Below is how most people use those to provide a consistent and reasonable way to manage how much a project, product, or service costs.

When using the GFC method, you are able to pick out two of those three things for your project, product, or service that you wish to have completed. The reasoning behind this is that you simply cannot have more than two out of three. Here are the layouts of how the possible combinations come together and what the type of service each of the combinations results in. From there you, as the client, are able to arrive at your own conclusions based on needs and wants, to pick out the combination that best suits your needs and budget.

Picking two of the three options can give you one of three results:

• Good + Fast = Higher Cost

For this type of project, the price is high because it requires a great deal of attention and dedicated time, which can make it much harder to work on multiple projects if more than one happens to be asked for.

• Good + Cheap = Lower Cost But Slower Return

If you want a quality project, but are on a very strict budget, this might be your option. The only drawback for you the client, is that if you are also in a time crunch things might not work out. Because asking for a cheaper price also places you on a slightly lower priority rank than that of one that is a higher priority project that is needed sooner and pays higher.

• Fast + Cheap = Lower Quality

Now that isn’t to say that the product you requested will be given to you as a small blurry file that wouldn’t even look good printed on a postage stamp. You will still receive a high quality product that can be used for anything, for any purpose. Lower quality, in this sense, means that for a quick result at a lower price, the time being spent is less and less of a chance to get extremely creative with the work.

All three have their advantages and disadvantages, it’s up to you as the client to decide what your current situation is and what route to go from there.

I happen to use this method personally and have found that it almost always works out for people. It is understood that there will have to be a compromise of some sort for every situation. In the end, the client gets what they want, and they have the choice of how it gets done.

As either another creative individual, or as a client, what do you think when you see how the list is laid out? Do you feel as though it is a fair representation of how things are? Do you think that it is a fair way to do business? Do you have any other methods that you prefer or are employing? Feel free to leave it in the comments.

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• A Tale of Manfrotto Woe
• Going 3 Deep
• Where Has The Time Gone?

Mark's EDC

For Mark, there is a much more minimalistic view on what he carries and the reasons behind them. Here is Mark’s carry:

• Droid X
• Glasses case
• American Optical sunglasses
• Money in micro binder clip
• Car key/keyfob
• Northfield NXLD knife
• Zippo Armor lighter
• Keychain with Snap-On screwdriver key, house, and two different toolbox keys
• Chapstik

When talking to Mark about the choices he made and some of the reasons for those choices, he went into short detail about only a few. The ones that were self explanatory where the knife, Chapstik and simple set of keys for his house and work toolboxes(Mark is a machinist by trade). The ones that needed a little further explanation where the binder clip on his money, and why his car key was not with the rest of his keys. Going with the keys first, Mark gave the reasoning that he had his car key separate from the others because of the way the car key fit into the ignition of his car. In his specific car, the placement of the ignition is on the dash. This placement would cause the other keys on the set to continuously rub on his dash and promptly ruin it. Great reason. Yet another simple answer was given for the simple money clip. He doesn’t like the bulk of a wallet, and yet wanted to carry both cash and cards with him at the same time. Most money clips cannot handle the added size when placing multiple bills along with multiple ID and credit cards. For his purposes the micro binder works just perfect, and as an added bonus, they are quite cheap to replace.

So there you have it, another look into the EDC of another individual. Seeing as this was a fun thing to talk about with Mark, I may bring it up with other people I know and see if they wish to share their EDC’s as well.

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• What’s In Your Pockets?
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This kit, of the mini category, resides within an Altoids tin. The seam of the tin is wrapped in electrical tape to create a water proof seal, and then around the kit as a whole to make sure that the kit won’t pop open. The list of items is composed of the following:

A mini kit in an Altoids tin

From bottom of tin to the top

• A little over 2 square feet of aluminum foil
• Duct tape; of which has been rewrapped lengthwise around an old credit card, the total amount is unknown but estimated at around 10ft
• Safety pins – 4
• Book of matches
• Utility knife style razor blade
• Bandaids – 2 plastic style, 2 cloth style, 1 knuckle style, 1 finger tip style
• Gauze – a 2in by 2in square
• Antibacterial ointment

Every item in this list has a specific purpose and reason for being chosen. In Part 2 of this Mini Kit series of posts, I will detail more of the reasons for why things are in the kit.

