Nikon has announced a memory upgrade for its flagship D3 DSLR. The service, which is already available, will increase the continuous shooting buffer from 16 to 36 shots for those people shooting 14-bit lossless NEF raw files. In most filetype/compression permutations, users can expect to see around a doubling of shooting buffer. Owners wishing to upgrade are advised to contact their local service center. The price will be £300+VAT in the UK, and $500+tax in the USA.

Pentax has announced the Optio E60 digital compact camera. This entry-level model comes with a 10.1 megapixels sensor and sports a 3x zoom lens (32-96mm, 35mm equivalent). It uses widely available AA batteries and should therefore appeal to those amongst us who tend to leave their battery chargers at home when going on holidays.

Pentax has launched the Optio M60, a 10 megapixel compact camera with a 5x optical zoom. It's got all the features you'd expect, including revised face detection technology that can locate the faces of the best part of a coach-party. The lens covers a range equivalent to 36mm - 180mm, so lacks any wide angle. The camera does offer an Auto Picture mode that automatically selects the scene mode it thinks most relevant for the shot being taken, helping to make the most of 8 of its scene modes.

We circle the on-call responsibility between all the programmers at 37signals. Every day is someone’s day to take care of the technical issues that bubble up from support but can’t be resolved there. And that seemed to work pretty well in the beginning, but we’re starting to think that we need a more systematic approach.

The problem with passing the support monkey around is that everyone just wants to get rid of him as soon as possible. There’s not a whole lot of vested interested in dealing with the root cause of the issues, so you solve one-off problems for individual customers and get on with your day.

For the individual programmer, that approach will appear to work reasonably well because the feedback cycle is so long. You forget next week that you’ve actually already dealt with this problem before. And you certainly don’t get the feedback of knowing that the issue caused three other incidents for other people during the week. So your personal incentive to fix the true cause isn’t building naturally.

I’ve found that to ever get anything done, you really need to align personal incentives with the task at hand. That’s why we’ve been thinking about doing support weeks.

A single programmer gets assigned to work the support monkey all week and have to solve the root cause for every issue he encounters. No I’ll-just-deal-with-this-guy one-offs. But not just because of the directive that it’s what you’re supposed to do, but because it’ll come ever so natural when you’ve solved the same problem three days in a row.

Are you finding the root causes for your daily grind or do the wheels just keep spinning on the same issues?

“We get it. But our clients would never understand.” It’s a frequent rebuttal to our Getting Real philosophy.

Read between the lines and there’s a disturbing undercurrent to that message. It’s really saying, “I get it but these other people could never understand. They don’t have the wisdom and the understanding that I do.” It’s like the way some LA or NYC people sound when they talk down about the masses in the flyover states. It’s insulting.

The truth is folks can usually handle a lot more than these wizards think. Are their clients really imbeciles who couldn’t possibly understand why they’re foregoing a spec to build something real ASAP? I doubt it.

A lot of times people are just stuck in patterns. Process gets done a certain way because that’s the way it’s been done in the past. Sometimes the arteries of work get clogged up simply because no one stops it from happening. Inertia happens.

Set a new course
Instead of looking down at your clients, look for ways to convince, educate, and guide them. That’s part of your job.

Start off by agreeing on your common goal: to create the best final product possible. Agreeing on a common goal is an old Dale Carnegie technique that works well because it gets everyone to realize they’re on the same team and fighting for the same thing. You start getting “yes” immediately.

Then steer them in what you think is the best direction. Take the initiative. Set expectations. Explain why you want to do it a new way. Tell them how you think the project should go.

Will this approach lose you the job? If it does, maybe it’s a bad fit in the first place.

But you may be surprised by the results. This kind of effort shows you’re someone who genuinely cares about the final outcome. And a lot of clients would love to work with someone like that. They’d love for you to tell them there’s a better way. They’d love to know that you want to do more than just phone it in.

Don’t assume ignorance. People live up to the expectations placed upon them. If you assume intelligence and flexibility from your clients, you just might get it.

