My family ability to garden was not passed to me. I got plenty of passion between watching my father expertly set up the automatic watering systems and following my grandfather down the rows of vegetables he nurtured across the street from his house. These memories excite me for the potential of growing my own food each spring. Unfortunately, I have a rather mighty obstacle: I lack the skill to bring vegetables into the world. I plan using Gliffy’s floor plan software, but rare is a vegetable to grow.
Honestly, I am lucky to produce one zucchini.
Never fear, a solution is near. This summer I decide to embrace my passion and forgo the growing: I joined our local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farm, Gullywash Gardens. If the concept of a CSA is new to you, here is a simple process flow explanation:
As you can see, the process has plenty of choices along the way. Using Gliffy not only helped our family to make a decision, but it helped to explain the process to our friends.
The end result is that I am enjoying locally, lovingly grown food, I’m not buying food shipped from across the country (or world!) and I can relax as my lackluster garden doesn’t produce because I’m enjoying plenty of food my expert farmers are growing. In the near future Gliffy will have BPMN symbols to assist in the documenting and analysis process. Lucky for me, using Gliffy’s Flow Chart software, the swimlane decision shape showed this was the right choice.

It feels good to put the experiences of Barbara Kingsolverand Michael Pollan into action, the folks at Gullwash Gardens are fantastic and it tastes great!

My girlfriend and I recently decided to move in together, sharing my 2-bedroom condo in Washington, DC. The master bedroom is currently my “man-cave” (which houses the equipment to support my expensive pro audio hobby). Its generous walk-in closet is a pack-rat’s dream, holding, among other things, four boxes of G.I. Joe toys, five of Star Wars, my Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and an Amiga 500. Plus, the box to everything I’ve owned in the last 10 years. When my girlfriend actually saw this closet (which is off limits to just about everyone), she suggested the radical notion of using it to store our clothes. This meant swapping the bedroom and man-cave.

First thing I did was to create my man-cave in Gliffy. The floorplan symbols made this a snap (Although Gliffy doesn’t have inches just yet, multiplying feet by 50 gave me plenty of room to work). The before picture is a pretty accurate view of this crowded room. While most of the furniture in there would be going, some would be staying, like my workdesk (where I’ve been hard at work on Gliffy’s developer API). We also needed to fit in my girlfriend’s armchair and ottoman. We were definitely having a hard time visualizing where things would go and even if they would all fit.

I did a quick redesign of the room and used Gliffy’s collaboration feature to send it to my girlfriend. We share calendars with Google Calendar, and have planned our vacations with Google Docs, so she instantly knew what to do when she got the email from Gliffy. She made a few adjustments and we decided on a layout that should fit everything nicely.

The “new” man-cave was a bit trickier; the room is smaller and oddly shaped, and it still needed to accommodate a couch and chair (I’ll often have two or three local band members in there during mixing sessions, and folding chairs just don’t cut it) Fortunately, everything seems to fit (and I might have a bona-fide vocal booth; much to the delight of my upstairs neighbor).

I’m pretty confident we’ve just reduced the move-in stress by quite a bit, and hopefully staved off our first domestic argument (odds are now on my cat eating her plants).

With rising gas prices and Earth Day a few weeks ago, a recent CNN Money article, caught our eye. We created a Gliffy flow chart to really bring the point home.

Join the movement Green Slow Moving Vehicle Movement or read how driving slower affects the the San Francisco Bay Area commute.

I’m getting hitched in May, and the planning activities are reaching a new high. Part of the challenge is being able to communicate to your vendors what the wedding site will look like, how things will be laid out, etc. For instance, our band would like to know where they need to set up during different parts of the wedding. Our photographer and videographer would like to know where certain things will be located, like the bride and grooms rooms. They also would like to get a sense for what the site will look like, indoors and out.

Well, Gliffy to the rescue! Using Gliffy as floor plan software, I was able to quickly draw and share the diagram below with my vendors to answer their questions. Click the thumbnail below to see the diagram.