World HQ, 2007
Posted on January 17, 2007
Filed Under All, Technology, Gulker labs |
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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4 Responses to “World HQ, 2007”
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That’s what I love about computers: they’re general purpose information machines. Amazingly, beautifully abstracted. Music? Yup, computers have just eaten it up. Films? Watch them, make them, copy them, all with your computer. Faxes? No problem, it’s just information. Fantastic.
The only thing I couldn’t understand would be anyone who *didn’t* love Gulker World HQ.
Of course, Paul, well put. That is the whole idea of a general purpose computer isn’t it…? One of our ’services’ is streaming WBGO from Newark, maybe America’s best straight-ahead jazz station, in the morning… from iTunes….
On the macs, most of this stuff is easy, too. I’m sure I could get my Linux box to do the same things, but I just know it would be hours digging up docs and online HOW TOs followed by digging throught the current distro to see what’s changed…
[…] This is how ‘World HQ‘ looks to me (as opposed to view, below), configured for work days. The MacBook Pro, left is hooked up to the 20″ cinema display, giving lots of real estate for email, calendar, browser and productivity apps. The 12″ PowerBook on the right is available for chores like search, and was my work machine until near the end of last year, so has deep archives that are occasionally useful. […]
[…] Our Macintosh G4 Cube was among the most beloved, and longest-working of all our Macs. It came home in 2000, almost as soon as it hit the local Mac dealer, and sat in the family room in one role or another until this year’s major overhaul of gulker.com World HQ. […]