Photo: Rodrigo Paoletti

For a while, it's bothered me how much soda I drink. I've always been a fan of the fizzy drinks. Pretty much all of my waking hours, I've got a beverage at hand. I can easily go through 12 cans a day.

When I was younger, it was the regular stuff: Coke, Mountain Dew and company. I also drink coffee and tea, but drink nearly all of it sweetened in some way.

For a long time, that sweetener was sugar. However, when I ended up tipping the scales at 300 pounds, I gave up drinking any of my calories. All of the experts say that you should drink plain water. The problem is that I can't stand drinking plain water. I've tried all of the things recommended in every article, book, from every expert, etc.

So, I've been drinking diet soda in one form or another for years and I managed to lose a lot of weight. Now, some of the other things associated with soda have been bugging me. For one, I hate dragging home case after case of the stuff every week to feed my habit. Then there's the cost. Even buying it by the case, I'm still spending more than I like.

The artificial sweeteners, while show in many studies to be totally safe unless you're eating the stuff by the pound, keep coming up as correlated elements in more and more metabolic studies. No one has yet proven causation (that Nutrasweet directly contributes to weight gain, etc.), I wondered if I might be able to better solve some of these problems more rationally.

I wondered if it was the flavor or the carbonation that made me like the stuff. So, a couple of weeks ago I tried a a full day with just sparkling water and discovered that I didn't really miss the soda. That's in stark contrast to the days where I tried plain water (bottled or not) and ran around desperately trying to find a can of Coke.

It was clear that what I was after was carbonation, not necessarily the flavor of a given kind of soda (though I still do like Coke Zero). However, the thought of buying sparkling water seemed even less sane than buying cases of soda.

And so it was that I consulted the oracle at Google, which resulted in my purchase of a home soda fountain, which arrived yesterday.

Now, instead of dragging a pickup bed full of cases of cans, I can just take filtered water from the tap, fill the 1 liter bottles and press the button a few times and I've got sparkling water. The gas canisters exchange for about $20 and they claim 100+ bottles per canister.

It comes with some flavored diet syrups as well, but the couple I've tried aren't terribly good. However, the sparkling water *is*. It's about noon, but I've already gone through 3 liters of water today and none of the other stuff.

Since about January, I've been using Dreamhost as cheap, offsite Subversion repository hosting. It's worked well for me over that timeframe and I've got documents, lots of my software settings and configurations, web projects and more under version control.

Several people have asked me for a bit more explanation of how to actually get started with Subversion on the Dreamhost accounts.
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This afternoon I had an argument that seems to really get under my skin. I've had it repeatedly in person, had it silently in my head while reading articles online and typed my side in forums.

It often starts as part of a discussion of food and how I do the cooking at home, but how much money we waste when we eat out. Then, the person I'm talking to makes the statement that sets off the buzzing in my head.

"Well, a lot of the time it's cheaper to eat out, you know."

Here's the short response. Every single meal you've ever eaten in a restaurant, picked up in a drive through or had delivered could be made in your own kitchen for less money than having the restaurant make it for you.

All of those meals made by the restaurant have the following things included in its price:

• The actual cost of the ingredients.
• Paying the people to cook, serve, deliver and sell the meal to you.
• Marketing costs to convince you to buy it (and apparently believe it's cheaper)
• The cost of the kitchen, dining room, etc.
• Profit for the owner of the restaurant and possibly for the corporate headquarters for chains.

You all have already covered the cost of the kitchen, don't need the profit or marketing, leaving only the cost of time beyond the food itself. It's at this point in the argument that most of my opponents invoke their salary or hourly rate. They say that their time "is worth" $25/hour, thus adding $12.50 to the cost of the food for 30 minutes of preparation.

There are a couple of problems with that math.

First is that people often invoke their hourly rate for hours that they'd be otherwise unable to sell to employers or anyone else. Here's an experiment. If you have already sold the hours between 8 and 5 to your employer for $25/hour, how likely is it that your employer would pay $25/hour for the additional hours between 5pm and 10pm. If those hours were really "worth" $25 each, you'd be able to get an extra $625 a week by working those extra hours.

However, salaried folks can work those hours and won't receive an extra dime. Most hourly jobs require approval for overtime (and it's often denied as being too costly).

The simple reality is that an hour of your time is, monetarily speaking, only "worth" what you could actually sell it for. At any given moment, most people are already selling all of the hours that they are willing to sell and that the market is willing to pay. The fact that these surplus hours don't carry the same value as the first 40 is clear when you look at most "moonlighting" jobs, which tend to require less skill and often pay quite a bit less.

