Re-

lonelysandwich:

lowindustrial:

We spend our lives rereading and rewatching and relistening and relearning. We eat the same things over and over. We end up loving people who remind us of other people. We perform these rituals, this spacetime origami, because the basic fact of our n-dimensional existence is this: Most things can be recalled and some things can be revisited but precious little can be relived.

do new things.  make good things.  experience life, stop trying to box it up.

The Feast Salon

dihard:

Yesterday I attended alldaybuffet’s The Feast Salon and was quite inspired by all aspects of the event.

First – The space: MEET at the Apartment.

Located at 101 Crosby Street, Meet is a highly stylized loft created to provide an intimate space to hold events and business meetings. It is “intuitively outfitted with idea-generating essentials,” and is really just beautiful. What a great concept, and a comfortable, hip place to hang.

The speakers:
Noah Brier discussed LikeMind, a concept he and Piers Fawkes of PFSK created out of the desire to just meet and converse with people. Likemind facilitates the meeting of like minded people over coffee and conversation in the morning. It has grown from its inception in New York in 2006, to a global entity, with meetings in over 65 cities across the world. Perhaps I’ll give the next NY one a go.

Steve Larosiliere spoke about his non-profit organization, Stoked Mentoring .  Stoked is great. It’s a mentoring program that helps at risk youth through the use of action sports including skate, surf, and snow. As a mentor, you join your mentee in learning how to either snowboard, surf, or skate over the course of the year.  They’ve also grown to include programs focusing on graphic design and sports photography. I admire that Steve found a way to combine the hobbies he loves with his passion for helping at risk youth. In his talk, he advocated two things. One - a book called No More Prisons, which I just ordered. And two - a mentor with whom to just kick it twice a month and from whom to learn. I’ve got to get me one of those.

Perry Chen spoke about Kickstarter, a new platform for funding new start-up ventures. To demonstrate the site, he showed us Allison Weiss’ video, soliticing donations in return for “cool stuff” in order to help her make a new EP. It reminded me of Kiva, but more of a pledging system for personal creative art-focused projects. On the site, one can raise money to build an i-Phone app, print a book, start an art project, and even empower women in Rwanda. Looks like it has the potential to be a very powerful platform.

The food: I think the delicious chocolates were from SweetRiot, though I can’t be sure..

The guests: I met quite a few diverse people with varying jobs – photographers, web developers, founders of non-profit organizations. Overall an inspiring and refreshing evening.

this is the 2nd event @ MEET that i haven’t been able to make it to. first was a CreativeMorning and now this. i purchased a ticket but the whole car situation meant i had to get katie her car back after work on monday instead of heading into manhattan. one day i’ll make it.

sharing, not caring.

consider it the minor leagues for things that interest me:

google reader

tumblr

btw, tom’s wedding was pretty awesome.

it's a shame

tratlee:

So i went to the movie theater with my sister tonight to watch the hangover.  Hilarious movie by the way.  What got on my nerves though is the fact that people talk so much in the theater, myself included.  People are talking, cell phones are out, and i can literally feel the lack of connection between the viewer and whatever is on the huge ass screen that STILL can’t command your attention even when it’s completley dark in the room and nonsense is coming out of the speakers.  I feel like it should stress someone out when they are constantly checking their phone 50 times a movie or otherwise.  I love the jokes in comedies like the hangover but there were so many funny parts that it’s all a blur.  There’s no build up, there’s no quality.  I’ve also got a feeling that if whoever made the movie didn’t put 927509 jokes all in a row, everyones attention span would shrivel up and d- OH A TEXT! yesssssss

who let the dogs out…

placeholder.

bermuda was a nice, relaxing vacation. i still need to take some more steps to reconnect with myself a bit more. some of that will be reflected here.

more to come when my personal computer resumes functioning.

no more cheap thrills.

digg is okay.  it’s not a bad site and it has value to some people.

i just never got into it.  that doesn’t mean i won’t in the future; but it also doesn’t mean i’m going to go out of my way either.

in the meantime, i’ve blocked DiggBar on jratlee.com.  why?

quite frankly, a better argument was made.

