After upgrading to IOS 5.1 on my iPhone I noticed to what I thought was the new camera button on the Lockscreen not working anymore. However I found out today that it’s not that it doesn’t work anymore… They just changed how it works. For those out there that used the feature before… You could easily access the camera without unlocking the phone by double clicking the home button and the camera button would appear next to the slider… Well now you see the camera button on any click… But when you click on it all that happens is the screen bounces… Well its not broken… Technically… But you will feel stupid because this what the changed… Just swipe the camera button you see up… That simple… Yet not intuitive enough for most people I know to figure it out without googling it… Oh well… Now you know like me

So I read an article by Brian Stelter about Netflix not-renewing its “STARZ Deal”, next month (March 2012). In case you did not know… Netflix’s new release selection for streaming is pitiful at best, and the movies they do have from the past 8 years (with somewhat of a good in the box office run) are 9 times out of 10 from their deal with STARZ. Netflix’s argument in short is  they want to focus on more TV shows than they do movies… stating they know they do not have their costumers #1 choice when they log on to view a certain movie… but they have other stuff in the form of TV shows that same customer should enjoy.

So I ask the question… is Netflix suffering from corporate sabotage within… are they literally trying to bomb their own company to the ground? Why else are there so many consumer point of view “stupid” decisions coming out pf this, up to now, successful company.If I wanted more TV shows I would not sign up with a company that had the word “flix” in their name. Netflix already lost a lot of support from their consumer base when they jacked their prices way up and tried to forcefully separate their DVD rental + streaming into separate paid for services and companies.

As a longtime subscriber to Netflix I joined for the convenience of getting DVD’s in the mail with no return dates or late fees, It was simple and worked for me. Then they offered their “streaming service” as a bonus, but in reality they really all it had were “B” and “C” rated movies. Now they are charging me almost triple what I was paying  4 years ago, wanting me to watch the service I don’t want to watch while separating from the services I do want, and telling me the titles I want to see are not really what I want to see… instead here is more stuff that is somewhat good for you according to our suggestion algorithms.

I understand the movie studios are making it tough for streaming services, but in reality separating yourself from how you are most profitable (read DVD+BD) and hoping that your customer base will be loyal with 3rd and 4th choice titles is insane from a business standpoint. I currently have Netflix and loved it when it was such a unique service. However, now that there is competition for digital media providers popping up with Easier Vudu access, Amazon prime, HULU plus, and HBO Go, and others,  it is not so unique anymore.  Add the fact that they are making me look at their streaming service separately from their rental service instead of a bonus with not so competitive pricing plans, you are forcing your consumers to look at alternative options. Which sorry Netfix,  I think I will start doing at the end of next month.

Trying to be a hip architect are you?

~CLICK HERE FOR MY STUDY GUIDE

Well then… you’ll have to get through taking the ARE’s first… one of the last steps in the long process of actually becoming licensed. Although the title of the post says study guide… I actually put together a page that is more of a study resource.  It’s a work in process at the moment as I am in the middle of taking all 7 tests, but I will update it as I go through the process, in the hopes of it helping someone else out. Check out my resource page here!

Good Luck.

If your studying for the ARE’s… specifically the CDS-Construction Documents and Services… the AIA has made available some of the key contracts covered on the test for ARE candidates…. All you need to do is log into your ncarb.org record… then go

1. Log into “My NCARB”
2. Click “Go” to access your NCARB Record
3. Follow link for ARE Candidates: Construction Documents & Services Resources visible in the lower left of your Record.

…or just click this link after you log into your NCARB record.

at the time of this post the following contract documents were available for study purposes.