The result is that you shouldn't be factoring the monetary cost of the time to prepare. That leaves just the ingredients and you can buy the same ingredients that the restaurant does. Your only monetary outlay is for the actual food itself, which is always just a portion of the cost of the same dish when prepared in a restaurant.

I'm not saying that we should all be cooking at home. Heck, I'd be the biggest hypocrite in the world if I said that. However, I don't for a moment try to pretend that going out is saving me money. It's more convenient, it accommodates my lazy streak and they're often able to do a better job with the food than I would, but it's NOT cheaper. Period.

Wikipedia defines a freelancer as:

A freelancer or freelance worker is a person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any one employer.

If I say I'm a freelance web developer, chances are you just got an idea in your head that's not accurate. I used to think that the misconception was tied to the term "freelance". However, I encounter the same misunderstanding when I use the term "independent" and several other descriptors. Basically, I think it comes down to most people only knowing about the one kind of "freelance". And, it just so happens that I'm the other kind.

The kind you're probably thinking of is more of a "retail" freelancer. If you go searching for sites related to freelancing, you'll find mostly stuff related to this kind of freelancer: web designers, web developers, photographers, writers, etc.

• They all generally spend their time going out and finding clients, bidding on projects, performing the work and repeating the process.
• As a general rule, "retail" freelancers deal directly with the client that wants the work done.
• They usually do the work in their own space.

What I do is something I've been calling "wholesale" freelance software development. See, many of my projects are for a client who has a client of their own. Much of the work is hourly. Most of it is done on site in a cubicle. I usually find work through recruiters instead of starting out by talking to the client directly.

Lots of things are the same between the 2 kinds. I still own my own company and am my own employee. I only get paid when I work and have to manage my own vacation and health care, etc.

However, lots of the things that retail freelancers spend a lot of time giving advice on don't really apply to me much. For instance, I've seen lots of articles about setting your billable rate as a freelancer. They often deal with the time you have to spend getting work and I've seen more than one talk about having 20 or 25 hours of billable work in a week and that rates should take that into account.

Most of the wholesale freelancers that I know put in 40 hours of billable work in a week and maybe an hour or 2 of non-billable stuff (like invoicing, accounting, etc.) in *some* weeks. My contracts tend to run about 6 months or so and are often renewed after that. When a contract actually ends, there's usually about 2 weeks of calls with recruiters, a couple of onsite interviews with the end clients, a day or 2 of negotiation and contract paperwork and then very little non-billable stuff until the contract is over.

That cycle is a great compromise for me. I don't have to spend half of my time doing marketing and pitching for work. Just a couple of weeks (and even that only an hour or 2 each of those days) talking to recruiters and doing a bit of paperwork. The rest of the time is solving technical problems and a little bit of business.

I get the benefits of being my own boss. My interactions with project managers and clients are less oriented to subordination and more toward partnership. I get to completely manage my finances and deduct things like computing equipment, my DSL, cellphone, mileage, etc. I can take money from consulting revenue and invest it into this site or other projects I want to have built.

And, most of all, I think that I really like the fact that, compared to an employee situation, wholesale freelance work lays all of the economic realities of the situation bare. There's no over valuation of things like free soft drinks (that are worth, what $10 a week?) or health care. Rather than hoping for a review every year, I have contracts that expire and need to be renewed.

There's a lot more to the whole thing, but I just wanted to share a glimpse of the world that I inhabit between full-time salaried employee and retail freelance. The longer I work as an independent consultant in a wholesale kind of role, the more I'm convinced that it's a great way to work.

And, with something like 10 million Americans working as independent contractors at this point, this trend is not small and I am not alone.

Photo: J Wynia

A few weeks ago, Scott Hanselman gave a spec for his idea of what the "ultimate" developer workstation, bringing the grand total to $1900, without monitors. While I think Scott actually is buying that machine, most of the time, such lists are more along the lines of "what kind of house would I buy if I won the lottery" than practical planning. It's a fun thing to do and consider how you'd configure a machine if money wasn't an object.

Beyond that, I'm pretty weary of the whole idea of constantly seeking out the "best" or the "ultimate", which is usually not even reasonably defined. His "ultimate" box, for instance, has a 2.4Ghz quad core processor ($531), but only 2GB of RAM ($216). My version of an ultimate box would swap those 2 priorities. I'd rather have 16GB of RAM than an ultra-fast processor.

