ColinAke.com…until I write a book.

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to shoot what I consider to be the best football game of my college career. I have long considered the Yellow Jackets’ improbable win in 2004 at Clemson to be the best game of my college career, but this tops it. In that game, the Jackets came back from a 24-14 deficit with just 3 minutes remaining behind Calvin Johnson and several Clemson mishaps.

UGA is different. Tech lives to hate UGA. Our fight songs focus on it. Those of us who were raised as Tech fans pull for two teams: GT, and whoever is playing UGA. My dad, who is a very gentle, nice, quiet man, has been heard yelling “C’mon, break their legs!” at the TV during GT vs. UGA games. As you can guess, I hate UGA.

I’ve been in college for five years. This was my last football season. My last away game. My last GT vs. UGA game. We’d lost four games, painfully, under Chan Gailey, Reggie Ball, and a rash of bad luck, bad bounces, bad calls, and bad blood. As we drove to Athens Friday night (before littering the UGA campus with THWUGA issues of the Technique), Akshay and I talked about the game. Never before had we wanted to win a football game so badly.

I walked onto the field Saturday morning in a drizzle with the other Technique photographers. We walked past security guards and in between the hedges. Past UGA’s ugly self and his doghouse. We stood and talked as the players stretched. We talked about who was going to shoot what, but mostly about beating the Dawgs. The Tech team went to the big G in the middle of the field while the baseball team was being honored and started jumping up and down. I could tell they wanted it. Every Tech fan wanted it.

The game started. The points flew. I spent my time on the UGA sideline, loudly cheering on the Jackets in my old gold windbreaker and hopefully annoying those around me. At halftime (28-12 UGA) we had photographers taunting us with calls of “It’s ok guys, you can come back from that!” in the media center.

Then came the third quarter. I got to watch from the sidelines on the UGA 5 yard line as the Jackets scored, recovered UGA’s return fumble, and scored again. Best seat in the house. All of a sudden, we were up 35-28. Here’s a real, straight-from-the-AJC quote from UGA scholar-athlete and senior defensive tackle Corvey Irvin:

“We lost our edge in the second half. I guess we lost our composure. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it sounds good.”

As time ran out and we won 45-42, I ran onto the field with the other media people. Shot the celebration, watched as players trimmed the hedges. Sung the fight song at the top of my lungs. Enjoyed myself. Watched the Tech fans taunt the UGA fans for the first time in 7 years. Waited until the players finally left the field for the locker room, and began to decompress. Posed for pictures in an empty stadium. Finally left and began the walk back to our car. Yes, I have called my UGA friends to rub it in. It’s the start of a long run during which we’ll see UGA’s decline and Tech’s rise. The player with the most rushing yards during the game, Roddy Jones (and 214, if you’re counting), is a freshman. Our quarterback and B-Back, Nesbitt and Dwyer, are sophomores. We’ll be good for some years to come.

What an experience. What a way to end Paul Johnson’s first year at Tech - if he doesn’t win Coach of the Year, I don’t know who should. The Jackets are now ranked 15th or 16th, depending on what poll you look at - now ahead of UGA for the first time in years.

What a delicious win.

Rain feels great after a drought. Victory is sweeter now because there was sour fruit for years before. And it only gets sweeter from here.

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope all is well with you and yours - enjoy the turkey and pumpkin pie. Take a moment to let those who you’re thankful for know you appreciate them.

Oh, and in case you missed it, check out my favorite float from the Thanksgiving parade.

Colin

It’s thanksgiving tomorrow. I’m thankful that I get to talk crap about ignorant hillbillies that live across town. That’s right, you know who I’m talking about, the Georgia Bulldogs, or, as some people (many who have never been to Athens), the “Dawgs.”

Saturday the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets play the “Dawgs” in Athens, between the hedges, and I’ll be there. I’ll be on the field, shooting photos for Georgia Tech Student Publications. It’s my job to capture the embarrassment on the faces of the Bulldogs as they lose to Tech in what caps off their most disappointing year ever, and the most exciting year for Tech of late.

UGAg started off the preseason ranked #1. Picked to win the title. They were stacked on offense. But their defense sucks, their offense isn’t quite as good as people thought, and they’re not even in the running for a BCS bowl after two UGLY losses.

Tech started off the year with a new coach installing a new offense on a team of players he didn’t recruit. He was picked to win 2-3 games by several major publications. And they’re sitting at 8 wins right now. 8-3. One embarrasing loss, two losses that could have been changed by one play, one series, one little x-factor. The Jackets are coming in off a game in which they piled on Miami’s decent defense for 472 rushing yards.

It’s going to be a close game. But the last 7 years no longer count. We have a new head coach, a head of steam, and I think I’ll be standing on the sidelines as the Jackets eek by the Bulldogs for the first time in recent history. It’d be a fitting endcap to each teams’ season. Jackets exceed all expectations (save their own), and the Bulldogs fail miserably to capitalize on what was supposed to be their coronation.

