“Here’s the deal: 15-year-old boys with no money pirate software. The harder you make it to crack the software, the more elite they’ll feel when they do it, so the harder they’ll work to publicize their feat.

But, and let me stress this point, IF YOUR BUSINESS MODEL IS TO SELL SOFTWARE TO 15-YEAR-OLD BOYS, YOU ARE SCREWED ALREADY.”

- Wil Shipley – Omni Group Co-Founder, Delicious Library Creator

From Draplin Design Co.’s blog.

Great video from the Stefan Sagmeister exhibition by Hillman Curtis.

Again I am sitting at my desk with a long list of stuff I never did last month like I said I was going to such as a Css Zen Garden submission or submitting new photography (albeit I do have some new photos, but I don’t think they’re that great). Guess my out-of-school work ethic could use some maintenance.

Anyway, I did finish and publish that Dashboard widget of mine that I said I was going to. Turned out to be a pretty good success for my first real jaunt into javascript. To boot, I am planning on adding some new features to it but I won’t kid anyone here, that probably won’t happen for quite some time.

As I’ve already established I’ve been pretty lazy this last month or two, with what exactly is hard to pin-point but probably consists mostly of sleep and some form of entertainment. Laziness aside, for the last week or two I’ve been working on learning myself some PHP and MySQL by diving in head first and creating something. With the help of the internet and a few books I bought before I moved back I’ve been able to make some headway into learning how exactly these beasts work and I’ve been pretty impressed with how easy it is to do this or that once I got the basics down.

I thought I’d start off my experience with PHP and MySQL with a project that’d I’d have to work at diligently to pull off, and so my first project in the works is an image gallery of sorts. I guess it’s more of a photoblog than a gallery but in any case I call it “Greent” (you can pronounce it like “green tea” or “geenteh” or whatever). Basically it displays your images and the information your put for each one. Under each image is a expandable and collapsable section (collapsed by default) where people can leave a comment for your image with fancy-schmancy live preview. As of right now that’s about it for features but as I learn more PHP and MySQL tirckery I want to add the ability to change the template around easily, have thumbnails (for a gallery overview type page), and have multiple users; at least those few things are on my to-do-eventually list.

So keep your eyes pealed for a public release of this thing. It’s certainly no replacement for already established photo gallery-esque things like flickr, but I think it’s pretty neat thus far.

In the past few years I’ve run across numerous sites advertising contests of their own or from some partnered website promising fabulous prizes and glory to the winner and runner-ups. Fabulous prizes and glory can be pretty sweet, but take heed and always read the terms and conditions (or privacy policy, or whatever they call their legal guidelines) of the contest you are thinking about entering. If you don’t, you can’t hold anyone but yourself responsible if you end up getting shafted by whomever runs said contest. By shafted, I mean there’s some clause in their terms and conditions that says something along the lies of “All submitted designs become the property of ______. By entering the contest, the submitter signs over all intellectual property rights of their entry to ______.” or something equally evil and underhanded.

There seem to be two type of contests, one is usually pretty legit, the other, well, you should definitely check out their terms and conditions:

1) Contests held by creatives, for creatives.
2) Contests held by businesses, for creatives.

The contests held by creatives’, often design communities, purpose is to shine a spotlight on the winner and let them receive the attention that they deserve which is so hard to attain these days. Usually, prizes are minimal, maybe some cash, maybe a t-shirt or a print, the real prize is the attention generated. The contests held by businesses’ purpose are usually stated right up front, but generally that’s a facade to cover up real truth, which is these contests are held to get these businesses some cheap design work. By holding a contest they figure they can drum up a lot of designs to choose from and just select the best from the lot. The prizes for this type of contest are pretty large, but definitely much less than it would cost to hire a designer and have them produce a quality design.

Now, who wants a chance at winning fabulous prizes? And who wants to be exploited?

Lesson of the day: Be careful what you enter, and read the fine print.