Conventional Family

• A101-2007           Owner and Contractor (Stipulated Sum)
• A201-2007           General Conditions
• A701-1997           Instructions to Bidders
• B101-2007           Owner and Architect
• B101-2007A        Document B101-2007 Exhibit A
• C401-2007           Architect and Consultant

Contract Administration and Project Management Forms

• A305-1986           Contractor’s Qualification Statement
• G701-2001           Change Order
• G702-1992           Application and Certificate for Payment
• G703-1992           Continuation Sheet
• G704-2000           Certificate of Substantial Completion

If your unfamiliar with SOPA, your can find out more about it here… but essentially it is a bill currently being discussed that is supposed to protect itelectual properties from being pirated illigally on the internet… such as movies and music. However this bill would cause more damage than good… First of all i doubt it would seriously stop online piracy… however it would swing the pendulum over way to the other side and make it way to easy for various parties to limit information that passes through the internet…

Essentially this would fatally damage the way the internet is free and open to all information, and these types of bills could make it way too easy for someone to control what information is passed through the internet… making search engines, money transaction sites, information sites like Wikipedia, and other major information avenues of the internet stop showing results from sites they deam to be “illegal”. These types of bills would be the start of a major censorship of what Americans see on the internet, defeating the main reason behind the internet, which is sharing of information… any information… the point is we currently decide what to believe and what to discard… we should not let someone else decide what we see and what we should not…lets keep that right… contact your representatives… call them if you can… it’s more powerful than an email… but of you can only do one at least email them… you can find out who your reps are through this link on Wikipedia… which blacked out its entire site today (2012.01.18) in protest of this bill. I did both… if your looking for what words to say in your email to your rep… this is what I wrote to help in your inspiration, or if you just want to copy and paste… go for it… the point is to let our congress people know what we want.

I am writing you today to let you know my family and I are against the SOPA act, PIPA, and similar legislation. Although I understand online piracy is an issue, I strongly believe these types of legislation would not stop piracy, and would in fact cause serious damage to the free and open Internet. I hope you will (or do) understand the ramifications of a bill that would allow any party to manipulate any DNS information, as well as other issues these bills would cause to limiting the “passing on” of information for future generations. my fear is that this type of bill will give to much power and control of limiting a currently free information highway, and could easily be taken advantage of to prevent freedom of free speech, freedom of information, and other freedoms that every united states citizen currently has a right to. I hope you consider my words here and vote in opposition of SOPA, PIPA, and similar legistlation.

If you are studding for your Architectural Registration Exams in the United States you know what the above title means… if you don’t… well this article probably will not interest you… but here’s a synopsis… I’ve written about my opinionated thoughts and explanation on the long procedure to become a licensed architect in any of the 50 States before. Essentially the are called the ARE’s (for Architectural Registration Exams, and if your studying for them you know about the AREForum.org, and if you don’t… you should… as it is an invaluable tool in studying fort the ARE’s. Essentially a forum of everyone else in the US studying for the exams as well as people trying to help that demographic… its a place to ask questions, and more importantly review and have your practice vignettes reviewed by your fellow peers.

However the forums are difficult to log into the first time on an iPhone or iPad if you don’t know this workaround. The problems arises after navigating to the home page of AREForum.org and clicking on the button “Enter Forums”. Before giving you the login prompt it redirects you to the forum rules… which you should read. However there is no way to continue pass this forum rules page and actually log in on an iOS device. I think this is because of Flash… not the super hero in the picture above, but the programing language, which if you know or not, is not available on iOS devices and probably never will be. You can read the rules fine on an iOS device, but there should be a button at the bottom of the rules saying “Accept” however this button i believe is created with flash for some odd reason and does not show up.

So here is the workaround to get AREForum.org to work on the iPad or iPhone… type the full path of the forums (after you actually read the rules to comply with them) in the address bar and you will get to the actual forums, which runs on vBulliten, which works great with iOS devices… its just that lonely accept button at the bottom of the rules that is flash. Anyway the full path of the forums is below. Once there you can login with your user name and password, or register to create a new one. Good Luck… on both the tests and forums

AREForum.org/forums/index.php

My brother got the iPhone 4s a few weeks before me… when he utilizes the voice recognition software built into it, called Siri, all he has to do is say… “text my brother what are you up too”… and Siri creates a  text message to Tim (me) saying “what are you up too”… it remembers his relation ships so it knows who his brother, wife, mother, etc. are… However when I got my iPhone 4s I would say “text my brother hello”… because my phone is new, Siri would ask something along the lines

“who is your brother?”

