Project OrielEmbracing Change

To the point:

• Sweet Home 3D is easy to use.
• Sweet Home 3d is open source (read: FREE)
• The hardest part is just measuring your the rooms in your house. Tip: use a grid to map out the floor plan with 0,0 on one corner of the house. It helps when you are making sure the floor plan is sized right. I suggest engage a kid that is enthusiastic to help – mine loved the measuring part.
• There are enough, but not too many, pre-built objects (couches, tables, etc.)
• They have a model for the IKEA POÄNG Chair that we actually own, so I’m happy.
• I’m playing around with the software ’cause our main entry drops you right into the middle of the sacred kitchen work triangle. This is no good when you have kids, coats, and snowy shoes to deal with.

* Juice Analytics has a nifty Chart Chooser for Excel and PowerPoint mavens. Free templates included. [Via O'Reilly Radar]

* Johanna Rothman ponders What’s Wrong With Wednesday for setting deadlines. She says “With a Friday or Monday milestone, what you’re really saying is that people can work overtime all week and all weekend to make the Friday milestone, so they won’t be late for the Monday start.”

* Quote: “[_] From time to time we offer to share our list of subscribers with door-to-door aromatherapy salespersons and ritual ax-murderers. If you would prefer that your data not be used in this way, please check the box.” Cluetrain

* David Pogue, of the New York Times hands out awards to ten innovative or unique features (instead of products) that were released this year. His first for 2007 goes to the iPhone’s Visual Voice Mail and says “Everybody knows that the iPhone’s voice mail software is not just one of the machine’s best features, but the way voice mail should be from now on.” I’ve been meaning to write about it, but this feature alone makes the price of iPhone worth it. And as Kottke said: “The design of the iPhone is such that all other mobile phones, including those released after the iPhone, look not only old but antiquated and even defective. IMO.”

* As a related note: Flicker knows the camera each photo was taken with and recently added the iphone as a recognized device. Check out all of the pictures taken with an iPhone.

* Quote: “I’ve noticed that people are actually more comfortable dealing with surprises and crises than they are taking control of processing, organizing, reviewing, and assessing that part of their work that is not as self-evident. It’s easy to get sucked into “busy” and “urgent” mode, especially when you have a lot of unprocessed and relatively out-of-control work on your desk, in your e-mail, and on your mind.” (emphasis added) David Allen, Getting Things Done

* Quote: “There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” – John F. Kennedy

* Quote: “And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trusted “bucket” that you know you’ll review appropriately sometime soon, more than likely you worried about it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and tension was increased.” David Allen, Getting Things Done

* A thank you out to my relatives in Wyoming for this link: “Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms. Our search results only include great links.”

* After pointing out that the biggest feature about the Kindle is that it is free internet anywhere you go after you purchase the device, Andy Ihnatko says this: “Think of the kindle as a robot that goes to the farmer’s markets, gets the best fresh organic ingredients, drives home, makes to-die-for hot fresh waffles topped with double cream and strawberries with a dash of chocolate on the side ready for you go down the stairs after waking up, the kindle is this, only with books, newspapers, magazines and blogs.” Full review at the Chicago Sun-Times.

* Give the gift of no longer checking voicemail: GotVoice will check your voicemail for you, and email the transcript of what was said (and provide an audio file too). When I first got my iPhone, I thought the visual voicemail was nice — but certainly no killer app. Having used it for a while, I must say that listening to voicemail prompts seems downright archaic.

* I had posted this Picasso quote before but /\ndy wrote up a nice short piece elaborating on the concept of working below your means. Sure everything you are doing is “important” and “worthwhile,” but give yourself a break. Make a new years resolution to take life a bit easier. Do fewer things, do them better, and enjoy the slow lane.

* The Story of Stuff has a nice presentation about the materials economy. This may be a bit unfair to bring up just after the height of the consumer spending season, and I don’t begrudge gift giving (I love giving gifts), but it is an insightful discussion about the wider consumerist economy. The bit of info that stuck in my head: Only 1% of all stuff purchased is still in use 6 months later.

* Google Trends offers some amazing insights about the wider culture. Check out the correlation between turkey and diet, or between depression and rain.