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• Survival of the Fittest

I finished the book in only a few days, but plan on going back through it and rereading specific parts of it in order to create a plan for the following kits:

• Mini kit
• Medium kit
• 2 x Vehicle kits

It is possible that I will also create a small kit, to take on small hikes and trips. I plan on attempting to blog through the process as I put the kits together (alongside putting my EDC together, as they are somewhat related) for your reading pleasure. I invite you to follow along and hope that it will encourage you to find yourself in need of a kit. Or, at the very least give you a reason to think about how you would survive in a situation where all you have is what you have on you. As the author of book says, “It can’t save you if you don’t have it with you.”

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• Survival Kit Mini – Part 1
• What’s In Your Pockets?
• A Friend’s EDC

My EDC

Listed from top to bottom- left to right:

• Leather Trifold Wallet – Nothing fancy here
• Sunglasses – Brown/Amber gradient darker on top than on bottom
• Larger Knife – Carried in most cases
• Smaller Knife – For when the pants aren’t equipped to handle the larger knife
• Keys – Bare keys on a setup of a few keyrings, a cloth strap, and carabiner
• Zippo Lighter – Plain silver
• iPhone 3G – Because anything else seems silly

When choosing which knife to carry it all comes down to whether the larger knife will fit into the edge of a pocket comfortably. If not, then out comes the smaller one. And the reasoning behind such a large, yet simple, key setup is that while I like to have my keys accessible, I am not a fan of, 1) having my keys out in the open where people could possibly grab them, and 2) I don’t not enjoy the sound of keys changl-ing along while I walk. In the future I plan on replacing the cloth strap with a woven strap of a few meters of parachute chord.

This is not my final EDC, as I would like to change some things, and it is essentially an ever evolving thing. And because of those things, I also have not submitted it to the EDC website. If you have any suggestions about things to carry, please leave a comment below or send them to me @ ben(AT)sphericalthinking.DOT.com

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• A Friend’s EDC
• Survival of the Fittest

I seem to fall somewhere in the grey area between the two groups. I sometimes enjoy being busy, but also rather like a laid-back atmosphere. For the past month or so, longer if you count the entire time that I have been taking classes and the weather has been decent enough out so that chores have to be done, I have been busy almost non-stop. It is the main reason that there have not been new posts here on the blog. I simply have been too busy to do anything other than what has to be done.

Housework, outside work, daughter, class, work, outside work-work, holidays, and family get togethers; all of these things have been keeping me so busy that it has been hard to think, let alone get anything done. And yes, I have been “getting things done” mowing the lawn and keeping things looking decent around the house, but those aren’t things that I really want to do. If I had it my way I would have been finished with the site redesign and would have been working on a few other work related yet personal projects. The only reason I have been able to write this post, is that I am waiting for a file to finish downloading so that I can finish the homework for this week. I only have homework because I am in the position that I need to have a degree so that I can be hired in full time. I really hope to be hired in full time so that I can better support my wife and daughter. This post really doesn’t have a whole lot of meaning other than to give me a place to kind of give my brain a release of all of the things that have been taking up its “processing” time as of late. I really hope that by writing this I will be able to “purge” all of this backed up cache and be able to move into the coming week with a clear head and be able to compete tasks more easily. Not that the week starts out easy though, for the first four days I will be swamped with filming events that require me to head off campus and mingle with the masses. It is a slight highlight however, that the first thing I get to do is more engaging work ( close shot interviews in HD ) than most of the rest of the week (general crowd and roaming speaker shots that get encoded into a low quality webstream). All the while I do not wish to sound unpleased with what I am doing. This job has given me many opportunities that I might not have otherwise had, and I am eternally grateful for that.

I will leave with this. While I have been running without break for quite some time, and am eagerly awaiting a pause in the hectic to and fro, I will also miss it a little. That is why I am in the grey zone. I am not a very happy person when under high amounts of stress, but I also become restless if I have too much time and nothing to do.

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• A Little Thing Called GFC
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This is what she looked like when I got her.

Since I have the work space to partake on such a project I decided not only to clean her up, but to completely strip it down to the frame and repaint. It was a fun project to take the whole thing apart down to the bits and pieces. And while I won’t go into little details about it, I will say that this can be as hard as you want it to be. I wish now that I had thought about some of the things I was about to do, before I had done them. The biggest of those was when I went to remove the headset. In all of my previous bike disassembly past, the bearings have all been in races. Seeing as this is a much older british model, it did not, and I did not anticipate that difference. Needless to say, I lost basically half of the bearings into the dirt floor of my shop. I was a quick learner however, and figured as much from the bottom bracket, and sure enough there where no races there either. This time I was more careful and was able to keep track of all of them.

Notice the electrical tape being used as handlebar tape.

