Some flint, a water bottle, and a knife. That’s all Bear Grylls has with him when he gets “lost” on Man vs. Wild.

In each episode of Man vs. Wild, Bear strands himself in popular wilderness destinations where tourists often find themselves lost or in danger. As he finds his way back to civilization, he demonstrates local survival techniques, including escaping quicksand in the Moab Desert, navigating dangerous jungle rivers in Costa Rica, crossing ravines in the Alps and surviving sharks off Hawaii.

I admit the show is pretty ridiculous: He’s stuck in the frozen tundra but stops to demonstrate how to climb out of a frozen lake!? What’s the crew up to while he is starving/freezing? You have to take the whole thing with a big grain of salt.

But it’s also damn compelling. Even if you never venture into the wild, it’s fascinating to watch him catch and eat snakes, bugs, and fish, build shelters, snow caves, and rafts, find utility in urine and dung, etc. Discovery.com has some clips and a list of survival tips from the show.

Some of the lessons he offers sound ripe for being turned into a business “survival” guide too. For example:

The way out of jungle or mountains? Find a stream or river and follow it.

You never know how steep something is until you “rub noses with it.” From far away, you can’t really judge.

Survival is about playing the odds. Expect to fail before you succeed.

Building a fire is a great way to boost morale. And keeping morale up is the key to survival.

Never rely on one source for catching food. If you set up a fishing net, go out and start hunting for something else.

Do your homework before going on a trip — know the local geography and what’s edible there.

Expect luck in your life. “People come through hopeless situations because they push themselves to extraordinary places.”

Comcast vs. Verizon
David Norton writes: “I think that a lot more consumers do not have landline phones and therefore must use the address search to determine eligibility for high-speed internet and other services. Check out the difference between Comcast’s form and Verizon’s form…

Comcast

Verizon

...Comcast gets it right here with just three fields: street address, apartment # (optional), and zip code. A whole lot of the required information on the Verizon form is redundant—and in the cases when it’s not, maybe a second form could ask the exceptional customers for more information.”

USPS
Adam Gretencord writes: “For the ‘Search by Address’ tab on the USPS ‘ZIP Code Lookup’ page...

ZIP Code field? If I knew what it was I wouldn’t be here.”

Have an interesting link, story, or screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Contact svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

AM yesterday: Press release issued: “Two years of 100-percent uptime at 365 Main’s San Francisco facility”...

SAN FRANCISCO, July 24 /PRNewswire/—365 Main Inc., developer and operator of the world’s finest data centers, has provided online retailer RedEnvelope with two years of 100-percent uptime at 365 Main’s San Francisco facility.

PM yesterday: 365 Main datacenter power outage brings down major websites

It seems that the Web 2.0 datacenter 365 Main, in the heart of SOMA, has lost it’s power. Sites that are affected include Craigstlist, Technorati, Yelp, Netflix, AdBrite and all Six Apart properties, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox.

Spooky. [via Metafilter]

Side note: For a bit, The Six Apart Twitter stream was one of the only places information was available on the issue. Will we see more companies launch Twitter streams for “just in case” scenarios?

Best Cellars

Best Cellars tries to demystify the wine purchasing process with a color spectrum for wine categories.

Best Cellars classifies its wines based on their taste and style, rather than grape type or place of origin. Our selections are presented in eight distinct style categories to help you choose the right wine for any food, mood or occasion…

Why have we chosen to categorize wine by style, using words, icons and colors? Because we want to make shopping for wine as much fun as drinking it. Because we think that it encourages you to try wonderful wines that would otherwise be overlooked on your way to Bordeaux, Burgundy, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. Because we believe that buying wine should be a multiple-choice question (rather than an essay test) where all the answers are correct. Because you know what you like, and we know wine.

Campaign Monitor

Really nice 2 minute demo of Campaign Monitor. Editing is very pro and whole thing feels more like an infomercial than a typical software demo.

Apparently all presidential candidate logos must use red, white, and blue.

2008 logos:

2004 logos:

I know, I know. Gotta look patriotic and all that. But isn’t there some virtue in standing out from the crowd?

When every candidate uses the same color scheme, it ceases to convey patriotism or “a stronger America” and starts to reek of bureaucracy, design by committee, fear of change, and politics as usual.

The last candidate to break from the r/w/b convention? Not surprisingly…

Logos from 4president.org.

An open letter to people who wear those Bluetooth headsets that blink:

In case you haven’t noticed, your eyes are actually located in front of your ears.

