^depends who you talk to Ricky.

Ricky, tad is the right word here. I guess you've not spent much time with them.

Tell that to SLCE's interior design consultants. They picked the wrong stone in a big project, stone deteriorated in months, then the owner sued SLCE for the cost of replacing all the stone to the tune of a couple million dollars. SLCE turned the claim against the interior designer and then everyone spent a year+ in court.

Public records are the best.

Hardness and durability aren't the same thing. You should probably hire someone to do your stone specification.

Ricky, the largest percentage of liability claims in my area are against non-licensed consultants with interiors designers eating a large chunk. Too many clients cheap out and hire them since they don't need to pay the higher fees of architects (damn that pesky insurance/licensing cost) and then hit a wall when they realize their int-des drawings can't get them permits. These clients then have no choice but to find any architect willing to absorb the int-des work under their scope and too many do so without making too many changes. I've seen it happen many times and our office charges 100% fees to re-do this work as our own, effectively removing the original designers from scope.

Ricky, it was Null, not I, who made the stone comment but for the record, when I specify stone, I make sure to pick the right one for whatever application I need. Had to go through a big exercise with granite a few months back regarding freeze-thaw cycles when installed 9 storeys high.

Rick all of this bs about what you "like" to do needs to stop. On exactly how many of your own professional projects (not academic workshops, etc.) has basalt tile been installed?

^most clients that can afford an architect want real stone.

The answer to my question should not have needed hundreds of words.  I asked for a number. I'm reading the hundreds of words to mean your answer is zero.

You need to stop trying to give professionals advice about things you've never done.  Having a saw with which you could theoretically cut basalt tile if somebody hired you who wanted basalt tile and wanted you to cut it is not at all the same thing as having experience with a project on which it was actually used.

BALKINS MFER THIS THREAD IS NOT ABOUT STONE. IT'S ABOUT LIABILITY. SHUT THE F UP.

for sean connery's sake... some much email from this one comment.

.

RICHARD W. BALKINS, DISCUSSING AN ANECDOTE INSTEAD OF THE SUBJECT MATTER IS A MAJOR REASON WHY PEOPLE FIND YOU SO UNLIKEABLE HERE. PEOPLE DON'T COME HERE TO GET LECTURED ON THINGS THAT AREN'T ON-TOPIC BY PEOPLE (YOU) WHO COULDN'T EVEN FINISH ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL. JUST THINK ABOUT THIS WAY THE NEXT TIME YOU POST: "WOULD THIS MAKE A GOOD LECTURE BY DICK BALKINS?" IF THE ANSWER IS YES, DELETE THE POST AND START AGAIN.

^terrible point Ricky. So one particular dude strikes it big in the history books while countless others fail... and somehow that's justification for you to ignore formal education, professional training, licensure path, etc, etc.

FLW had many actual built projects - he was a doer, not a writer about things he had not done. My issue with you Rick isn't your academic credentials, it's that you constantly try to frame your writing as if it's coming from your experience with your business and your projects and your clients. But your business exists almost entirely as paperwork. You have had very few clients and very few projects.  You have absolutely zero portfolio. You yourself have admitted that you have so little work that your income has been below the poverty threshold in almost all of the years that your business has existed. Every time I bring this up you go into all sorts of excuses and explanations about why that's been the case - which only goes to further establish that it is the case. You do not write well or informatively or usefully, because you're trying to write about things you haven't done.

Balkins: Mental fucking illness. If everyone here is telling you to get help, go get it bro. You're a narcissist with delusions of grandeur. There is no shame in getting help. There is shame in burdening others with your baggage who would otherwise choose not to be burdened.

More excuses. Classic Balkins.

Mental. Illness. I don't understand how admins allow this. He's probably going to hurt himself someday and then, when his trail leads to archinect, it will be the end of this site.

As a reminder, this is the guy who once said he'd beat me up if he saw me IRL. #thenortheastremembers

You know damn well that's not what I meant. Your businesses "exist" mostly only in the sense that you've filed incorporation documents with your state. That's the paperwork to which I was referring.

And there you go with the excuses again. It's not that I'm blaming you for not doing well during the recession. It's that you've repeatedly admitted to the fact that you've had virtually no work and no clients in all these years.  You have virtually no experience. You do this thing all the time where you say "well I have been a building designer for 10+ years" or "technically I'm an employer because I have a tax ID number", and you think those things give you credibility to write about employing people or designing buildings. 
Filing paperwork to allow you to operate a business isn't the same thing as having actual experience based on real-life projects. Having a tax ID isn't the same as having experience with hiring and employing people.

You're a building designer only in your imagination. That's fine, but you should also stick to doing all your posting on forums in your imagination.