What’s the good word? To Hell With Georgia.

How ’bout them Dawgs? Piss on ‘em.

I hate UGA. Everyone at Tech hates UGA. It’s time to get some payback.

Colin

PS - And go Virginia! Beat VT!

This weekend I’m shooting my last wedding of this iteration of Ake Photography. I’m going to have to sell my camera equipment here soon to take care of some debt (lots of equity tied up in camera equipment, no time to use it to make money).

It helps a little bit that the last wedding is in Cancun and I get to go enjoy beautiful weather down there. In addition, it’s with some good friends of mine.  I know most of the wedding party and it’ll be tons of fun to shoot a gazebo wedding and hopefully find some time to relax.

I’ve never been to Mexico (save Tijuana (sp?), which doesn’t count). I’m looking forward to this trip.

Now, time to go clean the camera equipment and find the passport. I may need it.

Colin

Yesterday I blogged about CloseBuy.me, the project I worked on at Atlanta Startup Weekend. I didn’t talk about much else… Today I’m going to break down what I took away from Atlanta Startup Weekend, as suggested recently in Skribit (by the way, use it if you want me to blog about something).

First - Atlanta has a great entrepreneurial community. Debate that if you want, and people will, but I think that the people make the community. Everyone’s approachable. Everyone makes an effort to help out. Everyone has their own opinion, and it’s respected. People are accessible - I met most of the community at BarCamp (or I still haven’t met them yet) and I feel at home and welcome in the community. No, we may not have the track record of the larger communities, but there’s a ridiculous amount of talent in Atlanta that I think will serve the city well over the coming years.

Second - Working with motivated people motivates people. It’s a drag to walk out of Startup Weekend - where you’re working on something with extremely motivated people - and go back to your ‘normal’ job where it’s really hard to get pumped up about something. You’re not sitting in a conference room bouncing ideas off of very smart people. It’s demotivating. It makes me want to work with motivated people. For the first time, I really became interested in coworking.

Thirdly - Short Term Success != Long Term Success. Our project is one that works - it has a prototype that works. It was “successful” in that the team stayed together and worked together. It is not a success as a startup. It’s nowhere near. What happened over Startup Weekend is a good basis for a platform, but most likely we’ll have to rebuild the code entirely, spend more time thinking about how things operate, and completely start over. Just because we were able to present a demo does not mean we’re successful. It means we now know more about what we don’t know. I now realize that I have so far to go before true success.

I could go on. (97% of) the people impressed me. Atlanta Startup Weekend encouraged me to take the leap and work on my own startup out of college. I learned a bit about when to try and lead and when to step back and let others do their thing. I saw firsthand how projects either fail or morph into “something that works” when a short amount of time is involved. I learned how to not compete against other projects and support them instead. I’m looking forward to seeing how bad my public speaking is, thanks to the video footage of the event. I’m sure I’ll annoy myself as I watch me.

The result of the weekend, to me, is far greater than just a few product demos and a few “failed” projects. Any one of the “successful” demos could fail at any time. The result of the weekend is a closer knit community - a more motivated community bringing in new people to focus on building businesses in Atlanta. The result is motivated individuals going back to their own lives and being unsatisfied with mediocre effort.

To the Atlanta startup community: If I can ever do anything to help out on a project you’re working on, let me know. If I ever do something that is annoying / stupid, tell me to my face. I want to improve as a person continually. I want to contribute to the community.

Colin

As I mentioned in my last blog post, Atlanta Startup Weekend was this past weekend.  What a weekend! I pitched my idea for a web-based product search through local inventory, and it got picked by a few people. I got to work on it all weekend with some rockstar coders, marketing advisors, and a few people that drifted in and out. And folks, we have a prototype (that you can’t see yet) for CloseBuy.me (what used to be Project Mayhem)

First off, a huge THANK YOU to Jason, Joshua, Hsiu, and Jay for helping all weekend. I don’t want to forget Blake, Glen, Dean, George, Jeremy, and whoever Jeremy called on his cellphone about JQuery stuff.

Needless to say, the project is nothing without this team. Jason and Joshua wrote an absolute crap-ton of backend code. Hsiu did a great job on the front end in concert with Jeremy and some help with the sorting features by Jason. Jay, George, and especially Dean did a great job helping me look at vertical segments for the site, as well as user base and how to appeal to them.

CloseBuy.me is going to be my project for some time. I will likely need some PHP / JQuery coders at some point, so if you want to help out and get in on a startup that is in it’s extremely early stages, then come talk to me, drop me an email, or send over a homing pigeon.

CloseBuy.me has some massive hurdles to jump, but that’s what makes it fun - and more importantly, that’s what makes it valuable. We’ll keep you up to date, but if you want to join the CloseBuy.me team, get on it. Most (if not all) of the people involved this past weekend have other projects to take care of, and I need people who can get pumped up about it.

