outside of Solana shopping center waiting for the two very confused young ladies behind the counter to figure out how to bake a pizza slice.

“Why does this oven have so many knobs?” whispered one to the other, loudly.

“How should I know? No, turn it that way. The OTHER way. Why do foreigners use these things? Hey, maybe the customer knows.”

“Ask her.”

“YOU ask her.”

At long last, my garden slice was shoved across the counter, topped with – oh joy – crunchy cucumber and partially-frozen corn.

The pizza stand shared the space with what I can only infer is a coffee shop called “Yikes! The Spot.”, not to be confused with more famous establishments “Crap! A blemish.” and “Uh oh! My period.” I considered ordering a coffee or a “Mike tea with yam currant cereal” but taking into account the speed at which the pizza was produced, I figured the next twelve years of my young life would be better spent elsewhere.

Had I been in any kind of a hurry, I might have been frustrated at the wait, but after yesterday’s mega death match with TaoBao, China’s hottest online shopping portal, and its standing army of Chinese online payment interfaces, staring off into space is about all the heavy mental lifting I can handle today.

Yesterday started out rather pleasantly. I stuck my head into a local bookstore. Bought a set of speakers for some Christmas movie magic. And I girded my girly loins for a long sit-in at Industrial Commercial Bank of China.

Despite the invariable multi-hour wait to speak to a teller, I like ICBC. You can pay your water, electrical and gas bill in one go (just bring in the receipt that the billing people tape to your door), their checking accounts are totally free, and you can’t toss a crab apple without hitting a branch office. So, daydreaming about never having to haul a single piece of furniture home from IKEA ever again, I figured I’d do the rest of my apartment shopping on TaoBao.com. For that, I needed a Chinese bank account.

The tellers were patient. I filled out forms. I filled out the same forms again. I nodded a lot and said “yup” a lot and a lot of people fussed over my foreign ID.  It all seemed rather straightforward, really. And just as things were wrapping up smoothly, the bank teller handed me this:

“Don’t let anyone else use it,” she said. If she had been wearing glasses, she would have looked at me balefully over the top of them.

“What is it?”

“You plug it into the computer. Com-PU-ter.”

“Yeah, the USB gave that away, but…”

“NEXT!”

So home I went to give the Mysterious Device a whirl. I plugged it in, and a big “ICBC” logo flashed on my monitor. And then nothing happened. I pushed some buttons. Poked it. Still nothing. “Meh,” I thought, pitching it off the side of the couch, and promptly forgot it existed. To the TaoBao mobile!

Okay, so I’d never navigated Chinese ecommerce.  But how hard could it be, really? Find something rad, add to cart, enter bank card information, rejoice. A few hours of poking around, and I found a pretty awesome coffee table. Added to cart, confirmed order, and prepared to pay online.

Pay online. Such small words for such a far-flung circle of hell.

What happened over the next seven hours can only be described as “doing battle”, and at this moment I’m not 100% certain whether I ordered a coffee table or authorized the Chinese mafia to launder money through my bank account. At hour two, I began to hallucinate new browser windows.  At hour four, I started to wonder if the Chinese had actualized an alternative system of economics under which people exchange pure liquid rage for goods and services. At hour four point three, I cried. And at hour seven, emotionally depleted and twitching a little, I gave up.

I had registered for online banking. I had set up some kind of IE-only browser-based-but-you-have-to-download-and-install-it application called “Banking @ Home”. I installed “security drivers”, whatever those are. I made passwords for AliPay, China’s Paypal equivalent. I made passwords for TaoBao. I tried direct bank transfer, but couldn’t figure out what info they wanted from me. I tried putting in my card number, but the form validator wouldn’t accept my foreign passport as a valid ID.  I gave half the Chinese internet my bank card number. I stared at, and gave up on, a screen called “Pay by pre-paid voucher”. I made up secret security questions and secret answers. At one point I had five programs open, and they all seemed to be telling each other juicy secrets, but none of them seemed to be helping me pay for my coffee table. I pushed next. Next. Next. Next. But nothing worked. The big red X is truly universal.

And suddenly, just as a disembodied fatherly voice told me to fall into the white light, I sat bolt upright, scrounged around under the couch, and dug out the Mysterious Device. I stared at it. It stared back at me. I plugged it in again. I tried to check out one more time. “Enter password for your USB key.” I tried one. It worked. “Click OK twice on your USB key to finalize your order.” I pushed “OK” twice on the Mysterious Device. And magically, miraculously: “Payment succeeded! Congratulations.”

Immediately, I received a private message from the coffee table manufacturer. “Thank you for your perseverance.”

