I'm a consultant for my own company.

Recently, a customer ordered a new website from me. I built it and they didn't like it. They sent it back. When I built it again, they didn't like it.

Finally I got smart about it. I wrote a proposal and had them okay it. They did. I even added a special waiver of a $1000 backend fee, if they accepted the proposal and site when it was completed.

They accepted graciously.

When I built the site, they claimed it was not what they wanted and that they wanted to cancel, outright. I convinced them to let me redesign it again. I showed them a test pic, and they loved it, and ordered me to "do that design instead".

After hours/days/weeks/years of being really annoyed by this customer's incessant whining about the site, I finally had them.

I canceled the waiver, based on our previous agreement, and issued them a 48 deadline for payment, oh about a few hours ago.

Why, do you ask, did I do this?

Because I'm honest and I don't like how many of the little guys get pushed around by big companies. They can make you wait in some office for a whole day just to speak with someone. They can slowly decide to take their sweet time about doing business. They keep you interested, but only by tossing you small potatoes. And when you get paid on a project basis, like I do, the customer's favorite thing to say is "I don't like it, do it again." or "There are too many blue squiglies there: it's unprofessional!" or "That's not what I ordered!"

So I'm getting my ducks in a row and swinging for the fence. No longer is my goal to please my customer. Now my goal is to make money.

That is why there no ethics in business, because everyone would rather get a deal than pay what they owe. That's why anyone who enters business, becomes slowly twisted into a ruthless manager.

FYI: most of my customers are cool, and they all get special fee waivers all the time. But the ones who don't pay their bills get set right.

I've recently updated our latest project for the Ontario NDP, which is a top political party in Canada. We're located at publicpower.ca and I am right in the middle of a major code rebuild to inject PHP and MySQL into the site.

So far we had a test site running that was slowed a tad by templating. I've rewritten it and am looking into stuffing PHP scripts into the db by base64 encoding gzipped scripts. So far we are noticing a large speed increase because the scripts enter the PHP compiler and are eval'ed in one foul swoop. The theory is that some hit would be felt from calling: eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(&$this)));

But the fact that the code is coming from the db to the compiler is a speed increase. And the fact that less BW is being used because the scripts are deflated when they enter, plays a part in understanding improvements. And these three calls don't soak up that much CPU, after recent tests.

When we are done, we'll have a highly scalable site that can be parachuted onto any server and optimized right away to run for anyone. This is good considering we have 103 candidates that could use the code to run their own sites, and that many updates would make this a possibly better way to handle such sites.

For the most part, we won't have loads and loads of traffic, except during elections, when we could have a few thousand users online at once, potentially. The site has been tested but you never know what you're going to get until you're bearing down on a bunch of trolls who are trying to flood or hack your site.

But I guess we'll push our way over that troll bridge when we come to it!