Articles by Adam Stone
Other than my personal life and hobbies I am all about the system integration and A/V industry. I started in 1981 as a “TV delivery specialist” for the Good Guys a west coast CE chain. From there I started my own big dish satellite installation company which morphed into a home theater installation company in the early 90’s. I got out of the installation business in 1996 and went to work for an electrical contractor as project manager of their residential division where I was exposed to the complexities of old school/analog job costing, estimating, blueprints and project scheduling. Being a long time PC geek and creator of some database driven estimating tools I knew that there had to be a better way to deal with these complex projects. During the course of my employment there I was exposed to Visio as an easy to use drawing tool. After spending some time with it I realized that I could hook it up to a database and automate many of the disparate processes I needed to do to accomplish my tasks. That let to the formation of my current company D-Tools which is the leader in the marketplace with thousands of companies using our design, engineering and business management tools. My direct contact information is on the About tab.
In Part 1 I described the sales and design process of my new HVAC System. In Part 2 I went over the installation. To recap, my furnace went out late last year. I purchased a …
I was reading this post in CEPro this morning about the AudioVisions software centric business process. Based on what I read, they have spent many years creating custom software that links all of their internal …
Great article in CEPro here.
I bought a Windows Vista Media Center Edition (VMCE) Dell XPS 420 late last year to replace my aging DIY MCE that started life about three years ago. The main difference between these two …
In Part 1: I described the sales and design process of my new HVAC system. In this installment I will attempt to elaborate on the installation process.
If memory serves me right, I signed an agreement on December 18th …
My furnace quit just before the holidays last year. Some of you from the Midwest laugh at our nor cal winters but to us it still seems really cold. In any case, the first guy …
I think one of the biggest problems in many companies is how people will defend a position based on their ignorance. I was aware of this behavior in the past but I never realized how …
Check this video that one of our product managers, Jeff Freeeman, put together on the new EZ Match data import function of SI5.1Â This feature allows our users to very easily just update price/cost information …
I saw this post in CE Pro today. Electronic Systems Consultants: Making Data-Driven Decisions. I like this article for a number of reasons.
Process first. They identified a number of areas where software (not ours BTW) could …
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Getting a DWG file in and out of Visio has always been a problem. The file needed to come in at the right scale so the Visio shapes would match the CAD shapes and then …
Rough wire, unlike other electronic components in a project presents a special challenge for installation and documentation because a rough wire will actually exist and need to be documented in two locations, the start and …
