unique la

this saturday, my mom and i went to unique la, a neat show at the california mart downtown with a bunch of crafty local designers. we saw stacey winters, who makes (and photographs, cause she's a photographer!) the following stuff:

and her bluebird print is the cover art for a new book!

and kelly robinson, who is a friend of a friend, and had this neat booth setup:

she also has a cupcake and event planning business, where she does amazing stuff like this:

so much talent! we bought a few things for each other's stockings, and i could have spent thousands pretty easily. we had a lot of fun, and maybe next year i'll have a booth of my own!

marlo noël in a new shop!

marlo noël jewelry has landed here right down the street in encinitas, just in time for the holidays. it's a fabulous little shop called dreamy run by the nicest networker ever, heather o'quinn. if you're local, go over and check it out! or go to their website, cause it's so lovely.

ps: clearly not my jewelry above, but isn't that picture beautiful? it's actually jewelry from chris bolton, a customer of mine at paper source who sells to celebrities like gwyneth paltrow. how neat!


and look at that little bubble- dreamy was just featured in in style magazine- what timing!

they also sell wonderful gift items. you should do all your shopping there. or here.

another treasury!

how nice to be included in someone's beautiful treasury. Thanks, Holly!

the animal

we caved (i caved; ryan cheered), and finally bought this very expensive piece of machinery- the dyson animal. bed bath and beyond sends us 20% coupons every week or so, and even though dyson is listed as one of the brands it cannot be used on, apparently it can. as can all but about three of the brands listed. we saved $110, then ryan won a poker game last night, so it's like it only cost us a couple hundred bucks. what a deal!

we'd been struggling with a vacuum purchased from sears 6 years ago that seemed to emit dirt instead of sucking it up. everytime we use it, our house smells pretty awful. we decided we'd had enough after max vacuumed the whole apartment saturday and we were fairly certain it picked up nothing from the floor.

our suspicions were confirmed when we got the animal home and ryan vacuumed the whole place again (with excitement and ease! thanks to the easy maneuverability of the ball action), and he dumped the filter out three times. we ran it right next to the wall and it picked up stuff lurking in the corners. we realized how grimy our carpet felt before compared to how it feels now. apartment carpet with almost no padding underneath, granted, but still, much better.

now the boys actually want to vacuum- i know this will not last forever, so i must take full advantage of it now. there's even a motorized attachment for couches, curtains, and cars, which looks pretty neat.

so, although it was pretty ridiculously expensive, i feel like i can breathe in here without getting sick, as i so frequently do. and dangit if it isn't the coolest looking vacuum in the world.

on textbooks

I've been reading this really great blog, and wanting to post something from it for you all to read. seth godin is a marketer who writes books (and a daily blog), and is really insightful about the new ways of marketing, and life. here's something i think anyone who ever had to buy a college textbook can relate to:

textbook rant:

I've spent the last few months looking at marketing textbooks. I'm assuming that they are fairly representative of textbooks in general, and since this is a topic I'm interested in, it seemed like a good area to focus on.

As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.

They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There's no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That's what makes it standard. It's hard, but it shouldn't make you a millionaire.

They don't make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don't take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.

They're out of date and don't match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.

They don't sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, "yes, this is what I want to do!"

They are incredibly impractical. Not just in terms of the lessons taught, but in terms of being a reference book for years down the road.

In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it's foolish to give me definitions to memorize. Where is the context? When I want to teach someone marketing (and I do, all the time) I never present the information in the way a textbook does. I've never seen a single blog post that says, "wait until I explain what I learned from a textbook!"

The solution seems simple to me. Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it's part of their job, remember?) When you have a class to teach, assemble 100 of the best pieces, put them in a pdf or on a kindle or a website (or even in a looseleaf notebook) and there, you're done. You just saved your intro marketing class about $15,000. Every semester. Any professor of intro marketing who is assigning a basic old-school textbook is guilty of theft or laziness.

This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.

[Update: got more mail about this post than any other post ever. People pointed to Flatworld and to Quirk, and so far, more than 94% of the letters aggressively agree with me. Most of the people are either students, parents of students, former students or other disgruntled customers that are tired of being ripped off by a senseless, broken system. I also heard from a handful of people who said that I was jealous, that the union won't permit the system to change, that textbooks are really good, that professors are underpaid, that professors are too busy or (possibly and) that I'm delusional. I'll note that not one of these letters came from a textbook user.]

why you'd want to live here

the nice part about living 5 minutes from the beach is that it's there if we ever want to go. the reality is that we never go. so ryan, max, my cousin travis, and i went to the beach tonight after dinner. we decided to take our fun camera out for a spin, and here are a few of what we ended up with:

max and i

me, filtered with ink

watching the tide roll in

cool feet

travis, max, ryan- ink again

the cardiff crew

ryan and i

you can see the rest of the photos here

french afternoon

i received an etsy convo today from a blog called ''inventing weddings.'' they chose to use the amethyst sophia earrings in an inspiration board called "french afternoon". how lovely!