November Randoms

Some random thoughts and diversions from this month:

• If webmail ever got around to looking this good, I would use it a lot more often.
• I have been getting way way way inundated with requests for design and coding work in the Seattle area lately. If you’re good, and you live around here, you should drop me a line. No need for a cover letter or anything… just drop me a link to your portfolio and I’ll keep you in mind when the next request comes up.
• Crest Lemon Ice Toothpaste: Come to where the flavor is.  I know Vanilla Mint was the early star for Crest, but this Lemon Icey dealio is the new leader in the clubhouse.
• I don’t know what possessed me to buy “Calcium Enriched” milk at the store the other day, but let me pass some valuable information on to you: it’s awful.  Don’t buy it.
• Four people got fired from The Apprentice this week, and two people got fired from The Marthapprentice. I know ratings are down on these two great shows, but does anyone know the back story behind the mass firings? I mean, that’s four fewer shows NBC can air now. To add to the confusion, this was all filmed before ratings numbers were even known. What’s going on here?
• I’m convinced that any cold-fighting effects of Airborne are psychosomatic. But since it tastes decent, I will continue to drink it.
• Dan Cederholm is right. Laced shoes are almost always overkill. I’ve been slip-on only for several months now and I may never go back. I suggest Eccos and Borns.
• Terrell Owens is a jackass and I pity the team that will inevitably decide to take him in next year. I don’t care how good you are… you don’t diss your teammates publicly and you don’t put yourself above your team. If you have him on your fantasy team right now, you should drop him on principle. And if you have Jamal Lewis on your team, by the way, you should drop him on incompetence.
• The motor on one of the windows of my Saab broke a few months ago and the dealership ordered a new part for me. Still no part, and now I just found out that there are apparently none of these parts available anywhere in the world. One woman has been waiting since May. What the hell? This is a 2001 car. Has anyone ever waited this long for a part?
• James Archer’s new Fruitcast site wins my Gradient-Of-The-Year award. Yum. The site was designed by Joseph Wain.
• Paul Mayne’s new “e-mail blender” is cool… the perfect diversion to plant subliminal thoughts of Mrs. Fields cookies in your head.

iPod Giveaway #6: We Have A Winner

Last month’s iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition drew almost 500 entries but was a bit too easy. This month’s was significantly more difficult and unfortunately drew much fewer submissions. The good news, however, is that we not only have a winner in Jeremie Blais of Ottawa, Canada but $2304 was raised for the American Red Cross.

Jeremie’s entry showed effort, creativity, and taste, and as this month’s winner, he will receive an iPod Nano from me and a pair of $150 Etymolic earbuds from iLounge. Congrats Jeremie.

As always, the submission pool for competition ideas remains open until the end of the year.

September Randoms

Some items of interest from this month:

• Keith, Matt, Nick, and Brian just launched BlueFlavor tonight. Head on over and check out their new shop.
• Andy, Richard, and Jeremy launched ClearLeft last week. Very check-out-worthy as well.
• I just won my fantasy football match against Scrivs tonight and am quite happy about it. In all fairness, my linebacker injured his wide receiver on Monday Night Football so it should have been closer. In other news, the NeinRüLz network continues to grow impressively.
• Finkbuilt is having a ketchup label design contest. Enter and win yourself some two-dollar bills.
• The 6th Monthly iPod Giveaway doesn’t have a ton of entries yet but has raised over $1600 so far for the Red Cross in the first week.
• I’m at the end of my rope with this Comcast HD PVR, and let me just tell you once again how badly it sucks. If you want to start watching way less TV, this is your device. If you like watching TV, however, definitely stick with your Tivo or another alternative.
• Speaking of annoying TV-related things, Rita Cosby, MSNBC’s new correspondent has a very annoying way about her. Am I the only one who is totally creeped out by her voice?
• Stan pointed me to the Leo Burnett site recently. It’s one of the most creatively designed and produced sites I’ve seen in a very long time.
• If anyone wants to create something really useful, develop an RSS-delivered web service which lets you know about every concert coming to your town before tickets even go on sale. I just found out the Black Keys played in Seattle last week. Slipped right past me, as these things sometimes do. I know there’s Upcoming.org, but for some reason they seem to miss a lot of stuff and aren’t very timely either. Is there anything better out there right now?
• I am liking Flash 8 quite a bit so far. The built-in components are still bloated as all hell though. I needed to make a simple MP3 player the other day and using the built-in media controller, it was 80k. I ended up hand-rolling a player instead and got it down to 3k including the skin. Hand-built components are still apparently the best way to deploy media in Flash… for audio at least. Also, with regards to Flash 8, we’ll be releasing a new version of sIFR pretty soon which takes advantage of the new Saffron text-rendering engine. I wouldn’t call this a mandatory upgrade at all, but it will provide crisper text — especially at small sizes — for people who have Flash 8 installed.
• One of the best articles I’ve ever read on electronic media evolution is Seth Goldstein’s Media Futures. It’s a five part piece with the fifth part itself being five parts, so make sure to read the whole thing when you get a chance. I first read Seth’s essay a few months ago but have re-read it a couple of times since. Great stuff. Seth also led an interesting discussion at Foo Camp on Attention Trust.
• Bananas Foster ice cream from Haagen Dazs is very, very good.
• Trimming your blogroll can be quite therapeutic.
• Crest Vanilla Mint toothpaste tastes a lot like a Captain & Coke.

iPod Giveaway #6: Renew Orleans

Political, philosophical, and logistical questions aside, one thing appears clear about the recent disaster in New Orleans: the city is about to undergo the largest rebuilding effort in the history of the U.S.

