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I am looking for images/renderings of a particular kind of office 'layout' - where the design involves lots of: wood, greenery, light, 'interesting' spaces, and perhaps even multi-levels.

We are in the early (very!) stages of planning a new working environment. About twenty years ago I visited the offices/warehouse of a mail-order art supply outfit in the Seattle area (kind of a hippy-influenced place), and had the chance to see their offices (normally not seen by customers). It was an astonishingly beautiful design: everything was done in light wood, there were plants everywhere, and desks/work-spaces were on different levels, a few steps up or down, with the arrangement such that there was quiet/privacy for those who needed it, and openness/communication where appropriate. Your jaw dropped when you entered the space, and as I was taken through it - up, down, around this way and that - to reach the desk of the person I needed to talk to, my single over-riding feeling was "I want to work in a place like this!"

In trying to get a handle on just how they did it, I wrote to them recently asking if it was perhaps possible to see some snapshots, but they did not reply. Googling for generic images of similarly interesting office spaces has not turned up much at all. My immediate problem is to find a way to communicate this 'vision' to the other people working with me here, who know only standard Japanese office design, and who are looking at me like I have been smoking something ...

Can you help me find images of this kind of place?

As a Christmas present, my awesome mom paid for me to get glorious purple highlights done at an excellent salon in my hometown. How do I take care of them and keep them vivid for as long as possible?

This is the first time I've ever had my hair dyed, so I really have no idea what I'm doing. Do I just buy the shampoo and conditioner that say "for color treated hair" on them? I assume I should try not to wash too often (my hair is long enough that I usually only wash it every other day in any case.) Should I wear a hat to protect it from UV radiation? Use special conditioners to keep the bleached/dyed hair from frizzing and tangling? Re-dye it at home every now and again (and if so, with what, and how?)

Worth noting: my natural hair color is very dark brown, so it had to be pretty severely bleached in order for the color to take. Stylists have always told me my hair is very healthy, so presumably the 2/3 of my hair that is non-bleached and non-colored is still fine.

I want to set up a mailing list of sorts, but with text messages instead of emails. What's a system like this called, and how do I do it?

I'm organizing an event and want to send occasional text messages to a (potentially large, maybe in the hundreds) group of volunteers and supporters. Of course, I don't want to send messages to this many folks manually, and I want them to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe at will, without my assistance.

If this were email-based, you'd type your email address into a form or send a message that says "subscribe myemail@address.com" to a robot and you'd start getting emails . To unsubscribe, you'd send a message that says "unsubscribe myemail@address.com" to the robot and you'd stop getting messages. Easy peasy.

Can this sort of thing be done with text messages? What's it called (i.e. what keywords do I search to learn more)? Can it be done inexpensively? How hard is it to set up? Have you done something similar - what were your experiences?

Thanks!

My friend is about to get get some very serious news regarding her health which carries with it a very, very poor prognosis and I am looking for advice on how to help her when she gets this news.

This friend, while in the hospital, was recently diagnosed with a particularly bad type of cancer. Other than the initial visit with the oncologist who gave her the diagnosis in the hospital she has yet to go in for another consult (due to the holidays and the oncologist being out of office). However I work with her primary care doctor and, with my friend's permission, I have spoken to her about the results of the tests they ran in the hospital. Things look very grim. Her primary care doctor told her this news as well but I don't think my friend understands, at least not that she is expressing to me when we have discussed it, what a poor prognosis this type of cancer carries.

Important to note here is that my friend is not looking to me for medical advice, although I do work in a context which makes me more knowledgable about medical issues than the average person. She has not asked me to explain these diagnostic tests and their results to her, although she asked me to accompany her to her oncologist appointment next week because she wants someone there who knows what questions to ask and speaks the language, so to speak.

I am nearly certain she is going to hear from her oncologist, at best, that her cancer is at an advanced stage or, at worse, that it is terminal. I fear it is the latter and not the former. I would be lying if I said that I wasn't experiencing some anxiety over being there with her when she receives this news as I have never before been in a situation like this. Other than going with her, helping her to navigate the medical-ease and holding her hand what can I do for her during this time? I'm just so very sad for her and want to do what I can to be of some comfort to her.

I am looking for a playlist with songs that are best of 2011. I'm thinking along the lines of this Metafilter post but with all the songs in one playlist. Does such a thing exist somewhere?

