Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life — Steve Jobs

Before any project gets built, the owner wants to know how much the project is going to cost. Most of the time we are providing cost estimates and competing with anywhere from 5 to 10 other contractors. In most cases, the low responsible price wins the contract.

On a $3 million dollar project, I will spend about 2 weeks putting the project estimate together. Estimating software is of the most important software that I use on a regular basis.

Recently, the company I work for tasked yours truly to oversee a new computer and software upgrade. This particular upgrade included a new company server, workstations, and estimating software.

Prior to the upgrade, we were using a product from Sage software called Timberline Estimating. I believe Timberline was the first mainstream estimating software. I personally have been using Timberline Estimating software for the past 15 years.

After enduring multiple webinairs from multiple estimating software platforms, I narrowed it down to two choices – ProEst and Timberline.

Timberline has the advantage of being a tried, true, and tested estimating platform by companies large and small. It also had the advantage that all of us at work have been using it for a long time. Because estimating software is the most important function for us at work, we desire to utilize the best software to help us with our estimating.

Let me make it clear that the estimating software is a tool that we use. We are NOT slaves to the software and the software does not “think” for us. I guess an analogy would be playing the guitar. You aren’t simply going to put a Les Paul guitar in someone’s hands and all of a sudden they become Eric Clapton.

ProEst has a great marketing deptartment. They are able to clearly articulate and demonstrate the great things that ProEst can do. Unfortunately, that is as good as it gets with ProEst. The program is slow and klunky and I personally ran into several bugs that, according to ProEst support, were being worked on and “would be fixed in an upcoming release”.

Our company went so far as to buy several licenses under the false pretense that we would be able to get some of our money back if things didn’t work out. Long story short, things didn’t work out. Nearly all of our estimating team found the software to be too slow and time consuming to use. Our estmating team consists of 6 who all have at least 10 years estimating experience. Once they have their hands on your money, they will not do the honorable thing and hand it back (as we were lead to believe).

Unfortunately, ProEst’s answer to our unwillingness to have them force feed their software to us was simply that we needed to sit through umpteen hours of their web based support. I beg your pardon? Hey ProEst, we’re not dummies. We recognize a sub par estimating platform when we see one.

What I can’t explain are all the favorable reviews for ProEst. The only thing I can think of is the people who are favorably reviewing ProEst are ProEst employees or folks that have not tried the more superior, refined, and FAST Sage Timberline estimating.

Like I said, Timberline estimating has been around since day one. The folks that put this fine piece of precision software together are not without their A-Game. The programmers who put Timberline together have obviously made it their priority to have people from the estimating profession give input into making the program function.

Timberline really excels with it’s excel spreadsheet integration (no pun intended), report writing, address/contact book, and did I say FAST! With Timberline you never more than two clicks away from entering an activity. ProEst on the other hand…Ugh! After opening at least 3 or 4 windows (I honestly lost count), you finally get the opportunity to enter an activity. ProEst is simply too slow of a process to contend.

If you are sitting on the fence in trying to decide which estimating software to use, look no farther than Sage Timberline Estimating. There is absolutely no comparison. Simply put, no other estimating platform even comes close.

The liberal leadership were told time and time again that if measure 66 & 67 (measures to tax businesses to the stratosphere and families earning over $250k) passes, these businesses and families would get the hell out of dodge.

And get the hell out they are.
In 2010 alone, approximately 15,000 families beat feet from one of the highest taxed states in the union (Oregon) to the lower priced and affordable Clark County Washington.

Rumor has it the not so top heavy liberals are caving toward repealling measures 66 and 67.

While they are at it, they should consider dropping the 11% income tax rate down a few notches.

Better late than never.

Having been self employed for a few years, I had a cpa do my taxes because there simply wasn’t enough time in the day to figure it all out. Now that I am once again working for the man, my taxes have become very easy to do myself.

So last night I was working on my Oregon tax filing and got the dreaded part of determining what I have to pay. I’m a freak about letting the respective taxing jurisdictions hold on to my money (since they don’t pay interest) and would rather that I be holding their money (which I don’t pay interest on either). That being said, I usually have to pay more taxes on April 15th. I’m fine with that because it’s usually under $1000 so it’s not a psychological money let down.

If you do your own taxes in Oregon, you will notice that in order to determine your taxable income, you have to go through the motions of determining your federal tax liability. Ideally, the higher this number is (for Oregon reporting), the less your Oregon taxable income will be.

The worksheet that is in the instructions (pg 33) for filing your Oregon taxes to establish your federal tax liability is as follows (these amounts are all found on your federal tax return):
1. Enter your federal tax liability
2. Enter your tax on qualified retirement plans (this is also a federal tax liability so this makes sense)
3. Enter line 63 (aka Making Work Pay) (what? this is obama money and has nothing to do with my liability)
4. Enter line 66 (aka American Opportunity Credit) this is a credit for college tuition – once again, nothing to do with tax liability
5. Enter line 67 (aka First Time Homebuyer Credit) nothing to do with my tax liability
6. Add line 1 and 2 together and subtract 3 thru 5

What? Remember, we want this number to be as high as possible. The State of Oregon wants to use your federal tax liability to establish your taxable income. The point of this whole article is why the State of Oregon wants to tax credits that were made to soften the blow of an already overtaxed fragile economy. Hell, even the federal govt doesn’t tax you on the credits they just handed to you.

So effectively, in my case, they took my Obama credit “Making Work Pay” and taxed it. I didn’t have the other two credits so those weren’t an issue for me.