“How do you know I was ‘persevering‘?” I wanted to scream. “I could have been taking a very relaxing bath.”

Despite the traumatic checkout process, the TaoBao “finding and buying stuff” experience is actually totally amazing, and uniquely Chinese. Like eBay, anything and everything you could ever want you can buy cheaply. But like any good Chinese shop, no price you see online is the final sale price. You put your desired item in your cart, you confirm your commitment to buying it, and then the seller usually contacts you right away (or you can contact them) and you can haggle over chat, after which they modify the price in your basket before you finalize your purchase. Thanks to this “promise to buy it and then hash out the details” method, you can also get all kinds of crazy custom items factory-direct. I just bought a ginormous custom-cut living room rug from a carpet manufacturer in TianJin for about $150.00 – shipping included.

Successful transactions in capitalism: the true meaning of Christmas. Angels are singing.

Happy Holidays to all.

I was just recently asked to design an ecommerce icon set for Smashing Magazine and after a several week long row with Photoshop during which I threatened to set its ruler states to “picas” and leave them that way forever, it’s finally done.

Doing design work for Smashing is terrifying in the way that asking Stephen Hawking to review your long division would be terrifying. You’d hand in your sad little equation, worn thin from your eraser, and pray only for the intelligence to understand all the myriad, cryptic ways in which he’s going to pity you.

Similarly, there are so many killer designers in the Smashing community that every time I go check out the work they’re showcasing I have to get out my drool vacuum just to keep the keyboard dry.

So I sat down to do the best icon set that has ever been created in the history of the entire universe and I ended up with a retro-bubblegum-Swiss-popart set with curled corners that I’m (obviously) rather hard-pressed to describe, and which couldn’t match my personality any less if it was wearing clown shoes and a Flat Earth Society t-shirt. “This set,” I think, “will represent my work to all the people I admire.” And I lay awake and imagine the comments section filling up with “Pfff, these don’t even have kerned laser-aligned ratio layers!”

When you have to Google the basis of someone’s derision before you can form a retort, you’ve already lost.

Anyway, while I’d love to show you the complete set, I don’t wanna steal Smashing’s thunder, so a small teaser will have to do:

No idea when it’s supposed to publish. You’ll probably know before I do.

The most amazing thing about creating an icon set is the carpal-inducing amount of zooming-in required to fiddle with the details. The smaller design gets, the more important the details become. Just in the last year or so, I learned about the dramatic difference in sharpness you get when snapping edges to a pixel grid. And creating an icon at, say, 24×24, every single miniscule pixel has to sit in perfect alignment, or it rebels in the way that chameleons rebel – by partially disappearing. You can see a mis-aligned right edge and top edge on this icon close-up:

And when the edge is correctly aligned:

For a dog’s age, I’d been under the impression that the minimum distance you can expand or contract any Photoshop shape is 1 pixel. Technically, this is so – but you can still free-transform the edge of a shape so that it stops between 1 pixel and another on the pixel grid. In order to deal with this, Photoshop doesn’t hard-cut the edges of the shape (by default, anyway) – it makes the offending edge semi-transparent, and therefore, a little blurry. This has something to do with Aliasing and Anti-Aliasing, I understand, and I also understand you can turn various knobs in Photoshop to make your edges edge and your aliases ali, but suffice to say I ended up manually edging all my work, in all five sizes.

The truth is that, to me, aligning to pixel grid is like shaving my legs every day, which is to say, if someone’s already zoomed so far up in my bidness that they’re stroking my calf stubble, chances are good that events will manage to move themselves forward, dull edges or no. And since many of my layout elements will be rendered as CSS, it usually doesn’t make much of a difference. With icons, though, it matters. It really does. Behold at actual size:

Other lessons learned: If you’re using wording on your icons, test your font at the smallest icon size before you begin design. Because certain fonts – and I’m not naming any names here – but certain fonts make “RSS” look like “ASS” at 32×32.

If you asked my friends to describe my temperament, you’d be unlikely to hear, “cleaves to the heavenly bosom of the divine” or “spends hours in quiet contemplation of the spiritual”, and more likely to hear, “is really too stuck on the ‘that’s what she said’ thing” and “should stop eating after the second helping but doesn’t”.

And okay, so I get up at noon on Sunday. But hey, my MUD character goes on holy quests for arcane artifacts and mana potions several times a month, thankyouverymuch. And I have been known to positively crusade for cookies. So imagine my surprise at learning that, according to Google’s Secondary Connections list, it turns out I’m connected by a distance of only ONE PERSON to a smorgasbord of ACTUAL PRIESTS. Picture proof of my consummate holitude after the jump.