So far, I can only find one on Spotify. I'd love any other options you could provide.

Thanks and Happy New Year!

I lucked into a half of a side of some beautiful pasture raised, grass fed, organic beef from a local farmer for cheap! The good news is that we ended up getting this killer beef for less than $2 a pound and that it all fits in our chest freezer. The bad news is ... well... I've realized we don't really actually eat all that much beef. What are some interesting things to do with ground beef and potroast?

In my defense, I asked probably a half dozen times how much beef we were looking at (although more out of concern for my freezer space). They told me the hanging weight, but could never really tell me how much of that was bones and guts. The consensus was that a quarter would easily fit in my small chest freezer, so that's what I got. After processing, however, it turns out there was about 30% more beef than even they had anticipated. We are talking about a boatload of beef here. And yes, also I am a child whose mental picture of beef consisted of piles of steaks. Whoops.

When I do buy meat it's generally pork or lamb, and it's usually only once a week. I make an occasional bolognese or meatballs, but don't really know what to do with the (60 pounds!) of ground beef in my freezer. I grew up in the midwest and have had enough hot dish to last the rest of my life. What else is there outside of burgers, taco meat, meatballs, chili, meat sauce?

I also have 5 or 6 of these things called a "7-bone roast". They weigh about 6 pounds apiece. We made a pot roast with one and it was great... but that's a whoooole lotta roast we're staring down over the next several months. What else can I do with it?

And as an aside - how long will this stuff last in my chest freezer?

Additional details: Cooking for 2 adults, one picky 10 year old and a baby; portions are pretty small. I'd consider myself an adventurous scratch cook. I don't love Thai flavors, peppers, or super spicy stuff. We love Japanese and Indian food, but... yeah. I got a half of a lamb last spring and it was fantastic: gyros, pastichio, lamb burgers... I was super sad when the ground lamb was all gone. Help me feel the same way about this beef!

Can anyone recommend a place where I can scan 35mm slides on my own at a workstation in NYC?

I have some 35mm slides that it's very important to me to scan myself. Can anyone recommend a place in New York City that would allow me to come in and use their Nikon Coolscan 9000 (or 5000) and do the job? Buying a scanner just to do this doesn't make financial sense, but there must be a place that will allow me to come in and do it, no?

Film and literature that depict empathy (or lack of) between adults?

Just saw The High Cost of Living which depicts both empathy and lack of empathy towards a character. I was struck by how the dunderheaded non-empathizer was caught up in his own view & concerns just like I do. I'm hoping that watching empathizers will help me get better at it. The gender roles might be important for me: the target was female & the ones I was watching for cues were men. I'm a cis-gendered straight man. I'm willing to try anything though.

Previously about this between children or adults v. children.

Rabbit Hole is another film recommended in reviews of The High Cost of Living.

US-ian Tax questions: After a long hunt, this year I finally found a job (yay) several time-zones away from my husband and family (boo). The travel, additional housing, etc costs have consumed a lot of my income. Are any of those additional expenses potential write-offs for my taxes?

I tend to be pretty conservative about write-offs so I'd rather steer clear of any write-offs if they are questionable. I'm a W-2 employee, we're not home owners, employer doesn't cover any travel/commuting/relocation expenses. However, I've never been in this position before so I thought it would be worth asking. We have filed separately in the past but are open to filing jointly if that would save us time or money.

Obvious caveat applies, you are not my accountant. Thanks!

How can I translate thousands of files written in an old Macintosh word processing program called WriteNow, into a format that is easily accessible, probably Microsoft Word or RTF? It's a problem. I'm a writer and I used WriteNow exclusively for about 15 years. Now it is unsupported and an orphan. A translator program I used to use, MacLink Plus, no longer works on the current Lion operation system for Macintosh. Here's a link that describes WriteNow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow

my 2008 kawasaki ninja 250R isn't running right. hoping someone might have an idea as to what's going on with it.

