This morning I received a call from a web designer who wants me to make some photos for one of his client. I don't really know him, I just know of him through a common acquaintance. Right now, 7 photos for the end of next week, plus the possibility of more photos later¹⁾. We start to discuss design, format… no problem, yes, yes… Then I start talking money, budget, the amounts sound reasonable. I can make these photos and still make an almost decent profit, and finally I say:

If they balk at that, I will negotiate down to 1/3 to start, 1/3 on delivery of the photos, and the last 3rd 30 days later or I'll give them 10% if they pay fully on delivery of the photos. I have not always followed my own rule/policy and I always regretted it. I wrote many times about it, see: Business Curse and many others Search for paid.

A big silence on the other side of the phone line, nothing, I still keep quiet²⁾ then he pipes in, in a lower voice:

I had to turn him down. Why? Because my expenses would have been at least a thousand dollars in equipment rentals and travel. Can't afford it, especially when I don't even know if I will get paid, what if his client doesn't pay him? If I don't receive a cheque or a PO from a “real company” to start then I can't afford to work.

Google's spider¹⁾ comes to your website, selects one of the page from your website and saves it in a temporary database. Google's spider save the URL, the web address, and the text content of your webpage. Google does not store any of the graphics, photos, logos…

Once the webpage is crawled by Google's spider, depending on the page rank of your website, your webpage will be indexed and ranked and eventually be placed in the search results. One of the criteria for the ranking is the URL.

You will get -1 point for foto-biz.com/dokuwiki?id=076598723T95827, but with http://foto-biz.com/doku.php/blog:google:urls-part-1 you will not get penalized. According to SEO for bloggers from Matt Cutts, the “head honcho of the webspam department” at Google aka Search Quality Control, you should have the URL paths with keywords in them. Use dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words. URLs with no space between words is a bad idea because you will be penalized.

I set my keywords in Lightroom, I also make sure that I save them, but Bridge does not see my keywords
That's because Lightroom, by default, only save all information and changes in it's own database. Lightroom doesn't save it to the photo if it's a DNG file or to the XMP sidecar if it's in another format. You need to tell Lightroom to save all the changes to it's database and to the XMP sidecar or the DNG file with:

Edit → Catalog Settings → Metadata tab → Automatically write changes into XMP

or you can save the changes manually for each photo with: Ctrl-S on Windows or Command-S on the Mac¹⁾.

My personal setting are:

1. Automatically write changes to XMP
2. Write date or time changes into proprietary raw files

Then whichever application will see the changes done in Lightroom.

Let me introduce your Merlot, one of the nicest attack sausage, aka a dachshund. Dashchund is German and literally means “badger dog,” from Dachs: badger, and Hund: dog:

This morning I went to a customer to show them the out-takes, so they could decide which photo to print and how each photo should be printed. And the problems started:

1. Only Charmaine was there, Bill had to go.
2. I started showing Charmaine the different photos and the different print sizes from 5×7 to 16×20, then showing the various photo papers, from Lustre, Matt to Metallic paper. I gave Charmaine too many choices. I overwhelmed her, she couldn't decide so she took the standard delay tactic.

I'll have to go back. When? I'll call Charmaine Thursday.

The description is in the markup: <meta name=“description” content=”…….”>.

Whenever I receive an email, I usually respond very quickly. But sometimes, especially when I want to smack the sender and give them a good kick in the ass, I will wait for the next day, so I have time to cool down. Yesterday was one of these days. Here is an extract of the email:

I should have answered: “That would be $0.12 per photo! Get Lost!”, instead I responded:

To which he didn't reply, so far. I'm not waiting for a response. I have a couple of alternate answers:

1. You left out three zeros.
2. I can't afford to go out of business

The titles are in the markup: <title>… </title>.

Not only I want to know what I have, I also want to know what I am missing. Often, to me, it's more import what's missing. It mean that I have not finished what I need to do.

Adobe has implemented the Smart Collections in Lightroom. The Smart Collections are dynamic collections based upon the photo metadata and/or attributes. The problem is that many of the filters does not implement the is empty, so I use my filter does not contain any of the alphabet.

If you use a different alphabet such as Chinese, Scandinavian… you can change the alphabet.

The a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z means any of the following letters. Maybe in Lightroom 3 there will an is empty selection criteria for all metadata and/or attributes and it's opposite: is not empty.

In Trust Me, I wrote about the friend of a friend who wanted me to participate/invest in his new Internet venture, mostly the technical end. The first thing he did, was ask me to sign a non-compete agreement. I agreed and signed, no question asked. I did read the non-compete agreement before signing, and still I didn't ask any question about it. Why?

This non-compete agreement was worthless and not worth the attorney fees he paid. I'm supposed not to compete with his idea for a full year. The problem is that you can't patent or copyright ideas. You can only patent processes, and copyright finished goods, such as photos, writings. I could implement their idea for 0, yes zero, dollar with open-source software.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has been sued, unsuccessfully, by classmates because they first had the idea of Facebook while at Harvard University.