Working on this project in my spare time at night I was able to get the whole thing stripped down and cleaned down to bare metal in about a month and a half. It could have gone faster, but I liked being able to take my time, and I also wanted to be able to do other things at night. Once I had everything cleaned up I made up a little holder for the front fork and hit it with some primer. For my design I wanted a completely different look for the color and chose to go with a flat black. One of the things that I wanted to keep after I had repainted was to to keep the 4 stripes that were on the seat tube. I knew that was part of the original Hercules design, and I wanted to keep it somewhat original in that respect. I decided to paint those stripes back on, and chose to make them a medium to darkish red like the bike originally was. I also had originally wanted to keep the emblem on the front of the bike, but as I was sanding/grinding down the frame it become more of a hassle to work around it and I just took it off.

Black and red, one of my favorite combinations.

After I got the rest of the frame clean I hit it with some primer and then masked off all but the seat tube. I painted that with some Rustoleum paint that gives the appearance of hammered metal. I kinda wanted those stripes to pop a little in contrast to the dark flat black. After that I wanted to give the red a clear coat before putting the black on. Before I did that, just out of habit I guess, I tested the Krylon matte clear that I had on a spare bit of metal that I had painted with the same red. The clear reacted to the red paint in a way that I had completely not planned for at all. It basically worked like a paint stripper and started to peel and bubble up the paint! At this point I was very happy with myself for testing this on a piece of scrap and not going straight to the frame with it. So I went out and picked up a Rustoleum matte clear and ended up getting the results I wanted. After the clear, I gave it 2 or 3 coats of black and then 2 or 3 coats of clear over that. The clear ended up making it a little bit shinier than I had hoped for, but I still like the results. After that I put some of the clear on the fork and it went a little funny. Near the bottom of the fork where the wheel fits in, it turned cloudy. I don’t know why, and now the fork has a black to grey fade in that area. Kinda mad about it, but not mad enough to want to clean it all off again and repaint it. Also the frame had some spots where, in the badly lit area that I was doing the painting, I didn’t get a good job done on the black. Tiny speckles of the primer show through in areas. Again, I don’t like it but its not enough for me to redo the job.

A profile of the whip.

Since I had lost a lot of the bearings from the headset I had to order some online, and while I was doing that I also got some black cloth handlebar tape. I also had to order some new cotter pins for the cranks, as one of the originals was so rusted in that I damaged it getting it out. It took me considerably less time putting the whole thing back together than it did to get it apart. I think that was because I had already gotten to know where everything went and that parts where cleaned up and not rusty afterwards. I left the rear hub as it was, and still do not have a shifter. I also reused the original brakes, except for new pads, and brake line. I didn’t have a good way to properly attach the brake line, so I used some hose clamps. As I didn’t want to mess up my new paint job, I took the old inner tube that I still had laying around and cut some strips from that and wrapped the tube before putting on the clamps. I think it gives the bike character. At some point I would like to rework the rear hub and get it working properly again. I would like to add a shifter just near where the seat attaches to the frame right about where the hose clamp is now. I like the idea of not cluttering up the handlebars. I almost want a coaster brake for that same reason, but like being able to backpedal while I coast too much.

I took it out this past saturday for its inaugural ride, and was pretty pleased. I am not sure on how I like the cloth handlebar tape. It is most likely a result of my not knowing how to do it properly and butchering the job. I also think that I may have been wrong with the way I put the handlebars back on. I like the bull horn style in that it just feels better on my wrists and that they aren’t bent uncomfortably. Originally when I set the bike up to ride last summer I put them this way, but with the handlebars facing higher up than down. This time I wanted to have a racier feel to the bike and so I dropped them lower. I think this was a mistake. I feel very hunched over. (Which I know is how you ride a racing bike. Why would you put them that way if you didn’t want to ride it that way?) I have only rode the once though, and will give it a longer try.

Audra thinks the bike is too big.

A view from Betty's backside.

It was a fun project and I look forward to doing more like it in the future. On a side note, this was as far as I can tell, the longest post I have done on the blog so far. It was nice to be able to put down the whole process and get some thoughts out of my head onto … well, not paper… but you get the idea.

Related posts:

Oops, nothing else quite matches this post.

Dyslexic monkey
Escaped from the zoo one day
Hid in my closet

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Early in the season it is still chilly outside for quite a few of the days. Because of this it makes it hard to get out and go camping, let alone being able to talk the wife into sleeping outside. Some nights are warm enough during the day that it carries over into the evening for a while and make for good campfire nights. I really hope to be able to get some of those in this year. Last year I started and tried to build a small fire pit that would accommodate a grill surface. This started nicely but I ended up losing steam on the project and it hasn’t really made it past being a small hole int he ground outlined with brick. It would be nice to have a place where people could sit around the fire and enjoy the evening and the company. Hopefully this year more will be accomplished.

