Here’s another of my favorite fast recipes. How many times have you been slaving away at the computer, trying to squeeze in that last bit of code, those final tweaks to the copy, or the final lines in your design when you were struck with an overwhelming urge for chocolate cake?

Sadly, this happens way too often here in my house. While I feel a bit guilty when I “forget” to tell my wife that I made a chocolate cake – I feel more so when there isn’t any left to share with her.

So I was delighted to come across this recipe – as it’s a personal-sized cake (well, really – what cake isn’t personal sized?).  And the best part is it will probably take you longer to eat it than it will to cook it!

This is a “Freelance Favorite” called Cup o’ Cake – but you don’t have to be a freelancer to enjoy it.  If you’ve got a microwave at work, you can bring the ingredients and mix them up for your afternoon coffee.  Why buy a $5 cupcake when you can make something like this?

Ingredients

• 4 tbsp flour (all purpose is ok, cake flour is better)
• 3 tbsp Cocoa powder
• 4 tbsp sugar (haven’t tried it yet – but you could probably use your fav. flavor Quik and skip the cocoa)
• 1 med egg
• 3 tbsp milk (evaporated milk might be pretty good, too)
• 3 tbsp oil (or melted butter if you want to be decadent)
• 2 tbsp chocolate chips
• 1 large mug

Add the dry ingredients and chocolate chips to the mug

Add egg, then milk and oil.  Mix very well. (A large mug is handy here, or this might be a bit messy)

Put the mug in the microwave, and cook on high for 3 minutes

Take out of the microwave, empty mug into a bowl.  Smother cake with canned chocolate sauce, ice cream, whipped cream or all of the above

Hide bathroom scale.

Enjoy! Keep Reading…

There seem to be two schools of thought on this topic:

• Do an excellent job on exactly what the client is looking for;
• Do a good job on the project, and provide additional value as a bonus.

I got to thinking about this after reading about optimizing your freelance career, especially the reference to “undepromise and overdeliver.”

Do people try and compensate for a perceived shortcoming – maybe they are concerned about their grammar or the originality of their concepts – by adding in additional value?  Does a client look at the job and think, “Well, the concept is ok, but we’ve got three pages of web copy that we weren’t expecting – hooray!” or “Wow – brilliant concept, I know we didn’t ask for more, but it would have been nice to get a few more pages of copy”?

Have you found that it is better to deliver “excellence” to your customers and nothing else, or provide” acceptable” with bonus material?

Keep Reading…

What do you do with this information?

• Close out of the folder without reading any further.  Inform your manager and your IT team that you have access, and suggest they fix that.
• Make copies of all of the files, and read them at home when you have time.
• Share the link with your work-buddies.
• Share the link with everyone in the office – the ultimate in transparency.
• Hold onto the information for a rainy day – you never know when you might need to play that card.

With security systems less than secure and passwords either known office-wide or easy enough to figure out, being presented with this situation is far from abnormal.

What would you do? Keep Reading…

Do you need a bit more motivation to get your daily tasks done?

Do you fantasize about role-playing while you do your household chores?

Does your real world keep you away from your virtual world?

Now you can bring them closer together, thanks to the brilliant folks at EpicWin.

EpicWin puts the adventure back into your life by providing you with an iPhone app that rewards you for completing your household chores; from washing the car, sending birthday cards, doing the dishes or going to the gym.  Gain experience points for doing your menial tasks, and maybe even find some loot.  Develop your character and stats based on the chores you complete, and if you’re lucky, your character might even develop into a CEO of Pain – or a Mage of Paperwork Mountain!

“Doing the laundry is an epic feat of stamina…”

EpicWin isn’t the first to try and merge a to-do list manager with a role playing game (RPG), and it’s not quite available yet.  If the hype about EpicWin has got you wondering why you aren’t getting experience points for doing your daily chores, you can check out Chore Wars or Booyah Society and then decide if EpicWin is truly an epic win once it finally arrives on an iPhone near you. Keep Reading…

Everyone knows that freelancers live on caffeine and nicotine, but it’s important to put the right fuel in your body occasionally.  Based on the feedback from a previous article, I’d like to present a few fast recipes that let you create a quasi-healthy meal, with a minimum amount of prep time, cooking time, and most importantly, clean up time.  Try out the recipe, and let us know what you think.

Pierogi Casserole

• 1 small bag frozen pierogi
• 1 jar of your favourite spaghetti sauce
• 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese(or mozza, or both)

_____________________

Turn oven on to 350°F

Place frozen pierogi in a casserole dish (um, remember to remove from plastic bag…)

Add pasta sauce (pour over top of pierogi  - recycle jar)

Sprinkle with shredded cheese

Bake in oven for 45 minutes to an hour

Remove from oven, scoop into bowl, serve with side salad and/or garlic bread.

Go back to coding/writing/designing – with a full belly.

Keep Reading…

Since I’ve experienced “lunch theft” on more than one occasion, I’m curious to know what you folks think.

What would you do? Keep Reading…

The other day I went out to have a quick lunch with a good friend of mine.  Nothing fancy, just a cheap pizza place that just happened to have a few excellent beers on tap.  (I’m not 100% sure, but I think it might be illegal here in Canada to eat pizza without drinking beer.)

Since I’m self-employed, had no need to drive, and was enjoying the first nice Friday afternoon in what seemed like an eternity, I opted to have a beer with my pizza.  I tried to get my beer-loving friend to join me, but he felt that it wasn’t appropriate given that he still had to go back to his office.

It got me thinking over the past week:  When is it okay to have an adult beverage?

When I was a cable guy, driving a company vehicle – no question.  And let me say this clearly – if you are driving, there’s no acceptable time to have a drink.  But when I got into the advertising world and learned that a beer fridge in the office was not grounds for immediate termination – let’s just say I didn’t think it was that big of a deal to have a “pop” and then walk back to a communications position in an office building.

Now, there’s a world of difference between wanting a drink and needing a drink – and if you are in the latter stage on a regular basis, you might want to consider asking for help.

My question to the folks in WorkAwesome:  Is there an acceptable time to have a drink during the work day?  Do you take part in a “liquid lunch” ritual? Keep Reading…

A dream job usually isn’t something conventional. Nor should your approach to getting hired. Have you ever thought of the whole resume process?  You spend many hours, and in some cases many dollars, creating – fabricating – a document for that your potential employer is going to probably dedicate less than 30 seconds to reading it.  Sure, there are going to be some occasions where they will read the whole resume because they are hoping to find that you have listed your hobbies, and you share a love of butterfly collecting.  But a happy coincident like that is a tad rare. Keep Reading…

Life is pretty good here in Canada.  Things are generally pretty quiet, so much so that a lottery jackpot going unclaimed for three weeks in a row is newsworthy.  Very newsworthy.

LottoMax is a weekly lottery where you pick seven numbers, from 1 to 49, for your chance to win.  The pot starts at $10 million, and once it hits $50 million it goes into super-fancy “maxmillions” mode, with additional $1 million draws on top of the main jackpot.   The other night there was one draw for the $50 million prize, and an additional 45 – $1 million draws.  No one won the $50 million.

The odds of winning are 1 in 28 million, but considering that there are only 33 million people in Canada – it’s surprising that it hasn’t been won yet, but not that surprising that it’s featured prominently in the news.

So what does this have to do with WorkAwesome?  I’m sure I’m not the only one to play the “what if?” game:

“What would I do if I won the big jackpot?”

How much would you need to win in order to quit your job?  Or would you keep working where you are if you had an extra $50 million in the bank?  Would you move on to something else altogether – something you truly love?

What would you do if you won the big jackpot?  Keep Reading…