April Randoms

Every month, I end up with several items I’d like to post about, but none is particularly worth dedicating an entire entry to. Rather than let these little things go unposted, I figured I’d just aggregate them into one post per month, and perhaps together, they are worth one post. Here goes:

Logotypes.ru

I’ve used this site for years but I don’t think most people know about. It is a huge repository of logos from various companies, mostly in vector format. If you’ve ever found yourself doing mockups involving corporate logos you may not have easy access to, check out logotypes.ru before trying to grab badly compressed web versions from production sites. Is it legal? I don’t know. But the .ru means Russia, and I doubt our comrades overseas really care about such formalities.

Safari 1.3 is out

Dave Hyatt announced the release of Safari 1.3 today, which uses the same codebase as the version of Safari (2.0) that comes with Tiger. I just downloaded it and I’m quite impressed. Aside from the 35% speed improvement, Safari 1.3 adds support for such features as getComputedStyle and contentEditable (yay!). This version of Safari also squashes the long running bug whereby Safari would need an innerHTML “kick in the ass” in order repaint elements which had been changed via the DOM. As you can imagine, all of these under-the-hood improvements benefit sIFR greatly. In fact, we used sIFR to help Dave and Apple squash a DOM bug a couple of months ago. I personally can’t wait to begin using contentEditable on some of my projects. I’ve always loved how it works in PC IE, and now finally Mac users can use it too. Firefox, where are you?
UPDATE: There do appear to be some newly introduced bugs in Safari 1.3 from looking at all of the latest comments over on Dave’s site. Some caching issues have arisen, as well as some JS and DOM issues. Hopefully a quick update will be forthcoming.

Levis Jeans

Did you know you can’t even buy Levis at most department stores anymore? I walked into my local Macy’s last week to buy some Silvertabs and was shocked to find no Levis whatsoever. The salesman told me that barely any department stores carry them anymore because most Levis are now sold through discount warehouses like Costco and Sam’s Club. Turns out that in order for Macy’s to sell Levis at a competitive price, they’d have to take a loss on them. I know there are plenty of other jeans around these days, but I have to wonder if Levis’ decision to whore their jeans out to discounters might bite them in the long run. In the short run, I’ve been reduced to shopping at J.C. Penneys (ouch!) in order to get a pair of Levis… they still sell them for now.

Incomplete Redesigns

There seems to be a practice lately of relaunching sites before they are ready. It’s mainly blogs, but I’ve noticed a lot of relaunches lately with disclaimers like “try not to pay attention to the navigation” and “the comment system doesn’t work yet” and all sorts of other warnings. Maybe I’m just old school about design, but I would never dream of launching anything that was less than about 90-95% ready. If you have a few chunks of invalid code or a couple of enhancements which aren’t ready yet, fine…. but if the state of your site requires a disclaimer of incompleteness, it probably isn’t ready to be launched. And if it isn’t ready to be launched, then don’t launch it.

The Pontiac Solstice

I have never come close to buying a Pontiac. I’ve never seen one which had any appeal to me whatsoever. Being a European/Japanese car snob my whole life, I’ve pretty much tuned out American cars as being anything I’d ever want to own. Pontiacs, to me, have done nothing to dampen this sentiment. They are often rental cars, and they are just never fun or attractive (apologies if you own one). But wow… have you seen the new Solstice??? It was featured on The Apprentice this week and I am just completely taken aback by how beautiful it is. Take the emblem off of there and you’d think it was an exotic car. The Apprentice has really set the new standard for product placement on TV, and I must say, whatever Pontiac paid for that placement was well worth it. I’m still not big on two-seaters, but the Solstice’s appearance on The Apprentice is enough to at least get me out to the lot.

Mind Control

If you’re at all interested in the power of persuasion, check out some of Derren Brown’s tricks of the trade. Interesting, and a tad scary.

iPod Giveaway #1: Make a Meatspace Shuffle

If You Love Something Give It Away

I want to give away some iPod Shuffles. I’d like to give away at least one a month and possibly one every two weeks for the rest of 2005 if that’s okay with everybody. This isn’t some freeipods.com network marketing dealio… I just really want to give some Shuffles away.

The only problem is, I can’t think of a really inventive way to give them away right now. Earlier this year, I gave Isaac Lin and Jay Robinson an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and a Wireless Mouse in a haiku contest that turned out great, so I may go that route again, but I’m thinking there might be a better way.

In light of my lack of creativity at the moment, I’ve decided that the very first iPod Shuffle will go to the person who comes up with the best way for me to give the rest of them away. Here are some considerations to keep in mind when coming up with your pitch:

1. Each iPod Shuffle will essentially be purchased by me online and shipped as a gift to the winner, so the contest cannot involve me personally doing anything with the iPod such as looking at a serial number and making people guess it.
2. Entries should be relatively quick to complete. A haiku is a perfect example. I don’t mind if they take a few hours or a few days to do, but nothing ridiculous please.
3. Entries shouldn’t involve performing any illegal acts.
4. Entries can involve the written word, photography, natural media, or any other creative outlet.
5. I am open to this contest changing slightly with each round, so the entry criteria don’t need to be exactly the same every month or week.
6. If your idea for this giveaway involves a novel use of the internet that I hadn’t thought of before, it is likely to win.
7. If no idea turns out to be better than the haiku contest, I will stick with the haiku contest and award myself the first iPod Shuffle. Woohoo!

