Office Makeover Giveaway

Look, I know you are busy.  We are all busy people.  But sometimes you have to take a break from all that hard farming you are doing on your farm-related Facebook games, turn off the television from your New Jersey-related Reality Show, and do something proactive for your work space.

Office Makeover Giveaway

Take a look at your hands.  Are they on a keyboard or a touchscreen?  Great!  You have an Internet device.  Does that Internet device usually stay in one room?  Awesome! You have an office.

Now look at your wallet.  Is it bulging with money because of all the cash you have?  Sweet!  Go find an envelope and mail it to me. I'll wait.  Okay, now everybody's wallet is on the same level.  Wouldn't it be great if you could spruce up your office without having to worry about the fact that your wallet is empty? Of course it would be.  So here's the deal.

DiscountOfficeItems.com is running a Giveaway for an office makeover.  The grand prize is worth over $4,000.  That means you could have an office setup on par with the Vice President of the average medium-sized company.  A desk, a chair, a bunch of organizers and a free TouchPad.  That's all the things you'd need to really give your office the professional feel that you deserve.  You could really get some farming done if you had an ergonomic chair, couldn't you?

I know what you are thinking.  That sounds great, but I never win anything. The cards are always stacked against me and so I shouldn't even waste my time entering because it'll just be a waste.  Well, today your luck is going to change.  Somebody has to win this prize and so far there have only been 24 contest entrants. If you enter right now you will be the 25th entrant so you'd have a 4% chance of winning (if the winner was picked randomly).  A 4% chance is like a million times better odds than winning the lottery.  That's better odds than finding a quarter in your jeans after they come out of the dryer.

Here's the deal.  Take a picture of your office.  If you don't have an office take a picture of the room that you keep your computer or Internet device in.  If you don't have an computer or a room you keep it in, then take a picture of the space that you'd like to setup an office.  If you don't even have that, then just take a picture of your chair.  Now upload that photo to the Office Makeover Giveaway App and tell all your farming buddies to get on the bandwagon and vote for you.  There are buttons on the page so you can spam share the link with them constantly.  Just don't tell your friends that you have a 4% chance of winning because they'll want in and decrease your chances. What have you got to lose?

Still not convinced?  Okay, fine.  You win.  I'm pulling out all the stops now.  This is total used car sales man style now.

Look at this:

Portal is free to download until September 20th.

Yes, Portal.  That game that all your non-farming game friends talk about whenever they say the cake is a lie.  Why is the cake a lie?  You need to play the game to find out.  You have to solve a lot of puzzles.  You like puzzles right?  Great.  Now head over to Steam and start downloading it.  It's not a small download so it might take some time.

So what are you going to do while you are waiting for the download to finish?  You could do more virtual farming, but that'll just decrease your download speed.  If only there was something fun you could do that was mostly uploading.  Uploading doesn't affect your download speed.  I've got it!  Upload a photo to the Office Makeover Giveaway!

Obama's Binder Clip Causes Outrage

Apparently some people are really picky.  Obama came out with his American Jobs Act this week and there are lots of people weighing the pros and cons of his proposal.  There are also people who want to talk about his usage of office supplies.  The New York Post came out with an article titled O gives jobs ‘clip’ service calling it a "chintzy fastener" and an "enormous paper clip" in the headline and opening sentence, but the rest of the article actually talks about the jobs bill.  Why would they tease me with that great introduction and then launch into boring lectures about economic theory?  Yuck!  Talk about the binder clip people; that's the news!

Luckily, the Huffington Post was up to the challenge and ran an article about the article that should have been about a binder clip, and actually did a better job of binder clip reporting.  They link to a product page from Staples with the information that they are quite affordable.  The Huffington Post is not an office supplies blog so I can excuse their lack of knowledge on the subject but a 1" capacity binder isn't going to easily hold all 155 pages of the Jobs Act when printed on standard paper.  They also wouldn't realize that even the generic Staples brand binder clips are not the most affordable.

