OrangeCoat

It's been a good damn long time since a new website made me excited. There are a lot of well executed sites, but not many that are different and creative and serve the brand in a real way. The new Converge SE made me excited and achieved everything it needed to do and then some. Congrats and good job to everyone who worked on the site.

Some previews from our Dribbble account for the What If Greenville Quarterly Report

So, if we let robots drive, what's the likelihood they don't become self-aware and drive all humans to a secret prison run by robots where we are forced to build even bigger cars that the robot-cars drive? I think we all know the answer to this. Come on Wired, self-aware robots must be stopped.

There's not much to not like about Allan Benton from the food he makes to his business philosophy to how he tells a story. Spend 10 minutes and watch another great Joe York movie.

Cory Doctorow's speech on the coming war on general computation is an hour long and worth your time. Open systems and open technology goes beyond SOPA and PIPA and I hope this fight over SOPA and PIPA opens up the greater dialogue on these matter. Doctorow does a great job of explain this all.

This is insane to me. Famous interneter Meg Hourihan is attempting to go a year without buying something new. Her only problem, less than a month in she already bought new stuff. And it was for backcountry skiing of all things!

As she explains it,

On one hand I’m kind of bummed I’ve “failed” already. On the other it’s hard to give up the ability to do something I love simply because I didn’t already own the stuff to do it.

That's the entire point of the experiment! If you're not sacrificing something you love because you don't have the stuff then you might as well just call the experiment the, "I already own everything I could ever need experiment."

Our hometown is pretty good at getting good press. People like our downtown, the weather and the people. It's always fun to see a mention in the national press, but this most recent run of press is probably the most interesting and useful yet. Adam Davidson of Planet Money fame spent a lot of time in Greenville and has used our town as the microscope to study the modern American manufacturer. His output can be found in the most recent Planet Money podcast, several reports on Morning Edition, and the cover story of the Atlantic Magazine. Big deal publications all.

What's most enjoyable about these stories is they aren't love stories to the downtown or the bridge or the other things most people write about. These reports are asking the important question of what does the modern manufacturing plant and worker look like and what's the future. Greeenville is doing some good and interesting things on this front, (BMW is expanding for example) but everything isn't rosey and bright and understanding what a job looks like in 2012 is important. I hope everyone from grandstanding politicians to clueless high school students read or listen to at least some of these reports. Jobs are available for the highly trained and hard working. The communities that either grow or recruit these workers are going to be the communities that win the modern manufacturing wars.

In case you're wondering, here's a map from 1884 with nicknames for pigs by state. Found on Boing Boing.

The single remaining reason to purchase a disposable camera.

A short documentary on a barbershop in Drexel, NC that doubles as a hang out for local bluegrass players. The film was directed by Matt Morris and found on Boing Boing.