Another thing this year that I really hope to do more with is biking. Last year I was able to get out with a friend a few times and with the family once. This year I plan on making it a much more steady thing. I have almost completely reworked my old english 3-speed bike (a 1970 Hercules) over the last few weeks. There might be a post about it later on. With this newly fashioned bike the plan is to be able to get out with the whole family and ride some bike trails throughout the nice seasons. We have attempted this to some degree already, but since my bike was obviously not in running order, I was the one doing the running. Needless to say I have declined in my athletic ability since the beginning of college. the little one also seemed to dislike the ride, and as such we may try to do a simple husband wife ride for a while until such a time as when she enjoys riding in the trailer more.

Other projects include attempting to clean out some of the storage areas around the property, and reclaiming them from the varmints that have inhabited them over the last few years. Namely starting with removing all of the grain from the holding bins so that the mice, chipmunks, rats, raccoons, and opossums no longer have an all you can eat buffet. I think that should be a very good start to helping the situation.

It feels good writing down all of these things for all of the world to see. I am hoping that by doing so, I will have some form of accountability to my goals. I hope to write more often on the blog and will attempt to update as I actually accomplish any of my goals for the summer.

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A little while back I decided to purchase some things in order to be able to start doing some of my own, and others freelance type jobs. I chose to order from multiple places including Crutchfield.com (which I highly recommend) and Amazon.com who both where efficient and informative with their shipping process. I ordered all of the items on a Friday.By the very next Monday the first item, a Zoom H4N audio recorder ordered from Amazon, was in my possession. The coming day, Tuesday I received the Canon Vixia HF S20 camcorder from Crutchfield. I also received something else on Tuesday that I ordered the same day, but has no relevance to this post subject.

The tripod that I ordered through the Manfrotto website on the same Friday as all the rest did not even ship until Monday. It did arrive on Wednesday, but I give all of that credit to UPS on getting it to me quickly. I arrived home from work to gleefully open and assemble my new tripod. To my dismay however, when I pulled the tripod out of its packaging, I saw a set of silver tripod legs looking at me. I had ordered a tripod with black legs. I proceeded to email the customer service of the US company that shipped my tripod. I knew they would be closed and did not want to wait on being put through a long ordeal of phone menu mazes.

I figured that I would receive an email the next day resolving my problem by shipping me the correct tripod and I would ship the wrong one back to them. I did not receive an email all day. I then proceeded to call the customer service number. I spoke with a representative and was told that they would ship out the correct tripod and for me to use the prepaid label that would be emailed to me within 24 hours to ship the incorrect one back to them. I did not receive that label for 3 days.

I did receive the correct tripod on Tuesday. But alas! The tripod was missing the 75mm bowl that connects the tripod legs to the head, therefore leaving me with no way to assemble my tripod. Not pleased at all. Again I did not return from work until after the business had closed. I called anyways and after waiting 15 minutes or so on hold, left a message with someone who said they where the the manager and that the case would be given priority status. I assumed to receive a call sometime in the early morning, at the very least an email regarding the issue. I did not receive a thing all day. While driving home, I decided to call again since I had left a little early, and use the normally wasted driving time on possibly accomplishing something. After waiting for 7 minutes or so on hold I spoke with someone who then attempted to transfer me to a different area. It was after being on the phone for 11 minutes that I was either hung up on, or they dropped my call. I know it wasn’t me, I checked and had full service.

I was beyond angry at this point. I called again and waited for a few minutes of being on hold I was answered by someone new. I explained my new situation and asked what they could do to resolve it. They asked a few questions that seemed completely irrelevant to the situation and then placed me on hold again. When I returned from being on hold I was speaking with someone new again. (this was the 4th person I had spoken with that day) This person seemed to be in a higher position as they knew answers to my questions and concerns as well as saying that I could simply remove the 75mm bowl from the first incorrect tripod and place it on the correct one. Then they would mark down that the one being shipped back to them would be partially incomplete and to have it sent to him. (Again he sounded like he had more power than any of the others) So when I made it home I did just that and finally had a completed tripod that was the correct model.

This whole ordeal took an extra 7 days from when the tripod was originally delivered to me. A full week of hassle and stress for something that should have simply been correct the first time around. After going through all that I have decided to retract any want to purchase from Manfrotto in the future as I see it. I will move on to a different brand from now on. Don’t get me wrong, I love the product. I respect the craftsmanship and quality. It is everything else about the company that I do not agree with any longer.

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• Making time.