Jason Calacanis wants you to save money for your startup, so he has come up with 17 tips on how. The intention is good. Working lean is great and means you probably won’t need outside money. And there’s some good stuff, like don’t buy Microsoft Office and skip the phone system. But there’s also some depressing bullshit like:

Fire people who are not workaholics…. come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. go work at the post office or stabucks if you want balance in your life. For realz

Here’s another take on that: Fire the people who are workaholics! Here’s five reasons why:

1. Workaholics may well say that they enjoy those 14 hour days week after week, but despite their claims, working like that all month, all the time is not going to be sustainable. When the burnout crash comes, and it will, it’ll hit all the harder and according to Murphy at the least convenient time.
2. People who are workaholics are likely to attempt to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at the problem. If you’re dealing with people working with anything creatively that’s a deadbeat way to get great work done.
3. People who always work late makes the people who don’t feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. That’ll lead to guilt, misery, and poor morale. Worse, it’ll lead to ass-in-seat mentality where people will “stay late” out of obligation, but not really be productive.
4. If all you do is work, your value judgements are unlikely to be sound. Making good calls on “is it worth it?” is absolutely critical to great work. Missing out on life in general to put more hours in at the office screams “misguided values”.
5. Working with interesting people is more interesting than just working. If all you got going for your life is work, work, work, the good team-gelling lunches are going to be some pretty boring straight shop talk. Yawn. I’d much rather hear more about your whittling project, your last trek, how your garden is doing, or when you’ll get your flight certificate.

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

Update: Calacanis reeled it in and reconsidered, sorta. Requiring passion is certainly something we hopefully can all rally about.

One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. That’s a terrible way to get from those 5 people to 5,000 or reach those 100 million users.

To reach the top, you have to be willing to use all the tricks that makes sense at the earlier stages. That’s your advantage over the guys who are already sitting up there. So you’re not Google and don’t do a billion dollars in profit every quarter. But I bet you that you’re way more capable of quick, sweeping changes. When you have 100 million users on your email platform, you can’t do the same quick iterations that constantly push upgrades out. When you just have your first few hundred or thousand, you can.

So stop worrying too much about whether giving everyone in your company a credit card at 10 people is going to work when you’re a hundred times bigger. If it doesn’t, you change, come up with something that does work for that size.

The same with your infrastructure. We started on a single server for everything when Basecamp was first launched. There was no point in growing a huge farm of machines if the thing was going to flop anyway. Today we have many more machines and redundancies and surveillance and more because we’re at a different level.

The best way to get to the point of needing more is by optimizing for today. Use the strengths of your current situation instead of being so eager to adopt the hassles of tomorrow.

Color me not surprised: The MacBook Air seems to be selling really well for Apple. So says a report from Ars Technica that quotes retail anecdotes from Apple stores, Best Buy, quoting Amazon lead times, and noting:

The MacBook Air has been the top selling Mac since before the middle of February, outselling the MacBook, the iMac, and the MacBook Pro—this, despite week-long shipping delays.

Geeks have a tendency to drastically overestimate the value of extendability, number of ports, and benchmarks while drastically underestimate the value of design, feel, and convenience as perceived by regular people. This would seem a case in point.

I’ve now used the Air for over a month and so has my girlfriend. Neither of us have ever been annoyed by any of the perceived shortcomings, but we’ve both been thrilled and continue to be so by the advantages.

If you’re on the fence, I’d heartily encourage you to jump on board. I highly doubt you’ll be disappointed. You can see availability for your state on the Apple site.

(Now Apple, where’s my kickback :)?)

Safari 3 is awesome. It’s really fast, it finally got decent debugging tools, and it just feels so native in ways no other browser on OS X does. But all is not well. Safari 3 is one hungry hound for cookies!

Every time Safari crashes and burns, which is a surprisingly frequent occurrence when Flash or a media player is involved, it decides to take all my cookies with it and munch away. That’s pretty effin’ annoying.

It means logging in to a ton of sites that already had the “remember me” setting put. It often even means requesting a new security token from Chase Bank before I can see my statement. It just blows.

So please Safari team, can we get the cookie lust under control? Of course, it would be even better if Safari didn’t go down as much, but I recognize that media players and flash can make that hard (Firefox often goes down on the same counts, but leaves the cookies alone).

Gaboogie is organizing a contest for developers to mashup their voice-application Lypp with Highrise. There are some cool prizes up for grabs including a $3,000 Apple gift certificate for number #1 and free service from Lypp and Highrise.

They got some cool ideas to get you going, like “Integrated Conference Calling within Highrise, Scheduled Calls, Click to Call Contacts in Highrise, Call-back Task links, just to name a few”. Get programming!

Kottke has a great point about the stupidity of trying to cast promising start-ups as The Next Google, The Next Microsoft, or The Next Whatever.

The true giants, like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, come to life so rarely that the chances of random company X being one of them is slim to the point that we might as well try to guess who’s going to be struck by lightning tomorrow or win the lottery.

But even more importantly, the real nexts are never repeats of the last next. That’s what makes them nexts! Thus the comparison is irrelevant.

Nobody is likely going to be the next Microsoft in much of anything that makes Microsoft the company it is: the Windows/Office power-punch. Google has been billed as such many times, but its entire being has nothing to do with the defining characteristics of Microsoft.

Defining nexts seem to be less about the companies and their character than about lazy writers starved for imagination to come up with something better than a tired cliche.

