Bank of ... America?

I just had to post my shock that Bank of America is now requiring people to leave their thumb print in order to cash a check. As I understand it, the only way to avoid this is to open an account with them. This freaks me out. Suddenly a state-issued drivers license is not enough? Or even my U.S. passport? SS card? Birth certifiacte? Really? We now need thumb prints to avoid check fraud? So Bank of America is having people either scan their thumb print, or ink it directly onto the check, so that the bank will have it, and if you ink it onto the check, the person whose check it is will have your print when the check is returned?! There's an interesting blog post about a court case against this policy here. We need to rename the bank. Bank of No Privacy? Bank of Communism? If your a Bank of America customer, consider what you are doing to the people you write checks to who may want to cash them there. Maybe just send cash. Maybe close your account(s) and give your money to someone else:)

Here's a blog post about students making false prints to fool computers for just $10. So for all those fighting for thumb print security, or think it's a safe way of doing things, read how easy it is to steal someone's print and use it.

~Matt

Green Reading

Hey folks, it's time! Santa brought this little book to us, and it is chock full of smart simple ideas to live a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.

A few favorite suggestions: Switch to fair trade/organic coffee... just one household switching to certified coffee for a year is enough to protect 9200 sqare feet of rain forest. If everyone in Seattle switched to certified coffees, a rain forest area the size of that city could be saved every year.

Use bar soap rather than liquid - if every U.S. household replaced a bottle of body wash with a bar of soap, roughly 2.5 million pounds of plastic containers could be diverted from the waste stream.

Hot Read: Maximize Your Time

Okay, we didn't post this for a while because we're really self-conscious about the title: we don't want to give the impression that we ONLY want to work 4 hours a week. But this is turning out to be such a great book that we just have to share. Tim Ferriss shares great insights and anecdotes about how to make your work-life more efficient, productive, and rewarding. We highly recommend this book!

Recommended Reading: HP

Oh, sad I am... the series is finally over. I read the last page on Thursday and I'm still mourning the end of some good summer reading (granted, each book only lasted a few days at most). So if you have any books to recommend to follow HP, let me know...

Book Review: Study Your Pictures!

After reviewing student work this week we felt inspired to recommend one of the essay collections by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, or John Szarkowski. But those are not stand-alone books: each one sort of requires that you read the other in order (and more) to get a well-rounded introduction to photography criticism. And then I found this book which is a collection of all of our favorite photography critics. It's a wonderful introduction to contemporary photography theory... read this book, or use it as a jumping off point to explore the individual writers' works in more depth.

Book Review: Going Local

Q: What is one thing that makes everyone in the house happy? A: Good Food.

We're often bemoaning the fact that we live in the city so don't get to listen to crickets, look at stars, walk in the woods.... We dream about our place in the country, but the truth is we're pretty settled in here in our sunny Jamaica Plain apartment. We realized that we can take other steps to get back to the basics right now.

We've decided to start eating better, and rather than follow a specific diet or count calories, we decided to simply go local. There are plenty of economic and health reasons to eat locally, but we wouldn't do it if it didn't also a) taste better, and b) make us feel better.

We probably won't be quite as strict as these authors were (we'll still allow coffee, chocolate, and hot dogs into our kitchen for instance), but as much as possible we're going to shop whole, local, and organic.

PCT Through Hiker

Life Rule 1: Everyone should have a dream! Life Rule 2: Everybody has to eat!

Last week my dad embarked on a journey that he has dreamed of for many years, the Pacific Crest Trail. He will be traveling from the Mexican border to the Canadian border over the next several months, and you can read all about his adventures here.

So this week's book is recommended because it was his main reference for building his trail meals. You might ask, "what do I have to do with backpacking?" "Why should I care about freezer bag cooking?" and those are valid questions!

The answer is: everyone should have a dream, and EVERYONE should find a way to connect with nature. We hope Mr. Dole's trip will inspire you to follow your dreams and to connect with nature! And if you find yourself planning your own long-haul backpacking trip, check out this book!



PS Here's Mr. D's interview with the local news station!

Weekley Read: Adobe Lightroom

We are incorporating the new Adobe Lightroom into our workflow. We're excited about all of the capabilities that the folks at Adobe wrote into this application. Aside from helping us simplify and streamline our image archiving and categorization process, Lightroom has some pretty nifty editing tricks up its sleeve, such as spot removal, individual color and hue adjusters, lens vignetting, and quick web galleries. Scott Kelby makes the best resource books for quickly looking up a tool or technique in Photshop, and we are eagerly anticipating his Lightroom tutorial. Pre-order your copy here (due to be released March 29):

Getting Things Done

February is here... are you keeping up with your new year's resolution? Ours was to find more order and balance in our daily lives. We finally started reading this book (which has been recommended to us countless times by countless friends), and already it is helping us to put our daily tasks into perspective.

the worst day of the year?

According to psychologist Cliff Arnall, January 22 is the most depressing day of the year. This time of year Matt and I always find ourselves daydreaming about beaches, mountains, remote Nepalese villages: in short, any sort of exotic destination to wake up the senses and give us a refreshed view of the world. So in that vein, we're recommending Matt's current read, a collection of vignettes about outdoor adventure published by Men's Journal. Okay, we admit, many of the so-called adventures in this book are mishaps of a grand scale, but they do make for a good read. Especially in the winter when we're holed up sipping cocoa and wishing we were shooting a wedding in the South Pacific.

Must Read: Seydou Keita

We've chosen this week's book in honor of our wedding clients Lesley and Paul who set off on their South African sojourn this week... they left their corporate jobs to become safari guides! We can't wait to hear about their adventures - hopefully we'll visit there someday soon!

Seydou Keita started his photographic career when he was given a camera in 1945. He made beautiful portraits of the people around him - many of his subjects are his own friends and family members. We like his work because of the glimpse it gives us of life in Africa in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and because of Keita's sensitive yet objective portrayal of his subjects.

Happiness

The current issue of Utne Reader has a great article on seeking and finding happiness (though 'happiness' is not the word used in the article). In this final week of 2006, this article makes great reading if you're still trying to figure out your new year's resolution. After all, whatever that resolution is, your end goal is probably happiness, right?

The article is not available for online reading but I'm sure you can find it at your nearest natural food store.

Article Title: The Deeper Meaning of Mindfulness by Thubten Chodron, from Shambhala Sun

Two-career relationships... hard knocks?

I was at a Pink Conference for Influential Women in Business yesterday when someone mentioned an article in Forbes online magazine entitled “Don’t Marry Career Women”. With a title like that I had to look it up – after all many of our clients [seem to] happily exist with each partner working. The article by Michael Noer presents a pretty bleak outlook for anyone considering marrying a working woman, predicting divorce, a messy house, lower “value” of the marriage on the part of both partners, cheating, and general unhappiness... Yikes! Fortunately Noer’s colleague at Forbes Elizabeth Corcoran hastily posted her rebuttal entitled “Don’t Marry a Lazy Man”.

The tone of Noer’s article was entirely upstaged for me by the positive and inspiring women who spoke at the Pink Conference. Each of these women is successful in balancing career, marriage or partnership, and children. A summary of my favorite points made by the speakers:

Set aside time for yourself
Outsource as many tasks as you can
Be true to yourself
Make difficult decisions using the ten year rule: “will I regret doing this/not doing this in 10 years?”