Friday 10 June 2011

Blogging It Up

Another day of unplugging and it is going great! Yet again I am amazed at how much you can get done when you're not taking those five minute quick flips through Facebook. I am currently reading "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and it took me two weeks to get through half of it, and then yesterday I read the second half in two sittings. I'm sure I'll write a blog about my thoughts on it later, but the point is I'm actually taking on the monstrous stack of books that I have piled in the corner of my room!

The other great thing about not having Internet every other day is that on the days when I DO have it, I am much more productive. I know that my time is limited and therefore I (like to think) am a better steward of my time. In my perusing today I found two more blogs that I will be adding to my daily scan and I thought they were interesting enough to post about.

The first is Austin Kleon's at www.austinkleon.com/blog. You may have heard of him before, but he is the guy who does the Newspaper Blackout poems. It's a pretty simple concept--take a newspaper, black out words, form a poem--but it's the simplicity and creativity that I love. It combines the task of creating art out of someone else's work and the act of solving a puzzle or code. It takes a small thing, something that we all have access to throughout the day (a newspaper) and makes it into a canvas. Perhaps I like it because it reminds me of my days as a young churchgoer. The only way I could concentrate through a whole sermon was if I spent the entire time circling each individual "e" or "a" in the church bulletin. Sometimes I would get creative and use different shapes to highlight the individual letters, and, if the sermon was long enough, write codes using the different shapes. I swear some of my most creative moments happened in the margins of church bulletins.

Either way, you should check out the site, because it's cool, and he posts things like this:


and this:

(Most of them are more poetic or longer than these, they were just some that I liked. Credit goes to Celeste for showing me this site.)

The second blog that I found today is Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS at www.startsomethingthatmatters.com. Legit guy. Anyone who starts a business based on giving and manages to grow it into an incredibly trendy product is awesome in my books. I remember when they started selling TOMS in Tehillah back in 2007 and they were only $40. Man do I regret not buying them then. Also, I would just like to make a formal complaint that there is not a single shop in Calgary that sells size 14 TOMS (I know, I know, buy them online, I just don't think it's fair that's all).

Moving on. I am particularly interested in TOMS lately because they're growing their business to be about more than just shoes; it's evolving into an entire One for One company which now includes eyewear. For every pair of sunglasses you buy, they supply someone in a impoverished country with the right glasses or surgery they need to see. Everything you'd want to know about that can be found here. It's good stuff. I'm hoping he posts on his blog a lot because he's a guy I could definitely see as becoming one of my entrepreneurial heros. Plus, he ends every post with "Carpe Diem". Who doesn't love a good Dead Poet's Society reference? Amiright?

Here's a clip from his blog:

2 comments:

kerry said...

Dead Poet's Society? "Carpe Diem" is totally a Carolyn Arends reference.

Yeah for getting your stack o' books!

Ben said...

I don't understand people's love for Dead Poet's Society. The problem in my mind is that by the end of the movie, the kids learned to love their English teacher, not literature. The great works of art referenced were just used as gimmicks.

The first blog obviously needs a comparison with Tree of Codes. You read that right? How was it?