FireSpike client Rob-Harris Productions has posted an article about the differences between Architectural Photographers and Real Estate Photographers and why to hire an architectural photographer. They provide a helpful list of differences and excellent reasons why you would choose one over the other.

We certainly found the article interesting and educational, and we think you will as well.

See the article here >>

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Different hosts will provide different things in their homes, and will have different terms for you staying in their home. Can I bring the dog? Is there WiFi? How many days can I stay? How many people can stay with me? Am I getting the entire house for a week or a month, or am I just getting a room to stay in overnight?

And so forth.

Someone being a host to you in their house has similarities to a company being a host to your website.

A website host is just someone–usually a company–who has computers that are designed to store and share websites.

Website hosts give your website a place to stay, and–like someone hosting you in their house–they have different terms, different amenities, different facilities available. Those facilities can be things like including email with your hosting, or automatically installing WordPress for you. Just like how many rooms are you renting, the same idea with hosting might be how much file storage space do you get for your website, and how many megabytes of data going out are you allowed.
I hope this metaphor–of hosting being like renting a physical space–helps you to picture website hosting. Coming next I will use a different metaphor to help you understand website hosting even more!

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The complexity comes in the fact that electronic emails are ethereal and disembodied from any physical medium. With “snail mail” in the physical world, if you want to share a card that you get (with ZERO electronic sharing), you physically show it to someone. You could make a physical copy of the email and hand it out in person or mail it out to a list of friends, paying for the copies and the postage and the additional envelopes to send it in. But duplicating that physical mail item and distributing it takes a lot of effort, material, and cost.
Now, think about email. You receive an email and you notice that someone important on it was not copied. So you click forward, type in an address and send. Boom! One copy of the message has been created and shared. What if it’s a funny email (appropriate humor only!) and you want to share it with your friends? You can quickly forward it to an email LIST and Boom! 10 new copies of the email exist, or 50, or 100! Instantly that email can feasibly be read across the globe!
Now, adding to the ease of just forwarding multiple copies of an email, let’s think about our work flow and the modern “productivity practices” we engage in.
I check my email on my work laptop, but I also check it on my phone. Further, I have a desktop computer at my home office that I frequently use as well, and I check my email on it. While I COULD just look my email up “on the Internet” using a web browser—which is essentially just looking the emails up “on the email server” (think “looking at your physical mail right at the post office!)–I use a software program called “Outlook” for the features it provides in sorting and managing the many emails I receive from FireSpike’s many clients and vendors. I have Outlook installed on my desktop computer AND on my laptop.
If email were delivered JUST like physical mail, then when I opened Outlook on my LAPTOP, all the email would be delivered from the server (from the “post office”) to my laptop. In this scenario, if I later used my desktop computer to then check my email (asking for my mail at the post office), the server (the “postal clerk”) would tell me all the mail had already been picked up and was therefore no longer available. Bummer for my desktop, and now I can’t look at all that mail that I want to read.
But, as I’ve already shown, email can be copied and sent over and over without one losing the “original” copy. And so, an email server can KEEP the stored original and send out copies to all of the devices I want to read my email on. This saves me a bunch of trouble, as I have copies of all my email on any device I happen to be using at the time. PLUS, I can still just peek at the email using a web browser, seeing my email right up on the server where it is all centrally stored and managed.
And that comparison between physical mail delivery and copying emails is the main point of this story, and provides the foundation for me to share and explain two email terms that it is useful to understand: POP3 and IMAP.
You can access your email from an email server using one of two different techniques: POP3 or IMAP.
POP3 generally acts like a physical post office. When you request your email, the POP3 setting tells the server to act like the email is real mail: it delivers the email to you and then removes the copy of the email from the server–just as if it had “physically” delivered you the email. The email then no longer exists on the server. If you want to check your email from a different device, the email that was delivered to the first device is no longer “at the post office” for you to pick it up. You can think of this as “Pop! It’s gone!” The email lives on the device it was first downloaded to, but then is gone from the server, for good.
IMAP works with all the benefits of “electronic” delivery. Emails are COPIED to local devices, and “mapped” between each device they exist on. You can have the same emails on a laptop, a desktop computer, your phone, and still up on the server itself. The “mapping” works in both directions, too. If you delete an email on your laptop, the IMAP setting then also deletes the email on the server, and the server passes on the information to the other devices that you deleted that email, and it gets deleted from those as well. Every device connected via IMAP “maps” out the content of your email box and shares that with all the other devices.
(This makes it sound like IMAP is “better” than POP3, but they’re just two different ways of dealing with email. If you will ONLY ever be looking at your email from an email client software like Outlook using just a single device, then POP3 can be quicker and causes less load on the server, so it does have its advantages in that way.)
IMPORTANT NOTE! The most important thing to remember when using multiple devices to connect with the same email account is to set ALL of them to IMAP – so all of the devices “map out” the emails between each other, and nothing goes “pop”. (I.e., make sure none of the devices is set to use POP3, meaning that device will download all the emails, then delete them from the server – making all the IMAP devices ALSO delete all the emails!
So hopefully this explanation makes the idea of emails and how our email software retrieves them a bit easier to understand–and we can keep things from going “pop!” by using IMAP if we get our email using more than one device!

