Steampunky… April 18, 2008
Posted by Ion Dan Marius in day2day.add a comment
While not exactly a steampunk worthy enterprise, I did manage to put a working USB harddrive on a picture frame. It had to be something worthy to sit near the Mac Mini at home and this is what we had at hand.
Next I’ll look for a cast iron frame and an ornate ashtray to hold a working USB hub. 
(sorry for the poor pic quality, even if we do have a high priced dslr in the house, the phone is so much easier to use )
Dan
Programmers April 10, 2008
Posted by Aurelian in day2day.Tags: freelance, NASA, programmers
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I was just thinking: why do people/companies come to us when they want a website? They could go to one of those thousand freelance sites and find cheaper programmers, designers, etc.
I’m proud to report that I’ve found the answer on my own. People come to us (or any webdev company for that matter) because we can do complex stuff. It’s not like we don’t do 4 page websites (Home, About Us, Products, Contact), because we do. I think it’s because we can (and) do unusual stuff. Check out our portfolio for examples.
And that brings me to the subject. Being a programmer in a good company (or a good programmer in a company) is a bit tricky. It’s not enough to know how to use some tools and copy&paste code found on the interweb. Almost every day you get to do an unusual task or some upgrade you’ve never thought about. And you must find a way to do it.
Building complex web applications isn’t hard, but you just need to be organized. It’s not enough to have an IDE with complex project management tools, code optimizers, frameworks and what not… You must first have them in your head.
Because I have to get back to work (and this entry is long enough for “My Very First Blog Entry Ever”), I’ll end this by telling you the only two acceptable reasons a programmer can delay/refuse executing a task:
- Because he’s bored with the project and thinks the damn thing will never get done.
- Because the client wants to control a sattelite orbiting the Earth from the admin section of his website. And that’t because NASA doesn’t want to release an API for remote satellite control and management.
A good programmer shouldn’t say things like “the project was not supposed to work like that”.
Ozy is 1yr old! ;) April 4, 2008
Posted by Ion Dan Marius in day2day.add a comment
Ozy is my and, sometimes, the company’s pet, the biggest eared cat in the universe.
We’ve previously decided her bday was on the 1’st of april, but then we forgot so now it’s the 3rd of April!
She celebrated with food and sleep and running around after noisy toys, like everyday actually…
Gotta love her, I mean it, you HAVE TO!
Dan
tu.ro shaping up nicely April 3, 2008
Posted by Ion Dan Marius in turo.1 comment so far
As none of you knows, we’re working on a rebirth of our famously procrastinating tu.ro, just look at some of the designs!
KEKEKE!
Dan
Web Developers WANTED! April 3, 2008
Posted by Ion Dan Marius in day2day.add a comment
We don’t call them web developers for nothing. In my experience, web people are some of the most flexible and “out of the box” thinkers out there.
The internet poses many obstacles and offers so many benefits that only the most creative people can be called “developers”.
We have interesting and cutting edge projects going on (and boring run of the mill presentation sites as well, no worries) so, if you’ identify yourself with the person described above and aren’t afraid to have your conceptions run down by people like Aurelian or Mircea, please, send me your CV at idm@ays.ro and we’ll be sure to call!
Dan
there are 2 types of clients April 2, 2008
Posted by Ion Dan Marius in Uncategorized.Tags: conacul bunicilor, jkd investments, madalina apostolescu, mastermind, neico group, radu zernoveanu
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We’ve been doing this for almost 10 years, and today, looking at the site today I realized that only one of our romanian clients hold… the oops media group, the rest are gone to the wind… on the other hand, all of our foreign serious partners have at least a 4 year history with us.
Why?
Maybe because romanians think we’re expensive? That we have an attitude? That we don’t know what we’re doing? You tell me.