Want to see your own secondary connections?

1. Log into your Google account, if you have one.
2. Click here: http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social?hl=en
3. Scroll past the “Direct Connections” until you hit “Secondary Connections”.
4. Freak the hell out.

Secondary connections, for those of you who weren’t aware that the internet is cataloging your every misstep and embarrassing drinkasode, is a running list of almost everyone that your friends chat with, follow on Twitter, and email, all handily alphabetized in your Google account. While everyone loves a taking a little stalky peek into everyone else’s social circles, we also must remember that when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back. And occasionally, the abyss tries to friend us on facebook.

And the abyss also ruins years of carefully not telling my husband my ex-boyfriend’s last name. Fuck you, abyss.

I don’t really mind the idea of secondary connections. I’m a member of the connected generation, and I accept the idea of “Privacy Invasion by Default” as an inevitability, as long as I can opt out. But I can’t. Neither, Google account holder, can you.

In my heart of hearts, I know that Google’s baby steps towards total, boundary-less interconnection are utterly unavoidable. I know that the world is hurtling headlong into an era of uncomfortable openness. I know that in 50 years, the kiddies are going to laugh so hard at my antiquated notions of “privacy”, they’ll pee themselves and drop their ice cream sandwiches. I know I can’t stop any of this, and secretly, the thought of living with intertubes hardwired into my brain gives me the good shivers. But I’m just not ready yet.

So, knowing full well that this statement has been thrown back in Google’s face enough times to make it lackluster and impotent, I say it again: “What happened to ‘do no evil’?” Please, Google, give me an opt-out.

So what else is up this week?

Reveled in the exciting launch of Visual.ly – I love infographics – they’re the romance language of the universe. If you were conducting Spice trade negotiations with the Harkonnens, you’d use math. But if you were, say, making passes at a Klendathu female warrior bug, you’d have a better chance of getting some with a textured minimalist chart on the evolution of carapace attractiveness. This week saw the launch of hot infographic gallery and inspiration site Visual.ly. Inter-species Don Juans rejoice.

Axureland.com gains some traction – Also filed under “cool new gallery sites” is Axureland, a well-presented collection of widget libraries for Information Architecture and prototyping tool Axure. Axureland is the adorable brainchild of Vim Interactive.

Saw a good show - Two hats off to Dylan Thomas & The Over Easy Breakfast Machines, one for ensuring they’ll have the number one search engine result for their band name for ever and ever for the rest of eternity, and two for an awesome live show.

If you’ve ever spent any time in a foreign grocery store, you may have noticed that design trends differ heavily from culture to culture. Packaging that says “nomnomnom” to an elderly Japanese woman says “dear god is that a cuttlefish with cartoon eyes?” to you. In terms of web design preference, the Chinese tend towards very busy portal-style page content, flashing ads, tiny text, photorealistic will-o-the-wisp-y light effects, auto-loading music and lots and lots and lots and lots of Flash.

I’ve heard this written off as the result of an “underdeveloped” web usability industry, but that strikes me as an obtuse and over-simplistic explanation. The fact is that the Asian print marketing, package design and MMORPG industries have largely driven China’s visual web aesthetic, and the Chinese have very different taste in terms of what represents both corporate and alternative design.

That being the case, Flash is alive and well in China, with many clients demanding full Flash sites, but the current Western trend towards jQuery as a Flash replacement has started making very small inroads. I’ve put together a small showing of some Flash-based and non-Flash-based Chinese websites with interesting design. So mute your speakers, prepare to see a loading bar or five, and enjoy.

1. Beijing Design Week

Beijing Design Week is a, and I quote, “a government-supported, citywide initiative that aims to become a mechanism and catalyst for raising the level of design and design awareness in China—while strengthening creative, commercial and governmental ties between China and the rest of the world. “. I love this layout, as you almost never see this kind of sans-serif bold slab text in Chinese web design, and the Swiss-inspired blue/black color scheme is particularly rare.

2. BianGe Design Studio

Based in ZheJiang, BianGe design studio does a sweet portfolio site. BianGe, whose company name is a politically-charged word meaning “change”, themed their website with pink-on-grey Maoist graphics and an ultra-skinny content area.

3. Doopaa – Upon

Doopaa is another design agency that does some really gorgeous stuff with Flash. Their tagline, “Very Chinese, yet very international”, is perfect for their audience. This showpiece site Upon is themed with animated traditional Chinese papercuts.

4. Energysource Christmas Card Mini-Site

I know, I know, ’tis not the season, but Energysource’s Flash-based “Merry Christmas” client site is really not to be missed. Inexplicable crotch-grabbing, moonwalking Santas, paper 3D dinosaurs, and some awesome Engrish (watch the teeny text at the very bottom).

