The Getting Real translation project is making progress. Recently completed: Japanese and Russian versions (Russian shown below). There are also complete (or nearly complete) translations in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Other languages are in progress. If you’d like to help, get in touch. Thanks again to all our volunteer translators.

Apple Inc. is looking for an Interaction Designer in Cupertino, CA.

Morgan Stanley is looking for an Information Architect in New York, NY or London, UK.

Getty Images is looking for a Senior Software Engineer in Seattle, WA.

Trek Bicycle Corporation is looking for a PHP/Java Web Developer in Waterloo, WI.

Felissimo is looking for a Webmaster/Technical Project Manager in New York, NY.

CACI is looking for a Web Production Manager in Washington, DC.

Millikin University is looking for a Webmaster in Decatur, IL.

AARP is looking for a Design Director in Washington, DC.

RBM Technologies is looking for a Web Developer/Engineer in Cambridge, MA.

Trabian is looking for a Rails developer in Indianapolis, IN.

Assembla is looking for a Web Designer located anywhere.

The Integer Group – Midwest is looking for a Web Developer in Des Moines, IA.

Find a job or put your design or programming in job in front of the best on the Job Board.

“The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time” by Edward T. Hall studies “how people are tied together and yet isolated by hidden threads of rhythm and walls of time.” It contains this fascinating passage describing how humans sync up with each other:

Rhythm is basic to synchrony. This principle is illustrated by a film of children on a playground. Who would think that widely scattered groups of children in a school playground could be in sync. Yet this is precisely the case. One of my students selected as a project an exercise in what can be learned from film. Hiding in an abandoned automobile, which he used as a blind, he filmed children in an adjacent school yard during recess. As he viewed the film, his first impression was the obvious one: a film of children playing in different parts of the school playground. Then — watching the film several times at different speeds, he began to notice one very active little girl who seemed to stand out from the rest. She was all over the place. Concentrating on the girl, my student noticed that whenever she was near a cluster of children the members of that group were in sync not only with each other but with her. Many viewings later, he realized that this girl, with her skipping and dancing and twirling, was actually orchestrating movements of the entire playground! There was something about the pattern of movement which translated into a beat — like a silent movie of people dancing. Furthermore, the beat of this playground was familiar! There was a rhythm he had encountered before. He went to a friend who was a rock music aficionado, and the two of them began to search for the beat. It wasn’t long until the friend reached out to a nearby shelf, took down a cassette and slipped it into a tape deck. That was it! It took a while to synchronize the beginning of the film with the recording — a piece of contemporary rock music — but once started, the entire three and a half minutes of the film clip stayed in sync with the taped music! Not a beat or a frame of the film was out of sync!

...When he showed his film to our seminar, however, even though his explanation of what he had done was perfectly lucid, the members of the seminar had difficulty understanding what had actually happened. One school superintendent spoke of the children as “dancing to the music”; another wanted to know if the children were “humming the tune.” They were voicing the commonly held belief that music is something that is “made up” by a composer, who then passes on “his creation” to others, who, in turn, diffuse it to the larger society. The children were moving, but as with the symphony orchestra, some participants’ parts were at times silent. Eventually all participated and all stayed in sync, but the music was in them. They brought it with them to the playground as a part of shared culture. They had been doing that sort of thing all their lives, beginning with the time they synchronized their movements to their mother’s voice even before they were born.

This is truly inspirational.

Roger Ebert’s salivary gland cancer spread to his right lower jaw. Part of his mandible had to be removed. It’s not pretty and he can’t speak.

Tomorrow night his Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival opens at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Most folks in this condition (especially public figures) would stay away from the event in order to hide from the cameras and gawking gazes. Ebert says no way.

I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what?... I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers. We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to miss my festival.

And what a positive attitude:

Why do I want to go? Above all, to see the movies then to meet old friends and great directors and personally thank all the loyal audience members who continue to support the festival. At least, not being able to speak, I am spared the need to explain why every film is “overlooked,” or why I wrote “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.” Being sick is no fun. But you can have fun while you’re sick. I wouldn’t miss the festival for anything!

I can’t imagine I’d have this kind of courage. Check that: I know I wouldn’t. It’s such an inspiration to see Ebert approach his current condition and life with such optimism. What a wonderful thing.

Eric Schmidt on enterprise customers vs. consumers

“We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance. And by the way, I would argue that we in the industry forgot this. We became as a group – certainly I did – consumed with the complexity of the systems that we were building for powerful corporations, and we forgot that there’s a much larger market around consumers for simple solutions.”

