Not Built in a Day

Today I am pleased to report that I have passed the LEED® Green Associate exam, so I am now officially a LEED-accredited professional.  I have a few thoughts on this process that might be helpful for others looking into getting their own LEED Green Associate credential.  While I'm certainly in support of sustainable building practices, which is why I went to the trouble to get the credential in the first place, I don't think it's inappropriate to take a critical stance toward the whole enterprise in order to challenge the profession (and the industry) to be more self-aware. The preparation: I passed the exam by using only resources that were freely available to me through my school library, including an e-book version of the LEED Green Associate study guide by Michelle Cottrell and the USGBC LEED Core Concepts Guide.  (Although I asked the library to obtain a new copy of the official USGBC LEED Green Associate Study Guide since the one they had was lost, they still hav...

The Sequel! This year for Christmas, I decided to reuse some scrap material left over from a school project to made gifts for my family.  The project was a parametric desk organizer, milled with the CNC router from plywood, and we had lots of extra funky-shaped pieces of wood from our failed prototypes.  These seemed to be the perfect size for picture frames, so I sanded and painted them, ordered prints, cut the prints to size, and voila! For myself, I traced, cut, and painted some images of the Rebel insignia and TARDIS to make cheap Star Wars and Doctor Who earrings from chipboard.  The earring hooks and wire are from Michael's.  I also made mini 3D TARDISes out of clay, but I'm not quite as happy with those.  (Dinosaur below for scale.) This next project was really Justin's, but it turned out fairly well so I thought I'd share.  He was thinking about getting a standing desk for quite a while, so he did the research to find cheap option...