37signals is looking to hire a second system administrator to help manage our growing infrastructure. We are looking for someone who has solid experience running production web applications and good all around system administration skills. In particular, you should have strong experience with Apache, MySQL and the HTTP protocol. Some of the other software we rely on includes HAproxy, Mongrel, memcached, and Xen primarily running on RedHat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 5, with a handful of FreeBSD machines.

Experience with Cisco hardware and Ruby programming are a big plus, but attitude and enthusiasm are an even bigger one.

Details on how to apply at the Job Board.

Superzoom specialist Tamron has today announced the development of its most ambitious lens yet, the characteristically snappily-titled AF 18-270mm F/3.5-6.3 Di II VC LD Aspherical (IF) Macro. Designed exclusively for digital SLRs with APS-C sensors, this optic offers a 35mm-equivalent range of 28-419mm, perfect for owners of megazoom compacts looking to upgrade to an SLR, and incorporates the company's 'Vibration Control' optical image stabilisation system. To achieve the spectacular zoom range (billed as the longest in the world),Tamron has used all its design nous, including the use of aspheric elements and low dispersion glass to keep chromatic aberration under control.

Avoid the middle of the road
“As a company, you have to be the most of something—the most exclusive, the most affordable, the most responsive, the most friendly. Companies used to want to be in the middle of the road — that’s where all the customers were. But now, in an age of hyper-competition and non-stop innovation, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What do they say in Texas? ‘The only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos.’”
-Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work

Put your business model in beta
“So my advice to startups in this particular category is if you’re going to put your product in beta — put your business model in beta with it. Far too often we are too product focused and not business-model focused. That’s one thing I definitely would have done differently with JotSpot.”
-Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot

Work in small bits
“When dealing with git, it’s best to work in small bits. Rule of thumb: if you can’t summarise it in a sentence, you’ve gone too long without committing.”
-Git for the lazy

The schizo thing about software development
“Here’s the schizo thing about software development (at least on Macs): 1. Everybody praises apps that don’t have a ton of preferences and features. 2. Everybody asks for some new preferences and features. (Okay, not everybody. Not you, I know. I mean everybody else.) To make it worse: 1. Everybody thinks they’re representative of the typical user, so what they want ought to be a no-brainer. 2. And they act like you put skunks in their fridge if you don’t do whatever-it-is. (Okay, again — not you. You’re cool. I’m talking about the others.) The problem is 100 times worse when it comes to deleting features.”
-Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire

Major in learning
“It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.” Google’s advice to students

Learn from mistakes
“If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”
-An old saying in Texas

Adobe has launched version 2 of its Lightroom raw processing and workflow tool. The result of feedback from professionals and a public beta process, version 2 of the software follows the basic structure of its predecessor but with a variety of tweaks and additions. The most obvious change is an increased ability to make localized changes. This include a gradient tool that allows alterations to be applied selectively across an image. Adobe Camera Raw has also been updated with support for the Olympus E420 and E520.

An always beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting site documenting the daily life of Philip’s 98 year-old father after his mother passed away. It’ll tug at you.

Aside from the personal story, the site’s navigation is worth exploring. Move your mouse to the bottom of a photo to partially expose the next one. Click it to move forward. Same thing goes for the top of an image, except that you move backwards. Move your mouse all the way to the left to reveal thumbnails. It’s not obvious, but when you can’t figure out what to do next you begin to explore. Then your mouse will eventually discover the system. You can also keep your mouse fixed at the bottom of an image and just click-click-click to move through.

Grady Booch delivered the following axiom at BrainstormTECH last week: “The average work of the average worker is average”. At first, it sounded perfectly rational. But on second take, I got really bothered by this. It’s based on an assumption of bad, average, and good as being static attributes of a person that I find whole fully offensive and narrow minded.

In my experience, we’re all capable of bad, average, and good work. I’ve certainly done bad work at times and plenty of average work. What I’ve realized is that the good and the exceptional work is at least as much about my environment as it is about me. Average environments begets average work.

