Friends and drinking buddies always tell me they envy me for my freedom. While downing bottles of beer or glasses of our favorite brand of cheap brandy, they would narrate the reasons why they think I have the best of both worlds. They would keep on telling me how lucky I am for being a stay-home dad and earning money at the same time.

I, on the other hand and to help ease their misplaced envy, would always tell them of the worries and fears that freelancers like me often face. Yes, I am liberated from that nine-to-five nightmare, and that even more nightmarish traffic on EDSA. But on the debit side, I had to let go of the security that a regular paycheck brings, on the 15th and 30th days of each month.

And worse, freelance writers often are targeted by scammers and other social vermins. Various Web sites are offering writing jobs and assignments. Using various schemes and incentive pots, they would try their darn best to entice the unwary into writing articles, editing books, or any other literary tasks they could think of.

And once the job is done, expect these heartless parasites to become scarce. You will definitely never hear from them again, at least not from the same e-mail address or phone number they previously used to get in touch with you.

To make matters worse, even seemingly respectable and reliable writing job ads may lead to similar results. I once did a writing test for an advertiser on JobStreet. After I sent the article, done according to the tester’s specifications and instructions, I never heard from them again. As in nothing, not even “Hah, fooled yah, sucker!”

Archos Phone

Archos, maker of portable media players, is developing a portable “tablet-phone” that runs on the Google Android mobile operating system. Equipped with a touchscreen and scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2009, the tablet-phone will also come with TV recording and high-definition video playback. With storage capacity of up to 500GB, the phone will offer hundreds of hours of video.

Coming with Adobe Flash support, the tablet-phone will have an anorexic, 10mm casing.

I hope that this Archos phone, unlike US Secretary of State Clinton does get to reach our shores.

Low-Tech, Reliable

Researchers and therapists in Kentucky have come up with one rather bright idea. They provided an autistic boy with a “guide dog” that would hopefully help the former get through each day with a lot more ease.

One problem, though. Autistic children do not usually welcome eye contact with others. Dogs, on the other hand, live for eye contact with their masters. Autistic children do not respond well to verbal cues. Dogs do.

Anyway, once they made the necessary adjustments, the researchers found out that a companion dog can greatly help improve the quality of life of some autistic children.

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next time as we keep on watching IT. For feedback: adlfrancis@gmail.com.