Architecture

If you love architecture, check out this web site – architizer.com   It is an online portfolio for architects and a connection spot for architects, clients, journalists and everyone interested in architecture.

Up and Running with Facebook with: Justin Seeley

In this course, Justin Seeley gives a quick primer on Facebook, the popular social networking site, showing how to join the conversation, share pictures, and find out what your friends and family are up to, all without compromising your privacy. The course shows how to make a Facebook profile; start finding friends; like and view their posts; share your own ideas via status updates, comments, and chat; and post photos, videos, and links. The course also shows how to control your privacy online and access Facebook on the go with your smartphone.



Watch Trailer

Beeminder Motivational Tool

Needing some motivation to get everything checked off on your to-do list? Here is a great article from Spirit Magazine’s January 2013 edition on a site that can help.

“Beeminder This new online tool forces you to shape up—or pay up. Here’s how Beeminder co-founder Bethany Soule describes the Web-based, incentivized task tracker: ‘When I met my co-founder Daniels Reeves, he was in the doldrums of dissertation writing. That’s when we started concocting a series of incentive schemes and productivity hacks called the Voluntary Harassment Program. It was so effective that he finished his Ph.D. that year and then asked me to marry him. After that, we built a simple website for friends that, paired with small side bets, became indispensable for tracking all sorts of goals.  The project evolved into Beeminder.  It’s a motivational tool where you pledge money to stay on track to meet any goal.  We show your progress using a digital yellow brick road, and we integrate with popular fitness and productivity sites to help you keep pace with your achievements. The way we motivate you is simple: If you miss a milestone, we take the money you pledged—which can range from $5 to several hundred dollars.  We’ll even let your twitter followers know you've fallen behind.  Most goals are fitness related, but some use Beeminder to boost productivity at work or fulfill lifelong goals like learning to play a guitar.  We use it to guarantee at least one improvement to the site each day.  We've made more than 600 since we launched, and we’re just getting started.’ Beeminder.com”

Facebook Likes

Here is an interesting article I found in Spirit  Magazine’s January 2013 Edition.

“Facebook processes 2.7 billion ‘Likes’ each day. The social media site’s users—who total one billion, or 1/7 of the earth’s population—are giving this feature a big thumbs up.  But the ‘Like’ button wasn’t always so well-liked—or even called ‘Like.’  In a post on the Q-and -A site Quora, Facebook engineering director Andrew Bosworth explains that ‘like was deemed more universal than the company’s first choice, ‘awesome,’ even though initial employee response was lukewarm. ‘We [had] become attached to ‘awesome’ and, comparatively, ‘like’ seem[ed] bland,’ he says. The digital sentiment as we know it today made its official debut in February 2009. Since then, 1.3 trillion ‘likes’ have been recorded. A quite positive development, indeed.”

Electric Slide App

Here is a neat article I found in Spirit magazine’s January 2013 edition, featuring the App of the Month.

“Electric Slide will simultaneously simplify and revolutionize your presentation setup. Upload PowerPoint decks, Word docs, PDFs, photos and videos to this cloud-based service.  Then, swipe a finger across your iOS device’s screen to navigate wirelessly through your content as it is ‘broadcast’ in real time to colleagues or clients on a Web browser- anywhere in the world.”

For more information on this app click here.

Basics for Safer Downloading

Whenever you download a file—whether you open a spreadsheet attached to an email message, grab a cool little screensaver or mouse cursor from the web, or download music or video files from someone else's computer—you could be putting your computer at risk.

Click here to continue to Microsoft at Home to read this article.

Faster Cloud

Several previous articles have discussed SaaS (Software As A Service) and the prospects for cloud computing. Today we’re going to look a step further at PaaS (Platform As A Service) as it is being utilized by RevUp Render.