So that blue light that blinks incessantly can’t actually be seen by you. The rest of us, however, do see it. And it annoys us. Stop.

“But how else will I impress the ladies?” you ask. I suggest purchasing some of those rims that keep on spinning after you stop.

Grid-it notepads are a series of notepads based on the layout grids of famous publications: “By moving the grids from the backround to the foreground, and divorcing them from their content, we pay homage as well as render the invisible visible.”

Some of the choices: Die Neue Typografie, Le Modulor, The Gutenberg Bible, and The Guardian. The Art Director’s Club awards site offers an up-close look at the pads. Couldn’t find a place to purchase though.

The Art of the Grid site also includes a collection of quotes about grids. A sampling:

Slimmy
The funny copy for Slimmy explains it is not for people with a “George Castanza wallet.”

STYLE WARNING: This wallet is not a magic trick.

If you have a “George Castanza wallet,” with over 10 credit cards, pictures of distant relatives, and 5 years of financial records, you WILL NOT be able to magically conceal the same contents in the Slimmy.

The Slimmy experience is about security, comfort and minimalism. Carry only what you need so that you are less exposed to theft, less emcumbered, and look better…

A Slimmy can help, but you have to want to change.

Mosso
The Mosso Story talks about how the company’s founders decided to scratch their own itch.

We were a two-man operation: a graphic artist and a web developer. Everyone said that for the sites we wanted to create, we really needed to get our own server and spend the time to manage it. But to us, that was as crazy as saying that to sell t-shirts online, we had to spend our time driving a Mack truck doing the deliveries. There had to be a better way to host our projects. Right?

We started Mosso because we knew there were others like us: other web agencies who wanted to promise their clients that their websites and email would work—always work—without being the ones responsible for all the technology.

The OS split for visits to BasecampHQ.com, (the marketing site, not the actual app).

How Costco Became the Anti-Wal-Mart explores the interesting formula for success that CEO Jim Sinegal has implemented at the nation’s fifth-largest retailer: Sell a limited number of items, keep costs down, rely on high volume, pay workers well, have customers buy memberships and aim for upscale shoppers, especially small-business owners. In addition, don’t advertise – that saves 2 percent a year in costs.

5 lessons revealed in the article:

1. Take care of your employees.

Costco’s average pay, for example, is $17 an hour, 42 percent higher than its fiercest rival, Sam’s Club. And Costco’s health plan makes those at many other retailers look Scroogish. One analyst, Bill Dreher of Deutsche Bank, complained last year that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.”

Sinegal begs to differ. He rejects Wall Street’s assumption that to succeed in discount retailing, companies must pay poorly and skimp on benefits, or must ratchet up prices to meet Wall Street’s profit demands.

Good wages and benefits are why Costco has extremely low rates of turnover and theft by employees, he said. And Costco’s customers, who are more affluent than other warehouse store shoppers, stay loyal because they like that low prices do not come at the workers’ expense. “This is not altruistic,” he said. “This is good business.”

2. Keep prices low.

He also dismisses calls to increase Costco’s product markups. Mr. Sinegal, who has been in the retailing business for more than a half-century, said that heeding Wall Street’s advice to raise some prices would bring Costco’s downfall…

At Costco, one of Mr. Sinegal’s cardinal rules is that no branded item can be marked up by more than 14 percent, and no private-label item by more than 15 percent. In contrast, supermarkets generally mark up merchandise by 25 percent, and department stores by 50 percent or more.

“They could probably get more money for a lot of items they sell,” said Ed Weller, a retailing analyst at ThinkEquity.

But Mr. Sinegal warned that if Costco increased markups to 16 or 18 percent, the company might slip down a dangerous slope and lose discipline in minimizing costs and prices.

Mr. Sinegal, whose father was a coal miner and steelworker, gave a simple explanation. “On Wall Street, they’re in the business of making money between now and next Thursday,” he said. “I don’t say that with any bitterness, but we can’t take that view. We want to build a company that will still be here 50 and 60 years from now.”

3. Pay attention to the customer, not the competition.

But it is the customer, more than the competition, that keeps Mr. Sinegal’s attention. “We’re very good merchants, and we offer value,” he said. “The traditional retailer will say: ‘I’m selling this for $10. I wonder whether I can get $10.50 or $11.’ We say: ‘We’re selling it for $9. How do we get it down to $8?’ We understand that our members don’t come and shop with us because of the fancy window displays or the Santa Claus or the piano player. They come and shop with us because we offer great values.”