Office Max!

This is an actual newspaper headline - “Scrapbooking store binds hobbyists via array of staples “. You can see the article online at this link (Fortunately it isn’t one of those papers making you register your email address to read their stuff).

Tip #2. Go shopping at the office supplies and discount clubs. You may find some discount clubs like Costco & Sams have a 6 month return policy, check your location. California stores have a 6 month no questions asked policy, and yes, this means Computers and Software too, even if the package is open and you have used it. Just make sure you can put it back in the box and you have the receipt.

At noon, I took a nice long lunch and came back for more meaningless tasks including un-sorting the paper clips and loading the copy machine with as much paper as it would take.

I found this article interesting from Chief Learning Officer called. Research: Poor Conversations Equal Disengaged, Dissatisfied Workforce. This makes perfect sense to me.

I made the decision to start a blog after I realized that many of my clients and friends were checking my pbase site to see what new images I was adding to my web albums. Since my pbase site has expired, I decided that it was important to develop a newsletter-style site where my current clients could see what I’ve been up to, brides and grooms could get a sneak peek at their wedding pictures, and my friends and family could check out my recent work. By incorporating some personal notes into my business, I believe that it will give current clients a chance to get to know me better and will give prospective clients some insight into my personality. I firmly believe that the better I know you and the better you know me, the better your photographs will be, so a blog is definitely in order! Also, since my business is so near and dear to my heart . . . it only seems natural to mix business news with personal news.

I like my class but it makes me a little upset that I don't enjoy it as much as I could. In class, sometimes (like tonight) I was yawning and just ready to go home about half way through. After a full day of work and then a stop over at Staples to print off my assignment, then to the library because the girl at Staples told me it would take two hours to print my stuff. I've taken stuff their before and that's never happened. She said 2 hours for colour printing (which is what I wanted). Then I asked what about black and white? She said 30 mins. I didn't get that logic. I only had 6 pages to print and I said nevermind and left for the library. Let's just say my library experience was not a great one.

A little over a year ago, I took my first office job since ’93. (I hated that one. Small office, psychopathic boss, and working for a company whose ethics were “questionable”. Never regretted tendering my resignation there.) This new job is in a professional, yet casual, environment. They are very strict with hiring requirements, only taking people with 5-years management experience, or having graduated in the top 5% of your curriculum’s class. So you can imagine my dismay to find that, despite everyone here being fairly well educated, academically or real world experience, that the same sort of juvenile behavior I have come to expect from retail employees is present in this environment.

The glass desk was a bonus for me. (Frank’s was planned moreso than mine was) So I’ll have those tables (he is using my bigger old casual dining table) back eventually for kitchen, learning, etc. use. Both new desks are from Staples. We looked at all the major office stores last week and in the weeks before. The point being we were looking for cheaper slim solutions. We saw plenty of nice big office desks, computer oriented versions and whole suites, but they are all out of our realm in this house. Pricey too. So what we saw at Staples were a few different desks in a certain product line. Mine is glass and metal, very solid, blue tempered glass, a wide desk area, keyboard drawer below, and two shelves below that to hold the computer, and other things. On the desktop is an elevated shelf to hold the monitor. In the “table” setup I’d have little room left on the surface to write, or store anything, with just a monitor, the computer, and the keyboard and mouse right there on the one surface. This new desk affords me super-duper space. It’s all open and lovely. I like the glass look. It’s very modern, moreso than our house is.

Hey, go here and read about the invention and history of the paper clip.

Hewlett Packard >Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett. Intel Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated Electronics.

Whether to rent, lease or buy a copy machine is up to you. But virtually no business can get by without file copies. Carbon paper means a loss of efficiency, and running over to the corner shop to get copies is going to cost you time and money, so be sure to fit some sort of copier into your business start-up costs. If impossible at the very first, use the old carbon paper - you must have a copy for your file.

All of our hotspots are funded by partner organizations. For example, the hotspots that are located in Downtown Manhattan are sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York, a Business Improvement District company. Some of our personal hotspots are set up and run by individual volunteers. We have some funding through personal donations to NYCwireless, but no formal funding arrangements.

Suddenly two of my teachers and the receptionist entered with of the men close behind. I assumed my staff was giving them a tour of the school but then I saw a gun in the man's hand and I felt a cold wave of fear sink into my stomach. I stood up as he roughly pushed us into my office next door. The small office quickly filled with people as the other gunman herded all the teachers and students out of their classrooms. We were forced to crouch on the floor with our heads down. Then one by one we were ordered to stand and empty our pockets and purses of money, watches and jewelry in the open briefcase that was sitting on my desk. As one gunmen kept his eye on us the other grabbed the only other American who worked at the school and forced him at gunpoint to open the front door for students as they arrived for the next session. One by one they entered my office, eyes wide with fear, as they obeyed the gunman's orders to give up the goods. Then one of the gunman forced the receptionist to open the cash register and to carry the school's computers to the car parked in front.

