Mint
Daniel Weiner: “The Mint forum lets you view a page of 30 posts that haven’t been replied to yet. It’s a great way to help other people without having to go through pages of posts that have already been answered.”

MySpace
Tony Cosentini: “If you want to narrow down your search results on MySpace by zip code, you have to specify how close the results should be. The default distance is set to any which doesn’t change your search results at all and causes you to waste time having to by forcing you to click on the drop down.”

In Momofuku Ko, The Full Reveal [via JK], hot NYC chef David Chang discusses changes in his restaurant empire and how his restaurants are a “spiritual home.” Although it’s foodie talk, a lot of the issues apply to all kinds of businesses, including those in the web sphere.

He talks about learning from mistakes (and how that gets harder to do once people are watching you)...

If we have learned anything, it’s that we’re terrible at opening restaurants and really good at making mistakes. We’re okay with that – learning from our mistakes has helped us grow as cooks and restaurant operators – but it’s harder to change and learn and grow when you’re constantly under a microscope.

Hype starts to obscure real value and distracts from the real task at hand…

Also, too much in the restaurant business is about hype right now. (I know we are lucky in that department and, trust me, we are thankful for the opportunities the attention has afforded us.) But chefs are not rock stars and are not cool. Restaurant openings are not movie premieres. All the bullshit distracts from the real task at hand – cooking – and from the food, which is what we’re in it for.

Dougal MacPherson sent in a photo of a menu from a recent Qantas flight he took from Melbourne to New Zealand. At the bottom of the menu, there is a “journey planner” timeline that shows passengers when they will be served meals, receive immigration documents, etc. It’s a creative way to set in-flight expectations.

Click for full version

“Against the Odds” is the autobiography of vacuum guru James Dyson. Jason recently mentioned it in our internal Campfire chat room: “One of the best books about design, business, invention, and entrepreneurship I’ve ever read. Highly recommended. It’s really inspirational. His persistence is otherworldly. You won’t believe what he went through to get this product to market.” Here’s one customer’s review of the book at Amazon:

I especially enjoyed the part about the early development of the machine, in which he made something like one version per day for over three years, varying things one at a time, measuring everything to exhaustion, all the while sinking further and further into debt. Edisonian it was, but sometimes that is the only way—the quest for the quick breakthrough emphasized by modern industrial managers can be a real obstacle to progress.

Ahead, a couple of interesting excerpts from articles on Dyson…

The inventor's life, he says in The Independent, is "one of failure".

When you watch a writer on a movie programme tearing up page after page, you think he’s in utter despair. And, in many ways, that’s what it’s like for us, but you learn much more in fact from an experiment which didn’t work out how you intended, but instead sheds some light on possibly another way of doing something. It can get very depressing but then suddenly, one day you make a break through, and that’s very exciting…

You can’t go out and do market research to try to solve these problems about what to do next because usually, or very often, you’re doing the opposite of what market research would tell you. You can’t base a new project two years ahead on current market trends and what users are thinking at the moment. That sounds very arrogant. But it isn’t arrogance. You can’t go and ask your customers to be your inventors. That’s your job…

The article also describes the suspended table in the company’s boardroom:

Mr Dyson thought it might “be nice” to have a table with no legs. At all. So in the company’s boardroom there is a giant glass table that is suspended from the ceiling by four cables. Another cable in the centre anchors it to the floor. And there you have the perfect example of how form fuses with function in Mr Dyson’s world.

Funky pinhole panoramic camera

Casado Pinhole is a panoramic camera reduced to its simplest elements. [tx CH]

“His paintbrush is his Macintosh”
Profile of Takagi Masakatsu, visual artist and musician. He transforms video footage into “paintings in motion.”

Moleskine popups
Moleskine popups: “Done on the run with pocket tools and available light…uses two spreads, edges glued together.” (more) [via drawn]

When we launched Highrise, we gave the forums a new look. We’ve since redone the Basecamp Forums too.

The old forums were heavy on borders and grids — “chartjunk” in Tuftese.

We customized the new forums, which are powered by Beast, so they’re cleaner and more open.

A public space
We give the forums a different look than our apps or marketing sites because we want people to feel like the forums are in a separate place — somewhere far away from the products they use everyday. The forums are a place where people can talk about the product without being inside it.

Gizmo
Matt Carey: “i came across the ‘learn more overview’ at the gizmo project site today. wow, someone needs to tell them that ‘less is more’! i’m still confused! box and arrow overload!”

Abel Cole
Melissa Fehr writes:

Abel & Cole are an organic produce delivery company here in the UK, and I just signed up to them this morning. The interesting bit is that within your account preferences, you can specify which fruit and veg you dislike, which you don’t mind, and which you love, all with an easy smiley face matrix. Then the system takes these into account when filling your box each week so you get the stuff you love if it’s available (like blueberries and squash for me) and never the stuff I hate (like brussel sprouts).

What’s cool is that you can specify groups all at once, so if you dislike all berries, you can choose to exclude all of them at once, or just exclude strawberries put keep all other berries, and you can set up temporary exclusions, like if you have a ton of apples on hand already and don’t need any more for this week’s delivery.

