She was
The One Who Got Away,
but
I just call her The One.
She changed her last name
on our wedding day.

Happy 4th Anniversary, Mrs. Blankenship. You were a beautiful bride, but you’re an even better wife. Thank you for loving me.

There’s something about Atlanta-based photographer John Kelso’s work that feels So Very The South. I love it—the lighting, the settings, random captured moments, all of it…

Clockwise from top: Molly Virginia Ellis, All American Diner, Derby, Kansas, Hatch Show Print

I firmly believe that as a designer if you have an intimate relationship with the manufacturing and the materials that you’re working with your designs will have more meaning and integrity.
—John Cho Moore

Even when the mission seems impossible, it is the strength of our belief that makes success possible. The absence of this belief guarantees failure. A strong belief in the mission fuels our ability to focus, put forth effort, and persist. Believing allows us to see the goal and break the goal down into more manageable objectives.
—Howard Wasdin, A Veteran of SEAL Team Six Describes His Training

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
—Clay Shirky

Watching Roy Slaper sew a pair of jeans is beautiful stuff. There’s a good reason handmade, USA-made jeans like these cost hundreds of dollars….

I have some strong opinions about craft in the sense of craftsmanship and skill. I don’t like the association that the word has now. In the past craft meant the culmination of years of practice and training expressed and visible in the finished piece. It was a noun.

In the present, the term has become synonymous with glue gunning and poor quality DIY. Its a dead term to anyone doing quality, professional work.
—Roy Slaper, this interview

Grain & Gram has a wonderful interview with him as well.

This could be about baseball. Or work.

Slumps are like soft beds. They’re easy to get into and hard to get out of.
—Johnny Bench

Brooklyn-based emcee and DJ MeLo-X knows his instrument well, only in this case his instrument is an Akai MPD32 and he live remixes to great success.

You can check out more of his remixes on Bandcamp. The BLACKsummers’night remix is a favorite, but I mean come on—it’s Maxwell.

The internet never sleeps…

Cameron Koczon wrote a brain-expanding article on some thoughts about Orbital Content he shared at Greenville Grok. “We are on the cusp of a complete overhaul of the way in which we interact with online content, and I think you should be a hell of a lot more excited than you currently are.” Indeed.

Speaking of Grok, Matthew got around to articulating his thoughts on the event.

How are my tax dollars spent? Well, whitehouse.gov launched Your Federal Taxpayer Receipt to help me find out. All partisan politics aside, after spending the weekend in Washington DC, especially a few of the Smithsonian museums, I’m happy to be a tax payer.

The latest Pictory showcase Handmade: A Collaboration between Etsy & Pictory on the Art of Craftsmanship and the accompanying editorial design from Magera Moon is lovely.

Music duo Karmin have made a YouTube name for themselves doing clever covers, but this take on Chris Brown’s Look At Me Now slays. Can a white girl out-busta Busta Rhymes? Apparently so. Such great flow.

A million acres of Texas burned wild and, as with most things happening in the world, Alan Taylor is curating an amazing collection of images. This one is especially ominous.

Frank Chimero continues to write some of my favorite things with Designer’s Poison, “the dispositions and mistakes of [our] field…things that hurt all of us.” I, like Naz, particularly enjoyed the section on villainizing criticism.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled interneting.

Late Thursday night Mrs. Blankenship and I boarded the Amtrak Crescent Line in Clemson, SC toward Union Station in Washington DC. We arrived in our nation’s capitol Friday morning, took a Metro train six stops up the Red Line to Dupont Circle and walked two blocks to the condo we’re rather affordably staying in thanks to Airbnb. A half a block around the corner I had one of the best meals I’ve ever had at Firefly. I ate truffle fries. Our bill came in a mason jar with a tiny light inside. Surprise and delight abounded.

Later that evening we walked a mile west on M Street into bustling Georgetown, down an alleyway to a tiny blue door and into Blues Alley, a jazz and dinner club the size of a living room, going strong since 1965. We saw a wonderful set by a living legend, playing a few sold out shows to celebrate the fact that he’s 90 and still playing a few sold out shows. “I guess I played a little…” Brubeck said, after introducing the rest of his quartet. “They’ve got me on oxygen. I made it through the whole damn set without having to use the damn thing.”

Yesterday we walked 88 blocks of DC proper, including the National Mall and its amazing collection of somber memorials, weighty words etched in stone, and dozens of adult kickball games and kite fliers. I took 180 photos. Leisurely. With my phone. I didn’t even bother bringing a “real” camera with me on this trip.

L to R: the Pan American Health Organization building, Kramerbooks & Afterwards, the Washington Monument from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Blues Alley marquee, DC Metro station

Thanks to the iPhone and great apps like Mill Colour, Picture Show, and FilterStorm (all AppStore links) I can capture, edit, and post-process my photos from one tiny device. Thanks to Instagram I can easily share them from the same device with a great, growing community of friends and not-friends. Why didn’t Flickr build this? Why do I visit Flickr so rarely now? The answers are related.

We’re staying a mile from the White House. We don’t have a rental car. I have a photo lab in my pocket. Make your next vacation whatever you want it to be.

Most bubbles are about seeking security and safety, and mitigating future risk. It’s about promise. PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel thinks that we’re in a bubble, but it’s not internet-related—it’s higher education:

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo.
—Peter Thiel

And the damage from the ensuing student loan debt:

You have to get rid of the future you wanted to pay off all the debt from the fancy school that was supposed to give you that future.
—Ibid.