I’ve been a virtual desktop user for a long time. I have Rails development on one, 37signals apps on another, communication on a third, feed reading and browsing on a third, and a few spares for clean-slate thinking.

These desktops all fall under the notion of task partitioning, not app partitioning. They all have Safari windows, many have TextMate windows and terminals too. Gruber has described the trouble with trying to fit this pattern on Spaces in the past.

But it seems that all you need to have bliss is two things: The latest version of TextMate (1455), which forces the Find windows to appear on the current desktop instead of the last on they were used on.

And then this neat hack from Mac OS X Hints that let’s you turn off the default Spaces behavior of switching desktops when you select an application that doesn’t have a window on the current. Which is mighty annoying when you want a Safari window on your communication desktop, but are forced to either right-click the dock for one or go to the programming desktop, click new, and then drag the window down to communications.

Between these two fixes, I’m now a content Spaces users and no longer wish for a Leopard port of the good old DesktopManager.

I’ve now been using the Air for some time as my only laptop. The Pro still hasn’t left the desktop and I doubt it ever will while I own it. My girlfriend replaced her regular MacBook with an Air as well. The verdict after extended use? L-o-v-i-n-g it. Both of us.

Gruber has a great post today on the appeal of the Air, which serves well to sum up the experience. The machine is plenty fast for everything I do with a computer. It’s plenty fast for emailing, browsing, photos, programming, and more. Probably the only people who wouldn’t find the performance of the Air good enough are the same people lusting after an 8-core Mac Pro.

That’s certainly a fair position. If you do computational intensive work, then you’ll want all the firepower you can get. Most people are not like that, though. I think we’ve reached the point where the computational firepower for laptops is simply Good Enough in the Innovator’s Dilemma sense of the term. Meaning that the puck is going to go somewhere else. That we’ll start caring about other things now.

For a laptop, those other things are exactly what the Air is optimizing: Thin, light, and sleek. But what I continue to be impressed with the most on the Air is simply the build quality. The MacBook Pro has OK build quality, but the regular MacBook frankly blows in this department in my mind. The plastic feels too cheap, it creaks and bends, and the black surface gets permanently smudged way too quickly. It just doesn’t feel tight in the same way the Air does.

The Air also works great with a 24” screen hooked up. I actually enjoyed working on one of those at the office the other day. No, it’s not as gorgeous as the 30” running at home, but it’s still pretty alright. So the only reason I still have the Pro is to run that 30” at home and even that is somewhat of a dubious argument if I hadn’t already invested in it.

That’s a long way around of saying I couldn’t agree more with Gruber. The Air is a perfect one-machine solution for a heck of a lot of people. Dismissing it as merely a 3rd computer vanity accessory, as I’ve seen many do, is misguided and not based on actually using one for a longer period of time.

If you fall into the category of feeling your machine is fast enough to do what you’re currently doing, I’d strongly encourage you to take a look at the Air and enjoy somebody optimizing for other factors than just performance.

BTW, I promise this will be the last love song I write for the Air. At least for a while :)

Since I got the MacBook Air, I’ve been using it as my exclusive laptop. The MacBook Pro has not even been disconnected from my 30” at the home office desk a single time. The joys, wonders, and more-than-adequate-for-real-work goodness of the Air is for a post in itself, though.

What has really surprised me is that having two Macs is not half the hassle I thought it would be. I remember back in the day when I still had my PC and I got a iBook what a pain it was to keep the two in reasonable sync. That scared me good from ever having two machines again.

But times have indeed changed. Here are the tools that keep me happy with two machines:

• .Mac: It keeps my bookmarks, contacts, and keychain in constant sync. All happening in the background. Once you turn it on, you never think of it again. It just works.
• IMAP: I’ve used IMAP in the past with varying levels of success, but for now it just seems to work. I’m using GMail and can now enjoy the same, synced inbox across the MBP, MBA, iPhone, and web access.
• SVN: All my code for joy and profit lives in source repositories in the sky. So whatever I check in on one is available on the next machine I work on.

These three tools cover 95% of all my syncing needs and probably yours too. The only thing that I don’t yet have a good, automatic solution to is photos, music, and my desktop.

So far I haven’t been bothered enough to set up something techy like rsync and have just copied things back and forth by hand, but it would be nice to top it off with something here. A little disappointing that .Mac can’t cover these three bases too, but not a big deal.

So if you’re thinking of either getting a Mac Pro in addition to your laptop or an Air in addition to whatever, I’d say you at least shouldn’t think twice because of the trouble with keeping the two in sync.

Hot on the heels of Yahoo’s announcement to get on board with OpenID comes the news that Microsoft, Google, IBM, and VeriSign are all jumping on too. That’s fantastic news. If they stick to it, I’m sure it won’t take too long for everyone else to follow suit, and we’ll finally have that Internet-wide authentication system.

While we’re already taking advantage of OpenID on Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise and integrating them all through our OpenBar, there’s still a lot more to do. We have quite a few plans to take OpenID usage even further and the news that all the big boys are starting to pay attention as well only prove to encourage those plans.

So if you haven’t already looked into this whole OpenID thing, I’d strongly recommend doing so. It’s one of those things where before you have it, it doesn’t really seem like a big deal. But once you do, you find it hard to believe you ever lived without it. And you’ll be somewhat annoyed when applications don’t support it (yes, yes, we’ll get Campfire on board as well).