Mass customization arrives

A dear, dear friend of mine is someone I'd refer to (affectionately of course) as a laborious schemer. He's an idea man and keeping up with his brain children is one of the more enjoyable aspects of my life. A pet topic of his is something he calls "mass customization." Mass Customization is an idea that makes me nervous. The idea behind it is that anyone anywhere can have anything manufactured to his or her specifications whenever he or she wants it. The logistics of something like that make my head spin, and there's something about the idea that there's no expertise needed to select specialized products that rubs me the wrong way. That must be it --the idea of empowering anybody to customize whatever they want leaves me and my profession out of the loop. Well, the day of mass customization is dawning with no regard to how I feel about it. Since I can't stop it, I'm going to hype it instead.

So the dreams of my friend the laborious schemer have come true in the form of a website called Shapeways. Shapeways uses a three-dimensional printer to produce 3D images uploaded to their site and then they sell the uploader the finished product. 3D printing has been around for a couple of years. Industrial designers use it for prototypes. It's a pretty cool technology, that's for sure. Where Shapeways takes it a step further is that they are opening up access to this technology to anyone with an internet connection. 

If this were a service for the trade only, I could upload a model, they would print it out and mail me the finished prototype. Now that's it's been opened to the general public, you can do the same thing. Don't know how to use modeling software? No problem, because Shapeways has a web application that does the modeling for you. Although it's still in a beta form, their service now has a generic prototype that you can customize to your specifications and then buy for yourself. For now, their offering is limited to something they're calling a Light Poem. But what's possible in the form of that Light Poem is mind-bending.

The Light Poem is a table lamp that looks like a candle holder. It is essentially made from text that you upload and lay out with the help of web application. Here's a video that shows how it's done.

Here's what the prototype looks like and in the background on the screen is its computer rendering.

Here's how the Light Poems look in life.

Stay tuned, I just joined this website and I am going to make a Light Poem of my very own.

Fresh photography for hip homes

My title today is how photographer Jennifer Squires describes her work and I can't think of a better description for love or money. I'm mad for this woman's eye. The idea of elevating the art inherent in everything around me is a thrilling one and I love to see it expressed. Squires succeeds in capturing the beauty of every day objects in a way that seems both studied and casual at the same time. That's a tough act for a photographer to pull off, but she does it with grace and aplomb. Many times, it's easy to fall into the habit of ignoring my surroundings. It takes work like Jennifer's to snap me out of it and I appreciate her efforts tremendously.

Follow this link to Jennifer's website, and then follow this one to her shop on Etsy. If you have a patch of barren wall or a spot that needs some livening up, think about adding one or a few of her photos. 

Another cool download

I love all things Excel, it's one thing Microsoft got right (even if they stole the idea from Lotus back in the day). Well there's a great website out there called Vertex 42.

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Debt Reduction Calculator - Download a free Debt Reduction spreadsheet for Excel from Vertex42.com.

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Vertex 42 is dedicated to all things Excel and their site is loaded with live spreadsheets you can download. The debt eliminator I'm showing here is really slick and if you're in over your head with debt, it's a great tool to get a real handle on what you're up against and how to get out from under it. I know, I have been there and super-indebtedness stinks. It's easy to fall into the trap where you tell yourself that you can't get out from under what feel like insurmountable obstacles, but that's a lie. The first step toward taking control of your life is to get an accurate picture of what you're up against. Here's a great tool to help you do just that.

Great (and useful) new website

If you're curious about your credit score, and your FICO number in particular, then check out this site. There are a lot of ways to access your own credit information, but nearly all of them charge for letting you look at your own records. To say this rubs me the wrong way is an understatement. Credit Karma shows you your FICO score and monitors it in real time for free. The site is supported by ads that are keyed to your FICO score, but if that's all I have to deal with in order to see a number that affects me daily, it's a small price to pay. Check it out.