That's what makes the whole "building your own" approach to computers interesting. Each and every component choice reflects your own priorities. And, today, when Coding Horror extended the aforementioned "ultimate" by also including a basic and "premium" in addition to "deluxe" it came at an interesting coincidental time.

See, just yesterday, I ordered all of the bits for a new desktop. With the laptop fiasco of the laptop I want not being available until nearly September, I stepped back and re-thought my technology plan for the next year. Most of my gear needs an update. So, I decided to start with a new desktop, then monitors, then the laptop and settle in for 2-3 years after that.

Looking at their "basic", it falls right in the price range for what I bought. My total with shipping was just over $800 and included everything except the power supply (because I have one laying here), but did include a copy of Vista Business as this will be a multi-boot system that I'm building.

If everything goes according to plan, the pieces will be here for me to assemble between the end of my current contract (Thursday) and the beginning of the new one (next Wednesday), giving me time to put it together and get it up and running.

Here's how I approached this and what my driving factors were. I rely on these things rather than benchmarks because these are the things that are actually important to me, not whether a given set of tools runs faster.

First is that I want a solid 3 year duty cycle out of this machine. The ability to build it as a decent machine this month, but make it progressively better over the coming months was important.

Second, more than anything else, my ability to juggle all of the things I'm working on at a given time is always my biggest bottleneck. After working with dual monitor setups, it's clear that I haven't been even close to the actual desktop resolution/size that I really need to get work done.

To that end, I want a setup with at least 2, but preferably 4 big monitors. One 30" monitor has less space than 2 x 22" monitors do and 2 22" monitors can go for $440 these days.

Third was to rationally measure what is to blame for slowdowns. On Linux, I really don't run into performance problems even with what I have. However, on Windows, it is universally not enough RAM. CPU is secondary.

Incidentally, that list is *why* I didn't just buy one from Dell or somewhere else. See, the ability to run 4 monitors or 16GB of RAM is just not in the mainstream usage and mainstream is what Dell and company are after.

At any rate, I started out with video cards, looking for those that handled the highest maximum resolution for the money. I settled on this 256MB card with dual DVI that handles 3840 x 2400 resolution for about $130. The Coding Horror "basic" machine uses a dual DVI video card with only 2560 x 1600. This selection ensures that whatever monitors I end up buying will be handled. And, should I choose to add another of these cards, all 4 monitors can be as big as I can afford and things will work out great.

That potential future upgrade (a second video card) prompted part of the motherboard selection. I wanted at least 16GB of maximum RAM and multiple PCI-x slots. There were a few out there that handled 32GB of RAM, but not a lot of choice on other stuff, so I fell back to the 16GB motherboards and ended up with this open box motherboard for about $50.

As I'm constantly frustrated by a lack of room in the case of desktops, I opted for a full tower case for about $70. However, I'm still intrigued by the IKEA solution to the computer case problem, so I have a Plan B.

Since the selected motherboard used the LGA 775 slot, I used my "bang for the buck" approach on the Duo Core processors and ended up with this Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 Allendale 2.0GHz CPU for about $125. Given that I never max out the single core 1.6Ghz on my laptop, I'm not too worried that there's a "better" CPU out there.

Much of the rest was pretty straightforward. A $100 500GB hard drive to handle the 3+ OS setups I intend to include, 2GB of cheap starter RAM for $80, CPU cooler and DVD burner and the basic setup is complete.

Since the first 2 OS's on the machine will be Ubuntu and Vista, I grabbed Vista at the same time.

All of that lays a foundation that can easily be expanded.

• The case is huge, so I can add lots of hard drive space.
• There's room for lots more RAM to be added over the coming months.
• I can shop around for 2 matching monitors and buy them in the fall. That will replace the monitors I'm using now (which actually replaced those in the picture of my office about 8 months ago).
• I can add more operating systems to the setup.
• Next year, I can add a second video card and another pair of monitors. Who knows, 24" or 30" monitors may have sunk into the "cheap" range by that time. However, the chosen video card will handle them fine.
• If, by some miracle, I start maxing out the CPU, I can swap it out, because I didn't pay much for it in the first place.

In short, by the time this thing is actually at the end of its life, it will actually be really powerful, meaning that the 3 year life might actually be low. And, by spending the money on things like the monitors, when it DOES reach the end of its life, I can start the cycle all over again for cheap.