Good people do bad work or worse all the time
Just think of all the great people and startups that have disappeared into some big borg of a company, only to come out after a few years on the other side with little to show for the trip. Even so-called exceptional people can do unmemorable work when they’re placed in inept environments.

Or think of how easily good people can be made to do bad things when put under the right circumstances. The Stanford Prison Experiment is a good example of the banality of evil.

That’s not to say that we’re all created equal and that star power can be unlocked with hippie music and sandals alone. Just that there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under crappy policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. People waiting to do great work if given the chance.

No one can be a rock star without a great scene
So if you want your team to excel, quit thinking about how you can land a room full of rock stars and ninjas (note to recruiters: even if these terms weren’t just misguided, they’d be tired by now anyway). Start thinking about the room instead!

Here are three questions to think about as you begin to self-diagnose your environment:

• Do you value effort over effect?
  Someone who stays up all night working is a hero, but getting the work done and leaving early marks someone who isn’t a “team player”.
• Do you trust people to do the right thing?
  We don’t count vacation days and we give everyone a company credit card but require no real expense reports.
• Do you encourage questioning?
  Ending discussions with “because I want it like that” or explaining policies with “because that’s the way it is”.

But most importantly, stop using the perceived quality of your team as an excuse for why you can’t try or follow new ideas. That’s a self fulfilling prophesy that’ll never fail to disappoint. Humans are incredibly eager to live down to low expectations.

P.S.: You’ll know you’re committing this fallacy when you start your comment to a Getting Real post with “but that would never work here” (it probably would, you just need the courage to try), “sure, you can do that because you have a team full of star players” (we have star players because we do it like that), or “we can’t all just do it like that” (don’t worry about all, just worry about you — and you probably could).

Charlie Rose talks with David Chang, chef/owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar, Momofuku Ko and Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York City.

Some choice bits excerpted below.

He describes what you don’t get at his restaurant:

We wanted to strip away all the nonsense. Do we really need a sommelier? Do we really need all the other accoutrements that you see at a 3 star or 4 star restaurant? Our goal was not to be a three star. Our goal was to serve the best food we can. Our goal was to try and make the best food in New York City regardless of anything else, regardless of the environment.

On how Henry David Thoreau has influenced him:

There’s a great line in Walden: “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” And that’s always stuck with me. That basically means if you really try and you want to do something, then go for broke. At the restaurant, that’s something we go for.

On how he feels about vegetarians:

I respect them, just not in our restaurants…You don’t go to a BBQ restaurant and be like, “I want everything vegetarian.” You don’t go to a sushi restaurant and say, “Please remove the fish, I just want the rice.” Our restaurants are what we serve. And if you don’t like it you can go eat somewhere else.

On avoiding the fear of losing what you have:

I want to be sure we don’t lose that recklessness. And I think that was the catalyst for a lot of the things that happened when we first started. No one cared about us. When you have nothing to lose, you can be as reckless as possible.

Related
David Chang’s recipe for sustaining food/business mojo [SvN]
David Chang Is So Stressed Out [Serious Eats]

Screenwriter/producer Lauren McLaughlin's YA novel debut, Cycler is just out, and just in time -- this is a book that the kids in your life really need to read, a gender-bending piece of speculative fiction aimed at young people that manages to say novel, useful, and challenging things about gender and sexuality without ever descending into squicky fluid-exchange or soapy romance.

Jill McTeague has a secret: every 28 days, at the start of her menstrual cycle, she...changes. Painful, graphically, her body transforms into an adolescent male form, and her mind is remade as Jack McTeague, an angry, horny teenaged boy who stays locked in Jill's room for four days until she comes back to reclaim her body and mind. Her stepfordwife mom is mortified by this, and bent on ensuring that none of their neighbors in their affluent Massachusetts suburb discover their family's dark secret, and her absentee father (moved into the basement years ago to practice meditation and yoga) is no help either.

