A Toyota factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, has a fairly relentless culture of improvement: “Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing. This is what it means to come to work.”
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Monthly Archives: October 2007
≡Why It’s Hard to Get Ready for Work
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
I’m a pretty good morning person, but I save at least 3 hours of staring into the closet by choosing a shirt the night before.
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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
A few days ago I watched La Jetée (on Google Video). It’s almost entirely composed of still photographs, just a half-hour science fiction montage with narration. Not bad.
≡Projects.txt
Sunday, October 28, 2007
It’s amazing what a 9k text file will do for your peace of mind. I finally got around to making a list of Projects like I’ve been meaning to. While I’m nearly religious about keeping a task list, I’ve never bothered to capture those multi-step projects in one place. What bothers me is why I […]
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Friday, October 26, 2007
I’ve been pining for this book since March. At long last, the Amazon Fairy turned a pretty crappy day into… well… Friday!
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Fancy Coffins to Make Yourself, a woodworking guide by Dale Power. People who bought that book also bought Animatronics: Guide to Holiday Displays.
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
“Theatre directors don’t review plays. And film stars don’t review the new releases. So why are so many novelists allowed to pass judgement on the literary efforts of their friends?”
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Most of the online designeurotic t-shirt selling craze gives me nausea, but I like this one.
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
The Superest is a never-ending game of one-upmanship illustration. “Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.”
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Lately I’ve been thinking about David Brooks’ essay from six years ago, The Organization Kid. “When I asked a group of them if they ever felt like workaholics, their faces lit up and they all started talking at once.” Definitely worth a re-read.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
“Minimalism in interior design has become a caricature. Everywhere you find shops or hotels with an ambience that makes you feel like you are in a refrigerator.” Ha! [via jb]
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Monday, October 22, 2007
A short NPR story on the names on paper bags by Barbara Klein: “One of the names, ‘Alan Rumbo,’ intrigues her. She traces the bag back to its maker, and actually gets to talk to the line worker at the paper bag plant, Rumbo himself, who explains how the name on the millions of bags […]
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Monday, October 22, 2007
I like Twain in small doses. On The Awful German Language:
An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech–not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on […]
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Sunday, October 21, 2007
Now here’s some graffitti I can appreciate: roadside storm drains made into little cartoons. Highlights include a mouse eating cheese, an illustration of a smoking guy, and a tv and vcr. If I’m reading the Portugeuse right, it’s the work of Leonardo Delafuente and Anderson Augusto.
≡He’s Just Not That Into You (review: 4/5)
Sunday, October 21, 2007
I’m fairly open to reading ‘girly’ books every now and then (see my reviews of Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge, How to Walk in High Heels, and The Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend). A friend of mine got me to read He’s Just Not That Into You: The No Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys. It’s […]
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Thursday, October 18, 2007
Rands tested some pens to try to find that perfect feel. I love how he parried the crucial topic of paper choice: “I’m going to avoid this entire debate and just use a Moleskine simply because if you’re going to have an argument about pens with anyone, chances are there’s a Moleskine nearby.”
≡The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse (review: 1.5/5)
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse is a book by Jonathan Selwood. Maybe I have a basic malfunction, but a lot of books that aim for humor are just kind of exhausting.
There’s some interesting goofy personalities in the book, but they just sort of drift between skits. Ehhhh… I don’t like whining about books all that […]
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Thursday, October 18, 2007
National Novel Writing Month starts in less than two weeks. Thirty days to churn out 50,000 words. Last year I said, “Maybe next year.” I’m not sure what I’m saying this year…
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Thursday, October 18, 2007
“With pre-production topping out at somewhere over 500 years, BibliOdyssey might well be the slowest book ever published.” Looks like a winner.
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Thursday, October 18, 2007
David Lee King used the new Twitter Tracking thingy to track what people are saying about libraries. That’s a pretty cool feature.
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Thursday, October 18, 2007
Hipster olympics, complete with ironic t-shirt competition. “—and they’ve gone back to the mirror!” [via moby]
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Thursday, October 18, 2007
So if the worst came to pass, Atlanta could be without water 4 months from now.
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Andrew Blum has a great article on urbanism, environment, and change: Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change:
We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density. When it […]
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Photographer Michael David Murphy had a video interview with Alec Soth a little while before Soth’s lecture for Atlanta Celebrates Photography.
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007
A very cool article on how the National Parks Service is making more realistic maps. [via anil dash]
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Photos of people and their breakfast. Some of them are just perfect. [via kottke]
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007
An interview with Alex Ross:
I thought I had no choice but to write about the 20th century; it’s such an extraordinary body of work that is relatively little known, especially in terms of your average educated person who can tell a Picasso from a Jackson Pollack and has read widely in contemporary literature and knows […]
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Seattle is an open and friendly place, but it’s apparently hard to form genuine relationships. The so-called Seattle Freeze is “the flip side of Seattle Nice… The dichotomy most fundamental to our collective civic character is this: Polite but distant.”
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Albert Jay Nock, Anarchist’s Progress:
The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it […]
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Monday, October 15, 2007
A couple artists are selling paintings of things they want. The price of the painting is the same as the item itself. The Wii painting cost $270.92.
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Monday, October 15, 2007
A timeline of things that have gone or will go extinct from 1950-2050. [via kottke]
≡The Best American Comics 2006 (review: 4/5)
Sunday, October 14, 2007
A little slow getting to this one, but it was worth the wait. The Best American Comics 2006. There’s a lot to cover in the collection, so I’ll just highlight the authors and stories I enjoyed the most.
Joel Priddy, “The Amazing Life of Onion Jack”: a short bio of an aging superhero who […]
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Sunday, October 14, 2007
I really like this painting of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird by Viktor Vasnetsov. It’s the carpet that really got my attention. You can see that it’s floating and rippling in the air currents, but it still looks thick and heavy like a rug should. It looks like something you’d actually use on your floor. […]
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Sunday, October 14, 2007
Buckminster Fuller invented the Dymaxion map, which folds and unfolds the Earth in all kinds of ways, so you can arrange the map without any hemispherical hegemony. Here’s a larger image of the Dymaxion map. It’s kind of mind-bending. This version with Antartica and its ocean at the center is particularly cool.
≡The Elements of Style (review: 3/5)
Saturday, October 13, 2007
I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. The Elements of Style is a handy little guide, sure. Brief, pithy. I suppose I’ve just heard it mentioned so many times that I was expecting a bit more. Honestly the best part of this particular edition of Elements was the illustrations by Maira Kalman. (Kalman […]
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