i left around an hour ago to run an errand and decided to take my bike as it's in the mid 60's today which is a bit uncharacteristic here in virginia. i rode a couple of miles and made a brief stop, and realized after getting back on the road that i needed to get gas. i ended up stopping at a gas station i haven't been to before (having ridden maybe 3-4 miles in all at this point). i picked up nozzle for diesel gas, somehow not realizing that there were 2 seperate nozzles. of course since i was pressing the regular unleaded button, it wasn't pumping anything. after picking up the correct nozzle and pressing the regular unleaded button again, it pumped as expected and i filled my bike up. while my bike had ridden fine to that point, it felt very sluggish when i attempted to accelerate after pulling out of the gas station lot. i think i had used very little choke to that point but i engaged it fully at that point and the bike seemed to accelerate okay to about 30-40 mph at which point it just ceased to accelerate and was clearly revving really high, which seemed to suggest to me that it was adequately warmed up. when i disengaged the choke though, the acceleration was again exceedingly sluggish, if existent at all.

the only thing that seemed to have any impact was fully engaging the choke, but again, the bike seemed to be revving much too high as it would if it was already warmed up. if i turned the choke off or it was engaged anything less than completely, the acceleration got very sluggish again.

the real kicker came when i realized that fully engaging the choke and then accelerating, the bike would get up to around 30-35 mph and then seemed to stop accelerating, and when i released or rolled off the thottle at that point, the speedometer would maintain at that speed as if the throttle was still rolled on. everything really just felt wrong about it so i ended up turning back. i haven't ever experienced a stuck throttle prior to this so i'm not sure if the throttle itself should be sticking or if it's just the motor, but again, the throttle felt as though it rolled off fine, but the engine definitely maintained. this only seemed to happen with the choke fully engaged.

the other caveat is that i just returned from a week-long vacation, so the bike had been sitting in the cold on basically a nearly empty tank for the last week. i'm not sure if that's a factor however, as the bike felt perfect prior to filling the tank. is it possible that some residual drops from the diesel nozzle mixed with an entire tank of regular unleaded could have this effect? i definitely didn't pump any diesel fuel into the tank, but the problems started immediately after i refueled, and i'm just really thrown by the fact that the bike was maintaining its speed even after i let off the thottle, and i'm not sure if it was just maintaining or if it was actually technically accelerating, since the bike wouldn't seem to go more than 30-40 mph in the first place.

sorry for the long post; just trying to be as thorough as possible. many, many thanks for any insights.

How to keep daily family friction from escalating into end of the world drama daily?

I live in a house with a lot of people (all one immediate family) most notably for this issue case of friction, 3 older teens/young adults. I moved back home for my final year of college and neither of the others are off at college yet. There plenty of attitude flying around, people trying to decide what to do with their lives, parents trying to give sound advice, etc. Normal life with a family with young adults.

We get along pretty well most of the time, and honestly are all friends. My parents are cool and do lots of stuff to make our lives fun and stuff like that. But as I learned living with some awesome roomates in college, who were my best friends. No matter how much you like or love someone, they're going to get on your nerves sometimes when you are together day in and day out. And that's what I want to learn how to deal with better. Specifically in the dynamics of my family.

I'd love a better way for dealing with how friction, tension, fighting and arguing escalate. Especially when one of us is fighting with my mom, things get really emotional, and kind of a big deal. I understand things are a big deal to people's feelings. But sometimes it's stuff that isn't full of a lot of meaning.

For example, sometimes I'm just in a bad mood that day and am acting bitchy, I know I'm being a jerk, and my mom should be upset. But it gets turned into such a big picture thing. Like if I'm crabby about what she wants me to do, her response will be something like: I'm so sorry I'm a terrible mother and force you to do things you hate and never give you any freedom. I'm sorry you weren't born to a nicer mother. You know, stuff like that. Then me or one of my siblings, whoever is fighting will escalate it in much the same why. Why do you always fill in the blank. I never said that. All about the extremes, and long term language.

I'd love to know if there's a way to tone stuff down, so that when she's mad about how I'm acting today, or I'm mad at her about how she's acting today - it can stay in today. And not turn into some hurt feelings acting like the issue is spanning our past and future. What can I do in the way I deal with these conflicts to tone things down and keep it in perspective? I'd also love to know if there's anything I can do to influence the way my siblings and parents argue with each other too. I know that's probably going out of my range of influence. But hey maybe if I put some calming incense scents around the house...IDK, I'm open to your ideas.