5. Duge Courtyard

Created by Beijing-based Lemonade Media, the Duge Courtyard site design blows away most other boutique hotel sites in the area.

6. Kevin Woo Designs

This minimalist-focused design firm does an awesome job presenting images and content, mixed with just enough scripting to make the site interesting.

7. Dying Art (Noir’s Lab)

This designer is pretty amazing (if you dig around, you can find his work portfolio) – maybe that’s why he’s been hired by a bunch of major international brands to do mini-sites and renderings. Yet despite all the fame and (presumably) fortune, he seems mostly interested in creating trippy 3D pixel dreamscapes.

8. Mags.roodo.com

Super clean, photo-driven magazine site by Roodo.

You know when someone you’ve been badmouthing pays you a compliment, and you’re suddenly left with a choice of being disingenuously nice in return or having to run back up to that moral highground you should have parked your butt on in the first place? Since Brandstack.com, not my favorite site in the universe, just promoted a couple of my works, I’m making up a third option, which is “blog about the whole thing at length then forget about it”.

For those of you who haven’t stumbled on it yet, Brandstack is a marketplace for agency-quality pre-made brand concepts and logos. Designers set the prices for their concepts with an enforced minimum of $250.00 per logo, and provide the vector files and a couple of preview images. I won’t lie, a bunch of the stuff on there is pretty awesome, and there are some generous dollops of pure genius. The beauty of the whole thing is that many of the logos available on Brandstack would easily go for $20,000 or more if produced by a full-service agency, so it’s nice to see top-shelf design becoming affordable to smaller businesses.

That said, I never was much of a Brandstack fan. Evaluating from a position of pure ego, when I started sending stuff in, they rejected my first 6 uploads, which made me hassa sads.

Evaluating it from a position of pure avarice, sales numbers on the marketplace are fairly low; I guestimate about one sale for an average of 15 accepted logo uploads. And why shouldn’t they be low? You’re not selling a logo, you’re selling someone a complete conceptual vision for their business. Considering that someone who buys a pre-made logo has to share the designer’s taste, direction and aesthetic, it’s the digital version of putting a baby up for adoption. If you can tear out a fantastic logo in an hour, then you might upload a ton of concepts and turn a solid profit. If you’re like me, and it takes you several weeks of pacing, drawing, deleting, shaking the monitor, walking away, coming back, turning cartwheels, brainstorming, drinking coffee, having ideas, rejecting ideas and eating Skittles, then it’s worse than working on spec.

I rarely use the site – it’s become more of a dumping ground for logo concepts that never made it past round 1 of a client design process, but which I’m particularly fond of, and an outlet for random creative impulses.

So imagine my surprise when this afternoon, two of my concepts were featured in the Brandstack Favs. I’d like to say I took the shiny red “Favs” banner as a matter of course, but the truth is that I made audible squealing noises and emailed all my friends.

Below is my favorite of the two, a brand concept for “Deserter“:

This concept was pure accident – I was moving a group of outlined characters in Illustrator, forgot to select the “r”, and there it was. It just needed some feet.

And the second, Up & Away Adventures:

I’m still not 100% sold on Brandstack. But I do think I’m coming to appreciate it as a showcase. Having someone else evaluate your work, even arbitrarily and out of project context, is a good way to pass your skills through the fire.

And now onto more pressing concerns, like what is the projected shelf-life of an Otter Pop, exactly? And could I unwrap and enjoy one after several millenia, like an Explorer’s Club member eating prehistoric mammoth meat?

Thing is, having a tutorial blog is more than a fire-and-forget affair, and as this is only about one of six equally neglected websites I own, I no longer have time to sustain the section upkeep. On some level, I feel that a list of tutorials blabbing on about exciting advancements in out-of-date technology is worse than no tutorials at all.

So, I won’t say they’re gone forever, but they’re certainly gone for now. Good luck, and happy designing.

Supporter of narrative causality that I am, I find it soothingly romantic to imagine that Hell is a tailor-made experience. Covet enough of your neighbor’s Ikea bookshelves, and when you die, the cosmos will reach into the remains of your consciousness, pluck out your greatest fear, and bam, you’re locked in a closet with Tom Cruise for all eternity.

Guess it’s a good thing I don’t believe in Hell, because based on my own logic and the sheer number of times I’ve spent Sunday reading The Onion, I’ll be uploading CSVs to Netsuite until the universe collapses.

Netsuite, for those of you who are still blissfully unaware, can be described as a giant, Cthulu-esque ecommerce platform, graced with enough tentacles to integrate warehousing and distribution, product development, management, accounting, and the front-end webstore.

