Boilerplater

This company has some great historic cast iron pieces, since they’ve been around since these pieces were contemporary!
http://stewartironworks.com/
 
Got to agree about the wood picket fencing.  Cast iron works better on buildings with more somber colors, brick, stone masonry.  Its for more dense urban environments where you need a material th…[Read more]

Wow, that’s an odd bit of info to have handy!  Researching other industries to kill time, are we?  Or maybe relatives in the industry?
 
What will be left of family businesses?  This country is evolving into a corporatocracy!

Sometimes I feel like I was forced to exit!  Yet I still keep looking for jobs, hoping to get back into it, even as others have advised me, even IMPLORED me to find something else.  Its hard to leave something I’ve put so much of myself into, so many years of my life!  Recently I had a temp job testing infusion pumps for a hospital.  In tal…[Read more]

but it seems to me that we trade one human oppression for another, except that now we know how to make real money off of it.

 
Exactly.  Those sewage systems and vaccines allowed a LOT more people to survive into adulthood, creating the population explosion.  Got to credit improved farming techniques, modern fertilizers and pesticides as wel…[Read more]

Yeah, South Jersey craigslist.  Of course, sometimes ads get misplaced.  And craigslist ads are of dubious value in my experience anyway.  So many scam jobs and postings where they’re just fishing to see who’s out there.  To broke to afford a real ad yet somehow you’ll be able to pay me a salary?! Yet recently I noticed that the hig…[Read more]

Small civil engineering firms, at least in my region, do more site planning than anything else.
That’s how it was in NJ as well.  I used to get so irritated with those dull site plans that civils would produce.  I’d passive-aggressively make suggestions as to how they could be better.  But if more LA’s wormed their way into this site-planning pr…[Read more]

What kind of jobs do they have that utilize planner skills, nr?  I was thinking of responding to one of those ads looking for people to work on oil rigs!

I didn’t get the cheering going on outside the White house.  Just wasn’t feeling like cheering.  Its like the quarterback was sacked five years after the game ended.  With high unemployment, high gas prices, and a generally sour national mood, it feels like the terrorists won.

Here’s a nice little opinion piece a Delaware landscape architect wrote about McHarg’s proposals for Japan.  I think its notable in that he uses an internationally known event to publicize an aspect of landscape architecture that most laypeople don’t know about.  My Dad sent me a clipping and put a little note on it: “I thought this was a s…[Read more]

Crisis Fatigue!  I think that’s what I have!  Got to turn off the CNN.  Maybe ignorance really IS bliss.

One of my former guys is in China, working for AECOM, and he seems to be happy, based on his facebook posts.  I think he’s in Shenzen.  I could give you his contact info if you want to ask him directly. 
 
You might also want to look up Walter Bone on here as he’s been in Macau for a few years.  He used to head up an LA dept. with a civil firm…[Read more]

An investment newsletter I get said the same thing about homebuilder stocks a few months back.  Not that I have any money to invest!
 
So how about some tips on how to get into ecommerce?  That’s what I’d like to see!  Today I had an informational interview for selling insurance.  Yeah, that’s what I’ve come to!

Maybe it was you that I heard the 2-week thing from, Chu!  You work for the Forest Service, right?

I’ve heard that if the application window is 2 weeks or less it typically means that they already have someone in the job or in line for it and they are just advertising to fulfill civil service requirements.
 
I recently got an email that my info was forwarded to a hiring official for a USFS job that I applied to months ago!  Can’t recall where i…[Read more]

This friend of mine sent a thank you letter for an interview via a telegram and even used old-timey formatting with “stop” after each sentence.  This was around 10 years ago.  I don’t think you can even do telegrams any more.  Needless to say, he wasn’t called back by the employer.

Henry, you get to be a more interesting person all the time!  I really admire the nerve of someone who goes for acting, despite an aversion to dramatic personality types!  I would have liked to try to make it as an actor, but I was quite shy when I was younger, and that is no business for the shy and sensitive types!  I imagine it did help with yo…[Read more]

That pretty much covers everything my program was lacking!  Slightly relieving to see that it wasn’t just my school.  I would add “basic economics” so that you understand the cycles in the construction industry and can make preparations.

I read recently in an economics book (yeah, you do odd things with your spare time when you have a lot of it) that it is considered common knowledge that when you reduce compensation people are less motivated to work.  That is why layoffs are preferable to reduced hours or salary.  OTOH, I was listening to NPR recently and they were talking a…[Read more]

Oh, there is certainly “dough in the dirt” thanks to California’s medical marijuana law!
 
I knew a daylily hybridizer who seemed to make a good living for himself growing and selling his hybrids.  Of course, he had a doctorate and had taught.

Hmm…I wonder if I could learn French in a few weeks in one of those intensive courses like the Army used to use.  I had Spanish, and its a Romance language, so I’ll recognize a lot of the Latin roots.  I hear Gabon is nice at this time of year.