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American Columbine

I remember sitting on a rock outside my grandparents house and pinching the tops off of this flower to eat them. We called it a honeysuckle and the roundish tips on the top of the flower were sweet like honey.

Wild Blue Phlox

One of the most fragrant flowers, I remember picking them on Mother’s Day with my brother and presenting a bouquet to my mom. We called them Sweet Williams and they grew on the edges of the forest in the dappled shade.

May Apple

These green umbrellas were everywhere under the trees! We didn’t pick many of them but just seeing them made me happy. It was as if a fairy village had sprung up under the trees.

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The Fix
When our house tilted, it was basically because the float (essentially the “foundation” of a floating home) was built exactly to the minimum specifications for the width of a float for a house the height of ours. The rule is that a house can only be 75% as tall as its floatation is wide. Ours was that, pretty much to the INCH.
But then add in another consideration for our house: the house was built with a boat garage, and underneath that part of the house there was no floatation. (That is, the logs that run from front to back under our house as our main source of flotation, those logs did not continue under the boat garage.) So there was a gap under part of the house, and that gap provided neither floatation (to help keep that side of the house UP should the weight of the house push it that way) nor additional weight (to help keep that side of the house DOWN should the weight of the house push it the other way, away from the boat garage).
So we contracted Harbor Services to both widen the deck and to fill in that boat garage. The boat garage would become another room in the house, and the widened deck would have two additional logs underneath it on either side of the house – all connected together structurally by extending the large metal I-Beams that run side to side across the tops of the logs under the house.
It would be quite a project!

And now, as of the end of January, it’s still just almost complete.

The metal I-Beams have been extended and attached to the new logs on either side of the house.

The boat well has been filled in and is now a fairly good sized room (as yet unfinished as far as flooring and paint on the inside).

The structure for the deck has been built.

Most of the new deck boards are in place…

But now, at least temporarily, work has stalled because members of the crew tested positive for COVID… 
But at least there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and the work should be completed soon, once the Harbor Services team can all work together again, finishing up this seemingly endless project!
I was hoping that we could have completed project photos to share this month, but ah well.
More updates to come!

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The last few months I have been busy with surgeries and recovery. Which, by the way, my doctor is happy with the healing progress and I will only need monthly check-ups (with telescopic laryngoscopy) until my scar tissue fully heals.
With a return to normality my house has been getting ready for winter and the holidays. Which includes the annual “placing of the antlers” on the dogs. Jene has accepted the Christmas antlers in past years but this year Miko was chosen! The antlers were on for about 10 seconds.

The last leaves have finally fallen from our oak tree and so in preparation for winter, raking has commenced. Only hindered by 2 fur babies who think rakes are big toys to try and catch.
However, leaf piles were Jene’s new favorite toy and she decided to claim the biggest pile for herself! It was a bed and a wiggle pile! Miko played with loose leaves and looked haughtily upon her younger sister in the leaf pile, knowing she was not dirtying herself with all those leaves.

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Because our house sits on about a dozen logs that have metal I-beams strung across them (thus, “stringers”) this is involving

• grinding the ends of the existing stringers (loud),
• welding new extensions onto the existing stringers (loud),
• adding new stringers across the boat well (loud)
• bolting those extensions into new logs (loud),
• cutting the ends of the logs so they are the same length as the extended deck is going to be (VERY loud),
• and building in a new “foundation” and floor in the boat well (which is becoming part of the house’s interior space). …(also loud)

So on to the news about Oscar and Felix.
For the most part, Felix could care less about all the noise. To him it’s just part of the background. He’s far more interested in watching “cat TV” (i.e., looking out the window at the many birds that live here still in the winter).

Oscar, however, has often traveled down under. Down under the bed, that is. He has been staying there most of the daylight hours, while all the grinding and hammering and sawing are going on.

All of this is MUCH more interesting than the fact that Felix has learned how to guarantee that he has our attention. (He’s in the “slowly push things off the nightstand onto the floor” stage.)
And that they’re going to be traumatized (ok, no they’re not, they’re CATS) by us being gone for the entire month of January. (Brian and I will be spending the entire month of January working remotely from Palm Desert to enjoy some more sunlight and warmth than is currently available in Portland, Oregon.) Don’t feel too sorry for Oscar and Felix, though, because our amazing friend Simone is going to be house- and cat-sitting for us, and the boys absolutely love Simone.
Even Oscar does, though it took him a little while to stop pretending otherwise!
Hopefully for next month’s newsletter I’ll have good photos of our new COMPLETED deck and ex-boat garage.
And, of course, more photos of the boys.

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