Ouch, this one hurts. I lost my Dad to pancreatic cancer last year and had a very similar experience - he loved jumping on the tractor and cutting the grass on his little farm, but we went so quickly from him asking me do it temporarily while he recovered from surgery to him never getting on the tractor again.
So sorry for what you're going through, and wishing you some peace wherever you can find it. My email is in my bio, please reach out if you need someone to talk to (I have no useful expertise or advice of any kind here, but will gladly lend a listening ear).
When I moved to my current job a year ago, I shut down my business and closed a checking, savings, business checking, and credit card account with Bank of America. I had a Simple invite sitting around, and thought it made sense to consolidate and...Simplify, making my single Simple account my sole bank.
I couldn't be happier with that decision, and believe that I have been saving money (in both fees and in general) because of Simple's interface.
So with this news, I feel excited for their team, but still very nervous. I joined Simple precisely because I was tired of dealing with a megabank (like many folks here), so if Simple can continue to buck the trend and stay customer-focused and agile, then I'll continue to be all-in.
I've downloaded the client, added an app (Django, Rails, and Node). When I tried to view the page, it 404'd and then promptly walked me through SSHing in and starting the server process.
I'm impressed.
Later in the day I'll dive a little deeper, but between frictionless "add an app" process to the way it feels like a local development environment - I think you've got a winner here.
After asking lots of questions, I was pointed to http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/, which does a pretty decent job outlining the workflow. It helps to read a lot of tickets first to get a feel for what they're fixing - http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/14 and then find a neglected (but fairly recent) but and chip away at it.
It's overwhelming, but I've found a great amount of confidence in just picking a (tiny) bug, fixing it, and watching the process work. Good luck to you!
I'm a Googler and would be glad to show you around one afternoon. Shoot me an e-mail (address is in my profile) and tell me a little more about yourself and we can work out the details.
(Edit: También hablo Español si te hace sentir más cómodo.)
Kirby came to my attention about 6 months ago, and I'm just getting around to playing with it. I'm highly impressed with how easily it can be extended and customized.
By the time I'm done, I will have an extremely lightweight static-file based blog that syncs with Dropbox (and has a web-based control panel, if needed). The tutorials on the site are great to get you set-up. Highly recommended.
I have said this before, but I don't understand why any developer would move a site to a live and public server without having received full payment. Yes, take a deposit. Then develop the site and leave it to the client to pay you before launching.
In 5 years I have had 0 problems with clients paying using this method.
Yep, same here. I'm currently sitting in a University library in Germany, working on some projects for my clients. I have an apartment in Texas, but haven't hardly seen it in three months.
I'm so, so thankful for the experiences in travel that this lifestyle has afforded over the last three years. I also think that in some ways, being constantly on the move has made me a better worker, but it's time for a change. I start a full-time sit-down-in-an-office position in February, which I chose to do for exactly the reasons that the article outlines. I echo the parent comment - it's a cool lifestyle that you should try if you can, but it's not for me any longer.
It's also worth mentioning that the customer service really is phenomenal, and I'm hoping that they scale this up at the same rate as the rest of the business.
Part of the magic in the support is having a button on the side of the site where I can just open up a ticket and describe an issue, and in short time get a response back from a real human being. For instance, I went to Mexico a week or so ago and sent them a message asking them to note this on my account. They quickly responded back stating that they had noted this, and including a list of fees and limitations that I could expect when using my card down there. This was a far superior experience to sitting on the phone, punching in prompts, and answering security questions.
If you do need phone support (I have once so far), the number rings through to a real person, and is superior to big banks in response time and helpfulness in my experience as well.
I'm a big fan of the service, as much for what it is now as for what I'm sure it's going to become as it continues to grow.
FreeAgent is fantastic. I have been using it as my sole accounting software for 3 years. If you need to track time and send out invoices (for a multitude of clients), and do general accounting work (tracking income vs. expenses), it's hard to do better than FreeAgent IMHO.
I've been freelancing full-time with Wildfire since they were around 40 people and had just closed their Series A. They've got a fantastic product (I still like it after working with it day in and day out), and a seriously rocking team. They deserve all the good stuff that this will bring.
I have definitely had my share of clients that have been slow to pay, and am very thankful for having had the majority of my clients pay well and on time. However, I have had the occasional client that just doesn't want to pay, and I definitely know the feelings of helplessness and anger that drive the creation of this sort of policy.
My question about this method is more about practicality than anything else. Has the OP actually tried to enforce this? It's hard for me to imagine presenting an invoice for 150% of the original and not have the client fly off the handle and make things much worse.
As far as resources for learning languages, I have been using Duolingo (http://www.duolingo.com/) to learn German over the past few months, and can't praise it highly enough.
They currently offer German, Spanish, and French (which is in beta). It's in private beta, but I recently had an influx of friends added to the site, so it seems like they're sending out invites pretty regularly.