SIGNAL VS. NOISE

Ruby developers in Chicago?

Any Ruby developers in Chicago out there? Anyone? We're looking for someone to help with Basecamp and our other Ruby-based apps in development. If so, drop me a line. Thanks.

Lessons From A Loser

Al Gore's advice on how to debate W (NY Times). One of the lines of attack he recommends: "...if the Bush administration has been so thoroughly wrong on absolutely everything it predicted about Iraq, with the horrible consequences that have followed, should it be trusted with another four years?"

On adding summary statistics to a screen

Whenever you add statistics/numbers (especially totals) to an interface, don't ask yourself if the information is useful or usable, ask yourself if you would do anything differently knowing that bit of information. Would knowing or not knowing this specific number alter your behavior in any way? If you wouldn't do anything differently, leave it off the screen.

For example, how would your behavior change knowing you've sent 12,400 emails this year instead of 7900? Or, how would your behavior change knowing that you've completed 612 tasks this year instead of 429 or even 15?

Adding summary statistics/numbers to an interface often seems to be the default, easy choice, but the harder option -- leaving them off -- is often the right one. Remember, if you wouldn't do anything differently with the information than without it, then don't show it on the interface. [Rant inspired by Ryan Singer]

When you leave your phone number on voicemail...

...leave it slowly or repeat it twice. Please.

"Food Police" Bust Chipotle for Calorie Coverup

Fresh Mex: Not Always Healthy Mex reveals that Chipotle's Vegetarian Burrito is the equivalent of an overstuffed corned beef sandwich -- plus 350 calories. Add beef and it's "like an artillery shell filled with a day's worth of saturated fat and sodium."

Chipotle's Vegetarian Burrito (with black beans, rice, cheese, guacamole, and salsa) weighs over a pound and provides 1,120 calories and three-quarters of a day's worth of saturated fat (14 grams).

Leave off the cheese and guac and you'll at least do a bit better. What healthy food (that's actually healthy) have you been digging lately?

Road stories: Mr. H. Ballard Harris and Johnny Cash

About 10 miles south of ghosty Cisco, Utah and 30 miles northeast of Moab, Utah is the Dewey Service Station. Well, Ex-service station. What was once a business first and a home second is now just the home of H. Ballard Harris -- an 87 year old fountain of history. Originally born in Green River, Utah, he has been living behind his service station and next to the Dewey bridge for over 40 years.

We first noticed him as we sped by the boarded up station. He was (barely) standing out front, tending the grounds. You couldn't help but think something special was going on here.

We parked the car on the side of the road, walked up, traded waves and howdies, and started listening. He had all sorts of stories. Each one preceded by "You wouldn't believe the changes I've seen in my life."

He talked about when the ferry would shuttle people down the Colorado river (which flows right behind the station). He talked about his five wives -- how they came and went and how much he misses "those ladies." He talked about his kids. He talked about being a real cowboy (and surviving all the falls). He talked about wearing -- not drinking -- white wine to keep the disease away. He talked about the Bible and Jesus and how the Lord told him that the doctors were wrong about his pancreatic cancer diagnosis (it turned out he just had gallstones). He even threw a prayer our way. He talked about the Ten Commandments in the schools ("No harm ever been done by kids reading those words"). He talked about the incredible joy that comes over him when he feeds the pigeons and wild turkeys along the river -- something he's been doing twice a day for the past 30 years. He talked about kicking the drink 20 years ago. He had plenty to say and we had plenty of time to listen. About 45 minutes was what he gave us. Twice as long would have been just fine.

And then, near the end, he slipped in this gem... Before he opened up his own filling station, Mr. Harris used to work at Clifton's Filling Station 10 miles up the road in Cisco. He pumped gas, fixed tires, did whatever needed to be done. He told us about how one day Johnny Cash pulled up. Mr. Cash and Mr. Harris had a little chat and then he filled up Cash's car with $7 worth of gas. And then Cash wrote a song about it:

Cisco Clifton's Filling Station (on Essential Johnny Cash 1955-83)
Cisco Clifton had a filling station about a mile and a half from town. Most cars passed unless they were out of gas so Cisco was always around.

Regular gas was all that he sold except for tobacco, matches, and oil. Other than that he fixed lots of flats keeping Cisco's rough hands soiled.

He'd wipe the glass and check the air. And a hundred times a day he'd patiently give directions on how to get to the state highway.

Usually he'd give them water or a tire or two some air and once a big black Cadillac spent $7 there.