No one knows how the new Orleans will compare to the old Orleans, but clearly a lot of interesting changes are in order. What new technologies will solve the geological challenges of the area? How many natives will return? How will a new population mix affect the culture of the city? Will the tourism and shipping industries be stronger in the long term due to this disaster and recovery?

Nobody knows for sure the answers to these questions, but the purpose of the 6th monthly Mike Industries iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition is to try and find out; to explore what the rebuilt New Orleans might look like. Using your medium of mastery (web, video, audio, print, etc.), create a short marketing or educational piece for the new city. This could be a poster advertising the new Riverwalk, a narrative audio of the history of the city, or anything else which might be useful in attracting people to the New Easy. Humor is perfectly ok for this project but let’s please keep everything in good taste.

The barrier to entry for this 6th competition is admittedly a bit high considering the skills required to put such a piece together, but the topic is important and I anticipate a few really great entries… albeit not 500 of them.

Given the increased challenge of this month’s competition, I am upping the prize from an iPod Shuffle to an iPod Nano. Thanks also to my friend Loren Schwartz who, over dinner last week, suggested this contest and as a consequence won himself a Nano as well. And of course, iLounge will also be chipping into the prize pool as usual with a pair of $150 Etymolic earbuds.

There are only three rules which must be followed:

1. The competition will be open for exactly two weeks… ending at midnight on Tuesday, October 4th.
2. Please post the link to your entry in the comments below.
3. Keep it clean. Questionable Mardi Gras photos are obviously fair game, but censor when appropriate. :)

Good luck!

iPod Giveaway #5: We (Almost) Have a Winner

Ask and ye shall receive.

In an act of laziness and borderline stupidity, I set the theme of August’s iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition to “submit the best site I’ve never seen”. I did so because I was about to leave on a trip and didn’t have the time to cook up a proper contest.

Seven days and 486 entries later, I had a real judging mess on my hands. Apologies for taking until today to get this entry up, but I spent 10 straight hours on Sunday afternoon/evening going through each entry and picking the best of the best. Brutal, brutal work. I also had to delete about 130 entries because they were either duplicates or had no business being on the list.

Originally the goal was to put the top five up for a vote, but I just couldn’t get the list down below 15, so I am presenting the top 15 sites for everyone to vote on. The person who submitted the site which receives the most votes by the end of next Tuesday (September 13th) will receive a free iPod Shuffle from me and a pair of $150 Etymotic ER-6i earbuds from iLounge.

Can I also just take a moment to say how much I love every single regular reader of this blog? The quality of the first 150 or so entries was SO much better than the last few hundred… the cause being that the last entries came from people visiting via MSNBC, Metafilter, and a few other sites which covered the contest. Nothing against outside visitors… I love all visitors. But the regular peeps here really know their stuff. Many thanks.

So without further ado, I ask you to take a quick look at all 15 sites in the poll to the right and place your vote. Please either view all the sites, or click the “Show Me The Results” button. I don’t want to skew the results with people who have not checked out all 15 sites. I know 15 sounds like a lot, but it’s less than 486… and they are all very good.

Happy voting and may the best site win.

In addition to the finalists in the poll, the sites below all receive honorable mention:

• Centricle
• The Museum of Bad Album Covers
• Flickr Related Tag Browser
• Official Web Site of New Zealand
• Deeply Disturbing Carl Lewis Music Video
• Kitten War
• Alli Arnold Art
• Group Hug
• Jamming a Pair of Scissors Repeatedly Into Your Crotch
• Black People Love Us
• The Circular Life
• GUIdeBookGallery
• Airtoons
• Gig Posters
• Top Left Pixel
• Red Nose Studio
• Bzzzpeek
• Ambigramatic
• Neave.com
• Chromasia
• The Hotchkiss School

Important Note: Any campaigns spotted on the net aimed at pumping up votes for a particular entry will result in the disqualification of that entry. Mint knows all.

Fantasy Football Cameo Opportunity

I run a 20 person fantasy football league of industry bloggers. We have an extra spot available. The entry fee is $25 (goes straight to prize pool) and the online draft is this Sunday at 6:30pm Pacific.

If you’d like the spot, simply send me an email with your picks for last year’s fantasy MVP in the QB, RB, and WR positions. Need to weed out the crazies. :)

iPod Giveaway #5: The Great Unknowns

Original illustration by Michael Schwab.For the 5th Monthly Mike Industries iPod-A-Month Creativity Competition, we’re going to keep it extremely simple. So simple, in fact, that you aren’t even the one who has to be creative. The winner of this competition will be the person who posts the best site I’ve never seen in the comments.