Glossary of Computer Terms You Need To Know:

The Cloud – Just another way to say the Internet. The distinction would be that the Internet is a method of connecting a whole bunch of computers so they can talk to each other. The Cloud expands the use of those computers to store data, to serve as the host for software and now even to provide a platform for software to work on. EX: Google Apps gives you several software programs such as word processing and lots of storage space on their servers. You don’t need a server in your office. The server is owned, managed, protected by Google. You access it via your Internet browser. You pay an annual or monthly fee to Google for access to their servers.

SaaS – Software that is totally hosted on the Internet. It is not downloaded to your computer. You use your browser to go to the service provider and to access the software. EX: Salesforce, Google Apps, Zoho. Some software manufacturers offer both downloadable software and SaaS to choose from. EX: QuickBooks, Microsoft Office.

PaaS – A server in the cloud that you can use with your software and a browser.  EX: Chermayeff & Poole tried to process a Revit file of a 42,900 square meter multi-use project. Their powerful in house computers locked up after hours of working. RevUp Render was able to complete the processing in 10 minutes.

CPU – Central Processing Unit which most of us have in our offices. The typical single chip processer that is in your laptop or that box that is your desktop computer. The Intel Pentium III had 9 million transistors.

GPU – Graphics Processing Unit. A supercomputer used for computing 3D functions. The first GPU was developed by NVidia.  The GeForce 256 has over 22 million transistors and can process 10 million polygons per second. (These are a tad bit expensive and usually out of the budget of an architectural firm.)

Platform – The hardware that is used to run the software. The CPU or GPU is my platform for running my software. My IBM Commodore CPU is too old and slow as a platform to run my new Windows 7 software.

You download Revit, 3DS Max or Google SketchUp on your CPU. You design a great model of your project. Then you wait hours or days for your CPU to process the information to print out a page of data. Or you do all kinds of contortions to have your client, engineer and other team members view the model with you online to make final edits.

RevUp Render simplifies that whole exercise. You create your model, you use the RevUp Render to process it. You can now edit the model very quickly as needed. Then you email a link to your colleagues and everyone joins you online for an editing session in real time.

To see demos and learn more details about RevUp Render, visit their web site at RevUpRender.com

Even if you are not an architect, it is worth your time to view a demo or two. Get a glimpse of our future with cloud computing.

You do not have the option of being computer literate. It is our future. Every day more and more of our lives are being organized, managed or directed by computers.  You just get to decide on your attitude and how difficult you are going to make the transition on yourself. Age is not an excuse. Your title is not an excuse. If you are a serious professional and/or business owner, you have to have basic computer skills and basic computer knowledge.  Anything less is like trying to survive today’s pace while driving a horse and buggy.

Written by:  Pamela Bir, Your Computer Lady

As published in Sources+Design Magazine November 2011 Issue

4 Tips for Safely Conducting Research on the Web

I found this great article on Microsoft at Work web site.

Surprisingly, basic safety is often ignored by people using the web to research information quickly and efficiently. If you use the Internet for research of any kind, you could be exposing yourself and your company to hidden dangers such as the unauthorized transfer of confidential information. And no one wants to be the person responsible for a company-wide computer network shutdown.

Click here to continue reading this article.  

7 Ways to Work Faster on Slow Connections

There is nothing like trying to work when your Internet connection is slow. It's tougher to send email, more difficult to send files to co-workers, and it's frustrating wasting time while you wait for web pages to appear. And even with the proliferation of broadband Internet connections, there are still times you may be working on a slow connection. You might be traveling, working out of your office, still using dial-up, or your broadband connection may be acting up. But there are things you can do.

This article will show you how to increase your productivity when your connection is slow. Many of these steps are also good tips for how to increase the speed of browsing and sending and receiving email.

Click here to find out how to increase your productivity.

Required Reading for Anyone Serious About Their Web Site

You want a web site that makes you money? Brings you new clients? Read and follow the steps in this article!

Google: How Ranking Works and What You Can Do to Boost Your Position

2009 Internet Statistics

Amazing numbers about the number of new web sites, the number of emails sent, etc.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/22/internet-2009-in-numbers/