On Saturday night, September 27th, Pleasure Island in Orlando opened it’s doors for the last time. Today Pleasure Island is no more.

It’s sad to see it close down. I have a lot of great memories of PI. In fact, when I first moved to Central Florida, this is where my brother’s took me to hang out. After years of not really spending time with my brothers since I was always hanging out with my older friends, my brothers and I reconnected while in Central Florida. We were all in our early 20s and were regulars at PI, dancing and drinking almost every night for a few months. What a blast!!!

At the time I had also gone through a bad break up so going out every night to dance and drink with my brothers and friends was a great way for me to get back on my feet. For the first time I enjoyed being single.

On Saturday night, my buddy called and asked me if I wanted to go one more time. Of course I said yes. So I joined him and his lovely wife for one more visit before PI closed its doors and becomes yet another slew of shops.

We hit the Adventurers Club first. I brought my sketchbook with me and was able to capture a quick sketch of Colonel Critchlow Suchbench (Click to enlarge). This is my last tangible memento of Pleasure Island (It’s still a work in progress). The piece is actually a sketch, but I scanned it and brought it into Painter.

Today, I finally sold my 1995 Honda Civic DX. What a great car she is.

Unfortunately one morning, I got in, getting ready to head to work and when I tried turning her on, she didn’t. I knew it wasn’t the starter nor the alternator.

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I’m off to the museum to see the works of Norman Rockwell and William Joyce. This is going to be amazing. Rockwell was the first illustrator I fell in love with as a kid. So my first favorite. I didn’t really pay attention to illustration until I saw his work.

I’ve been wanting to see Rockwell since I was a kid. Unfortunately, I’ve missed opportunities but this time I’m not missing this.

As a treat, I get to see the work of William Joyce, which is a huge bonus. It’s like going to see Led Zeppelin and The Beatles happen to be playing in the same venue. I’m stoked!

While watching Fuel TV, I happen to catch a video of the Cool Kids’ “Black Mags”. These guys are off tha hizzy yo. On tha real.

This is another great article about over working ideas. It’s something I see quite a bit in a corporate environment.

I consider myself a pretty good people manager but it took me a long time to become one. I’ve always been good at working with photographers but it took quite a bit of work to become good at managing the people under me and I only really figured it out in the last year or so.

The greatest piece of advice I ever read (out of 20 or so business books) goes something like this: Taking someone else’s idea and increasing the quality by 5% occurs at the price of a 50% decrease in their commitment to execution (here’s a recent explaination on the Harvard Business blog).

This is a huge problem in the publishing industry. Everyone tries to “add value” to everything: stories, photos, ideas, line-ups, headlines, cutlines, pull-quotes, captions, typefaces, colors and hairlines. If you’ve ever worked with an editor who makes slight modifications to every single effing thing that comes through the door then you know what I’m talking about. Your desire to execute is deflated because you no longer own anything thanks to the misguided idea that the readers will somehow notice a slight improvement in quality. They don’t. Half the readers were bought by the newsstand director anyways.

Photo editors know all too well of this phenomena that I call “shuffling the deck” where someone will come along and rearrange the photos and change singles into half’s and half’s into spreads all in the name of somehow improving the story. It’s not better, It’s different.

Some of my greatest accomplishments as a photo editor are a direct result of me doing nothing. See if you’ve got the sack to admit that.

If you want to make the magazine better do your job as well as you can and keep your mitts off mine.

You can find the article here.