Frank Chimero is changing his focus from image-making to writing for his book:

A hammer has two ends: one to drive the nail, another to remove it. One can not use both ends at the same time. I believe the relationship between images and text is much like this, especially for those of us who make both. Writing and image-making intermingle and sometimes negate one another in the name of progress. For those that I know that seriously pursue both, the relationship between the word-work and the image-work is tidal. I will always make images, but for now I need to use the other end of my hammer, because there is a thorn that needs to be pried out of my side and a story that needs to be told that doesn’t leave much room for images.

Ben Brooks on breaking the monotony in life:

I am prone to falling prey to habits, just the same as everyone else. When I catch myself stuck in a habit — stuck in a routine — I pull myself back into the interesting world of spontaneous. I buy a shirt or a pair of pants that don’t blend with the rest of my clothes — that don’t fit the preconceived image of me that I store locked away in my brain. Most importantly, to me and to my life, I change up the routes I drive.

NYTimes: The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

And what about the money:

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Engadget: The Daily generated 800,000 downloads, $10 million loss in first quarter of operation
I love the dichotomy between how much money the iPad has made for Apple and how much The Daily has lost.
To borrow a phrase from former Senator Ted Stevens, the iPad is not a dump truck. You’re not going to make money with mobile apps and and digital magazines if you just dump your content onto it. Even including videos and pictures doesn’t cut it.
It’s a new medium and it requires new thinking.

Never tell me the odds.

&#8212Han Solo, Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back
via magalomania

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw on the the future of gaming consoles and the false promise from 3D:

3D is not the future. It’s not “immersive.” At best it makes everything look like a six-inch paper cut-out, and in order to create that effect it has to reduce the quality of the image. After years and years of the entertainment industry working towards making bigger and crisper images, suddenly they’re trying to make us forget about all that because, holy shit, a thing looks like it’s in front of another thing because of an exploitable quirk in binocular vision. Well, they can’t do it. You either need glasses or you need to keep your head still at all times, and no new technology has ever lasted that’s less convenient to use than what it’s supposed to replace.

I finally have my my copy of Feltron’s 2010 Annual Report.
Instead of a standard report of his own activities during 2010 (like he did in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 & 2009), he decided to traverse his father’s timeline from 1929-2010.
Incredible work once again.

Ben Brooks reacts to Justin William’s reasoning on why Apple’s going to keep it’s lead in tablets for a while:

Justin Williams has a nice take on why Apple won’t be losing its lead in tablets anytime soon. The bottom line is that too many companies are shipping incomplete products with the promise of updates that will fix all the problems to come later — except that those updates are shipping.

It reminds me of photographers that snap a picture, look at it and realize it isn’t very good — then go on to state: “Umm, I’ll fix it in Photoshop later.” Except that “fixing” a photo in Photoshop takes just about as much talent as creating a great photograph to begin with would — often it takes even more talent in my book.

Technology Review: Will the Next Zuckerberg Be a Designer, not a Hacker?

A designer-founder can bring user-focused insight to everything from interfaces and Human Experience to information architecture to branding. We think that the world would be a better place were more designer-founders building products that rapidly grow to large scale.

What is this ‘design’ thing I hear everyone speaking of?