In the meantime, I’m absolutely exhausted. But I’m absolutely thrilled about the progress.

Colin

After a couple straight blog posts on Georgia Tech and how we’re overperforming while the Dawgs underperform, I’m back to blog about something I’m doing this weekend. Atlanta Startup Weekend 2 is being held this weekend at Georgia Tech’s ATDC. Quick summary: >100 people work on several projects over the weekend, and perhaps some of them become projects that continue after the weekend.

I’ll be taking what I’ve referred to on this blog as Project Mayhem to the mix - I’ve been talking with Jonathan about developing it, and I’ve got one of the key API keys I need, but I need more than that. This *may* prove as a catalyst.

If not, I’m looking to get behind any of a number of awesome ideas that were posted to the Idea Share. Either way I’m going to look forward to having fun, meeting some more awesome people, and getting involved with a really fun project that I hope will last beyond just this weekend.

I’ll tweet from it quite a bit, likely, so follow me on Twitter to hear about it incessantly.

Colin

I thought he was crazy. I liked his attitude, but I thought he was crazy. Paul Johnson, at his first GT signing day, said “It’s great to be here at Georgia Tech - I’m excited to announce our first recruiting class on our way to winning a national championship. Along the way, we’re going to be UGA a lot.”

In the spring of last year, you would have been crazy to buy that line. But one thing is clear - Paul Johnson believes he can compete for a national championship while at Tech.

Right now, we’re 7-2, leading the ACC Coastal division, have a great defense, and are looking towards the UGA game with salivating mouths. There’s nothing we’d love more than to knock off the Dawgs - in Athens - as the endcap to a season they started ranked #1.

In April, nobody would have thought that we would be thinking that way. This season was going to be a bust, it was going to be a learning year, it was going to be a year that we’d have to spend watching some bad football in exchange for some good years ahead. Instead, we’re being treated to a glorious display of enthusiastic football on the Flats. We’re ranked #20 in the BCS system. We finally beat FSU. We’re a couple of lousy fourth quarters away from being 9-0.

And this is just Johnson’s first year. Nobody in the offense is really used to this thing yet. Nobody has settled in, really learned their reads, and become an expert. They’re getting the hang of it, but they have their fumbles and their miscues.

What happens next year and the year after that, when Josh Nesbitt knows the offense like the back of his hand, Jonathan Dwyer has established himself as a back nobody wants to mess with, and our defense is even better?

I submit we can only go up from here. And that, my friends, is something to be excited about.

Paul Johnson was the right hire. And as long as he’s here, we will compete in the BCS system. And don’t tell him he can’t win some national championships. I sure as heck won’t bet against him. He’s the man for the job.

Go Jackets. And To Hell With Georgia.

Colin

I hate UGA. You should know that if you know me. I hate the assumed dominance by the media, the arrogance of their fans, and the arrogance portrayed by their players and coaches, not to mention the crap Heisman talk over Knowshow Moreno.

So you can imagine I loved the outcome of Saturday’s UGA vs. Florida game, formerlly referred to as The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.  That’s right, the “Dawgs” were dismembered play after play. They lost by 39 points. Ouch. So much for “best team in the country,” “best team in the SEC,” and “2009 National Champion.”

While the Bulldogs have underperformed to many (I expected them to fail, so I’m just thrilled), the Yellow Jackets have overperformed. Who - except Paul Johnson - would have expected them to be 7-2 right now, in contention for the ACC championship, and just a few plays away from being 9-0.

In fact, we’re ranked only 7 spots behind UGA in the BCS rankings. We’re picked by a few analysts to be playing in the Orange bowl while UGA will miss BCS bowls alltogether, most likely.

I like that. This college football season is shaping up nicely. Next up is UNC, which will be a good, tough game. Looking forward to that matchup in November.

To Hell With Georgia,

Colin

Fall is a nice thing.

It’s not nice that we skipped early/mid fall and hit winter pretty quickly - but that’s not the point of this post.

It’s sweet to wear jackets I haven’t worn since spring. I find things that I left in the pockets and have been looking for throughout the summer. I’ve already found:

• My nice Shure earbuds. Been looking for those for a while - apparently I took them to NYC with me in April and left them in my black Oakley jacket.
• A checkbook. Yes, it was empty, but had the stubs and receipts that I had been looking for since last spring. Will have to get that back to the proper student organization.
• Misc. crap - airline ticket stubs, pieces of paper I drew something on (NO clue what it is), etc.

This is aided by the fact that I’m a jacket addict. I have at least six jackets, and they’re all different. I’m in the market for a 7th - a heavy jacket I can wear in the rain. Right now I just double up on the lightweight jackets. Any recommendations?

Do you find things in your jacket pockets? Or do you clean them out before closeting them for the summer?

Colin