How To Apply For A Job (Episode 25 of 37 Signals Podcast: Hiring)

One of the best podcast discussions of how an excellent and ground-breaking company hires. A must listen for every job applicant, college student or parent thereof. Highlights:

• Applicants: write a cover letter that flatters the company you are applying to.
  • actually know something about the company by, say, reading about them!
  • demonstrate you actually know it in the body of the letter
• Applicants: If there are instructions as to how to format application or, simply, apply, READ THEM!
• Applicants: Spell correctly (at minimum). Write well or you don't stand a chance.
• Applicants: As difficult as this seems, imagine being your prospective employer, then be the person they are looking for.
• Designers: Make sure all the content you have produced paints coherent picture of who you are.
• Companies: when hiring outside of your comfort zone, be prepared. It can be simply hard, depressing work.
• Companies: ask applicants what they did yesterday at their current jobs. Amazing what you'll learn by the way they describe day, activities or mission

Available at iTunes Store.

If You Are An Unemployed Architect, Don't Start Over, Start Up: Google Reader As A Research Tool

Google Reader is the best research tool I've found. "Regular" Google searches result in reams of pages that--more and more--seem biased by spamming and commercial interests, requiring hours of tedious DSL-speed page opening and closing to sort through. Reader, on the other hand, allows you to focus your search by first identifying the authoritative voices blogging on subjects relevant to your start up idea, then aggregating feeds from those blogs into a personal, automatically assembled and self-renewing stream of information which you scroll through in your Reader window. My research became 500%-1,000% more efficient the day I dscovered Reader. Of course Reader was only meaningful because of first discovering who I should be following, and I did that via the various podcasts I was listening to as described in my last post.

The basics are as follows:

1. go to the Reader link at top of your gmail page (and if you don't use gmail, please start). 
2. type in the name of a blog or author if you have one, pull up their "feed" and subscribe, or
3. type in a subject of interest, wander through the amazing list of results Google supplies, and subscribe to those of interest

Reader adds the blog to the column on the left of your new Reader page, and later allows you to organize your blogs by subject folder. When you highlight a single blog or folder, only the contents of that stream appear in the Reader field, allowing you to scroll through the information from all--or just related--blogs in a single rolling feed. This allows you to go right to your most-read daily items ("The Daily Dish" & "Mashable" for me) as often (or in my case, compulsively) as you want, and save work-related research for work times. The efficiency and time savings from NOT having to bounce around between different blog sites in your browser is reason alone to adopt Reader, but Reader goes way beyond that.

For example, you can subscribe to all the blogs that a list of noted authorities and/or celebrities subscribe to. (Seriously, it's very cool.) Or you can browse blogs by subject matter as pre-organized by Google. And Reader lets you store articles of interest in a number of ways, including posting them to your own blog with a single click (btw, Google's free blog tool is called Blogger and that's worth a chapter, though my current favorite is Posterous.com) starring them, sharing them as part of your own RSS feed, or emailing them, and you can do all of that from within the stream (vs. taking all the time to open up the original source page then doing it). Just go and get lost in it for an hour or two and you'll quickly appreciate the efficiencies it brings, not to mention the amazing new factoid you discovered about QR codes or Paypal making mobile payment form your cellphone possible.

But the real reason to use Reader if you're an unemployed architect starting up is that for those fields related to your start up and about which you have to know as much as possible, there is no more efficient way to explore, absorb, document and organize the information. Give it a try. And then please thank me in the comments below so I know you're all reading this:)

When Is A Cord Of Firewood A Cord Of Firewood?

It's a common pain point among homeowners: When you buy firewood, how do you know if the pile of wood they dump in your driveway is actually a cord or not--as in 8' wide x 4' high x 4' deep after being stacked? I mean, that's a lot of wood, and the pile never seems to meet the legal definition once you stack it. All of which is not even to ask whether the logs are 18" or 24" long (2 x 24" = required 4'. Great. But 2 x 18"? That missing 12" of depth represents 25% of the volume of a cord). Well, wood buyers take heart from the following email exchange with my friend, a philosopher-developer-sculptor and all-around great guy who doesn't really need the money and sells firewood more or less out of the goodness of his heart.

