Outdoor Directory Signs
Directory signs are not always just found inside the lobby of a building. They are also often found outside in the entryway of an office park as visitors 1st enter a building.
Cool and Inspiring Directory Signs
Cupertino City Center Directory Sign Just like a 3D Logo, an outdoor LED sign, or anything else that is giving a 1st impression of your business, a directory sign can make a significant impact on a visitor to your establishment. All too often business owners neglect the significance of a directory sign at the entrance of their building. Here is a really cool, unique directory sign from the City of Cupertino.
A couple months ago, I was in a bit of a jam. I had been on a few dates with this girl I was interested and everything was going great. Unfortunately, I met her in a bar when I was a little inebriated, and I was doing my best to impress her. So when she mentioned she was really into hiking, I said, “No way! Me too! Huge fan!”. Now, I grew up in midtown Manhattan. I guess on occasion I have “hiked” across Central Park, but that’s about it. At this point, she’s been begging me for weeks to go hiking with her, and finally I had to give in.
I headed to the mall to find some shoes to go hiking in. I approach one of those mall directory signs to try to find where to go, when suddenly standing next to me was a certain female actress. I don’t want to give her identity away, but let’s just say she’s had some very public struggles with her weight and she was on Cheers. She asks me where Jenny Craig is, and I point to the sign: it’s up on the second floor. She looks up to the second floor, looks to her left, sees a Coldstone, looks back at Jenny Craig and says, “Are they not aware fat people like both of these things? Location, location, location!”, and heads over to Coldstone.
At first, I laughed, but then I saw Foot Locker was on the third floor and texted a breakup to hiker girl as birthday cake ice cream dribbled on my phone.
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Planning trips through public transit used to be such an inexact science online. It used to mean innumerable trips to search engines, slogging through obscure websites, and sometimes downloading arcane PDF files. Web developers have nightmares about this sort of thing.
In the last few years, though, Google announced a gamechanger, as the search engine giant has been so often apt to do in the 13 years it’s existed. It’s long been possible in Google Maps to plan customized driving directions to darn near anywhere in the world. Now, it’s also possible to make plans for walking, bicycling, and taking public transit. It’s like a giant directory sign/listing for public transportation.
It’s not just a matter of having a few bus schedules randomly loaded into Google Maps (what good would that do, anyhow?) In a place like the San Francisco Bay Area, the map directions can include train lines like BART, MUNI, and CAL TRAIN as well as every known bus service. Drop down menus allow for trips to be planned in advance meaning there won’t be any mix-ups planning a weekend schedule trip on, say, a Wednesday.
There’s no word on how much this new function has increased public transit usage. I can only speak from my personal experience and say that it’s made me much more apt to use it, particularly buses. I was hopeless at figuring those out before. Google makes this– and so many other things, really– a simple task, a snap. I would venture to say it’s one more way that Google’s making the world a better place.
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It’s been a long time since I called 411. I discovered online yellow pages as I was nearing the end of college, sometime after I must have racked up $60 in 411 charges for the campus newspaper, and the Internet phone book was a godsend for me, a free nationwide wealth of information. I’ve been able to avoid having to call 411 ever since, and thank goodness since it costs a dollar a pop. Still, at my peak of usage, I had good experiences calling directory assistance, and I’d recommend it to anyone.
I probably called 411 the most when I was working on a series of features for my college newspaper about baseball Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith. I decided I wanted to contact old teammates of the former St. Louis Cardinals shortstop, which meant I made many calls to various directory assistance people. These were people who patiently helped me out as I anxiously blurted out the player I was trying to find or the city I thought that he lived in. Mind you, this was in the days before Wikipedia which will sometimes say where old players now live. With the help of the 411 folks, though, I got through to a few of his old college teammates and got that much better of a series of stories, ultimately.
It’s definitely lazier days for me dealing with online yellow pages, and while I don’t miss having to pay money for 411 calls, I do miss the human interaction a little. It has its place.
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In one episode of the NBC series, “The Office,” Dunder Mifflin salesman Dwight Schrute announces plans to open a gym, a so-called “Dwight Schrute Gym for Muscles.” From a family of Mennonite farmers, Dwight sometimes displays a hilarious lack of common knowledge, and his gym reflects this. Devoid of sophisticated, modern exercise equipment, Dwight’s gym instead features things like arcane farm tools, cinder blocks, and, my favorite, a “dedicated phone book ripping section.”
I watched as Dwight attempted to demonstrate how to rip one of the telephone directories (he was unable to do so), and it struck me that that might offer a pretty good alternative weight exercise. Here are some others:
- Raising young children: My aunt told me awhile back that she never had to go to the gym when she was raising my cousins. That makes sense. For a few years there, any parent is essentially carrying around a 20-30 pound weight, sometimes for hours on end.
- Working a menial labor job: My day job is for a company that cleans leather and rugs, and I’ve managed to build some muscle and tone in the near two years I’ve worked there hauling jackets, area carpets and such. I’ve also learned how to carry inordinately large rugs by myself which I suppose will be useful at some point.
- Doing push ups and sit ups: This must have been what people did to build muscles before weights were in vogue. Surely, even the cavemen knew the value of doing 200 push ups, maybe 1,000 crunches.
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Over the past few months, I’ve been spending more and more time on Twitter, and an interesting thing has happened. While I’ve been corresponding with fellow writers and clicking on links for various articles that they and my other followers Tweet about, I’ve had less reason to visit major websites. In fact, Twitter is quickly becoming my go-to starting point for finding out about news.