He'd give anybody anything they'd ask And lend anything he had. His tools or tires, bumper jacks or wires the good ones or the bad.

In winter time there was a deep coal stove and a table for the checker game. And every morning at sun up the same checker players came.

So Cisco Clifton's filling station was always in the red. Personal loans were personally gone, but never a word was said.

One morning at 8 the checker players heard a big bulldozer roar like a freight. And Cisco said "I hope my kids stay fed when they build that interstate."

He'd managed to pay for the property where his little filling station sat. And friends still came for the checker game so Cisco settled for that.

He wouldn't say so, but Cisco knew the interstate was too much to fight. But to keep his will and pay his bills, he did odd jobs at night.

He still opened up at a sunrise and the checker game went on. The cars flew past on high-test gas, and the neighbors had sold out and gone.

If a car ever did go by, he was lost. And if they stopped they were treated the same.

So at Cisco Clifton's filling station, there's a howdy and a checker game.

50+ hours in a car was all worth it to meet Mr. Harris. If you're ever in Utah going down I-70, exit 220 to SH 128 towards Cisco and keep going until you see the Dewey Station on the left. Stop you car and listen. It'll be worth it.

UPDATE: Other pictures from the trip.

"Mommy wants a new President."

Keep your weapons of mass destruction sharply dressed this political season with a Lowercase Tee. This new Coudal offering sells anti-Bush t-shirts for kids: "Mommy wants a new President" and "I wouldn't vote for Bush if I were you." Jim and co. took it from idea to business in 15 days.

Great app: Paparazzi

I've been looking so long for a simple Mac OS X tool that can take screenshots of pages that are much taller than my screen height, and I've finally found it: Paparazzi.

There are three fields: URL, Width, and Minimum Height. Click "Capture" to preview the screenshot. One more click to save a PNG. That's it. Go get it!

Using Definition Lists For Forms

We've been getting some good mileage from coding forms using definition lists lately. Just place each form label inside a definition term tag (<dt>) followed by its associated form control wrapped in a definition description tag (<dd>). It's a great way to keep form code clean and tableless. Dan Cederholm discusses the technique further at devarticles.com.

The Question of God

Another interesting PBS program coming down the pike: The Question of God.

The Question of God, a four-hour series on PBS, explores in accessible and dramatic style issues that preoccupy all thinking people today: What is happiness? How do we find meaning and purpose in our lives? How do we reconcile conflicting claims of love and sexuality? How do we cope with the problem of suffering and the inevitability of death? Based on a popular Harvard course taught by Dr. Armand Nicholi, author of The Question of God, the series illustrates the lives and insights of Sigmund Freud, a life-long critic of religious belief, and C.S. Lewis, a celebrated Oxford don, literary critic, and perhaps this century's most influential and popular proponent of faith based on reason.

Day Camp

The studio's hopping with ideas today. The Basecamp Counselors have just started their presentation around the campfire that is the mac/projector. Right now they're talking about "Mantras" like "Easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible." That sort of thing... Pix and stuff soon.

Energizer Quick Switch: This is great design

Need some light in a pinch and only got AAs? Or Cs? Or Ds? No problem. The new Energizer Quick Switch Flashlight can take batteries of nearly any size. About time, eh? BTW: Turns out you can do this with other products too. [Thanks Jamie]

But, it's not all good...

Launched nationally last week, two truckloads of the flashlights already have been hustled to Florida, where consumers bracing for the third recent hurricane to rake the state have been stocking up batteries, in some cases depleting supplies.

Launched nationally last week? Why is there no mention of it on Energizer's site (or if it is, I can't find it)? And, if I do get to the Flashlights page, where would I start looking for it? Is this "Value," "Home," "Premium" ...?

A9 Launch

Today's the official launch of Amazon's A9, "a search engine with a memory." According to this BusinessWeek piece, A9 Chief Executive Udi Manber says he wants to help people finally bring information overload to heel and let them organize the entire Web in their own personalized way.

One column of the search page is a time-stamped history of every search a user has made -- including every Web site visited. So, if you remember visiting an interesting site several months ago, it's easy to find it just by scrolling back through the history list. Those sites also can be dragged with a mouse and dropped into a bookmark column for even easier recall. In addition, A9 has a diary feature, which allows you to attach notes to Web sites so you can be reminded later what was important about the page...[and] the information is available with a password on any computer, eliminating the need to laboriously synchronize data on different computers.