I would reply “Matt”, and Siri in return would say

“would you like me to remember this?”… and of course I said

“sure” and Siri would reply in her most devious voice

“OK”

The problem I was having though, was that she was not remembering Matt was my brother… even though I told her to remember it countless times. I finally figured out the reason and though I would post it here for others incase they are having the same problems and decide to google it.

My situation was that my email runs off of Microsoft Exchange (which for those that do not know many many corperations use for their email  servers… which also links up to my own calendar and own set of contacts stored on my exchange server that links with my iPhone. The problem is that default exchange contacts only has association fields of manager and assistant…. and you can not to my knowledge easily create custom association fields like “wife” or “Brother” in my case. So once I figured that out the solution was easy… I simply went to my contacts on my phone… browsed to exchange contacts… and deleted the contact for my self…. then i created a new contact for my self, but instead of doing it with all my other contacts on my exchange server… the one for myself resides souly on my iphone… not related to my exchange server. Now that I have a new contact of myself on my phone I can use any of the association or related fields pre=programed…or even create new ones…

The easiest way to do this after you create the new contact on your phone, rather than through your exchange server is to just call up Siri and say… So and So is my Mom… or whoever and whatever relationship you want Siri to remember. Cmmment below if anyone has any questions.

Ever wonder what a volume mirror or drive mirror was?… or better yet wonder how do I backup my hard drive automatically?

Well Windows 7 has some cool features to setting up whats called a volume mirror really, really easily… which is what you want to do if your looking to automatically back up a hard drive… Doing this is also called Raid 1…

Essentially all you will need is another hard drive the same size or bigger than the one you want to back up…

1. Open up your computer case and install the additional hard drive as the instruction that came with it tell you.
2. Right click on the “my computer” icon either on the desktop or in the start menu… then click “manage” in the menu that pops up
3. Now go click on the “disk management” icon in the left hand menu and you should see all your disks available… including the new one you installed (probably black or olive in color) and the existing disk you want to backup (probably blue in color).
4. The Disks have to be “dynamic”… which you can do by right clicking on the disk# button and selecting “convert to dynamic disk”… follow the prompts until its converted.
5. Now you can click on the older existing drive with all your data on it (the one you want backed up that says D: or whatever letter) and select “add mirror” option from the right click menu.
6. Some menus will pop up and you should eventually see a menu and will probably see the new disk # you just installed as an option, which is what you want to select… it will then go about creating a mirror with that disk you selected.

and that is it… now all the data on that drive will be “mirrored” to the new drive… so if your main drive fails… you will not loose any data due to drive failure because you have the mirrored drive.

Some general notes:

• Doing this will actually speed up your performance as well… because now when you tell your computer to access or execute a file on these drives it will have two hard drive needles (access points) to find it on your drives, rather than one access point to the file.
• Both drives will show up as 1 drive letter in windows explorer/my computer. etc…
• If the “add mirror” option is greyed or ggrayed or out, make sure the newer disk2 is larger in size… I had (2) 1 tb drives that i could not get this to work becuase one drive had 0.2 megs more than the new drive i wanted to back up too… if this is the case than just right clickthe original drive #1 and select “shrink volume”…follow the prompts  and make it a little smaller than the new drive that will be the backup… once its done the “add mirror” option should no longer be greyed out.
• After you do this (depending on how big your drives are) the drive colors will be red as they are syncronizing… basically meaning windows  is automatically coping all your data to the new drive your backing up too… you should still be able to access all your files while it does this in the background.

Let me know if anyone has any questions or comments in the comments below.

I have not updated my professional portfolio in 5 or more years, and upon deciding it is perhaps time to do so I found myself asking the question… “Do I even need a portfolio on paper”

In an age of conference room computer access, and tablets… I say no, and here’s why.