Ricky, I’m just as nice here as I am “irl”.

Rick this is EXACTLY what I said you'd do. Every time anybody points out that you have very little experience so shouldn't be giving advice, you write a novel about the reasons why you have very little experience. All you're doing is confirming the original statement. A decade ago when you were plaguing the ARE forum with this nonsense, I thought it was a little more forgivable: you were young and only slightly dumber than the average young, dumb new grad on that forum. At this point it's not cute anymore: you lose more credibility with each year.

Who is telling you to do that? I don't care if you go work for a firm or not. What I'm saying is: you don't have enough experience to be posting advice on this forum. You yourself keep admitting and further substantiating that you have virtually no experience. The reasons why you've got not experience are your business and I don't care whether or not you get any. I just want to make sure that anybody reading your nonsense understands that you have no experience. So thank you for backing that up so well once again.

No, you haven't had any more comprehensive building design work that has actually been built.

I just had a roof CCN that's likely twice the value of all Ricky's last 10 years of project values combined.

I know for a fact that you do not have any built projects more "comprehensive" than a deck. 

And your comment re "calling for" a beam made of platinum is exactly the problem: you can't distinguish between real life and fantasy.  You're a "building designer" only in your mind.  There are no resultant buildings.

I don't need to.  You have no projects.  You've proven that yourself.

You're not trolling RIcky, you're living a sad and failed fantasy.

You yourself have said you didn't do either of those things. Losing track of your own stories Richard?

Rick do you understand the difference between things you've really done, from which you have gained real experience, and things you could have theoretically done but didn't actually do? You seem to be spending a lot of time and energy coming up with unlikely scenarios to wiggle out of apparent discrepancies and conflicts that people have noticed in your various tales. Sometimes it seems like you're actually believing these unlikely possibilities. For example: yes it's arguably possible that you designed a house for $1 and that the house was actually built and that you gained experience on the $1 house that was equivalent to experience that an architect might gain while working on a first house project (even though taking on a project for $1 seems to go against all your ranting at other people about not being bottom feeders and not selling out). But if that's just an arguable possibility that you're making up, and the reality is you didn't really do it, do you understand that you didn't really do it? Because it seems like you kind of fall into your own tall tales and start to believe that you really did design the $1 house and that it gave you experience. Do you understand the difference between things that really happened and things that were possible-but-didn't-actually-happen?

"I could be acting..."

Again I don't think you're really admitting the truth to yourself. In the end it makes no difference what any of us know or suspect. It's you who have to live with you in your mind. Can you really look at yourself, at what you have done in your life - not any of the things you "could have" done but what you've truly actually done - and can you really see in yourself an experienced, competent professional? Or even an adult?

Rick Balkins, remember what happened the last time you posted one of your projects here? You know, the ONLY one you seem to have ever "done", and which was on a "volunteer" basis (aka "pity party project")? Didn't someone call the building officials in Astoria over it? It was a fucking fire-trap.

#thenortheastremembers

I don’t get it Rick. What are you trying to say by posting that?

Page 41 “Thermal and Moister Protection” always important to protect your moister by keeping it warm (or
cold depending on climate zone).

I think he means he's going to prove his competence to himself by passing that test - though I don't think he's been approved to take that test yet. He'd discussed here previously that approval is supposed to require proof that he's been employed in designing buildings at least half-time for three years - and as usual he's working on schemes to get around that minimum threshold requirement because he doesn't meet it.

Balkins is listed in that guide as a "subject matter expert"

If it was done the way the ARE and the LEED exams are, a "subject matter expert" is just somebody who participates in the focus groups to verify that questions in a content area make sense, and weed out the ones that don't. It doesn't necessarily require much, if any, actual expertise. But it should disqualify him from testing until it's far enough out that they replace the question bank(s) that he was exposed to. On most tests that would be a few years.

You've preempted his next excuse

What more is there to thermal and moister protection Rick?

Is "moister" really a common term there? I've never seen this used before.

.

Dayum! I'm missing all the fun, or not.

Ricky, I just assumed it was some sort of Oregon slang. I’m starting to think that part of the US is a kin to my Newfoundland. Just a bunch of crazies with impossible to understand English.

It doesn't look like there was any proofreading at all. I skimmed the pdf and every single page I looked at had more than one typo (example "What You Nee To Know")...  AIBD might want to look outside of the "building designer" community for editors with stronger grasps of English.

lol ... i figured if I could find one like "moister" in about 5 seconds there were bound to be many many more.

That reminds of one my licensing exams where we had to red-line construction details and I listed spelling mistakes as part of the "find X errors" task. My colleagues did not find any. Bonus points for me!