Al Zacharia, apartment broker extraordinaire

marco:

I wasn’t just paying him for 30 minutes of his time — I was saving weeks of mine.

classic argument.  i’m very much a fan of this.  i have no problem paying for something that gives me exactly what i want and need.  isn’t that why currency exists in the first place?  it’s your fault if you don’t use it to maximize the one thing you can never get more of:  time.

recently - everything, in my head, is coming back to a few key words:  authority, direction, curation, editing and value.

too many people are missing the point that amazing value might come in a package that, quite simply, saves me time.

i'm surprised someone hasn't done this yet.

in addition to your requisite google analytics, i use performancing metrics to gather statistics on people visiting http://jratlee.com & http://ratcliffe-lee.com.

pMetrics sometimes provides data in a much easier-to-digest format. lots of times, you really need to do some digging on GA to find data that is relevant to the casual blogger. beyond that, one of the main reasons i keep pMetrics around is that it allows me to get RSS feeds of every visitor, search term, etc. that people use to hit my site. throughout the day, as i comb through my feeds, i’ll see the random search terms people use, where they came from, stuff the clicked on, etc. bermuda, germany, south america, sweden, etc.

sort of like the ending to jay & silent bob strike back, what if i started traveling to all the places that came to visit my site? i’m not talking about seeking these individuals out, that wouldn’t be necessary (or sane).

more about seeing the places that came to see me.

The Substance of Style, Pt 1

goldenfiddle:

Wes Anderson and his pantheon of heroes (Schulz, Welles, Truffaut)

(make sure to watch the accompanying video)

Notes on Dallas

Tracy gives a pretty good re-cap.  Here are my notes:

• Traveling with nothing but personal effects is really nice.  Not that I knew what it was like, but it felt like I was traveling in a gilded age.  My one bag was checked and all I had to care about was which pocket my cell phone was in.
• For the flight down, I purchased and read the most recent issues of Esquire and The Economist.  Both were decent reads.  Nothing astounding.
• While reading, I caught up on lots of my podcasts.  A Prarie Home Companion, This American Life, The Moth, The New Yorker:  Fiction.
• I was preoccupied with the fact that you could still smoke inside bars.  It’s been ~10 years since smoking disappeared from establishments in the tri-state area.
• Tracy signed up for Twitter at 3am.  In doing so, we almost burnt the left-over pizza.
• Sleeping on her couch, I was sure that my allergies would go haywire.  They didn’t.  The most grief Jersey caused was climbing over me at the ass-crack of dawn wanting food/to play.  I brought meds with me, forgetting that they were in the outside pocket of my toiletries case - causing me to think I forgot them.
• There was no continuity to the architecture in Dallas.  Lots of different styles in every neighborhood.  Acreage was sparse as well.  Beautiful houses in Highland Park really close to each other.
• The St. Patrick’s Day parade was a spectacle.  Open container laws were very lax which meant people carrying around 30 packs at will.  The whole, “have a float-be in the parade” thing was interesting.  Trucks pulling drunk people throwing beads at you while others threw things back at them.  There really wasn’t much the police could do except try and control a riot if one broke out.
• I’m not really a fan of Turkey bacon.
• A “lemon mary” isn’t a drink and doesn’t exist.  Although, a waitress at the Idle Rich insisted it existed and even brought us one.  If anyone out there knows of this supposed ghost-drink:  make yourself known.
• We ran into a dude wearing nothing but a full-body green suit.
• No one remembers how the camera broke, but there are pictures.  We think.
• Number of times I’ve driven home from a bar in Dallas:  1.
• Queso makes life a little better.
• The stockyards are pretty cool but my outfit didn’t really mesh with the hometown crowd.
• We ordered wrong at Joe T. Garcia’s.
• The new Texas Stadium is massive.
• No one is around in Dallas on Mondays.
• Oh, Seth Godin, you slay me.
• For the flight home, I watched John Mayer, listened to a Smart Playlist and read the latest issues of Wired and The Atlantic.  I don’t read The Atlantic much but I’m a big fan now.  A convert, if you will.  These were some great articles.
• I’m not sure how, or why, but all of the open space made me anxious.  In the car ride back from Fort Worth, I couldn’t explain it.  Usually, I’m yearning to leave the proximity of other people but something was nagging me.  Maybe I missed the hustle?
• It was great to see Tracy and get to see the real Dallas.