The first reason that comes to mind is the size… as the feature picture shows… they can get quite large if you intend to bring originals… to the point of absurdness… Working with the construction industry for some larger projects its not unheard of for sheet sizes to get up to 48″X36″ for working documents… not to mention some artwork or master plan ideas (at least by me)… that are drawn at a similar large scale…

So we have been long in the age of digital scanners, and hence that is what most people did with large format drawings that need to become more mobile… the problem with scanning and re-printing at a reduced size is that sometimes the details that made the original lager version of the work so “grandiose” are lost in the reduction.

So you could bring in the originals in a large portfolio case as shown above, but think of how that looks to the people you are presenting it too. I don’t care what the laws say you can or can not hire an employee for, when you go to an interview you are selling your self as well as your capabilities and ideas.

Think of what the potential portfolio viewers are thinking when they see you for the first time and instead of seeing the confident, suave yet energetic future employee… they see you walking into their walls and struggling like you just came in from the marina with the sail of a portfolio you have…

Now think if they see you walking in with composure and not wrestling anything, but carrying a sleek piece of technology that says this person is already adept at the future… having the best of both worlds, your work is small enough to handle, yet with technology can be zoomed in and out of various detail with ease.

That’s how I see my future presentations of my work, and that’s why I’ve decided to not modify my paper portfolios of decades past, but instead investigate the presentation of my work digitally, both from the web and from a more portable tablet.

So I bought a couple of new domains and I plan to start developing one… so far its been a pain, not because of the digital translation, but because I am not a computer engineer by trade, and I’ve had some difficulties with my Linux server hosting multiple websites… but I think I worked out most of the bugs and plan to start actually building the site now the foundation of its interface is somewhat worked out.

As the site gets closer to launch I’ll release the domain names here on goolier.com, which will remain my blog, with the new site simply holding my professional portfolio only.

I have Google adsense running on my site. They generate the adds you see in the far right…

The concept is pretty easy… I set up an account with Google… I tell them what size adds I am willing to have on www.goolier.com … it auto generates the code so I can paste it right into my website template.

On the other end of things.. companies pay Google to advertise their company’s products on the internet… they’ll develop ads to display on various websites, Google will give the owner of that website money for traffic generated to the companies products through that website… easy… makes sense for all parties involved…

well… not so much… you see I had Google Adsense running for about six months…. then all of a sudden it stopped generating ads on my site… meaning I was not making any money… I went to my Google Adsense dashboard and everything seemed to be fine… the only thing that stuck out was that my payments were on hold.
I put them on hold manually for no real good reason… besides the fact that i don’t make much money through my small site and thought it might be better if I just put the payments on hold until i collected more of a hefty sum to collect…

you would think Google would not mine this as they are still getting paid by the various companies and not having to pay me my share for the moment…well you thought wrong…

So I did not know this at the time because I manually put my payments on hold, but even if they were not my payments would not get to me because of a few “check list” items Google needed. Basically they need to verify that the physical address of the business associated with the website is real. So I went through a form online where I enter my phone number and then they call it and i have to record the pin to enter it into… the mailing address form the physically snail-mail a postcard with a pin on the back for me to re-enter into my ad sense dashboard… once I did these two things my ads were being generated within 20 minutes.

In an age of electronic identities and wallets why must we still fall back to colonial methods of payments… I don’t know the answer, but I’m not necessarily blaming Google…. just venting. I am sure it has something to do with some old mandate / law by some archaic branch of the US Government. What I am blaming Google for is why they had to stop generating ads for my ad slots… they were still going to get paid for them by the companies, and they did not have to release any funds until I updated their forms anyway… which i am sure all the IRS cares about…

sometimes the easiest things that makes sense get convoluted by third parties to make non-sense I guess. Oh well…. just wand to share the story to bitch out loud and hopefully help someone else if they have the same situation and can not figure out why their Adsense ads are not generating properly on their websites.