Last week Robert Scoble posted on his blog about a discussion he was having:

“Francine Hardaway is here and we’re talking about obsolete skills. Things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us. Here’s some we came up with. How many can you come up with?

1. Dialing a rotary phone.
2. Putting a needle on a vinyl record.
3. Changing tracks on an eight-track tape.
4. Shorthand.
5. Using a slide rule.
6. Using carbon paper to make copies.
7. Developing film/photos.
8. Changing the ball or ribbon on your Selectric Typewriter.
9. Getting off the couch to change channels on your TV set.
10. Adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV set.
11. Changing the gas mixture on your car’s carburetor.”

Shortly after Scoble suggested someone setup a wiki so users could submit other skills and within an hour or so Obsolete Skills was born.

Download the PDF, print, cut and you have Bitter Valentine’s of your own!

[Via Woot!]

I think everyone has some voyeuristic tendencies to some degree and I get my fill from reading the Post Secret blog. Started by a guy named Frank Warren, Post Secret is a community art project which encourages people to send in secrets they’ve never shared before on a post card. Since it’s inception, the form of media has changed with people sending in printed e-mails, collages, paintings and more. You’ve probably seen the books in the bookstore, and they just recently started selling them at Urban Outfitters. Some of the things are really creative and inspiring, others are just downright sad or scary.

In my experience, people tend to keep their emotions bottled up forever, and in my mind the best thing to do is talk about your problems and get everything out. For some, this is easier said then done and I think Post Secret is a great outlet for these troubled souls. Few may question the validity of the items sent in, surely they can be fiction, but if anything, it’s an interesting experiment in creativity and human suffering.

Went to the auto show today. Philly really gets no love from the industry but there were a few cool cars including the Nissan GT-R (pictured above) which is just an awesome piece of design and engineering. Pictures aren’t too great because I shot with my SD850 and the lighting is pretty poor in there. Check them out here.

Had lunch in the Reading Terminal Market and picked up some amazing cannolis from Termini Bros. The market itself is incredible, bursting at the seams with people, but the aromas and colors in that place just blow my mind.

Headed out to the Sixers/Clippers game soon, a family friend gave us his season tickets for the night. Great seats, center court about 8 rows up. The Sixers suck but it should be a fun time.

There’s no question that we live in a digital world. Although I have my dad’s old 35mm SLR and love it, I’m in the market for a digital SLR - I never develop film anymore, and all of my pictures are either in iPhoto or on Flickr.

Today, Polaroid announced that they will be completely phasing out their instant film cameras within the next year, closing plants and taking the product off shelves. I’m sure everyone has played with a Polaroid camera at least once in their life and let’s be honest, they are quick, fun and cheap. The American dream. It’s a sad day, especially for the factory workers who will eventually be laid off.

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The plumbing in my apartment has been completely backed up for the past three days now. Despite the fact that I live in a newly renovated building and pay an exorbitant amount of rent, my landlord is a deadbeat and hasn’t taken care of it yet. Everyone else in the building is pretty outraged and I’m just waiting to see what goes down. Hopefully the pipes don’t explode first. As I type this, I can hear the toilet in the bathroom next to my room gurgling, and the bathtub is full of some disgusting murky water.

So maybe I’m just bitter about the lack of a shower since two days ago but I feel like this situation sort of relates to my life right now. As usual I started off this semester kicking ass in my classes and as we get half-way through, things are starting to pile up on me. Between all of the schoolwork and doing some part-time freelance work on the side, I’ve become slightly overwhelmed. In the end, it should all work out, like it always does (I hope). The lack of a girl right now in my life might also have something to do with it; this is the longest I’ve gone without a girlfriend in over 5 years. I need to realize that it’s probably a good thing.

This is a really strange and huge gallery of art; painting, photography and more. Definitely a cool time waster.

[Via Dead Air Space]

No matter where I am or what I’m working on, I usually come across articles on blogs or news sites that I want to read but just don’t have time to at the moment. For the past few weeks I’ve been pondering the best way to bookmark these articles to come back to them. I find del.icio.us to be cluttered and time consuming so I end up just bookmarking the articles in Firefox. My Firefox bookmarks are so completely unorganized and inundated with crap at this point that I usually don’t come across the article I wanted to read until several days later.

Tonight as I was going through my Google Reader feeds I came across an interesting post on Jakob Lodwick’s blog. He links to the blog of Marco, apparently one of the guys on the Tumblr team. Marco’s new side project is called Instapaper and is basically a little bookmarklet that sits in your browser and saves articles so you can go back and read them later. Such a brilliantly simple idea that I should have implemented when I originally thought of it.

The simplest ideas always strike me as the most complex.

The guys over at Hypeful.com compiled a mix of all of the songs played during Rob’s going away party before whatever the fuck that thing was tears the head off the Statue of Liberty. You can check out the mostly indie track list and download the MP3s over here.

I love pizza and was first blown away when I came across Slice, an entire blog about pizza, but was even more taken aback when I found their in depth evaluation of regional pizza styles. Big ups to the Trenton-style tomato pie and mention of the dueling DeLorenzo’s.