Travel tip #24

Have small bills with you for taxi rides. If you have to pay with a large peso, you may get this for change….the counterfeit ink looks extra special after it comes out of your soaking wet wallet! It will make great journal decoration!

iphone and imac not on speaking terms

I just got a shiny new iMac which is just waiting to be cluttered to death… part of the cluttering process is transferring clunky data from all sorts of other places. In this case, I decided I would attempt to transfer my address book info from my iPhone to my iMac wirelessly. I was all excited as this was my first real experiment with bluetooth technology… so I set everything into motion. Voila, my computer sees my phone but for some reason my phone does not see my computer. There were plenty of tutorials on how to get your bluetooth device to connect to your iMac… but I had already completed all the steps… so I called Apple…It turns out.. get this…. it turns out that the iPhone isn’t set up to “talk” to other apple devices. Huh… it’s a snobby little gadget that will only talk to headsets… we might be able to fix this if we all ban together and send them letters (www.apple.com/feedback). What good is it being an Apple junkie if the club is purely aesthetic? 

Way South of the Border

I’m off tomorrow to Buenos Aires on assignment for Delta Airlines. The land of red meat, red wine and the tango! I’ll be hanging out in wine bars and restaurants shooting the lifestyle for the in flight menu. Thank you Bob Wages and everyone at Wages Design for such a great job! Barring a coup, I’ll be back in a few days with stories to tell.Chau! 

Something from Nothing

Now that I have a real office at Portfolio Center I decided that I should have a desk, but not just anything will do. Since I’m involved in the Sustainability initiative at the school and AIGA, I thought it would be fun to make one using only materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Since my studio is next to a cabinet shop, it was easy to accumulate scraps from their discard bin. Walnut, maple, oak, cherry and a few others. I downloaded a photo of an acoustic guitar from the internet and made an enlarged template. Here’s an in progress photo:   

Airport Extreme Rocks!

For over a year now I’ve been annoyed by the poor wireless reception I’ve been getting at home. I had tried different locations for the router, replacing various equipment (not cheaply, I might add!) and had just about resigned myself to a life of walking around the house with my Powerbook looking for a signal. This weekend I installed an Apple Airport Extreme and got religion! I can now walk to the far corner of my lot past the pool and relax and surf under the pergola and look like one of those cheesy ads in Wired Magazine. Life imitates commercial art imitating life as seen through the eyes of commerce. Since I discovered last year that I’m allergic to my pool (what would life be without irony?!) I can now hang out by it and look like I’m just between swims.

StudioBurns moves toward LEED certification

Jerry recently completed his first online course for LEED certification. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction. Since its inception in 1998, LEED has grown to encompass over 14,000 projects in 50 US States and 30 countries covering 1.062 billion square feet (99 km²) of development area.^[2] The hallmark of LEED is that it is an open and transparent process where the technical criteria proposed by the LEED committees are publicly reviewed for approval by the more than 10,000 membership organizations that currently constitute the USGBC.

Individuals recognized for their knowledge of the LEED rating system are permitted to use the LEED Accredited Professional (AP) acronym after their name, indicating they have passed the accreditation exam given by the USGBC.

So, baby steps to be sure, but ones that move us forward! 

 

Jerry Makes Top 100 Again

So I got the letter yesterday from the Georgia MS Society and I made the Top 100 again this year. Thanks to everyone who donated to the Society to support my ride for my daughter, Lauren. It’s a great cause and it insures that I get at least 30 days of excercise each year:-). If you make the list, you get a ’special’ jersey (I think I need to introduce the MS people to some AIGA designers) and covered VIP parking for your bike. For those of you who’ve followed the story, Lauren is doing great now and has gone back to school to finish her degree. More about this in the fall. To find out more about the ride or to sign up, go to http://www.ms150atlantachallenge.org/about_tour.html

Are My Light-bulbs Time-bombs?

I was changing the light-bulbs in my kitchen from incandescent lights to compact fluorescents when I noticed a warning on the base of the bulb. It turns out that the bulbs that everyone is so excited about contain mercury. So, after I ranted for a while about the short sighted nature of our energy solutions, I decided to get a little more proactive and find out the best ways to dispose of flourescents. Much better than ranting.

As it turns out, recycling, of course, seems to be the best way to dispose of the buggers. (If for some reason you can’t bring yourself to recycle them and it’s just you at your house, double bag them in zip lock baggies and throw them away with your regular household trash. This is in no way good for the environment but it helps contain the spread of mercury before it gets to the landfill. Give the garbage guys and gals a chance.) There are very few places that recycle them at the moment. Your best option seems to be to take your spent compact fluorescent bulbs to IKEA for recycling. They generally keep a recycle bin near the registers. It’s free instead of .75 – 1.00 (and taken on the right day can even get you a discount on their As-Is section). There are other options. The following is a list of recyclers.

UNIVERSAL WASTE LAMP RECYCLERS

The following firms have informed the Georgia Environmental Protection Division that they are universal waste lamp recyclers. This listing does not constitute an endorsement by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

AERC Recycling Solutions
4317 Fortune Place, Suite J
West Melbourne, Fl. 32904
(321) 952-1516

Bethlehem Apparatus Co. Inc.

890 Front Street

PO Box Y

Hellertown, PA 18055

610-838-7034

Cleanlites Recycling, Inc.

100 Fine Road

Spartanburg, SC 29303

864-503-9900

Earth Protection Services, Inc.

102 Twenty-nine Court

Williamston, SC 29697
864-847-7700

Environmental Light Recyclers

2737 Bryan Avenue

Fort Worth, TX 76104-6716

817-924-9381

Email: steve.remley@lightrecyclers.com

Green Lights Recycling Inc.

10040 Davenport St. NE

Blaine, MN, 55449-4423

800-208-8340

HTR-GROUP

415 Kaiser Ind. Dr.

Kaiser, MO 65047

888-537-4874




LEI

46257 Morris Road

PO Box 2962

Hammond, LA 70404-2962

800-309-9908

Lighting Resources LLC.

5403 Jet View Circle

Tampa, FL 33634

866-961-9100

Veolia Environmental Service

342 Marpan Lane

Tallahassee, FL 32305

800-556-5267

Southeast Recycling, Inc.

906 Chase Drive

Johnson City, TN 37604

800-592-3970

USA Lamp and Ballast

7806 Anthony Wayne Blvd.

Cincinnati, OH 45216

800-778-6645



Apple Boxes For The Masses

Today, Jerry utilized his endless source of slave labor (he’s the photography department head at Portfolio Center) to construct custom, hand crafted apple boxes! Ok, so they aren’t exactly slaves, they’re students and they’re making them for the school. They’re making them from plans I drew up about a decade ago when we made our own. I have cut lists and instructions. If you ask me nicely, I might divulge my knowledge to you!

Who The Heck Is StudioBurns???

Well, for starters, we are a commercial photography studio based in Atlanta, Georgia. We’ve been in business in one form or another for over 20 years. Currently, we are composed of Jerry Burns, Guy Welch and Stephanie Richardson. We don’t claim to know everything, but we think we do know enough to finally have a blog and share it with the world.