I just thought this was such a great way to get across quite complicated information about each person’s food foibles, and it was done in such a clear and simple way.

While record labels bemoan their sad plight, artists like Nine Inch Nails are coming up with creative ways to inject mystery and playfulness into the music promotion game.

The elaborate campaign for NIN’s new “Year Zero” album — 42 Entertainment is the agency behind it — is a great example of blurring the line between marketing and entertainment.

Trail of clues
It all started with a concert t-shirt:

The bolded letters on the shirt spelled out a domain name that describes Parepin, “a revolutionary drug.” This kickstarted “a long, elaborate, cookie trail of clues and cryptically hidden website URLs hidden in the most unlikely of places.”

Another version of the truth is also one of the campaign’s sites. It features an idyllic photo and message, but clicking and dragging on the photo reveals hidden, darker imagery.

That dystopian vision is reflected in the album’s songs too. Fans discovered USB Flash drives left in bathrooms at the band’s shows. On them were unprotected versions of the new tracks. These leaked songs soon showed up online as another part of the puzzle.

The power of mystery
Rolling Stone said the “Year Zero” project is “the most innovative promotion scheme since the leaked sex tape.”

NIN have treated their fans to a sort of Where’s Waldo game that includes tour merchandising, a dizzying network of websites and, umm, bathrooms in European concert halls.

Adrants praised the campaign and said, “Mythology adds fuel to fan fire.”

This is the way a viral campaign should be run – with a brand using multiple forms of media to play with its users and leave them things to find and chase after.

The Google perspective
Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, points out why the campaign is a winner from an SEO perspective.

- Check out the text from iamtryingtobelieve.com/purpose.htm. It’s so jittery that it’s hard to read, but if you view the source, you’ll notice that it’s mostly text content, which lets search engines index it.

- The buzz built pretty organically. USB drives were left in bathrooms at conferences and messages were hidden in conference T-shirts. It’s much better to let people find you than to push too hard to get noticed. The links from the “people-find-you” approach are more organic than if someone spammed to get links to viral sites.

- I appreciate that the campaign picked a lot of terms (e.g. “parepin”) that were unique nonsense words. That keeps the marketing campaign from crufting up search results for actual topics or real peoples’ names, which is a pretty rude thing to do.

I recently decided to upgrade my cookware. I asked a friend of mine who’s a chef for recommendations. Here’s what she had to say:

I like All-Clad stainless, I’ve had good luck with it.

I also have some copper cookware that Williams Sonoma got from a French company, but I don’t believe they carry that exact brand anymore. Copper conducts heat really wonderfully; it gets a patina which some people don’t like, but I don’t mind. I never polish it and I don’t think that affects its performance.

I dream of also owning some Le Creuset cookware, at least a Dutch oven to make braised meats and stews.

Calphalon is a brand people like a lot, too, but I haven’t personally worked much with it.

Re: nonstick, it won’t hurt to have one nonstick pan for certain uses, but keep in mind the lifespan of nonstick is not very long because the nonstick surface gradually wears away.

There is also cast-iron, which can be a great option and not very expensive. It conducts heat well. But you have to take care of it; you shouldn’t really submerge it in water, and you need to rub it with vegetable oil to keep it conditioned/seasoned. Very respected among cooks.

The 8-year old in me snickered since that’s the first time I’ve heard the phrase “dutch oven” used in a serious manner. Anyway, I wound up purchasing this All-Clad Stainless 6-Piece Set and so far it’s great. Made some hash browns this weekend and got some crispy onion action that I never achieved with my previous pans.

Related: Lodge cast iron [SvN]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 recently launched with a streamlined, cut-through-the-crap service-level agreement (SLA). The old version was seven pages, the new version is one page (competitor Novell’s is 36 pages). According to Red Hat, the new SLA eliminates legalese and offers “no questions asked” support on anything it makes.

With one fell swoop of a presentation slide, [Red Hat vice president of support Ian] Gray took the nine-page document that accompanied Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and turned it into a one-page affair meant to simplify a customer’s service experience. “If we ship the bits, we support the bits,” he said. “No more legalese.”

In the old SLA’s place was a “production support scope of coverage.” While technically an SLA, this one-page document now says if Red Hat made it, and it’s production-ready, then Red Hat will support it—no questions asked.

Plus, the company is simplifying support for customers too. It is creating the Red Hat Cooperative Resolution Center to solve problems even when they come from partner products.

In addition, Red Hat created a support center called the Red Hat Cooperative Resolution Center. The center will work to solve issues whether they arrive from Red Hat technology or a partner’s applications, executives said. With this center, Red Hat will take sole ownership of inquiries for any partner’s product that runs on RHEL 5, regardless of whether the problem lies with RHEL 5 or the partner’s product. It’s important to note that Red Hat says it isn’t just covering vendors like Oracle, but all of its partner applications as well. According to Red Hat, its support technicians will accomplish this by working with the support staff of a customer’s vendors to solve a problem.

Kudos to Red Hat for seeing things through their customers’ eyes. Customers don’t care who/what caused the problem, they just want it fixed. When multiple technology providers are involved, it’s nice to know you can count on someone to get it done rather than shift the blame. [tx ED]