How We Learn

According to William Glasser, we learn “10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what is discussed with others, 80% of what is experienced personally, and 95% of what we teach to someone else.”

Participation isn't huge on web 2.0

“Only .16% of visits to YouTube, .2% of visits to Flickr and 4.59% of visits to Wikipedia are ‘participation visits’. Wikipedia numbers break down to show that older users are the ones doing the editing…There is one new blog being created every second somewhere in the world. Posting volume has also gone way up with 1.5 million posts per day. Dave said that 21% of tracked blogs are active down from 36% in May of last year. He gave us a rundown of things the top bloggers do: Post frequently, stay at it and don’t be intimidated. Japanese is the largest language in the blogosphere with 37% of posts in Japanese.”

Play-Doh interface

“As I twist the Play-Doh and take bits away, the film reacts accordingly in real-time. Add too much Play-Doh and the film rapidly speeds up. An intimate connection is made between the user and the media. Every action has a reaction in the digital space. No scary buttons to press. No instructions to read. It’s just Play-Doh.”

Coda integrates file browser, text editor, terminal, etc. into “a single, elegant window”

“While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.So, that’s what we’ve built. Coda has a complete file browser (and the ability to work locally or remotely), publishing, a full-featured text editor, a WebKit-based preview, a CSS editor with visual tools, a full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more.”

This weekend Highrise had its one month anniversary. 30 days is a fun number, but we wanted to share some additional first-30-days numbers as well.

• Over 500,000 contacts (people and companies combined) have been added so far
• Just about 75,000 tasks have been added. That’s a lot of stuff to get done.
• 130,000 notes have been added
• Over 7,000 cases have been created
• About 40,000 emails have been forwarded into Highrise (email and Highrise get along great)
• And just over 9,000 files have been uploaded so far as well

Those numbers, the uptake, and the fact that Highrise is our fastest selling product ever tells us we’re off to a great start.

In the first 30 days we also made some significant improvements:

• Global search
• Significant printing improvements
• Significantly improved vCard import and email parsing
• Public contact cards
• Daily “what’s on my plate today?” task summary emails
• Avatars for cases
• Mass contact export and tagged contact export in single vCard, multiple vCard, and CSV file formats
• And a bunch of small things to polish up the UI and overall experience.

We’re working on some more flexible importing features now and have some other great stuff planned this year. Stay tuned.

And remember, for a limited time if you sign up for a Max or Premium Highrise account you get Campfire Premium for free. This also applies if you upgrade to a Max or Premium plan from any other Highrise plan.

Thanks again for making the first 30 days of Highrise memorable.

Cover art by Mingering Mike (book at Amazon), imaginary soul superstar from the ‘70s.

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

The Chatters
Dave Brasgalla (Icon Factory)
Brian Brasher (Firewheel Design)
Jon Hicks (Hicks Design)
Corey Marion (Icon Factory)
Michael Schmidt (Cuban Council)
Josh Williams (Firewheel Design)
(Moderated by Matt and Jason from 37signals)