I’m biased, but I’m inclined to agree.

Leadership isn’t an exception from the behaviors that come from your community’s core beliefs—it is the requirement of their solidification in your life.
—Tony Steward

You know the old adage that the customer’s always right? Well, I kind of think that the opposite is true. The customer is rarely right. And that is why you must seize the control of the circumstance and dominate every last detail: to guarantee that they’re going to have a far better time than they ever would have had if they tried to control it themselves.
—Charlie Trotter, A Leader Left Behind

I’m fairly sure the standards bearers of most of my favorite brands would agree with Charlie.

Do you know what we get to do today, Brooks? We get to play baseball.
—Jimmy Morris, The Rookie

Well, do we wanna build up this whole thing again and go chase business that we don’t want and get into pitches and win or not win business based on the whims of people who are stupider* than we are? Or is there another way?
—Jim Coudal, excerpted from Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Coudal

That question led to this insight:

If you have the skills to do client work, you have the skills to make your own product. You’re selling yourself short by selling that on a work for hire basis.
—Ibid.

I’m currently trying to do both, client work and building a product (and holding down a fulltime job, and writing a book). We’ll see how it goes.

*Caveat: I don’t think my clients are stupider than I am.

No one does what Reggie Watts does better than Reggie Watts. Granted, no one is doing (can do?) what Reggie Watts is doing, but still, always enjoyable.

In case this is your first exposure to Reggie, you might enjoy Out of Control or Lost in the Options (the slow motion part is covered in awesome sauce).

If your personal vision doesn’t align with The Mission you’re on, it will meet resistance from The Powers That Be. They will view your vision as short-sighted and narrow. Because it is. In the context of The Mission, submit or exit. There is no middle ground for missionaries.

If you can’t kick your own nagging vision, go make it a reality. Elsewhere. Everyone will thank you for it. Eventually you will thank you for it, too. Don’t derail one train because you were too lazy to get on the right one.

More to come. Getting close.

Between his rant about modern conveniences and this quote, I think Louis CK has cemented the fact that he is Utterly Capable of Apt Cultural Commentary.

I think you should do your job. I think a lot of people don’t do their job, because they don’t like their job. I don’t get that. You know, if you go to a coffee place, and the kid looks at you like, “Uh.” I didn’t come to your house to ask you for coffee. This is a coffee place. Your clothes match the building, I had a right to expect—and you’re closer to the coffee machine.

I don’t know why someone wouldn’t want their job to go really well. And I think usually it’s because they’re twenty. Because they’re twenty-year-old douchebags. I’m prejudiced against twenty year olds. Because, nineteen you’re still your parents’ fault. Twenty, you’re technically an adult, but you still haven’t done anything.

Twenty year olds at their jobs are always like, “This job sucks.” Yes, that’s why we gave it to you! Because you’re twenty. You haven’t done anything. You’ve just been sucking up resources, you’ve just been taking food and love and education and iPods, and taking it and judging—“I like that,” and “Oh, that sucks.” You’re like a big orange on a tree that’s rotting, and the tree is like, “Get off!” and you’re hanging on, “I don’t want to go.” If you’re twenty, you definitely have never done a thing for anybody.
—Louis CK, on the Late Show With Jay Leno

via Lapham’s Quarterly

Jamiroquai, I have a soft spot for your Brit funky, horn-laden, make-me-dance music. But why do you never play shows in America? I need more of this in my life…

The Live from Abbey Road content on YouTube is stellar. All kinds of great acts.

My friend Matthew Smith organized a small gathering (conference? alt-conference? nonference?) in my proverbial backyard this past weekend. The first Greenville Grok was a blast for a handful of locals and out-of-towners.

So, what’s a grok anyway?

[grok] — verb

1. to intimately and completely share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity
2. the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed

[Origin: 1961, coined by author Robert A. Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land]

The weekend was equal parts 10 or 20-minute presentations/questions/thoughts (here’s a spreadsheet of topics), relaxed conversation, shared ideas, food and drink from local eateries, and good old fashioned camaraderie.

I’m an introvert by nature and I admit to not being much of a “conference guy,” so this format was very appealing to me. No fluff, no filler, no lines for the bathroom—just an onslaught of ideas and feedback with a stellar group of people. Here are a few highlights and orphaned thoughts from my notebook…

On Project Managers:

Project Managers without any subject matter expertise are glorified secretaries.
—Rob Wright

On free [journalism] content:

If it’s free, it’s dead. Either no one’s going to do it or everyone is going to do it and it will suck.
—Yaron Schoen

On side projects:

Getting stuff done isn’t the only thing.
—Matthew Smith

On articulating the mission first:

Unless pixels help you hone it, iterate goals and your message before you begin development.
—Cameron Koczon

There was much more to chew on regarding business, clients, teams, side projects, language, trust, paywalls, journalism, apps, beer (oh, the way these gents love their beer…) and I was only there for one day of the three. I can get down with that kind of return.

Many thanks to Matthew for organizing and everyone else who attended—you filled Grok chock full of amazing content. Let’s do this again sometime soon.

Update: Cameron posted a great write-up and curated a Twitter list of all in attendance.

If you want to be the boss, dress like the boss.
—Anonymous

This has nothing to do with clothes.