Game of Thrones Daily
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
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Today's Document
Phantogram Three
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
h
tumblr dot com
The Bowery Presents
blake kathryn
One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
Show & Tell
The Bright Sessions
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Color Me Curious
Not today Justin
bliss lane
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@thisworkinglife-blog-blog
We're Back
Sorry for the long, long break. I've restyled the 'blog and should be putting up some new stuff very soon, beginning with a monograph on Field Culture vs Office Culture, and why they go together like bologna and peanut butter, which is to say, they don't mix.
Soon, dear readers.
Spam & Scam of the Month
I still get these sometime at work and I must say, I've never gotten one from "Australia" before, so I've decided to start sharing them with you. Please contain your excitement.
______________________________________________________________________
Email text reads:
Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 16bit Greetings I am Mr. Bruce John Glover, a citizen of Australia. My company acquired 600,000Mt's of used rail scraps from Nigeria railway co- operation and wants to resell or partner with a reliable, capable company or individual to dispose the materials. Kindly reply back if you are interested to partner with us to sell them out to end users or buy from us. DETAILS OF THE USED RAIL SCRAP: =============================== PRODUCTS: USED RAIL SCRAPS QUANTITY: OVER 600,000 TONS PRICE: US$205 per ton CIF ANY SAFE PORT PAYMENT TERM: full payment by T/T after 14days of delivery of the goods to buyer’s port. LENGTH: 5.5 METERS LONG ORIGIN: UKRAINE STOCK IN Nigeria SPECIFICATION: R50 - R65 Chemical structure of the Materials (used rail scrap) is: C - 0.71 - 0.84% Mn-0.75 - 1.25 % Si- 0.18 - 0.55% S - Not more than 0.045% P - Not more than 0.035%. Regards Mr. Bruce John Glover.
At Fab Cafe, you can order coffee, snacks, and time on a laser cutter.
Because EVERYONE should be able to fabricate at a coffee house...
This is Why I Clobber Tech Sales Reps on the Phone
Have a read at this here link:
http://al3x.net/2012/02/29/how-not-to-sell-software-in-2012.html
If I'm going to shell out the boss's money to pay for some software or managed service solution, I want to know that the salesperson on the phone knows his or her stuff about the product he or she represents. I cannot abide sales chumps, and here I define "sales chump" as a clock-punching nonprofessional sitting in a call center for the sole purpose of vending pre-programmed, convictionless lines about their software or service. If you don't believe in what you're selling, sir or ma'am, get a different job, or learn to put on a convincing act. You're selling software, not french fries, and your product could impact a multimillion-dollar business either for good or bad. There, I said it. I feel much better. Don't you?
Bluebeam, for example, is a great example of great people. Pre-sales Q and A, Tech Support, all the people there I've dealt with over the last year have been top-notch or close to it.
QuickBooks has some competence in their staff, but no real conviction or empathy I could detect in the people I spoke with.
Apple? Spot-on, wonderful people.
Microsoft? The folks I talked to recently were right up there with Apple in knowledge and helpfulness.
Even the business sales people at Dell, especially one person at a call center in Austin, Texas, knew what he knew, didn't pretend to know more, researched answers he didn't readily have, and was a solid pro to work with. I bought a network attached storage device from him with full confidence. I followed up less than a month later with 2 Dell Precisions with no worries.
Buffalo's tech support was a 50/50 split. The first person I talked to needed to go sell french fries. The second one more than took up the slack. Redemption.
These are some of the good guys that help us all get our jobs done.
Anyone preparing to drop a few hundred dollars on Adobe Acrobat should stop in their tracks and take a good long look at Bluebeam's PDF Revu. Never heard of it? No surprise. That's because it's largely a targeted product, namely, to those in professional fields where documentation is king: Law, construction, architecture, and a small host of others. What follows is a list of credits:
Bluebeam is much easier to use, much more responsive, and far better to look at. Take it from an information designer and former UX designer who cannot abide unintuitive, ugly, or buggy software.
Bluebeam handles LOADS. Very large PDF files, PDF Packages with built-in folders, documents on large sheets, splitting, extracting, and combining PDFs, PDF creation and conversion.. Done. Done. Done. And that list goes on.