Slashdot has more on the A9 launch.

The Building of Basecamp: San Francisco here we come!

You asked for it... We're taking the Building of Basecamp Workshop on the road to San Francisco on November 9th.

But there's more... This time we're teaming up with our friends at Adaptive Path and Stopdesign (a.k.a. Doug Bowman). They'll be offering a "Building Blogger" workshop (detailing the process of their Blogger redesign) on November 8th (the Building of Basecamp Workshop is on November 9). You can attend either workshop for $395 or $745 for both.

But there's even more... Use registration code "ebboth" before October 10th, and you'll save $50 on both days.

You can find out more about the Building of Basecamp Workshop or just head straight to the registration page.

If you have any questions, email us at workshop at 37signals.com. We're really looking forward to it. We hope we see you on the 9th in San Fran.

The Mitch Hedberg Interview

The Onion A.V. Club presents the Mitch Hedberg interview. If you don't know Mitch, get to know him or check out a show -- he's one of the funniest guys around. And, if you can, go see him on a slow weekday -- I once saw him when there were only 6 other people in the room. Now THAT was comedy. I'll never forget.

Misleading war casualties graphic

Look at this infographic of U.S. casualties in wars.

The image is linked from a sidebar on this CNN article that reads "U.S. casualties in other wars". But the only data that is compared in this graphic is the duration of each war, not the number of casualties. The size of those red blocks has nothing to do with casualties, which may as well be footnotes to the time data.

If you want to raise your awareness of how graphics can deceive and misrepresent, check out Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Four more years of Skull and Bones

No matter who wins in 2004, Skull and Bones will keep the Whitehouse. Roughly 800 living members, and 2 of them are running for President. Want to know more? Listen to this Realaudio stream from BBC Radio 4 (link expires on September 17th).

Sacred Ground

Think it's tough to fight off design by committee when you're building a web site? Try designing the most famous building in the world. PBS' Frontline: Sacred Ground takes viewers behind the scenes of the battle over the Freedom Tower (the skyscraper to be built at Ground Zero). It's mesmerizing to watch the brutal clash between architects David Childs (the "corporate" one) and Daniel Libeskind (the "artistic" one), especially if you're a designer. Emotion, politics, money, architecture, design, and (lots of) ego -- it's all there.

Here's architecture critic Paul Goldberger on why the Childs-Libeskind collaboration was so difficult:

Do you ask Matisse and Dali to collaborate on painting a picture together? No, because they're such different kinds of artists that they could respect each other's work, perhaps, but not try to combine it. And so it was here.

I think it was a mistake to believe that two good architects, because they're both good architects with intelligent ideas and a commitment to Ground Zero, therefore can produce a single work that will be a coherent and good work. We had what I think is actually an unsuccessful collaboration, because the end result is not as good as either of their buildings were when they had their own separate ideas and visions for them.

And that's the sad part in all this. The end result, shown after the jump, is a watered down compromise that doesn't really seem to make anyone happy. Sacred Ground airs again in Chicago on Sep. 11, 2004 at 10pm.

The Sacred Ground site also gives some background on the architectural philosophies of David Childs and Daniel Libeskind, with a slideshow of their best-known works.

The collaboration between David Childs and Daniel Libeskind was a difficult one, not only because both men are architectural superstars accustomed to being in charge of their own projects, but because they approach architecture from two very different perspectives. Where Childs speaks in terms of engineering and a building's physical and structural connection to its surroundings, Libeskind likes to use analogies, relating his buildings to their environment through a complex web of symbolism. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in his book Up from Zero that Childs started work on the Freedom Tower, believing that "the design of a skyscraper begins with its structure, not a pictorial ideal"; while Daniel Libeskind's design "began not with a structural idea but with a visual goal, to create an abstract form that would suggest the profile of the Statue of Liberty."

The love of the big product shot

We all know it's really tough to really "see" a product online -- especially when the product shots are about the size of a quarter. Let's build a list of online retailers (or resources) that offer really large product shot views. Here's a few I've found to get it started:

Bigha weld detail (more), Tirerack's 1000x1000 SuperView, Digital Photography Review's product reviews...

Post yours as comments.

Kicksology: The end of a public passion

37signals alumnus Ernest Kim (a.k.a. Professor K and the Grand Poobah) is hanging it up. "It" being Kicksology -- one of the best examples of what passion + great writing + great design + expressive photography + attention to detail + the web + good taste can equal.