On Nov 4, 2010, at 11:53 AM, James Akers wrote:

Now don't get mad!! You wouldn't respect me unless I pointed out the following.

Here is the math you asked for so you could double check your cord estimating technique:

• volume of 1 cord of wood stacked = 8' w x 4' dp x 4" high = 128 cu ft.
• volume of 2 cords stacked = 128 cu ft x 2 = 256 cu ft
• volume of my pre-existing 2009 remnant firewood pile: 2' high x 8' long x 2' deep = 32 cu ft
• volume of 2010 stack (see photo, previous email) after 2 cords wood delivered and stacked over pre-existing pile = 10.5' w. x 4' dp x 6' h. = 252 cu ft
• actual volume of the 2 "cords" you delivered = 252 - 32 = 220 cu ft
• missing volume of wood purchased from best friend (you) = 36 cu ft = 8' x 2' dp x 2' high

I can come get it if it makes it easier? Or you can never talk to me again, your choice. But I would miss that:)

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 7:59 PM, (best friend)  wrote:

I hope that your asshole is not as tight as you had to stack that wood (I looked) to "prove" the math. We can form the missing portion in suppository form (on a lathe) if that would be to your liking.

Actually, and all kidding aside, I am glad to have a lunatic actually check the formula. The kid that told me that 187 cubic feet loose was 128 cubic feet stacked--as published in the State of Maine Forestry something or other. The question, of course, is what does that actually mean? I loaded the truck to the "top" of the 24" tailgate (thus 2'X8"X12' or 192 cubic feet) with a little bit sticking up and some voids below--loose. The second load appeared a bit light but I had wondered if the first was a little heavy. Averaged out we are 12.5% shy on two cords. I will drop it off.

The thing I have puzzled over for years is why people are so anxious about getting ripped off on firewood. Its the corollary question to why people go to Taft Farms and peel their corn on site because there may be a bug and a dozen ears is four bucks. Firewood processing is basically public service and yet few of us hold all the other thieves to account i.e. the billable hours from the $250 an hour lawyer, the $20,000 a year health insurance bill and so on. Maybe it is because it is something you can see and count and we have so little control everywhere else. I was the same way whenever I bought wood.

Yer buddy

Me to my friend:

Very nice (and funny) reply. Glad you're still my friend after me being such an asshole. I think its a version of what you say: no one wants to spend $200 on a cord of firewood when the same could go toward food or fashion, so we cling to the commonly accepted definition of "a cord" to reduce the pain, always suspecting we haven't actually received a cord (since they know we'll never check--or have the guts to call them on it). A cord, goes the thinking, is still supposed to be a cord, thank God...unlike a 2x4. Of course a cord is also supposed to be 4' deep when stacked, begging the logical question: "should the 18" logs you left be 24" long so that, stacked in two parallel rows, they create a 4' deep stack, or is the 12" of air between two rows of 18" logs also meant to be overlooked by naive consumers?"

Anyway, many thanks for your honest and auspicious reply, and my condolences for your voluntary involvement in a thankless retail operation where performance is so easy to measure. Yer bud.

Lamp For An Unemployed Architect

Bang! comes from Bitplay and is a lamp like any other at a first glance. When the user no longer needs light, he or she can simply take the “white weapon”, point it at the lamp and shoot. A second gun trigger will have the reverse effect.

Part II: When Architectural Renderers Are Also Architects, Architecture Clients Study Options More Cost-Efficiently

In Part One below, we saw the beginning of an architectural idea: stackable, pre-fab units that come together in a way that animates building and neighborhood. The series of images below follows the thread of that design through to the final black-and-white digital renderings.

Bitt, you may be asking yourself why an architect who does traditional pencil and watercolor architectural rendering would present final images of his own design in a black-and-white digital style-especially given that architect's thoughts on the shortcomings of digital rendering. In this case we were looking for a dispassionate style which combined the strengths of digital modeling (real-time navigation as we pitched the project to the Planning Board) with the charms of the pencil sketch.

Anyone else find ways to combine digital rendering and traditional rendering tools to save time and money in the architectural rendering process? Stew? Chip? Dale? Mark? Tom? Bill? Vic? Leave your comments, lads. As always, click on images to enjoy detail.