Frog Up or Down

Yesterday, one of my colleagues showed me the video below, created by GlidebyJJ - Jody Johnson, its a moving little piece, for a number of reasons, The building was a mental hospital in the USA, called  Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital , it was built in 1876 and was the largest building in the US at the time. This beautiful, historic masterpiece was demolished from May - November 2015.  and for all sorts of reasons it was not a nice place, but putting that aside, the video is packed with interesting construction, its actually reversed, and as the film proceeds, you see the building come to life. I had to watch it several times to get the full impact of the construction, the brickwork, the roof construction, and the floor structure, and as the building completes the final impact of the estate. So often classic buildings are lost to the demolition crane, some are lucky enough to have been photographed, and some even filmed. The film at the bottom is packed wit...

In December 2016 I compared Google keep to my then, usual data repository, Evernote , and microsoft's one note plus apples notes. Since then, some three month have passed and I have kept up a duel usage with just Evernote and keep. The other two just lack  in there use with me, apples product is a good note keeper but lacks some how in comparison. And one note, well t just would not sync with my iPad and iPhone . So it was keep and Evernote. Evernote is huge, I have so much tucked away in it, but finding it was sometimes a chore, it searches just to well, and I could never remember how to limit the search engine enough to weed out all but what I wanted to see. Keep is well simpler, easier to search, but what gained my attention was the simple way it now integrates with Google Dock as a side panel, allowing such an easy way to drag all or a portion into the doc. I will stay with Evernote, I have so much tucked away, but in the Lastweek, I find myself using keep more and mor...

In about five weeks, or on the 20th June 2016, all the region CIAT CPD officers will meet in City Road, London, to discuss CPD. As yet I have seen no agenda, but you know me, thats not going to stop me making a list of things I want to talk about, from manufacturers presentations, to real study time, to reading lists, to note taking to building up some sort of personal archive of information. to just an electronic record system. I also want to discus the way BIM seems to be taking hold of CAD, not that thats a bad thing, just the way the "CAD" bit is being dropped and I hear only I am going to BIM this up, not CAD or draw it up. Yet BIM surely should be on the list as it will and is affecting the way we draw, and also with it huge potential for data rules base, or internal / external algorithms, and how it will be shared via IFC. Evernote, or anything similar, is there anything!, should surely be discussed, as the personal archive I mentioned before. Is there a place...

I am happy to tell you, the old site archive of all several 1000 blogs I have made over the last 5 or so years is back on a wordpress.com domain : https://konstrukshonarchive.wordpress.com So head over and use the search button to read all those old blogs I will add a link to all my sites and also to the current domain at Blogger. For some reason Google Blogger will not allow the files size wordpress exports to be imported into blogger asking you to reduce it, !! But the free wordpress.com site will allow it and when I tried it, I had no problems, even sent me an email to tell me all is well and site working .

Scan to PDF One of the things I am doing at present, is cataloging my construction books in Evernote, so I can include them in any search I do. This I do by scanning the front page for the title, and then as part of the scan, which I save as a pdf, is to include the index pages. The picture today is a screen grab of PDFpen, the program I use to operate my scanner, where you can see the title page followed by two index pages. I also tag the pdf with several tags like construction, Book, and the title, I also will be placing them into a separate folder within Evernote so I can share as required, with my students.

As Technologists, we are being inundated with data, lots of it from almost everything we do. The easy route is to just delete, or make a folder on your hard drive , and dump it in there thinking you'll sort it later. But there are a few simple tricks that will solve you problem and make it easy to retrieve. First is Email, I use gmail its still the leading service, despite its age,  I get so much, some important and these get tagged and put into a correct folder, the rest just get marked as read, I never ever delete emails. Important ones that I want to keep out side of Gmail , I send to my Evernote account, via the secret email address they give, more on this later. Never ever rely on your hard drive to store important things, I have, like so many done this and lost it all when the disk failed, and it will. With the cloud now so easy to access, I store all items in one of two places, first Google Drive , this has to be a no brainer, its easy to set up, easy to use, and yo...