In 30 days it's history. Starting Monday he'll be publishing a parting message each day from some of the people he's met along the way. They'll be sharing their favorite review and their thoughts about what Kicksology meant to them. From what I hear, some of the biggest names in the billion-dollar industry will be joining in.

But, what was special about Kicksology wasn't the subject matter -- it was the passion. And even beyond that, it was the way he communicated the passion. It was a quality production through and through. EK understood that it's not just about good content and pretty pictures -- it's also about how you present it, how you execute it. It's about the design, the tone, the timing, the language, and the honesty of the presentation that makes content great. Ernest gave a shit and respected his audience by giving them the very best. He really really cared. And wow is that rare. I'm going to miss his giving a shit.

Kicksology was the best example of self publishing the web has ever seen. Kicksology was one man. Ernest tested the shoes, he took the pictures, he wrote the prose, he designed the site, he answered the emails, he cut the deals, he paid the bills, he saw it through. One guy with an idea, with vision, with talent, with dedication, with respect for his audience. He did himself in his spare time what a typical company would put 5-10 people on full time -- and he did it better. I have a soft spot for people and achievements like that.

Kudos, EK. Now you can finally dedicate yourself to figuring out how to sell $3000 bikes and $120 lasers ;)

Update: A reader reminds me that I (J. Dawg) actually wrote a review of the Nike Air Carbide back in September 2000. I hope I'm a better writer today than I was back then... Google is a cruel, unforgiving paper trail, isn't it? This is so embarrassing... ;)

Opel Astra GTC with Panorama Windshield

Love this panoramic windshield (big version sans story) on the new Opel Astra. A windshield that extends all the way to the b-pillar is definitely a neat idea. What blew me away though was the process that forms the curved shape:

The arched panorama windshield, made of six-millimeter thick, laminated safety glass, is shaped by means of a gravity bending process. Selected points on the glass pane are heated so strongly in a special oven that gravitational force alone pulls it into a predefined form a very elaborate process with glass of this strength and size (around 1.8 m2).

Newton would be proud.

Now THAT's packaging

A camera arrived from Russia, via eBay.

As if the rope/cord wasn't cool enough... The guy stitched the foam together!

Worst Promotion Ever

Received an e-mail from Peapod announcing this promotion:

Find the Founder -- If one of our founders delivers your groceries between now and 9/24, you'll get your groceries for free ... if you recognize them at your door!

Sweet. This will be a breeze. I mean, really, who doesn't know what the founders of Peapod look like?

Chicago Sunset: September 6, 2004

More...

Bigha: The Jasper Laser

EK's Bigha is at it again. Introducing the Jasper Laser -- a laser so bright you can actually point out stars with it (or really freak out your cat). You know this laser can really go when the Simple Saftey Tips include this advice: "Don't shine into airplanes." An objective review can be found at Gizmodo.

Hacking Congress

Semantic web frontiersman Paul Ford has a new column on XML.com. In his first installment he describes his plan to create an RDF description of the U.S. federal government.

For the last few years, I've wanted to collect as much data on the U.S. government as I could, convert it to RDF, and build a site and a web service that make it possible to explore that data. This will be my goal over the next year, and I'll document my progress here on XML.com . . . In addition to testing the Semantic Web concept, if all goes well, I'll have a nicely organized map of the U.S. government, structured using publicly available ontologies, available in a single, reliable format (RDF), which anyone can incorporate into their own Semantic Web projects.

Awesome.

LAUNCH: 'Tis The Season: Holiday E-Commerce Ideas

There are 114 days to Christmas. Is your site ready?

'Tis The Season: Holiday E-Commerce Ideas, a new (free!) site from 37signals, is here to help. In these pages you'll find dozens of ideas for improving the holiday customer experience at your site. Each idea is accompanied by examples taken from top retail sites (we've visited hundreds of sites over the past two holiday seasons seeking smart techniques).

The site discusses the best way to present:

• Gift Finders
  Idea: Let customers use multiple criteria to reduce the number of gift items displayed.
• Holiday Shipping Info
  Idea: Offer a holiday timeline that highlights key dates.
• Wrap Details
  Idea: Show customers what your wrap looks like.
• ...and plenty more

If you're looking to spruce up your e-commerce site for the holidays, it's a swell place to start.

LAUNCH: ColoChicago

We're pleased to announce the launch of ColoChicago, a side project for our kind and wizardly hosts at Tilted.