That isn't something that should be relegated to volunteers. They should involve a professional editor and an attorney.

The myriad typos have nothing to do with technical terms. They're simple carelessness. Any good editor will clarify technical terms, look up book titles, etc. The more you write about AIBD and NCBDC the more haphazard and unprofessional they're revealed to be. They should probably make some sort of deal with you to look the other way on their eligibility requirements so that you can take this meaningless test, in exchange for your silence about them forever more!

If they were smart they would have done that a long time ago Threesleeve. But as you can see from the reluctance to hire an editor, and listing Rick as a SME, I'm not so sure they are that smart. Isn't this also the organization that only required you to hold up a picture ID to your webcam in order to verify your ID in order to take the test? What thread was that in...?

Found it! Only on the third page. Gosh, what ever happened to the OP on that thread? It's a shame archinect had to ban him. Notice how we've come full circle though?

Rick the problem with dividing this up and letting volunteers write and proofread it is that at least some of the volunteers are likely to be people like you (if not you yourself) who simply do not have the skills to do that competently. Your heart is in it but there's a mountain of evidence that you can't do it well. No matter how many people tell you over and over that you don't know the difference between "maybe" and "may be", "then" and "than", singular and plural, "accommodation" and "commendation", you simply do not absorb and learn language. You're permanently stuck at a 6th grade level. It's like having illiterate volunteers write the materials for a literacy program. They may be the people who are most enthusiastic about doing it, and they may be the people most invested in the outcome, yet that doesn't mean they're at all qualified to take on the project.

The typos are really a minor problem here compared to the insanity of AIBD allowing test content to be designed and written by "subject matter experts" who have not been tested on the exam content.  That invalidates the entire test.

EA, there is some serious gold in that link... oh man. What about this nugget of awesomeness: 

Question: If Richard Balkins was a sandwich, what type would he be? 

 a. A precisely cut (no crust) ham and cheese on white bread, carefully warped, and immediately discarded since its maker lacked the necessary online testing for licensed sandwich makers.  

b. An uncooked hamburger, preferably from a greasy-spoon diner that still allows patrons to smoke inside. No pickles. 

 c. Vegetarian roast-beef 

 d. Peanut butter and jelly served to an allergic kid via drone 

 APR 27, 16 5:20 PM · REPLY

I understand that you personally did not write or see test questions. My point is that the volunteers, collectively, include people like you who do not have the technical competence nor the fluency in English to do that work. Your response is further proof of your low reading comprehension. AIBD should be ashamed of itself.

"When writing a report, you make errors and all in the first draft to get the thoughts down. Then you go back through it and make corrections, additions, removal of sections, etc. Afterwards, you proofread again. It is a process that takes longer than what anyone would spend writing a post on a forum." 

Except that's obviously not what AIBD did with their report/handbook. As a SME, why didn't you recommend that course of action? I mean they've already done three revisions on it and still can't get the spelling or grammar correct!

I would like to take a minute and thank you all for the 59 email notifications I've received as a result of my int-des comment. 

 Pop quiz, what's the best colour to paint a flaming dumpster?

10% typos is still 10% too many typos.

Rick, if you have gold paint that needs to be melted down and recast into a gold bar, why wouldn't you just pour the paint into the mold and skip the dumpster?

Fact check: the two paragraphs Rick wrote above indicating that he uses words at a 6th grade reading level actually check out to be about an 8th grade reading level.

source: http://www.readabilityformulas...

I agree with Ricky. All public refuse containers should be painted with precious metals and adorned with jewels.

"I would like to take a minute and thank you all for the 59 email notifications I've received as a result of my int-des comment."

What the fuck? Did that actually happen ?

Congrats! I checked a number of my blog posts and I'm apparently writing at mostly a college reading level. Some of them are 10th, 11th, and 12th grades levels with some as low as 8th depending on the post. Not sure what that says about me. I suppose it's fine if the intended audience is at the same level, but there is probably an argument that I should dumb it down.

Yes Bench, it did.

Still can't get the image of Rick Balkins in PB&J form being shoved in a kid's face by a drone commandeered by Balkins. All the while, the kid's face is getting more swollen and Balkins is screaming about what the drone manual told him to do.

Also "The art of autodidacticism is the art of the edificiation of a person's cognizance of their chosen fields of calling without attending a formal institution of education." MENTAL. ILLNESS.

Null, you can always propose your own sandwich option.

Michael Avenatti's career has hit a slump, so he might be available.

^ I hear he's very good!

Planning firms get sued, too.

Everyone gets sued in america. Planning firms get sued way less.

He's a legal expert, you didn't know?