Home & Garden: Square Foot Garden

The Lifehacker website had some great information about creating a small food garden in a square foot of space. One of the great things about this garden was it can be built for about $42 dollars. You should be able to grow enough food in this garden to pay back the cost within a couple years.

Don't forget about our Summer home and garden classes! Click here for for more information.

Business: Bigger Monitors = More Productivity

Wall Street Journal had a great article about bigger monitors. People using 24 inch monitors were 52% faster than those with 18 inch monitors and those with dual 20 inch monitors were 48% faster at task completion than those with 18 inch monitors.

Bigger monitors give you more area to work on the task at hand. You can open multiple programs and have them side-by-side on the screen. You can also drag pictures and documents between open programs windows.

Unfortunately, you need to learn some skills with opening and positioning program windows and multi-tasking to get the full time savings of a bigger monitor. You don't get the saving just by opening one program in a bigger window on the bigger monitor.

Whatcom CC: Music Department's Spring Concert

Don't miss the Music Department's Spring Concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday May 27th in Heiner Theater. You'll hear everything from big band jazz to Renaissance love songs to Papua New Guinea pop, and an incredibly lyric choral setting of an e.e. cummings poem--all for free!

Digital Life: Ion Hub Universal Charger

If you travel with electronics like laptops, digital cameras and cell phones than charging is a constant problem. The biggest part of that problem is all the various cords you have to carry. The other problem is finding enough outlets in your hotel room for everything.

The Ion Hub Universal Charger may be the answer to this traveling problem. The Ion Hub can charge up to six devices at one time. The Ion Hub also support worldwide power types and comes with a car power socket charge cable. Dozens of other cables and connections are available on the Ionhub website.

It may be a bit expensive for the casual traveler with a suggested base price of $49 plus additional costs for the various cables. A charger for my iPhone and my sons Blackjack phone would cost $65. If you do a lot of traveling or have lots of cables to deal with, the ease of use of this product may be worth the cost.

Business: Can Linkedin Increase Your Sales?

Linkedin is a social media site that many business people use. Basically we linked to friends of friends, establishing a net of business connections that can help us with our business. The question has always been does effort actually increase the sales in your business?

Can Linkedin Increase Your Sales is a Free e-book from Jill Konrath, Chief Sales Officer for Selling to Big Companies, goes into how Linkedin can affect your business. I haven't read the entire document yet, but, there are some good nuggets of information to be had.

Geek: A Step Back in Time

I made an awesome discovery last year and with that discovery took a small step back in time with my writing instruments. Daly's Pen Shop in Wisconsin, was a happenstance discovery which has permanently changed the way I look at pens.

Daly's is the oldest pen shop in the United States having been established in the 1920's. They have been in the same location sense that opening surviving several remodels and the radical change of their building into a multi-story business tower.

Daly's sells pens. Lots and lots of pens. These are all high quality writing utensils....not a Bic pen in the entire store. It's here I got hooked on fountain pens. Yes, nibbed pens. The only real change to fountain pen technology in the last hundred years is they now use an ink cartridge instead of having to dip the nib every few words. This makes the entire process cleaning and easier to deal with.

Writing with a fountain pin is different. It makes you slow down a bit and think. The writing has more character as each letter isn't perfectly inked. You have to think when you write, as the pen must be held correctly and the nib angled just so. Each letter you form is composed of different angles and shadows depending on how the nib moved across the page.

You find that people are interested in your pen. It starts conversations and gives you an opening to start conversations with them. Fountain pens also make good gifts. A quality pen starts at around $30 dollars and there are lots of great pens for under $100. I currently use a Lamy Safari (pictured) which is a good everyday writing pen.

If you are looking for something different, or a unique gift for a graduate, you should take a look at a fountain pen. A stylish piece of old school technology that like me, you may just enjoy in the day to day grind of your job.