Thomas J. Johnson

Dear god, thank you. Can I please come work for you?

“How many of your senior management or partners have an MBA? And why don’t they?” – This is an excellent point. and a subject that I’ve given much thought. If I were to go back to school, would an MLA or an MBA be most valuable? Why doesn’t our profession insist upon business men running the…[Read more]

Wise words, wise words…

It’s a place in Italy…

It seems to me, in my limited experience, that Principals (and some P.M.s) design and everyone else produces. There is no judgment in that statement, it’s just reality. I’ve learned a lot about design by “producing” plans for great designers.

Design takes time, exploration and is non-linear. There are no right answers, only defensible…[Read more]

What up ACE?

You’ve got crazy, mad skills so you shouldn’t have any problems finding work. The only drawback I can see is that if you don’t have the piece of paper, you cannot accumulate time towards sitting for the L.A.R.E. The L.A.R.E clock doesn’t start ticking until you’ve got the degree.

Nick Aceto bringing the sickness once again… Nice work Nick!

Nick, you know that you can shoot in the Pawnee Grasslands, too. Now you have another reason to go! Bring your camera AND a gun! Good times, good times… Man, I miss CO…

No, I got all that from your statement” Being in the position to have the potential to waste an employer’s time is a circumstance that I’ll embrace at this time.” Now is not the time to waste time. We are all expected to do more with less. To produce more with fewer co-workers. Now is the time to refine processes and to tune up “the machine” so…[Read more]

We can agree to disagree.

I’m thinking in terms of a large organization. Many people wasting little bits of time equates to a lot of wasted time. It also equals a lot of people doing the same thing, differently, which again, is ineffective. Did Henry Ford hand one guy a pair of pliers, another a box wrench, the third a crescent wrench and the…[Read more]

I would have spent less time in the studio. Worked full time and taken on less / no student loans.

As far as the issue with text, I’m not sure. It sound like you are going about it correctly with having the text left justified and adjusting the margin. I would set up one cell the way you want it, even just typing gibberish, then copy and paste that into the other cells. Now each cell is formatted the way you want it and you just need to…[Read more]

Yeah, AutoCAD 2010 pretty much rocks! I’m trying to learn Vector Works right now and I think I’m just going to stick with AutoCAD. Vector Workds makes everything 3Xs as hard as it needs to be.

I’ve owned a MAC before and I just don’t see the advantage, other than it having pretty icons. It costs twice as much as a PC, isn’t compatible with 90% of…[Read more]

I don’t have CAD open but if memory serves… select a cell by left clicking it, then right click it. Drop down menu appears. Select insert block. A dialogue box opens. Browse to select the block you want to use. Check the box that says “scale block to fit” or something close to that. The block will automatically fit the cell. If you later change…[Read more]

There is no such thing as “free”. The park cost $3.4mil to build and I guarantee that somebody got paid to design it. It might not have been a landscape architect but hey, really, if an architect can design a building, why can’t they design a park with nothing but hardscape? It did take five years after all…

The first picture in the article has…[Read more]

Insert block, for your symbols, saves you from having to copy, paste and scale the block from another drawing. It scales the block automatically for the “cell” size. If you change cell size, the block changes with it. Also, if you decide to change symbols, all you do is click on the cell, select another symbol and you’re done. No copy, paste,…[Read more]

AutoCAD Table – Set it up once and copy throughout projects. Use insert block for symbols. You can set up all of your text and line weights so everything looks custom, clean and designerly.

If you are still “drawing” your tables and placing “m-text” you are wasting time and should be fired to make room for somebody that actually gives a (&*%$…[Read more]

If you have 15 years of experience in the design/build industry, I honestly don’t understand why you would go back to school for a degree in Landscape Architecture. Not only will you have 3-5 years of lost wages but you will have the additional expenses of going back to school (i.e. 20k/yr min).

If you enjoy the design/build environment, you…[Read more]

Revoke the permit? Huh? “We revoke your permit to have oil gushing from that broken pipe 5,000 feet under sea.”
The only thing that would accomplish is letting BP walk away from it and turning the project over to the government (tax payers). This is BPs problem, they should fix it.

Government oversight still exists regardless of the status of…[Read more]

I think you just hit the nail on the head right there. It’s a matter of where do X and Y cross.

The Valdez spill (257,000 barrels) cost Exxon approx. $8.5 billion in clean-up and legal fees. That’s in 1989 dollars.

The BP mess is currently 4 times that (approx. 912,000 barrels). At an inflation rate of 76% since 1989 that would cost: 8.5Bn x .75…[Read more]

They seem to be genuinely working on stopping the leak. The measures they have taken are expensive and i don’t think they like losing 200,000 barrels a day. That’s a lot of money. I don’t think we can comprehend what it will take to clean-up. That’s a whole other issue.

In hind site, I think it was a mistake to dump 1,000,000 gallons of dispersal…[Read more]

Yes, Nick, I think you’re on to something. There is a nefarious reason for not sealing the leak. It’s an evil plot to create a dead-zone in the Gulf. Kill off all life in the gulf with an oil spill. Then the hippie environmentalists won’t have any reason to protest additional off-shore rigs throughout the region. There is nothing left to protect!…[Read more]