I've been freelancing for ~7 years now, and at this moment I can recall one month-long bug that took A LOT of time to fix.
I like to imagine there is a certain "buffer" of hours, let's say a day or two of work, which you can use/are reasonable to spend on fixing bugs and issues. If I fill this buffer, I stop charging particularly for the time used to fix that bug. Again, it depends on the client, situation and how well I'm treated.
Doesn't show useful info. Window load time is 1809ms, workspace load time 94ms, everything else is under 20ms. I hate being nitpicker, but thats a lot of time to load window.
This is exactly what I do/did. Making initial contact over Freelancer, payments over wire/skrill. I look only for crème de la crème clients (as funny as it sounds over those sites) and it is maybe one out of 100 hit. I have several recurring clients which i charge $50/hour and recently bumped price to $100/hour. For 3rd world country where I live, thats surreal money.
patio has very good point, and I'm looking to get off the FL bandwagon as soon as possible and switch to more prosperous/lucrative opportunities.
Thats why you shouldnt do any larger jobs over these sites. Do smaller scale projects over them to build your profile and reviews, and each larger project should go directly through wire or any other kind of payment processor, without freelance sites being middleman.
Just a tip, but maybe you should try to put public pressure on them. I had a case once when I got scammed for $1200 on Elance by a guy doing chargeback frauds, and Elance locked my account because I didnt had enough funds loaded to cover up the scam cost (they wanted to minus my balance by $1200 to cover chargeback, which I had no right to appeal to). I was locked out for a months, until I found a relatively popular blog post about Elance (over HN too, coincidentally), and an Elance representative who commented on it in comments. I replied to his comment and asked him why they did what they did to my account, and got account unlocked in less then a day. He probably figured out 1k$ bucks is less worth than negative publicity.
I use a flat desk, which I extended on both sides so its more wide. Under left side of it is chassis & UPS, under right are routers and subwoofer. On far left side on the desk you can see laptop, and on right one various stuff that form one mess :) Also there is a white light lamp that forms nice soft backlight in the background (it's not that strong as it is in picture). This summer I plan to move, so I plan to get a new setup, a better desk and a better cable management.
I will certainly take a look at Qt, and other alternatives, but isn't Visual Studio the ultimate tool of all tools? I'd rather start with it from the start, since I'm already familiar with most of the programming paradigms and stuff that isnt tied to language itself, so it's just a matter of learning cpp + IDE, and I figured out I can easily enough start out with VS? Maybe it will have a bit slower learning curve than if i start with Qt, but at the end it will pay off.
Thats exactly my plan, to learn some basics then further improve skills on minor contracting jobs I get and I feel comfortable to do them in new language. It would probably be C++.
Delphi is a great RAD tool, but it's also slowly dying and has lower and lower market share, 100% of my income come from Delphi contracting at the moment, and I love Delphi, but its not a great choice if you're just starting your programming career and have to choose the language to go with. I've been sticking to Delphi for whole my programming career (3 years professionaly, 10+ years hobby programming, i'm 24 now), but its more and more occuring to me that I have to learn some new tech ASAP if I want to progress further. Delphi has no proper crossplatform support and it's a big minus. Also it has ridiculous price.
I'm in similar situation, and from neighbor country, Serbia. 24 years old, and with 2 classes left to finish college. I've started with freelancing 2 years ago while I still had tons of classes left, then job just went upwards. At the moment I work for a monthly salary that would cover atleast 8 months of living here, but this reflected negatively on my motivation and time for last extra push to finish remaining 2 classes. What I can tell you is to not give up, as majority of other people mentioned here, college degree may feel not-needed in your CS career, but it doesnt really hurt to have one. I actually renewed my college year today, and plan to finish it by July, while working fulltime. I also recommend you to not focus fully on college, IMHO, better use your time to develop your skills on whatever you want to do in future and look at college as a place to make connections with other people and try to finish it with minimal effort involved in classes that won't help you at all in your professional path.
Last year I was to USA (10 days), Mallorca/Ibiza (14 days), Greece (4 days), a bit around the country for a few days, and during winter I tend to take every 3rd weekend or so to go to skiing. That sums up to around 30+ days/year.
This year, my plan is to mainly have active vacations, travelling & working, Thailand for a few months, and some mountain during winter for a few months.
I like to imagine there is a certain "buffer" of hours, let's say a day or two of work, which you can use/are reasonable to spend on fixing bugs and issues. If I fill this buffer, I stop charging particularly for the time used to fix that bug. Again, it depends on the client, situation and how well I'm treated.