Some recent postings at the 37signals Job Board:

SquadGod Fantasy Football is looking for a Lead Developer (PHP/MySQL) in London (W10), UK.

Milkshake is looking for a Front-End Technologist in Austin, TX.

zootoo llc is looking for a CSS/XHTML layout specialist in NY Metro area.

NEMO Design is looking for an Art Director/Senior Interactive Designer in Portland, Oregon.

The New York Times is looking for a Front End Technologist CSS web developer with AJAX in New York.

Google and YouTube Veteran Founded Online Video Start-up is looking for a Senior UI Software Engineer-Ruby-on-Rails in San Francisco.

Fotolog, Inc. is looking for a Senior Web Designer in New York City.

IDEO is looking for a Web Developer in Palo Alto, CA.

Precision Flight Controls is looking for a Firmware Designer in Sacramento, CA.

Electronic Arts is looking for a User Experience Specialist in Redwood City, CA.

Blackbaud is looking for an Interaction/User Interface Designer in Charleston, SC.

Philips Design is looking for a User Interface Designer in Andover, MA.

BuzzFeed is looking for a Business Development Director in New York, NY.

New York Magazine is looking for a Project Manager / Product Development in New York, NY.

Songbird is looking for a Senior Developer Evangelist in San Francisco, CA.

The Genographic Project: $99 to learn where you came from

“With a simple and painless cheek swab you can sample your own DNA and submit it to the lab…Your results will reveal your deep ancestry along a single line of direct descent (paternal or maternal) and show the migration paths they followed thousands of years ago. Your results will also place you on a particular branch of the human family tree.”

Feng Shui in Retail Stores

“There are four types of buildings; those that are good for people, those that are good for money, those that are good for people and money, and those that are not favorable for either. When selecting a location, a Feng Shui practitioner will examine the surrounding environment and then utilizing a Chinese Lo P’an and age old calculations will determine the nature of the building and whether the occupants should move in. Ideally, you want a building that is favorable to both people and money. In the case where it is only good for one, you can enhance the other using either the Earth element or the Water element properly placed.”

Behind the curtains of Wufoo, Blinksale, FeedBurner, and RegOnline

“Support is more demanding than most would anticipate. While multiple things can lead to support requests (poor code, bad interface, complexity, lack of documentation, etc.) what seems to matter the most to customers is how quickly, friendly, and accurately you handle it.”

Q&A with the CEO of Lego

“Monocle Editor-in-chief Tyler Brûlé talks to Lego CEO, Jrgen Vig Knudstorp, at the company’s innovation centre in Billund, Denmark.”

Managing Humans

“This book isn’t just about management, it’s about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff. It’s about what to do during the first ninety days of your new gig, and explains why you should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.”

Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

Mark I.	AT&T & Apple announce iPhone service plans: http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/apple/28807/
Jason F.	Oh cool, checking
Mark I.
Jason F.	I love that there are just 3 plans
Mark I.	I love that there’s unlimited data access.
Mark I.	The cell providers usually charge through the nose for it..
Jason F.	of course people will look at the minutes and price and just compare those to other plans
Jason F.	And when you do that it looks expensive
Jason F.	But with unlimited data… It’s a fair deal.
Jason F.	And AT&T has rollover too, which is great
Mark I.	These plans are totally driven by Apple, it’s obviousl
Mark I.	They make too much sense to have originated at a telco. :)

A couple of Lil’ 37signals fave authors while growing up…

Crockett Johnson:

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Amazon Web Services “success story” on 37signals
Amazon Web Services recently published a success story about 37signals’ usage of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

How a Masters student at Drexel uses Basecamp
“I’ve learned a lot just by interacting with the system and paying attention to what it does and how it does it. For me, being an aspiring systems developer Basecamp often makes me think ‘wow that’s really cool – i wonder how they do that.’”

Basecamp gets OpenID and “Open Bar”
Use the same login for Highrise, the Highrise Forums, the Basecamp Forums, and Basecamp. Plus you can use that same login at any OpenID-enabled site on the web.

Highrise has got your back in customer service interactions
Highrise is a handy way to keep track of all those pesky interactions with cable companies, cell phone companies, electric/gas companies, etc…Highrise makes it easy to remember whom you talked to and when. You’ll have a paper trail that you can refer back to at any time. You’ll be able to track all your conversations so nothing slips through the cracks. And you’ll be able to hold people accountable for promises that are made.

Insert “Update” tag graphic in Basecamp posts
Dave Rosen points out a neat little way to indicate updated content within Basecamp. When you’re typing a message/comment, just put “[UPDATE]” in there. Example: Basecamp turns your update text into a little tag graphic.

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

George Orwell: "Politics and the English Language"

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.” [tx B]

How uses, not innovations, drive human technology

“Carl Sagan once said, ‘We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.’ If he meant that we are unfamiliar with the principles on which the technology around us works, he was right—there’s an enormous gap between the knowledge of makers and the knowledge of users—but this is exactly as it should be. As users, we typically want our technology to be a black box; we don’t want to be bothered with adjusting it, monitoring it, repairing it, or knowing about its inner workings. A sure sign of the success of a technology is that we scarcely think of it as technology at all.”

Humane interface philosophy

“Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn’t be that hard; on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. But on newer digital wristwatches—ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts—it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason.”