Hopefully you get the gist of the issue I'm having from that explanation. When I was more naive, when I'd be frustrated with this kind of thing I'd think, I just need to stop doing the things that upset people that I didn't want to have fights with. Now I've grown up a little. That's a joke. I am a human being, I can be a jerk sometimes, as can everyone else. Not intentionally, but it's just a fact. I'm not so naive to think I'm going to perfect myself and make everyone happy by being nice all the time. Now I know that, as I said before, living with anyone is going to mean having some tension and disagreements with them, I just want to keep small disagreements small.

So I'd love ideas or tips, great if they are from experience, on how to keep issues small that are small.

A few extra details that might help:

I've come to realize, that instead of giving a punishment - whether grounding, losing privileges, etc. that rarely happens - things are all emotional with my mom. As far as, what I call "being in trouble" means she is crying or her feelings are hurt or shouting back and forth about something I've done. And usually the same issues keep coming up in a certain season, like back when I was learning to drive it would often be stuff about that- for example.

Like I mentioned there are three of us who are the most in an argument or whatever with the parents. Between the three of us, frequency of someone being in a fight goes up to, maybe every two days or every other day.

A lot of times at least two of us get tangled into being in trouble together. Sometimes someone will set things off but the other person ends up lumped in. Like if my parents had asked my sister to get his room cleaned for the last 3 months and he hasn't, and my mom gets mad at him, she may also be mad at the other two for not taking care of our stuff either.

Last extra detail is I feel like me and my siblings act like control freaks most of the time, it;s like we have to be sure things are completely smoothed out before we're satisfied so we drag arguments out instead of just letting someone be mad at us and moving on.
I guess that is about it. Lately I have just been caring a lot less, realizing things will blow over soon. I try not to escalate things from my side as much. Say I'm sorry, explain sometimes then go off and be alone and watch a movie or something, instead of feeling real mad or guilty or anything. But sometimes I'm swept up with wanting to be right, or explain how I'm misunderstood, etc.

That works pretty good for me when I can let things drop, but I feel real bad when things hurt my moms feelings so much. I think maybe sometimes she's not as upset as I think, that I take it to heart that she's real mad or hurt, but maybe it passes soon for her too.... But I feel bad to totally ignore her feelings etc. and go on my merry way. She's my friend, and I'd love to make things better for her in our relationship and in our home in general. Anyone who watches Gilmore Girls, I feel like our disagreements are a lot like blow ups that Lorelei and Rory have.

Dumb cheap downloadable Mac fun

I'm in the mood to waste some time on an entertaining game for my mac. Must be downloadable. Fairly simple to pick up, as I'm not really in the mood to be challenged today. No adventure/RPG/FPS, please. Willing to pay $5-6, but can be convinced to shell out a little more for something really fun. Anything?

"It hadn't been raining all morning, but drops began to fall at lunchtime."- is the bolded clause grammatically correct? Is there ever a case where it could be properly used in a sentence? If the person wants to say that there hadn't been any rain that morning, wouldn't he say "It hadn't rained all morning, but drops began to fall at lunchtime"? On the other hand, if the person is trying to say that it had rained that morning, but not non-stop the entire morning, how would he say it? He still wouldn't say "It hadn't been raining all morning,..." would he? Or would it be correct in that case?

I've committed to barbecuing an 11-pound bone-in prime rib tonight. Should I cut it up into individual steaks or grill it as one giant roast? My grill is a hybrid gas and charcoal, if it matters. Any advice is helpful; I've never done anything this big. The diners' preference is for medium well and dinner will be in about seven hours.

Invitations for a (co-ed) baby shower.

I'm helping plan a baby shower for my wife. She has been very clear that she wants the shower to be co-ed, but having not been to very many co-ed baby showers ourselves we feel a little unsure of the proper protocol. Do we send an invitation to my single father? His unmarried brothers? My male cousins? As a couple we're as feminist as can be but this still seems a bit odd to us, and we know it will seem very odd to them.

More generally, what is the etiquette for inviting people to a baby shower who are very unlikely to attend? Some of these people live rather far away, and we'd be very surprised if they made the trip just for a shower -- but we'd like to invite them anyway just to let them know they're in our thoughts without leaving the impression that we're trolling for gifts.

Between the co-ed and the probably-won't-attends the list of possible invitations seems to be growing uncomfortably wedding-sized, which seems like it's much too much. How do we make decisions about who to include and who to exclude?

How have other people navigated this sort of thing? My wife's friends will be mailing the actual invitations, if that makes a difference in terms of how you think an invitation will be perceived. Thank you!