Bluebeam is much, much less expensive. At $179.00 for a single Revu user licence, you're putting two (and a half) people to work for about the same price it takes to put one to work on Acrobat.
Bluebeam is already heavily used in construction, engineering, and architecture, and has had a few years to mature as a PDF and documentation solution.
Their customer support is very good, capable, and courteous.
User licences are transferable: Using it at work and need it at home? Save 179.00 and simply unregister your copy on the work PC before you leave, then register your copy on your home PC with the same credentials. Bluebeam will tell you so. (Just don't forget to unregister your home copy before going back to work the next day.)
Yes, there's a good, longish free trial that is fully functional. Once it expires, Bluebeam will still work as a PDF reader.
There's my micro-review of Bluebeam for you. No, it isn't perfect. I noticed a problem with creating PDF packages where too many folders will make them all disappear (I'm still working with support on that one), and as of this review it is still not available for Mac, though they are working on their first release this year. Even so, once I started using it over a year ago, I was hooked. Acrobat is off my Get list, likely for good.
Wunderlist Reviewed, Retired.
Apparently, Google has now moved into the automotive industry.
For me, this year has been marked by big losses, both good and bad. Here's the short list:
Osama bin Laden - This was a good loss, and I'll make no apology either for possessing or expressing my sentiment here. He was directly responsible for delivering a heavy blow to our economy and national security, the effects of which we still feel in some areas, not to mention the staggering loss of life on our own soil... Ten years later it's still enough to get your blood pressure up.
Borders Books & Music - I'll be mourning this loss for while to come. Borders was a second home for me many years ago when I lived in South Tampa squalor. It was an immersive environment that provided an escape from the heat, the cockroaches, and the perennial financial distress of those days. Between Borders, Barnes & Noble, and various coffee houses, I had a living room, a study, a kitchen, a measure of self-respect, and the raw materials to dream.
Steve Jobs - What can I even add to the subject of his passing that hasn't already been said by so many others? I won't paint him as a saint (he was buddhist, after all. There are no saints in buddhism.), but I'll sure paint him as a spectacular innovator and businessman who can never be duplicated. I miss him already.
architizer:
Steve Jobs in 1982. RIP
A good combination... conceptually.
architizer:
Architecture + Religion + Food
hyphenprojects:
Housing concept collage
What we can be more (immediately) concerned with
I just added the following to my email signature block
"Please consider the extra hassle, footwork, and inconvenience of handling and tracking hardcopy before printing this email and any attachment, regardless of the environment. We're in the digital age. Be smart. Get organized. Print less."
mystrea:
by http://kleemass.deviantart.com/
This gives a new meaning to "Green Building Practices".
Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
Frank Lloyd Write
architizer:
graffitilab:
Frank Gehry Strikes Back: Carbonite Tower (realitycues.com)
I think this is technically outside of our scope of work...
"And So We Celebrated."
The death of the human-shaped monster known as Osama bin Laden is being celebrated today throughout the great United States of America, and I, for one, celebrated it by going to work. I suppose a national holiday could have been declared, and that would have been great for the sake of leisure, but by going to work, we keep the economy running - the very thing Osama tried to damage on September 11th of 2001, and had worked to damage ever since.
See how we mark your passage, Osama. We very well just get on with our lives.
Litany Against Loafing
Get it. Get it done. Get it done right. Get it done right now.
I don't know who first wrote this, but it's a great litany to get one's mind back in focus when dealing with the task at hand.
The Importance of Document Management -
- can be illustrated thus: Do you want to have to dig for your socks at the bottom of three different laundry baskets in two different rooms, or would you rather find the exact pair you're looking for, neatly folded, right in the top drawer of your dresser?
If you prefer to go mining for your documents the same way you go mining for your clothes then you deserve all the lost time and productivity you get.
I know. That's blunt of me, but that's how much I despise disorder. Poorly managed documentation results in:
Multiple copies and multiple versions of the same docs
Lost docs
Hard-to-find docs
Lost time
Lost productivity
Lost money from the lost time and lost productivity of people going on safari to find lost docs, hard-to-find docs, and weed through the multiple copies and versions of the same docs.
This is a quick post. I may elaborate more on this in the future, but in the mean time, take my advice and get organized. Once done, it's very easy to maintain, especially when compared to the time it takes to put it all in order.
