gulker.com’s World HQ is in pretty good shape, if I do say so myself (’before’ picture left, ‘after’ above). A major cruft removal campaign, the installation of a new Gigabit LAN, collapsing all of the LAN’s extant services (and the initiation of new ones) into 4 computers (G4 Mini, Intel Mini, single G5 tower, Dual G5 tower) have now freed up surface space (the most precious commodity around here) even as we have moved our whole life and enterprise toward paperless workflow thanks to a Fujitsu ScanSnap and Canon MP 530 multifunction device.
So I start the new year more organized, able to find more stuff, thanks to things like Acrobat OCR of scanned paper docs that now show up when I search by keywords (or visually) in a Mac PDF browser called Yep. World HQ space has been designed to give me a space where I can set up my work laptop, hook it into an Apple 20-inch Cinema Display and with a nearby conference phone ‘attend’ meetings, plough through email and otherwise be productive and in touch with work. Indeed, my 2 busiest days since going back were spent working remotely – and productively – from World HQ.
Useful tools have been the fax modem in the single G5: it replaces the now-retired (temporarily) Cube (whose OS 10.3 fax software had a few bugs) and reliably sends PDF copies of received faxes to my .Mac mail account where I can get to them wherever I happen to be connected. It’s amazing how much of the world is still fax-based: our remodel contractor, and all of the doctors and hospitals we’ve been dealing with for the last 4 months, prefer fax as a communication medium, with a few exceptions.
So our faxes come as PDFs we can now easily deal with as email attachments (e.g. my oncologist’s ‘return to work’ letter came as a fax that I forwarded to HR as a PDF email attachment), and we can fax directly from our workstation apps by using OS X 10.4’s built-in ‘print to PDF’ function, which includes faxing. Amazing that I would even be thinking about faxes, much less provisioning the service on our home LAN in 2007, but there you go. Can you tell I’m pleased with the results so far…
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I feared the earliest Caltrain service might be local, too, but was pleasantly surprised to find 2 fast early trains, at 6:57 (that’s the 6:57 above, pulling in to Pally station) and 7:19, and, working backward, saw that I could walk the pleasant mile over to Stock Farm road and catch a free Marguerite shuttle (seen left, gearing up for the day at their Stock Farm yard) to Palo Alto, thus sparing my spouse yet another ‘taxi’ ride. Since this would be a first I rose a bit earlier than usual (I’m a morning guy, so no big deal) and was on the road by 6:00, cool new Oakley bag (of