If you have a site you’d like to nominate, by all means do, but please no self-promotion whatsoever. If all goes well, we’ll have a nice little huge page full of inspiration by the time everyone’s done.

Here are the rules:

1. Post the URL on the first line. If you can write a lick of HTML, try to link it properly. Here’s how —
   <a href="http://www.theurlofthesite.com">Site Title</a>
2. Post an explanation of exactly one sentence or one word (or none at all). Anything more than one sentence will be disqualified.
3. On or around midnight on the last day of August Monday, August 22nd, I will close the contest and pick my five favorites.
4. I will then post the five favorites, and using the new Mike Industries Polling System, I’ll put it up for a vote. Most votes wins.

* One entry per person only. Multiple entries will be disqualified and overtly offensive material removed. Multiple entries are also considered overtly offensive.

As always, the winner will receive a brand new iPod Shuffle from me and a pair of $150 Etymotic ER-6i earbuds from iLounge. iPod fans might also want to check out iLounge’s free iPod Book as well.

Good luck, and you can’t tell me it gets any easier than this!

Helpful hint: If the site you submit requires 20 minutes of time just to figure out what’s going on, I probably won’t get past the first minute.

Heading to Frisco

Just a quick note to let anybody who’s interested know that I’m going to be in San Francisco for the Blog Business Summit from Wednesday until Friday and then Foo Camp in Sebastopol over the weekend. If you’re going to be at either event, feel free to come say hi.

I love going to San Francisco because it’s my second favorite U.S. city behind Seattle, and it’s home to many great designers like Michael Schwab (work pictured at right), and Doug Bowman. I also can’t wait to get my hands on about twenty In-N-Out burgers… a delicacy not available in the Great Northwest.

The Blog Business Summit should be an entertaining affair with plenty of great speakers, not to mention a pinch of Scrivs as well. Those of you who thought the kid’s head couldn’t get any bigger are about to be wrong. :)

If you’re going to be in the area and haven’t purchased a ticket to the conference yet, I believe some are still available.

As for Foo Camp, well, I really don’t know what to expect at all from it, but I’ve heard spectacular things. I haven’t been to Sebastopol since I was about 10, but I do remember they have the world’s best apple juice. The opportunity to camp, do keg-stands, and talk shop with some of the best minds in the industry sounds like a good time… I can’t wait.

iPod Giveaway #4: We Have a Winner

John Whittet (whose illustration is to the right) said it best when he clarified the purpose of the 4th Monthly Mike Industries iPod-A-Monthly Creativity Competition:

“This particular contest is about telling a story, not writing one.”

With 60-some entries to read through over the last week, I encountered a great many well-written ones, but none told the story of a lost iPod more creatively and convincingly than the audio-blog-umentary by Ohio State University’s very own Josh Schoenwald.

You see Josh bought a very special iPod Shuffle about a month ago; one that not only had a personality but was also smart enough to set up its own account on Blogger, keep an audio diary, and even fade U2 songs into the ends of its blog posts. “Flit”, as Josh calls him, is no ordinary Shuffle.

As of today, I’m happy to say that Flit is indeed in my possession and will be returned to Josh first thing tomorrow morning along with a pair of $150 Etymolic earbuds courtesy of iLounge.com (formerly iPodLounge). Congratulations Josh!

I also want to draw attention to a few other spectacular entries of note, the first one being John Whittet’s amazingly well illustrated animated docudrama entitled “Little White Cookbook”. John produced some amazing visual effects by overlaying his own hand drawn figures against a backdrop of photos pulled from Google Images and then Gaussian blurred. It’s a really cool effect and one I’d never seen before… you can read more about it here, and perhaps hire John for any illustration projects which require such awesomeness.

Another standout was Paul Santolaria’s take-off on one of my favorite films “A Shot in the Dark” starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. Very creative and extremely well done.

My favorite two pure text entries (which each were worthy of first prize) were David Barrett’s account of his iPod-Shuffle-turned-pregnancy-test and Kat’s hilarious yet tragic home mugging.

There were five others I found very amusing as well, but I’ll leave those a mystery.

Thanks to everyone for entering, and the next contest will launch around the middle of this month!

Too Much Cream of Wheat?

Are there any Cream of Wheat aficionados in the audience? If so, can anyone tell me why my local supermarket gives me four choices for what should be one of the most basic foods on the shelf? See the picture below that I snapped yesterday. We apparently have a 10-Minute version, a 2.5-Minute version, a 1-Minute version, and an Instant version now:

I haven’t eaten Cream of Wheat since I still had my baby teeth, but is there really such a need for so many versions? I guess I understand the “10-Minute” and the “Instant” because usually food that takes longer to cook is better, but is there a palpable difference between the three quickest versions? And perhaps more importantly, if the stuff is to be eaten hot, how much quicker could “Instant” really be than “1-Minute”? Who is the person who needs to shave a few seconds off of their one-minute breakfast drill?