The first one to go was Neico Group. After 3 years of successfully creating their complete product range (from diaries to calendars to promotional effects), a couple of websites and acting in a very responsible manner, meeting impossible deadlines, dealing with other of their suppliers directly, generally behaving as a trustworthy partner, it all went to hell, why? Because we’re uped our prices with appox 30%. The market changed, the prices increased and salaries went through the roof, so it was a decent increase. What happened? Madalina Apostolescu, Neico’s CEO, a person I’d almost considered a friend, wouldn’t accept this, accused me of cheating them, wouldn’t pay anything more (we did, indeed, have a “gentleman’s agreement” running), and threatened to sue (while lying to my face that she didn’t have anything to do with it) when I wanted to charge for the source files of all the work we did for them (which noone does for design anyway). I was disappointed, did a favor for someone working there and let them have them for free. The result? 3 years from them they’re still using them!!! Even stuff that wasn’t accepted at first (their famous “children” line was just a proposal for one of their clients that didn’t get accepted… Everything looks bad, unprofessional and the site went to hell… why? Because she put money in front of quality, hired a third rate designer to hack away at our stuff and is probably loosing clients because she hasn’t come up with nothing of quality in ages…
Then there’s Mr. Radu Zernoveanu from Mastermind.ro… We built a very nice site for him several years back, very little updating needed, it all went smoothly. Last year he wanted a new site for his team building busienss (conaculbunicilor.ro) we gave him a price, he said it was too much, couldn’t afford, said something about more business he had, if only we decreased the price (by 40%, nothing less), we did, it was a simple job but we liked it, we drew a nice layout, sent it over, was agreed upon, but if only we could’ve changed some details, such as everything… I thought that the layout was nice and that it would have been enough, and since we did give him a substantial discount, I explained that we’d rather go with it as it’s a nie layout.
Then he called furious that we’ve had the nerve to not do something that he wanted (keep in mind that we’ve done alot of favors for him, change this, tweak this, upload that, because he was a nice guy and I liked him and his business) that he was paying and that we were basically his slaves bound to do whatever he asked… We dropped it… Good riddance, we offered him the site looking like the atatched picture for 500euros and he went ahead, showed his colors and ended up with http://www.conaculbunicilor.ro/ LOL!
And the last one, and most recent, are the guys at JKD Investments, creepy people… They contacted us to have their site redesigned, we provided a couple of very nice layouts and they forced us to copy a site COMPLETELY, I wasn’t too keen on it… but hey, it look easy, we already had a contract and wanted to finish it, we did it and then the changes came, sometimes 20 a day… small stuff, we had it all done in flash and wanted to use the standard components, but we were almost forced to build another text area component that wouldnt’ allow text to be copied… In the end it was too much and I said that the site is done, let’s finish, if not, I wanted to charge more for the changes. Then this gree guy (never, i mean NEVER work with greek guys) calls and yells at me in a bad english that he is paying for it… I told him in my perfect english to go fuck himself and droped this project also… What’s funny is that the guys at e-afacere took it and did the same copy, except that they don’t know flash (http://www.jkdinvestments.com), our version is here http://ays.gotdns.com/work/_jkd/ (fully administrable from php, mind you, database and everything), the very original is http://www.isv.gr and our original layout looks like the attached (they did pretend their color was that green)…
So I guess they did get their site…
So I understand about the greek dude… he came to this country looking for slaves… But Madalina and Radu? Do I have an attitude problem? Do they? What do you think?
Ps. In case you’re wondering I did not made myself look better and them worse, just told the facts from my point of view as objectively as possible…
Dan
sites are UP!!! April 2, 2008
Posted by Ion Dan Marius in news.add a comment
Oh happy day, the presentation site for amorphys is up and running… both ro and en.
Still alot of tweaking, but at the rate we had time to do it we figured it’s better to simply put it up there and make the changes as we went along…
The main reason is that by the time we managed to put it live it’s already outdated, some other projects to put up as soon as possible:
www.pcpower.com
www.conceptvisuals.co.uk
www.aeon.ro
some banners
a new ocz presentation dvd
some prints for memoryc
and alot of upgrades and tweaks to past sites.
I need opinions, I know the content is lacking, need to get ye olde fingers on the keyboard and lay it out, but still, i like it!
dan