The State of Oregon is always talking about how they want to help the middle class. Well, this method of establish your Oregon taxable income is an assault to the middle class. It irritates me to no end because here we get some tax relief at a much needed time from the federal govt only to have the State of Oregon swoop in to scoop it up.

I implore our state assembly to get rid of this tax on our taxes and quit spending so much so you don’t have to keep coming up with ways to pay for your inability to maintain a budget.

And since you made it to the end of this article, a great way to utilize all of those fillable pdf tax forms the government provides is with the free pdf program – Foxit Reader

My experience with Google’s pdf viewer was not pleasant. It is limited and it takes longer to render the pdf. My biggest complaint is Google’s pdf plugin would not allow me to click on weblinks within the pdf.

Since I had never had to mess with this plugin, I wasn’t sure how to get things back on track again. After a while of searching for the cure, I finally found it:

Up in the right hand corner of the Chrome browser, click on the little wrench icon which is your settings icon.
Click on “options”
Click on the “Under the hood” tab
Click on “Content Settings”
Click on “Disable individual plug-ins”
Disable Chrome PDF Viewer (and make sure your pdf plugin is enabled)

PhotoRocket is a drop dead simple way of sharing photos to various social network sites and will link your email contacts from outlook, google, etc.

You simply download the 12mb program, install it, and right click on any photo to share with Facebook or will email it (without the use of your email program).

Check it out, you will be pleasantly surprised. And the best part – It’s FREE!!

Visit Fodey.com to have a little fun.

This is a newspaper article I created to have some fun with some Oregon Ducks fans.

It had been a year or so since I tried Chrome so a couple weeks ago I wondered how Chrome was coming along. I downloaded the newest version of Chrome and to my surprise, it had evolved into a very nice browser.

One of the biggest reasons I enjoy the Firefox browser is its add-on capability. I have add-ons I just can’t live without so making the jump to Chrome was an exercise in wishful thinking. Also at the time, Chrome compatibility with various websites wasn’t quite there yet.

Wow, was I ever surprised. Chrome has evolved to the point where it had all of the add-ons I used in FF. And better yet, it has some other add-ons that made the integration with my android phone a huge plus! I haven’t ran into any problems with browser site compatibility. Another excellent feature of Chrome is bookmark syncing across all of my computers (I use 3).

So, two weeks ago I downloaded Chrome and switched to it permanently. I haven’t really looked back.

If you are sitting around watching football and need something to do, download and try out Google Chrome.

My favorite Add-ons include:
LastPass
Google Voice
Send link by email
Chrome to phone
goo.gl url shortner
Google Reader notifier
Click & Clean
Open Downloads Window
IE Tab
WOT
AdBloc

Google Chrome is also a very streamlined and minimal browser so if you run it on a laptop (like I do) you don’t loose a lot of screen real estate. Chrome also is snappier than Firefox. Tab management is nice too in that if a tab crashes, you don’t have to shut down Chrome – only that tab.

All in all, my opinion is the Chrome browser is ready for prime time and has become my browser of choice. If you haven’t yet tried it, give it a shot.

I got an early invite to try out Google Voice when it was still in beta and a few months ago, Google Voice became available to the masses.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Google Voice, it allows you to pick a local number and set it up to ring through the google answering service and will forward to whatever phone you want.

Recently, Google released a key ingredient to Google Voice which allows you to now take calls and make calls right from your computer. It operates kinda like Skype except you can call anywhere in the US for free! How awesome is that?

If you haven’t yet looked into Google Voice, go here for the complete rundown. To make and take calls from your computer, you need to have a Gmail account with Google chat set up to make/take the calls. My experience with Google Voice has been 100% positive. It’s free and the call quality rivals both my phone and cell quality. You can also set up video chat along with this.

Since my daughter does not yet have a phone, I set up her Google Voice number to ring directly to chat. Usually when she is in the house, she’s on the computer so it keeps our home phone line from being tied up. She also set up her own answering service so when her friends want to leave a message, once again, our answering machine isn’t filled up. How many of you have bought another line for your kids? Now you don’t have to.

For those of you not familiar with Google, take it from me, I couldn’t function without it! Google Voice is only one of many cool applications that Google offers. Check it out and be all things Google!

Libox is a media streaming service that allows you to stream your music, photos, and video from your computer.

It works similiar to Orb in that you download their FREE software and sync whatever media folders you want.

This software works both on Mac and Windows 32/64 bit XP, Vista, and Windows 7 machines. I found the software very Mac-ish and had problems shrinking the window (which I have had problems with other Mac type software). However, since it is a streaming program, most, if not all of my use will be via my browser and in my tests, functioned excellent.

The pro’s of this software is it is extremely easy to set up and use. The developer has been working on this project for a few years and has just released it into a beta. I have yet to find any bugs and it functions flawlessly. I also like the fact that it plays the music/video with it’s own built in player so it doesn’t rely on third party players like Orb does. I think the functionality of this program will be more user friendly to mobile devices.

The only real con that I have is the inability to choose an album to play. To play an album you have to click on all of the songs in the album as if you were setting up a playlist. I hope a future release will give the user more settings to choose how they want to listen to music. It’s not a big con but just an extra step.

The social aspect of this program is awesome! Sharing your media is as simple as clicking and sharing.

In the world of media streaming, there are few good options to choose from. Libox is at the top of the list if you are interested in media streaming and I can’t recommend it enough.