Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things

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 NeinRÃ¼Lz 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.

Jet Blue’s Masterful Approach

Photo by Lori Shepler (LA Times)At about 6pm yesterday I got a call from my friend Calvin.

“Are you watching the Jet Blue plane drama right now???”, he asked.

The first thought that went through my head, of course, was 9/11 and the chance that something terrible was happening again.

“Uhhh, what Jet Blue plane drama?”, I responded uneasily.

“A plane took off from Burbank and its landing gear turned 90 degrees after takeoff. It’s been circling above LAX for three hours trying to land. Turn on your TV!”

The first thing I did was check the major news sites. MSNBC.com, to their credit, was showing live video of the plane circling around. To their extreme discredit though, the video wasn’t viewable on a Mac. This is off-topic, but now is as good of a time to bring it up as any: MSNBC, get your shit together. Seriously. I know what it takes to deploy cross-platform video on a major news site. I’ve done it at ABCNews and ESPN. It’s not hard. Even if you use Windows Media as your format. Step it up already and support cross-platform video. CNN is kicking your ass in this department.

Anyway, end MSNBC rant.

Luckily, my new office is a six-minute walk from my place so I jammed home and turned on the TV. The jet was just beginning its final approach onto the runway and the tension was intense. Ordinarily, this would be when viewers might start thinking bad thoughts about Jet Blue. Instead though, here are some of the snippets heard from the TV commentators during the next few minutes:
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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:

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

Good luck!

Note: All proceeds from Dreamhost signups which occur during this competition will be donated by me to the American Red Cross Hurricane Relief Fund. Additionally, Dreamhost will match that donation. If you’re thinking about switching hosting providers, now’s kind of a decent time to do it.

Total raised so far: $2304

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Gillette’s Five Blade Folly

What you see to the right is the latest in shaving ridiculousness from the fine folks at Gillette: the five blade “Fusion” razor. That’s right. Five blades. Six if you count the built-in trimming blade. In the battle to out-blade the competition, Gillette’s latest creation leapfrogs the Schick Quattro by one blade and aims to provide an even closer shave to the millions of men who apparently are having trouble with only three or four blades.

Gillette’s previous flagship razor, the Mach 3, has three blades while the Schick Quattro has four, but Gillette president James Kilts insists this latest “innovation” has nothing to do with the competition:

“The Schick launch has nothing to do with this, it’s like comparing a Ferrari to a Volkswagen as far as we’re concerned… There was never a plan to go to four.” — James Kilts.

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Now I’m no Schick fan, but I am a Volkswagen fan, so this comparison of Schicks to Volkswagens troubles me on an automotive level. What troubles me even more though is the outright lie that going to five blades had nothing to do with Schick’s four-blade model. So we’re supposed to believe that studies in Gillette’s labs showed that a 1, 2, 3, or 5 blade razor is great but a 4 blade razor isn’t? This launch has everything to do with Schick, and I think at 5 blades we’ve officially reached the point of imperceptible returns in the razor blade industry. Seriously. If you can’t get a close enough shave with 2 or 3 blades, maybe God is telling you to grow a beard.

I am no authority on close shaves since I currently sport a beard, but I have definitely gone through my paces with razors. I started with the Gillette Atra Plus in high school and never found anything easier on my face. I’ve never liked Schicks, thought the Mach 3 was pretty good, and absolutely hated the Sensor. Can’t do the electrics either… don’t have the right sort of face for it. So anyway, that’s my razor preference: What’s yours? And would you try a 5 blade model?

*Note: This is not part of an organized effort to hype the Gillette Fusion razor within the blade-enthusiast community. I do, however, recommend trying out some Mint-flavored shaving cream.

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Originality in Logo Design

“Never waste a stroke.”

That’s the best piece of advice you’ll ever get in logo design. However, it’s also advice that can inadvertently get you in trouble. Draw a blue circle on the screen and you’ve just stolen the Blaupunkt logo. Draw a yellow line and you’re copying Visa. Draw a black swoosh and you’re ripping off Nike. The less intricacies involved in creating your masterpiece, the more likely it is that someone has already created it.