To be fair, the webstore, and thus the products assigned to it, is really the only part of Netsuite that I have anything to do with. I get the impression that the webstore area was a tacked-on afterthought that has since grown, and I can promise you that Netsuite corporate either didn’t talk to, or didn’t listen to, any good usability guys while building it. So it’s possible that the warehousing and financial areas of the system are screamingly stellar, and it’s just the webstore part that makes me want to break my own fingers.

Like with so many of the truly evil influences in my life, I have a love-hate relationship with Netsuite. When one of my clients opted to buy Netsuite’s Gold Support option, I discovered that the NS guys were so on the ball, I had to resist the urge to ask them for relationship advice and stock tips. One of their Indian support reps actually wrote me a Javascript function off the top of his head that not only solved the problem I was calling about, but several other issues besides, and which, I’m sure, would have produced cold fusion if I’d passed it the right arguments. And that wasn’t an isolated incident.

On the other hand, well… allow me to demonstrate with a real-life example:

The problem: 450 images were uploaded to the Netsuite images folder with the wrong name. I need to delete them, and re-upload them with the correct name.

Easy-peasy. I’ll just search the file cabinet for the wayward images and delete the returned results. Here are the results now:

Wait, what? There’s NO MASS DELETE OPTION FOR RETURNED SEARCH RESULTS?

In fact, there’s no delete option on this screen at all. The only way to delete from a returned search is to click “Edit” for each file, then click here:

At which point you’re not returned to the search results, you’re returned to the File Cabinet screen:

… which a) erases your search results and b) tantalizes you with a giant “Delete Files” button, which, being the spawn of the devil, takes you to another screen, where file cabinet images are not sortable by any kind of criteria, and on which page NO FILE PATH IS SHOWN, making it completely IMPOSSIBLE to know whether or not you’re even deleting the right item from the right place and <hysteria> oh god oh god oh god you already have a checkbox on the file cabinet screen! Just add another checkbox! All the pieces are there! Just ONE MORE CHECKBOX! AND I CAN CLICK IT AND DELETE THINGS! RIGHT FROM HERE! WITHOUT GOING ANYWHERE!</hysteria>

*ahem*

That’s right – 5 clicks to delete each item. 450 items. 3 unbillable hours. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have case of carpal tunnel to cultivate.

When the code you’re handed is kind of shitty, roll it into a ball that’s 250 times heavier than your body weight and bury it.

With a client’s new Drupal-based project specs sitting in my inbox, I did a bucket of research and found an awesome new module that made my toes all tingly. The project deposit burning a hole in my hot little fist, I called the module developers, ready to do anything this side of adultery to buy a copy. And then More Technical Guy answered.

Me: Hi! I’d really love to buy your new Drupal module. I was wondering if you guys do custom scripting? Could you integrate a checkout of some kind? What would be a ballpark quote for that?

Him: Uh…. yeah, we talked about it, but that would be a lot of work.

Me: *eyeshift* Okay. Still, though, when you say “a lot of work”, how much are we talking about?

Him: I mean it would pretty much be impossible. We’re super busy for the next few months.

Me: But I can get someone else to modify it instead, then? Hire a freelancer?

Him: Um, yeah, we’re legally required to let you do that.

Me: … Good? Anyway, if you can’t do that modification, would it be possible to do a slightly easier modification?

Him: Theoretically.

Me: …

Him: We’re really busy.

Me: For the next few months.

Him: At least.

Me: (silence)

Him: (silence)

Me: So, uh, can I buy your module? As is?

Him (sighing heavily): Why don’t you shoot me an email and I’ll pass it along to the guy that handles this stuff, and he’ll let you know what you have to do. I’m the More Technical Guy.

I still haven’t heard from them.

The biggest fail here is not that More Technical Guy was kind of a dick. I mean, I have a thing for antisocial coders. They’re hot. Where I’m concerned, on a normal day, the word “theoretically” constitutes a wildly successful pick-up line.

The fail is that the CEO is letting More Technical Guy pick up incoming calls from clients. Unless your coding team is made up of peppy, well-informed girls named Amber, I don’t want to talk to them first. Nay, YOU don’t want me to talk to them. Ever. Why? Because even though the merest whiff of a sales pitch would have had me forking over, I still have my money right now.

The entire structure of a programming firm is based around keeping the coders in the most comfortable, moist… est (most moist? really?), dumb-proof bomb-shelter you can manage, away away away from annoying client questions like “Can I buy that?”, and all the way on the other end of the office from the chipper morning people. Let’s stick with that, mmmkay?

That is all.