Universal Binder Clips are Cheaper than Staples

The people who rate binder clips live in a strange world of actual capacity vs ease of use.  Everybody who has spent some time in an office knows that different weights of different papers (see previous article about paper weights as it pertains to actual binders) so nobody wants to say a specific binder clip will hold an exact number of pages.  However, I do know that a large clip can physically hold the 155 pages of the Act.  The binder people would probably advise against it as the binder clips are being forced nearly to their breaking point at 200 pages.

Of course I didn't actually see Obama with the paperwork so I can't tell you if he was performing an act of treason against office supplies.  It's possible he printed the paper double sided and it would fit easily.  It's possible he printed on a lightweight paper that would fit easily.  It's equally possible that he only had 100 pages of the 155 page document actually in the clip at the time.  Like finding out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, we may never know.

It does go without saying that once you are binding more than a 100 pages with one clip you have to know the pressure on the inner most pages is greatly decreased and may not stay put as well as you would like.  Buyer Beware!

Staple City

Can you imagine a city of staples?  Not a city of Staples, the big box store (that would be frightening and expensive), but a city made entirely of staples, the kind that go in a stapler.  Well I assume like most every other human being you have already notice the image right below this paragraph, but some of you may have not.  Anyway, checkout the photo below of a city made out of staples.

City of Staples

The linked page states it is an art installation from 2010 and that it was made from exactly 100,000 staples and took 40 hours to setup.  I have no clue where it was setup or how long it was actually ran as an installation.  This is the Internet, not an actual encyclopedia.  The important thing is that it was made from 100,000 staples.  That is one hundred thousand staples and forty hours if you are adverse to reading numbers.

I was initially impressed by these numbers until I realized that 40 hours is only a standard work week.  5 regular 8 hour days isn't much for creating a true and lasting piece of art.  100,000 staples sounded really cool until I remembered that staples come in boxes of 5,000.  I've got more than 20,000 staples just sitting in my desk drawer right now.  Since you can buy 5,000 staples for $0.60 getting 100,000 isn't even very expensive.  That's only $12.  Twelve dollars isn't even enough cash to buy food for a couple healthy Americans at McDonald's.

Cheap Staples

Each of these staples has a sheet capacity of 20 so one box is capable of holding 100,000 sheets of paper together in 5,000 different groups.  Now that's a number.  If you have 20 boxes of these staples, that means 2,000,000 sheets of paper.  That is 2 million.

Buy Wacom Inkling Refills

Wacom recently announced a new product to their line of digital drawing paraphernalia.  The Inkling is a device that allows you to draw on your favorite drawing surface (notebook, paper, whatever) and with the special pen and special receiver it allows you to digitally capture your drawings for simple transfer to a computer.

Refills Circled in Red

Because the Inkling at its core is just a regular pen with a bunch of electronics strapped to it, you do still need to draw real lines on your real paper.  So you are going to be using real ink.  Luckily the people at Wacom were smart enough to realize nobody is going to be replacing electronic pens regularly, and their ideal customers are not going to be interested in some old Bic Stic ink so they designed the Inkling to allow easy replacement of the ink reservoir. 

They claim it uses a standard mini 1.0 mm ballpoint ink refill, but I have no clue what they mean by that.  Nobody in the refill business will tell you that their refill will be universal because they want to make sure you buy their pen, so you are left guessing.  Just what is a standard mini ink refill?

Proposed Inkling Pen Refill

Since I don't actually have a Wacom Inkling I can't tell you exactly what refills will and won't fit it, but the Cross CRO85184 sure looks like a dead ringer.  It looks a lot like the refills pictured in the product imagery and the product specs seem to match.  Amid several references to ball point pens and compact and mini refill size,  I don't know if I can find a better solution.

Does anybody out there know more about this setup and which pen refills specifically fit it?  I can't seem to find any easily available accurate info.