BrainFuel

This is pretty cool. Play chess against a computer and watch as the computer visually shows you its thinking process. Try it out at Thinking Machine 4.

I stumbled across the Puget Sound Energy website the other day and liked the look of it. So there you go.

I couldn’t help but download every single mp3 from this site: The Top 100 American Speeches.

I liked the look of the Nationwide Insurance site.

In the past year or two I’ve met a couple of people who only know of two or three fonts. They’re usually the old school fonts and come in one of these flavors:

And, if they’re being brave they’ll live with Arial or Verdana.

I just spent 2 hours locked in a room with about a dozen creative business owners. We talked about business issues that are common to design firms and web agencies. We’re planning to meet once a month and see what happens.

Quite a number of the people were just starting out on their own (2-4 years) and others were veterans (20+ years in the biz). I couldn’t believe how many of them wanted to take their company to the next level. For many of them, this meant striking out and hiring employees, getting an office, and so forth. It’s the thing to do.

It’s a great idea. Talking to business owners who do the same thing you do is great for stress relief. There are issues like payroll, hiring and firing, sales, marketing, project schedules and project management, freelancers vs hiring, and tons of other stuff to talk about. Talking to other business owners helps with perspective.

Some random stuff, links to some cool apps, and more:

This Flash intro on the HP web site is really cool.
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Neat little program called DropCopy (for OSX).
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We recently installed Xeobook a PHP Guestbook (free) on a server for our client. Highly recommended and incredibly flexible. If you need a guestbook, this is it.
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Fish.
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Has anyone used JAlbum? It looks pretty cool, I’m considering installing it and creating an album to show all of my photos. That’d sure be a trip.
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Google just bought Keyhole, a company that uses satelite photos in mapping. They just cut the price by $40, too.
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Jeff noted that there will be a lunar eclipse tonight. NASA has something to say about this, too. How to photograph a lunar eclipse.

I have an advertising idea but I don’t know if it’s legal. So I’m looking for someone with expertise to let me know about whether this is an idea I could pull off without huge fines.

So here’s the idea: Being an election year, there are about two dozen political signs on every street corner. My simple idea is to throw some other signs into the mix for myself or my clients. Imagine driving down the road and seeing the Bush-Cheney signs and the Kerry-Edwards signs and also seeing one for Taco Bell or Apple Computer? Wouldn’t that be awesome? The sign could be made in the exact same way as the other signs and wouldn’t be flashy. It’d look like a political sign but it wouldn’t be.

I think the best part of the deal would be the buzz you’d create. You’d probably get in all the newspapers and trade journals for a brilliant ad campaign. People would start to notice. So anyone? Why hasn’t this been done? Would the fines be that bad?

This reminds me of the 1984 Michael Jordan incident:.

“His shoes cost him a fine every single game due to being ‘too colorful’ and ‘non-conforming to his team colors’. His sneaker commercial had a big X on the shoe with the word BANNED.” (Source: Timeline of Basketball Shoes History)

Nike paid the fine every game and it created a huge amount of buzz.

A few months ago as we pondered our new logo, we got some help from local icon agency Developer Icons. Most of what they do is icon work for applications, however they took a stab at our tornado and came up with the great green tornado image. We just wanted to say thanks for the great work and let our friends know.