I made my own got-damn rubber band ball because it is a slow day here at the orifice, but I'll be doggone. You can buy them pre-made.

SMALL LAW FIRM VS. LARGE LAW FIRM: The size of the law firm has absolutely nothing to do with how well that office will represent you and/or handle your case. A large law firm (10 or more names on their letterhead) will not impress an insurance adjuster into giving you a better settlement. On the contrary, adjuster s who ve been around, know that huge law offices have multi-million dollar clients with mind-boggling legal problems. Because of this those types of law firms often do not put the time (nor concern) into a several thousand dollar personal injury case that a small office would. The bottom line? You ll receive more and better attention from a small law office. Many of the best personal injury lawyers operate within the confines of a law firm with only two, three or, at the very most, four associates.

Our roots are middle class. I think middle class interests play a big role in characterising our work. We were quickly buoyed by our abundant funding. Although we felt far more modest than the Big NGOs (nicknamed BINGOs), we still showered ourselves with facilities like the telephone, fax machine, and computer. Yes they may be basic facilities but everyday we wanted more. Our phone bills kept rising: up to one million rupiah (US$500) per month - compared to fifty thousand rupiah (US$25) a worker needs to rent a room monthly! We became dissatisfied with simple computers, we wanted colour notebooks. We paraded like executives. We would fly or take cabs to meetings instead of huddling in a bus or train like we used to.

But the question about the size of the Web came under intense debate last week after Yahoo announced at an Internet search engine conference in Santa Clara, California, that its search engine index - an accounting of the number of documents that can be located from its databases - had reached 19.2 billion.

Greetings. A great number of people have difficulty with computers and with technology in general and in an effort to alleviate some of these problems, I proudly present the first entry in the When Reality Knocks Lifestyle and Technology Guide. Today’s topic: How to deal with everyday computer problems.

its made up entirely of post office rubber bands. everyday i get the office mail it has a rubber band around it. i decided to start making them into a ball. once it gets big enough i’m going to take it down the street to the post office and return it to them.

My four months stay with this firm, I am engaged with are Human Resources projects. No offense meant, but I really am not interested with them. Sure, it’s something new and the process is another learning bead. Going through it and working with the people I’ve mingled were all good learning experiences, but I hated General Psychology in college. And I’m sure the feeling is mutual. I wouldn’t mind though listening to friends who actually studied the field, or some trivia how the usual things we do describe our personalities (i.e. Niel’s Salter vs. Taster theory). Still, I can’t find my feet planted in its turf. It’s not my cup of tea, and I can’t stand the thought that I have to think how people think, or make conclusions based on momentary judgment or from man’s need to take leisurely trips to insanity. Just can’t.

Another frustration is that I have not found the printer I want. We purchased a HP Officejet 7310 (an inkjet all in one), but I simply cannot get it to work on my Mac. The software crashes every time, and I have the latest version. It installed fine on my laptop, but spending $550 CDN + 15% tax (a premium to what it is selling for in the US) on something that doesn’t even work is insane. So I will be returning it to Staples..

I'm definitely a child of the PC computing industry. I've grown up around computers. I've seen one innovation after another. I have to say the most amazing times in my programming life have been spent hunched over a computer all night hacking out a new way to solve a problem. Even later in my professional career, during the "high-tech late 90's" I had a blast playing with xml data islands before example one hit the list server (wow, does anyone remember learning new concepts on list servers? yikes I feel old). Whatever the case, what was interesting was that everyone was learning something new because everyone was solving technology problems on their own; sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. But every programmer had to learn to be creative to solve problems.

Granted, it's not an expensive chair (I think I paid like $60 for it at Office Max), and it's not the best crafted piece of furniture I've ever owned, but I'd like to think that when I buy something like that, it'll last longer than it did.

Anyone with a love of building things out of paper will enjoy this site. Inside this blog you will find links to origami, info on paper Disney castles, way cool japanese ‘make-it-yourself’ paper version of Life, and other coolness.

I’ve been trying out Plaxo the past couple of days. I am an extremely lazy person when it comes to updating my address book and I usually just try to label emails with “Contact Information” if I get an address update. And I have a stack of business cards with a rubber band around them in my desk drawer at home..