Josh	I don’t do as much sketching as I used to. Sadly. Unfortunately, there are only so many ways to render "Email"
Brian	Email: a man with an E on his chest.
Brian	And I still use … drumroll … ResEdit!
Jason	ResEdit!!!!!!!!
Josh	Hooray for ResEdit!
Dave	Freehand was wonderful to draw in, but illustrator… not so much
Dave	and that’s been a block for me.
Corey	can’t beat quick pencil sketches to quicky extract ideas form the brain
Jon	I still love using Fireworks, as its pixel/vector tools are lovely
Jason
Josh	Jon: have you ever used Illustrator at all?
Jon	Oh yes
Jon	all the time now
Josh	I nearly got fired from my first job when I used ResEdit to change the Trash Can icon in OS 7.
Josh	I deleted a bunch of system resource stuff on accident.
Brian	I hacked a Mac so bad at my former place of employment it was gruesome.
Dave	Plus, I was working almost entirely in Photoshop the past few years
Jon	What do people use to create the final icon?
Dave	Photoshop and Illustrator
Dave	With all this resolution-independent business, it makes sense to hedge your bets.
Corey	Shameless Plug > IconBuilder
Jon	No shame, Iconbuilder is superb
Jon	Illustrator for everything these days
Michael	Can’t stand illustrator – feels extremely clunky. IconBuilder is terrific, though.
Josh	Since most of our work is for the web now, we export most of our artwork straight from Illustrator with Save For Web
Corey	Illustrator > Photoshop > Iconbuilder
Brian	Dave is correct, AI could benefit greatly from some of FreeHand’s drawing capability, but for creating pixel-precise icons AI is suh-weet.
Josh	Iconbuilder is awesome
Dave	My only problem is 5 years worth of Freehand vector files. :-(
Jon	I have an illustrator file set up to match the Iconbuilder expanded grid, thats how it all gets done
Jon	Scale, then tweak
Jon	usually, a LOT of tweaking
Corey	Pretty serious tweaking
Jon	then for 16px, redrawn
Corey	yep
Jon	I usually do 16px as pixel art almost
Dave	I will say this: I miss the old 32×32 pixel-click days.
Dave	.-D
Matt	Some nitty gritty questions: Do you work zoomed in or zoomed out? When scaling and making several versions of the same icon (64×64, 32×32, 16×16) do you scale down the original and then tweak or start mostly from scratch each time?
Brian	Zoomed in to work, view at 100% periodically (the virtual taking a step back from the canvas).
Josh	I just started using the Mac OS’s (10.4.8+) "zoom" feature a lot—it’s faster than using the Zoom tool in Illustrator at times.
Josh	You can set it up under Universal Access to zoom to say 3x with an easy keystroke
Matt	ah, interesting about the zoom feature
Jon	me too Josh
Jon	very useful
Jon	zoom, with smoothing turned off, of course!
Josh	Jon: of course
Corey	two windows in Illustrator or Photoshop
Corey	one at 100% one zoomed
Brian	I usually build every icon at every size. Resizing often makes a mess.
Dave	Keyline mode is often helpful
Brian	Dave’s using FH terms!
Dave	Heh. Recovering Freehander.
Corey	Ah, Freehand
Jon	Illustrator’s ‘Global Colours’ feature is a big help to me
Jon	then if I get the colours wrong, I can change the whole artwork easily
Josh	Tons of folks seem to think that just because we use vectors a lot that it’s all infinitely scalable. It’s not.

Paul Graham recently proclaimed Microsoft is dead. Time will tell, but at this very moment I’d rather be Microsoft than Yahoo.

Microsoft is still a leader. They rule the OS space, they rule the corporate desktop. They remain influential in many areas. They may not rule the web, but at least they remain leaders in very profitable spaces. And they have $40 billion in the bank.

Where is Yahoo’s leadership? What are they leading in? If they are leading, are their leadership positions profitable? Is their trajectory up or down? Their revenues are relatively flat, growth is flat, it’s all flat. You can stand to be flat for awhile when you are way ahead, but when you’re #2 and flat you’re not in a good place.

And it’s not like Yahoo is being attacked on all sides. They’re not being eaten alive by a gang of rats. They are being devoured by the 900-pound Googlerilla in the room. Google’s revenue is growing at twice the rate of the Internet ad business overall and 9x faster than sales at Yahoo.

Yahoo’s woes seem like a management issue. Semel’s gotta be on the way out soon. Yahoo has a boatload of talent. Yahoo is full of good people. But they’re not being led in the right direction. That’s on Semel.

So, yeah, for now I’d rather be Microsoft than Yahoo.
What about you?

Everyone wants to be a hero. Techies especially so. And there are special occasions where true glory awaits the hero. When there’s a crisis, it can pay to just carry on no matter what. Get the problem solved and celebrate victory. Winning through shear effort.

But most days are not like that. Most features need not heroes. They need realists. People who are willing to give up and walk away. Being a hero is all about sitting aside all costs and winning anyway. That’s not a prudent way to drive everyday development.

Here’s the problem: You agree that feature X can be done in two hours. But four hours into it, you’re still only a quarter of the way done. The natural instinct is to think “but I can’t give up now, I’ve already spent four hours on this!”.

So you go into hero mode. Determined to make this work, but also embarrassed that it isn’t already so. So the hero grabs his hermit cape and isolates himself from feedback. “I really need to get this done, so I’ll turn off IM, Campfire, email, and more for now”. And some times that works. Throwing sheer effort at the problem to get it done.

But was it worth it? Probably not. The feature was deemed valuable at a cost of two hours, not sixteen. Sixteen hours of work could have gotten four other things done that individually were at least as important. And you had to cut the feedback loop to avoid feeling too much shame, which is never a good thing to do.

That’s where the concept of sunk cost gives us a guide on what to do. It doesn’t matter what you’ve already spent. That time and money is gone. It only matters whether spending what’s left is worth it or not. Business school 101, but one of the hardest lessons to internalize.

In other words, stop being so afraid of calling it quits. You’re playing to win the full season, not a single game. Every time you play the hero card, you’re jeopardizing the next game.

Heroics are for when you have no other choice. When you can afford to take on tremendous risk because there’s no alternative. That’s probably not today.