The Saltine Challenge

While on business at our New York offices a couple of weeks ago, I was introduced to a peculiar competition known as “The Saltine Challenge”. Apparently this has been around for quite awhile but I’d never heard of it. In a nutshell, one must ingest 6 Saltine crackers in 60 seconds without the help of water or any other digestive lubricants. The crackers must also be of the salted variety. Seems quite easy… that’s what I thought.

With a small crowd of onlookers, I tried and failed badly on the first attempt. The second attempt was a failure as well. Not even close. I managed to get all 6 decently chewed, but there were still two full crackers worth of dough when the minute mark passed.

So I went back to Seattle thinking, as I was told, that less than 1 in 10 people can accomplish this. Not wanting to give up, however, I sent out an all-office e-mail summoning Saltines from all corners of the building for use in further testing. I administered the Challenge to four more people, and sure enough, everyone failed. Before giving up, I decided to give it one more try using a special chunking strategy that my co-worker in New York Phil Berberian had mentioned in passing, and lo and behold, I did it! Six down the hatch!

Just to see if this feat was repeatable, I tried three more times over the next three days and lowered my time in each trial. Could seven be next? Absolutely. After all, if six Saltines was a great bar trick in itself, seven would bring the house down. Sure enough, I did seven on my first try yesterday.

And now a day later, I’ve officially reached the addiction stage.

I’ve already tried eight twice today and although I failed both times, 70 seconds was all it took to get everything down. It’s definitely within reach and I’m not stopping until I achieve this dietary milestone.

Has anybody else tried this? Care to post your results?

UPDATE: Chunking strategy revealed!

UPDATE #2: 8 Saltines accomplished!

Ten Things I Learned in Texas

I just got back from the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin and here is what I learned:

1. Austin might as well be its own state. I haven’t traveled around Texas much but I can’t imagine the rest of it is anything like Austin. In order to preserve the overwhelmingly positive opinion I have of Texas right now, I don’t plan on going anywhere else in the state.
2. You don’t know Joe Clark until you’ve met Joe Clark. Joe’s communication style is full of nuance and levity, but when it takes the form of typed words you’ve never put a voice to, the subtlety can get lost. Now that I’ve met Joe and seen how nice a person he is, I have that much more respect for what he does. Joe is also a human captioning machine… see next point for more on this.
3. The interest in web typography is even greater than I figured. Joshua Darden, Shaun Inman, and I hosted the Typography for the Screen panel and it couldn’t have been at a worse time: 10am on the last day of the conference and opposite Jon Hicks, Doug Bowman, Dave Shea, Jon Allsopp, and Eris Free talking about The Web in 2010. I joked all week with people that I’d rather go to that panel than my own. Lo and behold, our panel packed the house. It was standing room only and people were sitting on the floor as well. I won’t pretend to know how well we did, but the crowd was engaged in the discussion, and we did manage to get an unsolicited ringing endorsement from Joe Clark on sIFR. Joe was also nice enough to blog the hell out of the session with a comprehensive account of our panel. He must have been a court stenographer in a past life because I’ve never seen anyone type that fast.
4. The whole world is going to Macs. SXSW was not a particularly designcentric conference and yet probably about 8 out of every 10 laptops there was a Mac. In fact, out of all the speakers I saw on stage during the four day conference, only one, Jason Calacanis, had a PC. Calacanis went on a silly rant against Apple and its lawyers, urging people to buy PCs instead, but from the looks of the crowd, I don’t think anyone was listening.
5. 2005 is indeed the next 1997. The amount of energy and entrepreneurial spirit around SXSW reminded me a lot of when I worked for an upstart young dotcom in the late ’90s. Everyone is doing new things. Photo sharing, podcasting, blogging, social networking… it doesn’t matter. There is a sense of newness and optimism on the web right now and you can see it all over people’s faces.
6. Derek Featherstone knows some very entertaining drinking tricks. I’d never seen someone stick a half-full pint glass to their chin before. I’d also never seen anyone create water vapor in their lungs and release it through their nose. Very impressive stuff. Derek represents.
7. Slip-ons are here to stay. Prompted by Dan Cederholm’s post several months ago, I bought a pair of slip-on Eccos earlier this year and am pretty sure I won’t be going back to shoelaces anytime soon. I’m usually not one to notice shoes on people, but there certainly were a ton of slip-ons and sandals at SXSW. Are laces becoming obsolete? I think they might be.
8. The web community gets along remarkably well in person. It’s easy to get lost in all the long distance pedantic web disputes sometimes (divs vs. tables, strict validation vs. best practices, XHTML vs. HTML) but put everyone in the same room and the mutual respect quickly bubbles to the surface. We talked a lot of shop, even at the bars, but it was less about my method vs. your method, and more about what we’re all doing to move the web forward.
9. Del.icio.us is the best way to run your linkblog. I flew back to Seattle with Matt May of the W3C who showed me how to use a cron job to pull the last 10 del.icio.us bookmarks into my linkblog automatically. It’s a nice little trick and it was just the impetus I needed to get on the del.icio.us train already.
10. SXSW is the most well-rounded interactive conference around. I’ve spoken at several other conferences around the country but one thing that has always bugged me about them is that it’s generally one type of person who shows up. It’s either mostly designers, most coders, mostly video people, or what have you. SXSW was filled with designers, coders, writers, marketers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and all sorts of people from other professions. This diversity of attendees made for a great social atmosphere and it’s the primary reason why I think I’ll be going back to Austin every single year from now on.