I've been working with a group of 2 other senior engineers for several years. We each have about ten years experience doing web development, mainly doing high volume e-commerce sites. Our work is client services based, companies come to our company to build sites out. We'd like to do this for ourselves. Our question is very basic, what our options for bidding work or getting clients? Do recruiters ever have projects they give out to bid? Bonus: the other two engineers are female, so we'd qualify for any contracts that give weight to women owned businesses.

We're very good at what we do, work well as a team and have investors in place. Several of us have experience with startups, but no one wants to get into straight product development. We want to do client service work, ideally we'd like to land a project, and then six month later do another project. We've hit the pavement and are networking like crazy, we're locally recognized as good developers. We're invited to conferences and give talks at local meetups, and while we have a few prospects through this, these relationships seem to take a long time to build.

So we have a few questions we're came up with and are throwing out there:

- Perhaps I'm remembering the halcyon dot-com days, but do tech recruiters ever bid out projects? If so, how do we find these types of recruiters?
- Most, if not all, of the software development bid sites seem packed with low-quality projects and people underbidding each other. We're not interested in this sort of work.

I would like to emphasize we aren't kids out of college looking to be the next Facebook. The analogy we like using is that we're a bunch of lawyers at a large law firm and want to open up our own practice. Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we're not allowed to take our clients with us.

Any other thoughts would be great. Our goal, again, is simply to work for ourselves. We're not married to the idea of doing straight development and would definitely do consulting and training, but we have no clue how to go about that. If you'd like to keep the conversation private, here's a throwaway address we're using: developerdeveloper25@yahoo.com

Dumb kitchen move question: how do you wash capsaicin out from inside your nose?

I was making pozole and must have absent-mindedly scratched under my lip or blown my nose before washing my hands. Yes it was dumb. I've read other askmes about capsaicin and mucous membranes, but am not about to put milk inside my neti pot; what else can I do?....

Help.

MeFi cooks, please help me ace my New Year's Eve dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes.

I'm making dinner tonight. There's 9 of us, my husband and me, plus several members of his family. We're at a an apartment at the beach, so I'm not cooking in my regular kitchen and I'm a little nervous. Also, on a whim I decided to make roast beef, which I've never made before. I'm a good cook, but roasted meats are not in my area of expertise.

I quickly Googled for a recipe so I knew what to get at the grocery store and came up with this, so I bought a 6.5 pound hunk of rump roast. It sort of looks like the one in this picture. Do I need to string it up? I got some string from the grocery store butcher. Also, I don't have a meat thermometer here, and I'll be cooking on an electric oven while I'm used to a gas one, so I'd like some advice on how much time this could take to get to a nice medium inside.

For flavor, I decided I'm going to make a ginger/garlic wet rub and let it sit for a while before putting it in the oven.

Please help make this a great first for me. I'll be checking back in case there's needs for follow-ups.

Also, I want to make mashed potatoes with a combination of regular and sweet potatoes, do they have different cooking times, or can I just boil them together?

I need to automate the format of outline-based information into slide presentations, given some simple rules. I can code. I have some ideas. What options am I missing?

I have been asked to help streamline the process of creating a certain text-heavy deliverable. The client creates a text outline and enters it into a set of very specifically formatted PowerPoint slides in a currently-labor-intensive process. The client would like to have the slides generated automatically from the outline, subject to some relatively simple rules about when to split content onto a 2nd slide, what info to include in the heading of that 2nd slide, etc. PowerPoint is not an absolute requirement, PDF slide output using a fairly specific template is. A few ideas I'm considering:

• LaTeX + Beamer, with a preprocessor to convert an outline into proper TeX markup. Pro: simple-ish, no temptation to manually edit the output. Con: difficult to edit later if you have to, assuming your end user is PowerPoint fluent and doesn't want to bother with TeX.


• PowerPoint + Apache POI + a preprocessor. Pro: I already know the API; output would still be editable. Con: POI's functions for creating presentations are a bit buggy; capability to edit the output = temptation to edit the output.

Anything I'm missing? I'd rather avoid VBScript if I can, and I'm not a .net guy, so I'm worried about writing an Office plugin even though it's certainly one potential route. I know I'm kind of handwaving the format of the outline -- as long as it's usable and I can get data out of it, there's no specific requirement there.