Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

Lake Lydia is a wonderful little slice of East Texas heaven, right outside a town called Quitman. I’d apologize for being missing in action this weekend, but I’m not sorry.

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, I’m guessing you’re vaguely aware of my affinity for bags. It hasn’t gotten any better with time, only more focused.

In chronological order, as best I can remember it, I have owned/used the following bags since I started doing “computer stuff” and carrying a laptop: random black Northface backpack, Kelty Essential 950, Kelty Essential 750, another random black Northface backpack, non-desrcript black Target messenger bag, a Crumpler Barney Rustle Blanket, a 70’s Samsonite briefcase, a Tom Bihn SuperEgo, a gray Field Portage messenger bag, an orange Timbuk2 messenger bag, and (as of this moment) a black Manhattan Portage Laptop Backpack.

Obviously, I am on a quest.

To be honest, I love the the Field Portage messenger bag for the daily commute kind of stuff. But every time I travel and have to spend long periods of time carrying a bag, any kind of one-strap messenger-style bag digs a canyon of pain in my shoulder, makes it near impossible to remove items gracefully while sitting on an airplane, and apparently can’t hold a laptop, a book and an SLR camera without sticking 2′ off my back. The Timbuk2 is even worse at making me feel like a turtle, and for the life of me I don’t understand why they can’t make a bag that will sit up straight when you put it on the floor.

I made the decision to switch to a backpack, and did months of research before finally landing on the Manhattan Portage Laptop Backpack. Work was nice enough to procure it for me. I love the simplicity (three pockets, no gadgets, no ridiculous crevices and extraneous material, a literal old-school aesthetic, etc.) What I don’t like is them telling me it “Holds up to a 15” laptop” when it actually “barely has enough room to violently wedge a 15″ laptop into it and zip the bag up tightly around both corners.” It’s the perfect laptop backpack, an inch too short. Manhattan Portage has a great return policy that I’ll be taking advantage of I took advantage of, which is in their favor, but this bag was made for 13″ laptops.

And so back to the Field Portage bag I go, ever in search of bag perfection on this side of heaven. (Though I do have my eye on the InCase Nylon Backpack…)

How can I help you?

Quote, “The map is not the territory is a remark by Alfred Korzybski, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself, e.g., the pain from a stone falling on your foot is not the stone; one’s opinion of a politician, favorable or unfavorable, is not that person; a metaphorical representation of a concept is not the concept itself; and so on. A specific abstraction or reaction does not capture all facets of its source.” — Wikipedia

Personality begins where comparison ends.
— Karl Lagerfeld

My powers of deductive reasoning tell me Karl is probably talking about fashion, but the same thing goes for your brand. Or your design work. Or your writing. Or your music. Etc.

Within a few days of starting to use Daytum to collect and display personal data I realize it’s already a part of my daily routine. It’s not a big deal; add a bookmark to my daily folder, make sure to keep a decently accurate mental picture of what I’ve done during my day, login and capture the data. It might take all of 5 minutes a day.

But one more thing? How in the world do I have time for one more thing, right? Easy, I made it. (Easy for you to say, Blankenship. You have a fairly flexible job. You don’t have kids. You work fast. Etc.) 100 years ago we didn’t have time for television. 30 years ago we didn’t have time for the internet. Did we suddenly get more hours in the day? No, we made time. We moved our schedule around to fit in something we wanted.

Next time you “don’t have time,” it’s ok to admit you just don’t want to make time because that thing obviously isn’t important enough to you to change your schedule. And if it’s not that important, you shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place.

• Juno-esque Checkout Girl: Woah. Somebody’s a healthy eater.
• Me: We try.
• Juno-esque Checkout Girl: No, seriously. Are from around here?
• Me: I’m SO from around here.
• Bagger Dude: [entering scene] Woah. That’s a lot of fruit and veggie.
• Me: [sigh]

1. Cartesian Coordinate Systems
2. Leather-making
3. Screenprinting
4. Statistics related to Data Graphics
5. How commercial/residential loans work

Within a few minutes of getting my invite to Daytum, I had set up a few graphs and statements. After a few hours, I got obsessive and had a date-specific pie-chart of all the addresses I’ve lived at based on how many months I spent at each one.

I’m a sucker for solid information graphics. And I obviously love the web. Designer Nicolas Felton (client work at Megafone) has put out his personal annual report for the past three years and I distinctly recall thinking it was a great idea, it just needed a web framework to capture all that data easily and then graphically represent it.

This collaboration with Ryan Case does that, with gusto. Quote, “Daytum is a home for collecting and communicating your daily data. Begin tracking anything you can count and display the results immediately.” Daytum is still in private beta, but you can go and request an invite. In the meantime, you can find me at daytum.com/blankenship where much info graphic fun will continue to occur.