Video: David Byrne and Daniel Levitin conversation

The singer/songwriter/artist/author discusses music, science, memory, and more with the producer/neuroscientist. Fascinating discussion.

Are you climate friendly?

“Calculate the carbon emissions from driving your car, air travel, and the electricity used in your home or office or combine travel and power to offset events such as a wedding or conference. We’ll tell you how many carbon credits you need to neutralise your emissions and become Climate Friendly.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp wins in the Productivity category in the CNET Webware 100 Awards
Huzzah! Basecamp, is a winner in the Productivity category in the CNET Webware 100 Awards.

Add pre-built iCalendars to your Backpack Calendar
Did you know you can add pre-built iCalendars to your Backpack Calendar?...You can find a list of calendar options at iCalShare. Apple.com also has a list of iCalendars.

Basecamp gets a global iCalendar feed
Last night we just added a global iCalendar feed that contains all the milestones for all your projects in a single iCalendar feed. You can still subscribe to each project individually if you’d like, but if you prefer a more all-in-one solution, subscribing to the global feed is your best bet.

Pyro 1.6 is released for Campfire
We can’t run our business without Campfire and Pyro is our browser-of-choice when running Campfire. Pyro 1.6, the latest release, brings these great enhancements…

Room descriptions at Campfire
Campfire lets you add a description to your different rooms. This can be a helpful way to clarify the purpose of a room. You can also have some fun with this field. We like to fill the description area of our main chat room with quotes that are inspirational or educational.

Robby Russell explains how to use Highrise to organize customer contacts
Robby Russell’s review of Highrise (part 2) includes an in-depth example of how he uses Highrise to organize contacts. He takes us through the whole cycle: initial customer query > review in email program > forward to Highrise > schedule follow up tasks. If you’re looking for insight into how to put Highrise to work for your business, check it out.

Dean Kamen's commencement speech at Bates College

“You are moving for the first time into a world where ideas matter more than all the stuff there is. But those ideas have to come from educated people and they have to be used as a tool and not as a weapon. That’s the biggest change that’s happening…So I would beg every educated person in this world to remember, every day when you get up, that you are an incredibly small minority of all humanity. And with all the privileges I understand it gives us, I think it gives us an enormous responsibility to be leaders that do the right things for the right reasons. And remember that you can be doing good while you are doing well.”

Craig Newmark podcast interview

“Everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.” Other interesting Craigslist facts: Seven billion pageviews a month, the company has never had a tech quit in 12 years, they never hold meetings.

Edward Tufte takes his next book to Real-land

“No more staring at pixels on the screen. More staring at…what’s going into Real-land. Movies, books, DVDs—I don’t know. It’s called ‘walking, seeing, and constructing,’ and it’s now in Spaceland. No more representations. Instead of designing with Adobe Illustrator, I’m designing with a Komatsu excavator.”

YouTube Presidential debate

“We’re moving to a society that is video-based from one that is text-based, whether we like it or not. Candidates are starting to recognize that the only way to fight the potential of the tsunami of voter-generated video is to produce lots of video themselves. The Internet culture recognizes that Internet video is more authentic, more granular, less scripted than television, and it is an antidote to sound-bite politics.”

Having a mindset of constant criticism

“You have to reshape your mind until you’re finding fault with everything…And as you fix more and more of these little details, as you polish and shape and shine and craft the little corners of your product, something magical happens. The inches add up to feet, the feet add up to yards, and the yards add up to miles. And you ship a truly great product. The kind of product that feels great, that works intuitively, that blows people away.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp links Kidrobot’s NYC designers to manufacturers in China
In “The New Instant Companies,” Business 2.0 talks about how Kidrobot, a retailer of limited edition art toys and apparel, saves tens of thousands of dollars and tons of time by using Basecamp to collaborate with its engineers in China.

Highrise tags help you drill down to specific contacts
Tags are a great way to harness the power of Highrise and help you drill down to a specific group.

Improved date picker for Basecamp Milestones
We just pushed a Basecamp update that includes a long top-requested feature: A calendar date picker for milestones. Now when you add a new milestone, or edit an existing milestone, you pick the date from a calendar instead of a series of pulldown menus.

Some recent postings at the 37signals Job Board:

Northwestern University is looking for a Sr. Web Applications/Software Developer in Evanston, IL.

LevelTen Design is looking for a Web Developer in Cleveland, OH.

imeem, inc. is looking for a Visual/Interaction Designer in San Francisco, CA.

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is looking for a Web Innovator in New York, NY.

SpikeSource is looking for a UI Designer in Redwood City, CA.

Link to Life Connect Ltd is looking for a Technical Architect in Nantgarw, Cardiff.

Waterfall Mobile is looking for a Software Engineer in San Francisco.

Skype is looking for a Product Designer in London.

Epoch.com is looking for a Senior Web Developer in Santa Monica, CA.

Comcast is looking for a Web Developer in Philadelphia, PA.

Joost is looking for a Web Designer in New York, NY.

Library of Congress is looking for an Information Technology Specialist in Washington, DC.

Inkling is looking for a Senior Rails Developer in Chicago, IL.

Avenue A Razorfish is looking for a User Experience Lead in Austin, TX.

AOL is looking for a Tech Analyst in Dulles, VA.

Find a job or put your design/programming job in front of the best at the Job Board. Freelancers/contractors can meet their match at the Gig Board.