Yet another video I can't stop watching...

Part of the reason I got into gardening was simply to have less lawn to mow: the more gardens I had, the less grass there was to deal with. (And I enjoy taking care of flowers and shrubs much more than grass.)

I came across this site -- lesslawn.com -- that has many ideas and tips for having less lawn. This is just a public "note to self" when I have time to explore it more...

Remember several years back when we ("we" being the United States) got word that the Taliban and/or other radical Islamic groups had outlawed kite flying? And how ridiculous we thought that was? Turns out that the kite flying methods they have in that part of the world isn't the "let's get this thing as high up in the air as we can" kind of fun that I remember as a kid:

Pakistan: 11 dead, 100 injured in kite flying festival

At least 11 people died and more than 100 people were injured at an annual spring festival in eastern Pakistan celebrated with the flying of thousands of colourful kites...

The festival is regularly marred by casualties caused by sharp kite strings or celebratory gunshots fired into the air. Kite flyers often use strings made of wire or coated with ground glass to try to cross and cut a rival's string or damage the other kite, often after betting on the outcome.

I'm trying to get in gear to take more photos and get to the point where I feel like I'm actually a good photographer and not just a competent one. (Of course, that time will probably never come, so I should just try to get to the point where I can shoot photos that I'm satisfied with.)

I need to just shoot more often, but part of my problem is my "fear" of taking photos: I often feel that if a shot isn't going to be great, I shouldn't bother taking it at all. (Not too long ago I could make an argument that I didn't want to waste film...of course I can't use that excuse any more.)

Photographer Paul Butzi has an article on his site, Ability, Accomplishment, and Art that was useful to me, and hopefully will inspire me to just shoot, regardless of whether the shot will be a "keeper." He mentions a book ("Art and Fear") that he paraphrases:

99% of the art you make will fall short of what you hoped for, and the purpose, the function of that 99% is to enable you to make the 1% that soars and actually exceeds your hopes and expectations.

The article also contains a good anecdote about pottery class students, and ends with: "we need to let go of the quest for quality, and focus on making the art that's genuinely ours, and trust that the quality will take care of itself."

Related: Note to self, look into the Greater Brockton Camera Club sometime.

Fortune has a good article about the Apple Stores: Apple: America's best retailer

Some interesting bits:

Saks...generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666... But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone's lunch.

It shouldn't surprise me that Apple built a prototype of a store before actually opening them. That seems like something all retailers would do.

"One of the best pieces of advice...was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn't work," says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product.

And just like Apple pays attention to the details in their software and products, they do the same in their stores:

"We've gotten it down so there's only three materials we're using [in the interiors]: glass, stainless steel, and wood," says Johnson. "We spent a year and a half perfecting that steel. Stainless steel can be cold if you don't get the finish right. See the bounce? See the blues up there?" No, frankly, but Apple hunted down a Japanese supplier and pushed it to achieve the effect by blasting the metal with small beads.

An adventure in relative time-keeping
A man outfitted his family minivan with high-precision cesium clocks to demonstrate to his kids that they gained 22 nanoseconds of vacation time on their mountain camping trip than they would have at a lower altitude. (via kottke)

I can see his kids now, rolling their eyes at their nerdy dad. Oh wait, those are my eyes that are rolling...

A new site I built is now live: Hollister Thomas Photography. The original designer sort of disappeared so I took his initial rough design, finished the details, and built the site. It was a lot of fun to do, especially adding the Lightbox 2.0 slideshow and the page load/fade-in code (which I needed to do because of the way the content is centered on the page). And Hollister's photos are great, too!