Today’s on-foot journey included obscene amounts of sweating and water consumption (potentially related), a stop by Sermet’s Corner for grub, buying Mrs. Blankenship a huge straw hat, seeing the glorious old Garden Theater on King St. has been converted into an Urban Outfitters, and a relaxed stroll down Church street towards The Battery, where we found that all three floors of 18 Church St. can be yours for a reasonable $3.4mil.

I love this city.

Given an unlimited supply of money, what would you buy?

1. Mrs. Blankenship’s birthday
2. Tickets and backstage passes for Willie Nelson and B.B. King
3. Almost two weeks of ensuing time away from the office
4. Having my first magazine article published
5. Eating the first bell pepper from our garden

After I master the unicycle, I intend to move on to Timbersports.

I rolled across the following quote via Opus:

In the scriptures, I’m commanded to love a lot of things: my God, my neighbor, my wife, my enemy…I’m never commanded to love my country. In fact, if “loving my country” means that I demonstrate preference to someone based on their ethnicity, their nationality or, for instance, their loyalty to America’s foreign policies, I think I’ve pretty much undermined a very important aspect of Jesus’ mission on this earth — to make his temple a “house of prayer for all nations” and ours, to “make disciples of all nations.” And when I’m willing to value American lives over, say, Iranian lives or when I’m willing to promote America’s economic interests over the interests of the world’s poor simply because I’m American I may actually demonstrate my infidelity to the only Kingdom worthy of my allegiance. — John McCollum, To Love One’s Country

McCollum makes a number of great points in that article, and asks some tough questions (Quote, “Is patriotism a good thing? A bad thing? Both? Neither?”). These are questions I feel like are rarely, if ever, in the public discourse within the context of American Christians, where patriotism is such a hot button topic in the current Presidential campaign.

How unfortunate. If we’re to “…love the Lord your God with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul and with all [our] mind…” I wish more Americans who profess Christianity would actually start using their minds and wrestling with some of these types of questions out loud.

My lovely and wise wife just posted what we’ve been referring to as her “Green Manifesto”, but what is more aptly actually titled Why Christians Should Care About Being Green. Quote, “How can we serve others by feeding and clothing them when we’ve done everything possible to destroy our means of making food and clothing?” She’s a smart one.

I made the decision to come back to NewSpring Church sometime in early November of last year. I actually started work as a paid employee in January. One of my contingencies of returning was that we would begin a very necessary rebranding, and then the main focus would shift to an accompanying ground-up re-strategizing and building of a new website. I think the arbitrarily-assigned estimate I threw out was “seven or eight months,” thinking we could get a good foundation of corporate identity and a new site up in that timeframe, and then start the “real work” of making the new site work for the myriad of messages, ministries and needs we have.

Has it really been almost six months since I started working here?

After a three-month-ish process of presenting more logos than I care to remember, we settled on a new logotype and color scheme. Then came the grunt work of choosing complimentary typeface families (within the constraints of a Church budget), refining icon sets, mapping out and laying out a wayfinding signage system flexible enough to handle multiple locations (the majority of which will be portable locations in the future) but cohesive enough to create an environment that feels branded, designing administrative collateral and dozens of other branding applications, sitemapping and wireframing a site that presented one church in multiple locations.

This week, we’ll put the big bow on a 40+ page Brand Standards Guide and a 10+ page Communications Guide. We’ll send letterhead, envelopes, cards and other printed materials to the press. And in the midst of that, I’ll continue playing massive catch-up with my developer friends working on the mark-up and video player for the www.NewSpring.cc (sneak peek) relaunch. I owe them many Photoshop files.

We’re going to look a lot different in the next few months. I think I’m past the design-second-guessing and back into task-mode, ready for this season to reach its close and make way for the next chapter in how NewSpring Church communicates, looks, feels and interacts with people. I love what I get to do. I hope it all works.

It’s just past the time I’m normally waking up and I’ve been somewhat coherent for at least fours hours now. Mrs. Blankenship and I are currently sitting in the C Concourse of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport awaiting our delayed connection flight to Louisville, KY. She’s reading the National Geographic issue about China and I’m wondering if it would be weird to eat Qdoba before 9:00am.

We’re on our way to the New Attitude conference for a few days to soak up some teaching from a few pastors/teachers (John Piper, Mark Dever, C.J. Mahaney and others) and meet a few dotcomrades in person for the first time.

I’m also excited to see the Louisville Slugger Museum, The Speed Art Museum, Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft (do you see a theme?), and all the tasty typographical treats Matthew Wahl has cooked up for the conference, eat some good local food, meet lots of new people, and generally enjoy some vacation with my wife in a city neither of us have visited before.

I also hear that the Kentucky Reggae Festival is this weekend. I bet that would be a riot.