JLH Design Blog

Well…He went and mowed around my landscaping detail. So I promptly went and mowed right up to the correct property line. This will start getting real funny if he mows again tonight when he gets home from work.

The real big news is that I’ve got a graphic to go with the saga, courtesy of Odie.

So I promised I would post some pictures.

Here’s one of me, Ben, and Tarl, at some bar…

And another one with Tarl’s girlfriend, Tiff, giving me a kiss. She’s the one who supplied the camera as well. ..

The older gentleman that lived next door to me moved to a nursing home last winter and sold his house. I haven’t met the couple that moved in yet, but have seen them around. They’re middle age-ish if they plan to live to 110 years old. I must admit I didn’t give them much of a chance right of the bat because the first thing they did was build a kennel for their large dog in the back yard. This poor thing is relegated to living its days out in 12 X 20 foot chain link cage.

So anyway, back to the story at hand. I live in nice neighborhood that was built in the 60’s and early 70’s. The streets aren’t straight and kind of meander around the base of the hill that the neighborhood occupies. The lots aren’t all perfectly flat or even square for that matter, mine for example is on the hill. From the street it looks like a normal 1 story ranch, but in the back yard it opens up to a 2-story walk out basement with a tons of privacy due to the old growth trees. With all of that being said, the lot lines are clearly delineated by fencing, hedges, utility poles, and off course the official demarcations.

Apparently my new neighbor isn’t quite satisfied with his lot size as he has taken to annexing some of my property through proxy by mowing more and more of my lawn. I’ve seen this before back at my parents house with a strange neighbor so I thought I’d nip it right in the bud this spring. I walked up, introduced myself, yada yada, then as I excused myself casually mentioned that if he insists on mowing my yard to have the courtesy of mowing the entire yard. This lead to a discussion, he didn’t really know the lot lines, etc, we walked around, I showed him the big telephone pole with the lead lot numbers situated right at 4 corners where all the lots came together. We then discussed how the lot line probably radiated to the streets at right angles from that point. So the spring went by….

Apparently he has rethought his position on the matter, and has again began cutting my yard. He still only goes to where the pole denotes the lot separation but now goes out to the street at an angle. I think the real problem is that my house sits back on the lot farther from the lot line than his. So when mowed properly it looks like I have more land as their is more grass next to my house than his. So began our passive aggressive battle.

I started noticing that he would make a point to mow just the stripe between our lots (but in reality on my side) then go and finish the rest of his yard, maybe go in and have drink and finish the spot by my house several hours later. So then I started timing my lawn mowing to coincide with his, as soon as I hear their mower stop, I’m out there with mine, set about 1/2″ shorter to clearly mark out my territory. So he stepped up his mowing habits. We keep this up and we’ll both be mowing daily.

So my son was up to the house for the weekend. We like to work in the yard when we can, so I thought of a project. I’ve got a landscaped area out in the front yard, kind of an island. It’s got some shrubs, rock piles, wood mulch the usual stuff. We extended the border about 3 feet so that its within 1 lawn mower width of the lot line.

Today was his first mowing since this bold move on my part, we’ll have to see how this escalates!

I’ve been asked about my domain and blog name. So let’s try to tackle that.

The JLH part is no large mystery, those are my initials.

The design part is a bit more complicated. I chose that based on its the defining word for everything I have ever done, succeeded, failed, or attempted in my life. I suppose there’s also an existensial meaning behind it as well. From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential, Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views the individual, the self, the individual’s experience, and the uniqueness therein as the basis for understanding the nature of human existence. The philosophy generally reflects a belief in freedom and accepts the consequences of individual actions, while acknowledging the responsibility attendant to the making of choices. It’s easy to view the scientific observances of cause and effect and believe you understand the world, but if within those details you discover the design you have truly understood the meaning.

For me design is a process, a unique one, that not all people are capable of. There is the artistic design which combines creativity with personal expression, I have little talent in this field. There is also layout design which has more to do with spatial relationships as seen in such fields as graphics design, architecture, interior design, landscaping, etc. I’m impressed with people that can do such things, but again I have no interest in this.

I must say that I have done work as a designer in the HVAC industry and in process design, mainly with heat transfer and controls.

For me the design process is used daily in work and lifelong in living. The design starts with the final product, or at least the initial notion of it. This may be a project goal, a sales goal, a marketing plan, a piece of furniture, or a business model. You have to know what you want to achieve until before you can design a way to attain those goals. I find that not having clearly defined end goal is usually the failure of most designs. Most good designers end up in the end with what they wanted from the beginning, the great designers have clearly laid out their goals before it even began. That’s the easy part.

The fun part is figuring out how you are going to attain those goals. This is the education experience, the time of discovery. When you take stock of your current assets and abilities and figure out what you don’t have and how you can get it. This is generally a time of a lot of reading, interviews, writing, and trial and error. For example when I decided I wanted to design furniture, this is the couple of years I took learning the tools of the trade, working with material, understanding the methods. When I wanted to start an online business I already knew all that there was to know with the HVAC market in which we went into, however I didn’t know a thing about HTML, shopping carts, web design, SEO, etc. I spent 6 months of research before the first page was published. Three months later we had 18,000 pages in the google index and were doing $50,000 a month in business. When an idea came up at work for a better lead/lag control system, the control theory was the easy part, for me I had to learn how to program a PLC.

The hard part is actually doing the work. The good thing is that the hard part is also usually the shortest duration of the process. If you start with well thought out design and clear directions the work can usually be delegated, any my role becomes more supervisorily in nature.

Within those brief descriptions you can see my grand plan. For me to succeed at anything I need to know it inside and out. How the sausage is made. I can’t tell a drafter how to lay out a drawing without first knowing how the drafting system works, its limitation, its possibilities. I cannot sell a product to someone without knowing how it works, how its made, or how the competition makes theirs. I need to know how its used, the processes it benefits, the applications its effective or ineffective.

I’ve got 12 domains online at the time of this writing but most are commercial in nature, this is personal. The internet is great opportunity that still exists for designers of all types. Designing a website requires a little technical knowledge, a lot of intuition, but most importantly a unique understanding on a topic.

more later.

Made a great business contact last night. I’ve landed the rights to build a web site for a well established local business, its in a great sector that is kind of disorganized but has a tonnnnnn of traffic so I think I’ll be able to make it very profitable.

M, as she signs off has her email is all set up at the new location linked to above. It’s quite an interesting read, full of energy and spunk. Makes me think I should start writing more here…but then I’d need some time to do that.

What I learned from the whole experience is that 1) Blogger is a very buggy system, much like copy machines only breaks down when you need it the most and 2) that using an Apache server is much easier than IIS as I set up a 301 on her site in about 10 seconds, nothing to it.

What I need to figure out is how to do a proper 301 on a blogspot domain, or in the least how to set up the meta refresh to at least send you to the right page on the new domain.

Any ideas out there in blogville?

Oh well, its Friday afternoon, and I think I’m going to bug out of here and head down to the river to my favorite watering hole, Pettibone Boat Club.