So which is better, Twitter or, say, ESPN.com? Here are the advantages for each:
- Twitter: First and foremost, Twitter moves amazingly fast. I can generally count on learning of a news item on Twitter well before it’s up on ESPN or elsewhere. I also get said news and other cool things from a roster of people I’ve chosen to follow. The base of things I’ve been learning about each day is determined by folks I know and trust (at least by Twitter standards) rather than some faceless organization. And I don’t have to navigate the various ESPN home pages which can be an impenetrable barrage of information.
- ESPN: I learned an interesting quote this week after some self-proclaimed insiders Tweeted misinformation about some baseball transactions. The quote, courtesy of Mark Twain, goes something along the lines of, “A lie can spread halfway around the world before the truth has even had a chance to put its boots on.” With its speed, Twitter can feed into this, and it’s tricky sometimes to know what to trust. On the other hand, I generally assume the items on ESPN have been vetted through some kind of journalistic filter. It takes a little longer to get my news, but I probably place a lot more stock in what I do read. It’s also generally of higher quality.
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Recently, much of the Web participated in a daylong protest of anti-piracy laws currently making their way through Congress, and the unthinkable happened: Wikipedia went dark for a day, by design. Ordinarily, this would appear catastrophic as I write prolifically online and use Wikipedia as a resource. But the truth is that I didn’t really notice its absence. I personally haven’t had to rely on the website as much. These days, Twitter can do a lot of things that its older, encyclopedic counterpart can.
There’s even a joke for this that people Tweet about: Ask Twitter. Basically, anyone with a decent following or even anyone savvy with hash tags or other ways to get a response from the general Twitter public can have an answer to a question fast. It’s more fun than a Google or Wikipedia and it might be more effective.
Just last night, my girlfriend was struggling to put together a website, wondering about how to translate something from Composer to HTML. She eventually figured it out on her own, though I tried to get a Twitter answer as well. One of my friends replied offering his services.
Personally, I write a lot about baseball, and my list of roughly 500 followers is quickly becoming some kind of council of learned elders. There is such an unbelievable amount of knowledge online at any given hour. Just today, my friends on Twitter helped me determined some of the most offensively productive players of all-time who hit less than .200 in a season.
To me, it’d be much more unthinkable if Twitter ever ceased to exist. That, for me, would be a dark day.
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Jan 12
18
The hazards of GPS units
My girlriend told me something interesting recently. As an aspiring geographer, currently in graduate school for it, she told me the hazards of Global Positioning Satellite units.
I work as a delivery driver by day and have long since known that directions are not always what they seem in my handy GPS. Dont get me wrong, that thing saves my butt most days and is probably far easier to navigate than a Thomas Guide (never had to use one, so I wouldn’t know.) Still, I’ve gotten used to buildings not quite being where they should be, clearly visible onramps not being in my GPS, and having to take circuitous routes because my GPS doesn’t like to let me do left turns, even legal ones.
I’ve had to learn to trick my GPS, doing things like typing in an address one number off so the unit thinks it’s on the other side of the street and then finding a place to make a U-turn if need be. In the everlong battle between Man v. Machine, I consistently find new and exciting ways to win this one, even if it’s just me versus a cheap directory tool. I have to, or I couldn’t stay employed, at least not in this job.
Apparently, though, my experiences are lightweight compared to some people. My girlfriend told me that a woman got lost in Death Valley, driving further and further into the desert on roads that no longer existed. The reason? This particular GPS company loaded its maps into its system after having interns trace over 30-year-old maps. You cannot make this stuff up.
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Jan 12
9
Social directories on the Web
With so much noise and confusion for years on the Internet now, some websites exist by offering to make sense of it all. Beyond the Googles and other search engines come another curious breed of sites, social directories like Twitter, Klout, and Digg.
Here’s a rundown of what they do:
- Twitter: The author of this post read a gushing article within the past few weeks from a writer gushing that thanks to Twitter, he never has to go to the home page of major websites anymore. Instead, his Twitter timeline directs him on where to go, what writers to read, and even what news is happening. Best, Twitter users are given the freedom to craft their own directories. It’s no wonder it might be the hottest site on the Web right now, perhaps with a shot to overtake the fading, glutted Facebook.
- Klout: This rising Web star looks a little like its San Francisco tech counterpart Twitter did a few years ago, an interesting website with an indeterminate value prop. What exactly does it do? Can it make money? For now, what’s mostly apparent is that the website (which uses an algorithm to determine its users “klout” based on their Tweets, Facebooks, and other content online) is rapidly gaining in popularity. Seems like everyone is Tweeting these days about giving +K to their followers.
- Digg: Klout, beware. Digg went the route of created an algorithm a few years ago to determine Web hierarchy. It proved to be easily manipulable, and it doesn’t seem like folks are talking about Digg so much anymore.
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I began working as a delivery driver about a year and a half ago, and one of my first orders of business was to troop down to Target and lay out $130 or so on a new Global Positioning Satellite unit. It was money well-spent, as I can’t even estimate how many hours my GPS has saved me since then, though with that being said, it took me a little time to learn how to use the thing.
Here are some things I’ve learned about using a GPS:
1. They don’t like to let you make left turns or U-turns, legal or otherwise: I suppose I get the thinking behind this as a GPS that did otherwise could be a lawsuit waiting to happen if led to accidents. Still, it’s a pain in the butt when my GPS wants to take me four minutes out of the way instead of making a legal turn 100 feet in front of me. I’ve learned to look for the flag on my GPS screen telling me where my destination is and then trying to find a place to make a legal turn.
2. Along these lines, it sometimes pays to type in an address on the other side of the street: My GPS is pretty reliable about giving me the quickest legal route, though if it believes the place I’m going is on the wrong side of the street, that route will be circuitous.
3. They can lead to traffic accidents: I’m generally a safe driver though I had my first-ever fender bender attempting to program an address into my GPS in minor traffic in Monterey. Be careful using these things while driving. It might actually be against the law.
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