This subject has resurfaced in my head this week because of a couple of questionable logo unveilings, and I think it deserves some discussion. First, let’s go over the three categories of what might be considered “logo theft”:
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Mint Not Considered Harmful

I’ve always wanted to write one of those “considered harmful” essays, but then I remembered Eric Meyer’s “Considered Harmful Essays Considered Harmful”, so I’m writing a “Not Considered Harmful” essay instead.

The subject for the day is Mint… something I find to be extraordinarily harmless. Beneficial, actually… the polar opposite of harmful. Yes, I know I’ve already written about my love for Mint last week, but a few things have developed since Mint’s release that I feel require comment. Here are a few of those things:

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Lots and lots of people have purchased and downloaded Mint, and as far as I know, there’s only been one request for a refund. Yay!
Shaun is completely bogged down helping people one-on-one (even over IM!) work through various intricacies of their server setup and how it relates to Mint installation. He is also simultaneously adding improvements here and there to the install process as well as fostering the development of the Mint Forums. In short, the man is slammed.
Although the lion’s share of comments and blog posts I’ve read around the net are positive, I did see two isolated negative posts which went all the way from questioning whether or not people deserve to be compensated for software they develop to whether or not the group of Mint beta testers was somehow in the wrong for posting about Mint.

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

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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:

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.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Glen C. who has just won this competition! Glen nominated the excellent AvalonStar and received the most legitimate votes in this competition. Note: Pixel2Life was unfortunately disqualified for voting irregularities.

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Mint: The Flavor Of The Month

Next week is a big news week. Apple is releasing their new lust object, NFL season begins, and there are tons of Labor Day concerts and festivals to attend. But the biggest development for me personally will be the release of The Wolf’s shiny new creation:

Mint.

For the last several months, Mr. Inman has been frittering away his nights and weekends creating what I believe to be the most useful stats program in existence. It’s not Urchin, it’s not Analog, and it’s not designed to record every single hit to your website since the beginning of time.

But that is its strength.

Mint, as the name so cryptically implies, is designed to give you a “fresh look at your site”. A slice in time, if you will. Where has my traffic from the last 48 hours come from? What days of the week does activity on my site peak? What terms have people possibly been searching for that could lead them to my embarrassment-of-a-website?

Mint grew out of a desire to maintain a rolling window, or dashboard, of activity with which one could easily analyze what’s going on in the here and in the now. Not so much in the two years ago. It is this philosophy which allows Mint to maintain such a small database (generally around 20 megs, but fully customizable) and yet provide such great functionality.

I’ll let Shaun spill the full details upon release next week, but I wanted to briefly talk about my favorite Mint feature; one I feel somewhat responsible for since I badgered The Wolf so incessantly about it all through development — The 24-hour “Drive Through” Referrer Window.
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Movable Type 3.2 Impressions

I just upgraded to Movable Type 3.2 a few days ago, and as predicted, it has just enough nice new additions to keep me, once again, from switching to WordPress (sorry Matt!). If I were starting from scratch, WordPress might be my chosen platform, but MT gives me enough to keep me happy, and it’s still arguably better than WordPress in several important categories.

Some observations:

I’ll start with perhaps the only major disappointment in MT 3.2 because that is what I would like the community’s help on: search. Since the beginning of time, Movable Type’s search function has been a severely limited raw CGI query which outputs ugly search results incapable (without serious hacking) of displaying themselves on a PHP, ASP, JSP, or other dynamic page. If you wanted the search results page to look nice, you had to either hack some design love into the cgi output or do what I currently do: set your CGI search results as a PHP variable and output the results with PHP. It’s a horrible hack and the worst part about it is that it doesn’t even return results 100% of the time. If the CGI query doesn’t return in time or gets throttled by MT’s search throttler, you get an empty record set. Anywayyyyyyyyyy, I am sick of this. Really, I am. So I got to thinking… why hasn’t someone just written a simple PHP function to query MT’s database and return a record set? Am I missing something here? Why would that be a hard/bad thing to do? If anyone is willing and able to do this, I, and plenty of other Movable Type users would be eternally thankful. The function would just need to take in search terms and return an unordered list showing a linked entry title, entry date, and either the MTExcerpt field or the first X number of words in the entry. Anybody see any problems with this? Seems like something a PHP/mySQL expert could do in like an hour, no?
Movable Type has vastly improved the cleanliness of their URLs. You no longer need a mountain of hacks to produce custom, extensionless, search-engine-friendly URLs. This is a huge improvement and I am very thankful for it. However, it’s still missing one bit of flexibility I’d like to see, hopefully in the core, but perhaps in a plug-in: I like to save my files out with .php extensions for easier identification and editing, but on the web, I want to refer to them as extensionless. Movable Type will let you refer to them as extensionless, but only if you save them out as extensionless. What’s really needed in this case is the ability for MTPermalink (and any other tag which returns a URL) to automatically strip the extension off the end. Right now, I’m stuck using a regex in all of my MT templates to accomplish this.
The Movable Type interface has been tidied up and beautified quite nicely with this latest addition. One of the main reasons I chose MT over WordPress from the beginning was the nicer interface, and MT has widened their lead in this department with 3.2. Matt showed me the new Aqua-like WordPress admin skin in San Francisco last week, and it looks nice, but I’m pretty happy with what MT 3.2 has done (besides using 10px Trebuchet all over the place… had to switch that to Lucida Grande, ASAP).
The new trackback moderation is nice. I’ve already pretty much licked comment spam on my own, but illegitimate trackbacks have always bothered me. With MT 3.2, you can keep trackbacks from being posted immediately without applying this moderation rule to your comments as well. I want comments posted immediately. However, with trackbacks, immediacy is not as important… so this new feature is great.
The new plug-in framework sounds great, and I like the name: BigPAPI. Good times.
My favorite plug-in, MT Notifier, has been updated to work with MT 3.2 and it functions even better than before.
Still no live preview, Six Apart??? C’mon! I need the ability to publish a new entry directly to a non-publicized URL (without it pinging anyone or adding it to my feed) to check visually intricate entries for design completeness and general visual quality. The only way to (kind of) do this right now is to publish your entry with a date long in the past and turn off pinging temporarily. That way, it’s live, but nobody knows about it. Horrible solution. Please fix.

Anyway, my overall opinion of this new version of Movable Type is a positive one, and I do recommend all MT users install this upgrade… but we’re still not quite there yet. I’ve been bugging Anil on IM a lot over the last couple of weeks, and both he and the Six Apart team are aware of these little nagging issues. They are dealing with them as time allows, but I of course, must continue pushing…

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ESPN.com Seeks Creative Director

This just in: ESPN is looking to fill a very high-profile web position — Creative Director, ESPN.com. You heard it here first. Yes, that’s right… a chance to set the design standards for the largest sports site on the web and continue to blaze the trails ESPN has been blazing since the original days of ESPNet SportsZone back in the mid ’90s.

I’m not going to post a long description of the job since the position more or less sells itself, but I will say that this is a great opportunity to work with some very talented people on some very exciting projects. The position is out of the main ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut and is only suitable for a candidate with a wealth of experience managing design teams as well as a killer portfolio. Experience managing the design of high-traffic web properties is a huge plus as well.

Anyway, I don’t work at ESPN anymore but I’ve volunteered to post the position on this site in hopes that either a Mike Industries reader or a friend of a Mike Industries reader might be the right person for the job. If you (or someone you know) think you might have the right stuff, drop me a line through the contact form and I’ll see what I can do. I can’t answer many specific questions about the job but I can help shepherd the process along a bit. Any e-mails should include at the very least a URL where some of your work can be viewed.

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