On a Rolle

On Monday, I wrote about a great Bahamian breakfast I had at Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma and the great conversation I had with the Lounge's proprietor, Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the history of The Bahamas and he's a man who's very proud of his heritage. He has ample reason to be so, and a cursory Google search of his name shows that the Rolle clan is a pretty influential bunch in both The Bahamas and in the U.S. In addition to bringing us the likes of Esther Rolle and Estelle Evans, a number of Rolle descendants have risen to great heights in the world of professional sports. So much so that two years ago, Sports Illustrated ran a great feature on the Rolle family in the Bahamas and in the world of U.S. professional sports. SI sent a reporter to spend a day with my new pal Kermit and here's what he had to say:

WE ARE coming to the point where my father took me as a little boy," says Kermit Rolle, after the car, rolling along Queen's Highway on Exuma, has passed Jacob Rolle's Christian Academy, Rolle's Chat and Chew restaurant and nurse Lydia King Rolle's clinic and jounced through two bumpy detours around floods caused by Tropical Storm Noel. Sunlight blasts through the windshield. He motions the driver to slow. Kermit is 72 years old, but for a moment he is young again. The turquoise sea flashes through the trees. To understand anything about the Rolles, you must begin right here.

Kermit was nine or 10 that day. His father took him to this spot in Steventon to retrace the route of a slave named Pompey, one of hundreds working five settlements owned by an Englishman, Lord John Rolle. In 1829 the physically imposing Pompey led a protest against a plan to move a group of Rolle's slaves from Exuma to another island in the Bahamas . Pompey and others seized a boat and took it to Nassau to plead their case with the colonial governor. They were caught and whipped, after which Pompey escaped and famously ran five miles to Rolleville to warn other slaves that British soldiers were coming to seize them. The slaves "put hell" on the soldiers, Kermit says, laughing. "Pompey knocked them down left, right and center."

Pompey's rebellion earned him a place in history; he is credited with sparking the Bahamian antislavery movement. For the Rolles, who in the custom of the day took the name of their owner, Pompey is an icon of resistance: He didn't take servitude passively; he stood up and fought. A document from the time tells how soldiers were constantly being called out to quell the Rolle plantation workers. "They were always troublesome," says Gail Saunders, a historian and former director of the Bahamas ' national archives. "They wanted their freedom."

"Maybe that's how we get some of the strong players in the U.S. today," Kermit says. "My father always said of someone who's big and strong and healthy and runs fast: 'That could be one of Pompey's.'" Kermit, a restaurateur and businessman, is one of Rolleville's most prominent figures, a living repository of history. His great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave, told him that Lord John's overseers whipped any slave they caught trying to read and that some slaves risked their skins to secretly teach each other the alphabet.

During that walk with his dad on Pompey's route, Kermit also learned about the source of the Rolles' distinctive pride: Lord John's benevolent deed. Legend has it that, instead of selling off his land after the British fully ended slavery in the Bahamas in 1838, John Rolle willed the 5,000 acres in perpetuity to his freed slaves. Not one clod of that prime Caribbean waterfront land could be bought or sold. It could only be handed down to other Rolles.

This alone, Kermit says, makes Rolles different from other Bahamian blacks, not to mention their counterparts in the U.S. Kermit worked for 14 years in the postwar U.S. , shuttling in and out of the Bahamas on the Contract, and never understood the acceptance of second-class citizenship by many African-Americans. "John, Lord Rolle, was a perfect man," Kermit says. "That's why we ask God to bless him: His mind was so clear that after emancipation, all the lands he had he willed back to his people. That made us the most happiest people, because he treated us as human beings. He set you up in such a way that you can be proud, and there's still that proudness. The other slave owners? They just turned those people loose. [The freed slaves] didn't know where to go. They don't know where they are. But my father showed me the boundaries—and within those boundaries, the land belonged to our people."

A vast simplification? Perhaps. But Kermit is right about the psychological heft a prize such as Lord Rolle's can provide. In a recent essay, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. cited lack of property as a key reason for the growing wealth gap between poor and middle-class African-Americans. Studying 20 successful African-Americans, Gates found that 15 are descended from families that obtained property before 1920. By then, the Rolles on Exuma had been in possession of their land for more than 80 years. "People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society," Gates wrote. "They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not."

In the Rolles' case, the slave owner's gesture imbued its recipients with a sense of grace. "I heard that story about Lord John Rolle," says Florida State 's Myron Rolle, who was born and raised in the U.S. "Something like that just makes life more fulfilling. It makes you feel more connected with who you are, knowing where you came from and the people who came before you."

Amen Kermit.

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