Taperouge Editorial Desings

Organize or die!

Eternal, ungrateful, never-ending job! It's your purse, your drawer at work, the kitchen, your hard drive... the chaos, the chaos!!

Maybe a garage sale is the solution! Or a more Earth conscious one like FreeCycle! You certainly can find junk or treasures. Isn't the neighbor's grass always greener?

And if all else fails you can call in Clean Sweep or just do something stupid to your computer so you are forced to format and re-install everything. You'll loose good stuff, but inevitably you'll have everything organized. For a while at least.

Hey! Tips and tragic stories are welcome!!

Quality fine

Listen. I know this web site might not be the greatest in the world. It might not be the most beautiful, nor the most organized, and maybe not even the most interesting. But I do worry about doing things right, to the best of my knowledge.

Today I had the opportunity to take a look at a design agency's portfolio site. They were trying to pitch a sale of a web service application and I was curious to see how they worked. Obviously, the first thing I noticed was that in their e-mail signature was the address to their web site. So there I went.

My first impression was OK. Strong graphic design. But as soon as I started to go through the menu, page after page came up with "404 page not found" messages and "500 server error" messages.

"Are they trying to sell web applications?", were my thoughts.

"Well, let's take a look at what's wrong..." EVERYTHING! The most basic tags were missing. Definitely not a good sign.

When contracting web services try to ask someone for help to evaluate the quality of what is being offered if you are not sure. This simple snoop under the hood can reveal a lot about what's going on. It might even give you a hint as to whether the services will be rendered as promised or not.

To me, looking at other people's work is always a way to measure my own work. To evaluate if I'm doing things as I should or if there's a better way.

Can you guess if they got the job?

The secret to making money online

Catchy title, huh? "David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals gives insight into creating a profitable startup company." Great advice: don't be greedy and you'll achieve a lot more than aiming for the billion dollar idea by trying to get the perfect one right off the bat! Way too much pressure.

Major decision

I've decided to start blogging in English.

Funny how the whole panorama has changed with this decision. Certain subjects are no longer relevant, the depth of certain discussions must be revised, and I'm being forced to re-think what I considered suitable material due to a a completely different public. Certainly some of the old visitors will continue to read, but I just opened up a whole new "customer base". If I want to be authentic, original, and interesting things have to change.

And don't get me started on language. For about a month now, English has been an ever more present requirement at work. Our old manager retired and we now have a Swedish manager who is still in the process of learning Portuguese. He is doing so because he seems to be a very cool person and wants to fit in, but actually we are the ones who always have been required to know English, at least at some level, since it's the company's official language. It just wasn't an urgent need until now and everyone kept postponing the inevitable.

English is my first language, but since high school I haven't had the need to go beyond what I already knew. Now I am back using my mother tongue and am noticing that my vocabulary stopped in high-school. I'm polishing it and removing the rust, but once in a while I have to fish for words.

Definitively this is a wonderful challenge, and I'm certainly up to it. Guess this is what I needed to renew my enthusiasm with Taperouge.

Not only this! My portfolio is online, even though its only my freelance work due to confidentiality, but anyway, you can see some of the things I1ve been up to. My Flickr photos, my Last.fm song list and stuff I share in Google reader are a couple of other things I've added here.