Jill does everything she can to pretend that her four-day absences just don't happen, while Jack seethes and rages against his captivity, in chapters that alternate between both points of view. Both characters are flawed and likable, smart but dumb about emotional stuff in exactly the way I was when I was a teenager. McLaughlin does an admirable job of nailing the voice of Jack -- I know that hormone-addled, enraged teenaged boy. I was that boy.

McLaughlin's screenwriting background carries through well, too: the plot is faultless, building from the weird premise (and the concomitant weirdness) to a series of ever-more-desperate scenarios that have you rooting for Jack and Jill even as you facepalm yourself and peer between your fingers at the wreck they're making of their lives.

This is a book about sex and love, and it's got a lot of it -- but not steamy between-the-sheets stuff (though there's some of that). Instead, McLaughlin's sex and love happens between the ears, in the realm of the mind and its contradictory and embarrassing and fickle passions. Through it all, there's always something redeeming happening, some sense that these people might, somehow, muddle through.

I've got a few years before my newborn daughter needs to start thinking about these things, but this is one I'm putting on the shelf for when she does. Cycler on Amazon

I can't remember how many companies I have started in my life. It's quite a few. Many have worked, some haven't. The one thing I know with certainty is that at no time prior to starting a company did capital gains or income tax percentages ever impact whether or not I would start a business. As any entrepreneur will gladly tell you, you have to have income before you are taxed, so how much you pay on your earnings is a good problem to have, and a better problem is how much you have to pay on capital gains.

What has impacted my decision on whether or not to start a business is the amount of paperwork involved and the local, state and employer taxes involved. Its complicated and expensive to start even the smallest business in the real world. The real world of course is different than the Internet world. The state of business, and in particular, entrepreneurship in the US has devolved into two worlds, the Internet and the real world.

In the Internet world, all you have to do is setup an account with an ad network, put it on your website, generate some traffic and they send you a check. Which is exactly what I did with the Google SearchBox below. No licenses, no tax id, no announcements in the newspaper. It took me minutes. Its exactly what millions of people do as well and its created an entire Internet economy that lives off of Google, Yahoo, MIcroSoft, AOL, Ebay and others. Its the entrepreneurs path of least resistance, which is exactly why most take this route.

Compare that with setting up a real world business. This is from the State of Texas: (Which I am proud to say makes it far easier than most states to start a business).

Step 1:Legal Structure and Registrations
Step 2:Business Tax Responsibilities
Step 3:Licenses Permits and Registrations (Note to State of TX, this link was broken, I had to find the destination page )
Step 4:Business Employer Requirements

As an entrepreneur , I can tell you that working through the requirements of these four steps is scary and intimidating. Why ? Because to merely start your business, you have to deal with lawyers and accountants, which not only costs a lot of money, but more importantly, requires you to trust those lawyers and accountants to make decisions that could have make or break consequences on your business. You may have the best idea with the ability to execute on that idea, but one little snafu by these professionals and your business is down the tubes.

Even worse, if you mess up on any of this, you could get in legal trouble. You could get sued, or find yourself in the middle of some legal nightmare.

Then of course, there is the financial reality of having to pay all of the business and employer taxes.

Contrast the above to what it takes to start a business on the Internet. Sure, Internet businesses are supposed to follow all the above steps in one manner or another, but they don't. Sure, when an Internet site hires people they are supposed to treat them like employees in the real world, but they don't. On the Internet, there are no employees, only contractors and consultants. No one pays employee taxes until they are big enough to have something to lose if they get caught.

Which brings us back to How to Jump Start the Economy.

If you want to see an immediate re invigoration of the economy, open the door back up for individual entrepreneurs to enter the real world without fear and without an immediate financial burden that pre empts their ability to be successful.


If we really want to stimulate job creation in this country, take the same approach to small business with 25 or fewer employees that we take to Internet taxes. Outlaw them.

No taxes of any kind on small businesses with 25 or fewer employees. No employer payroll tax. No state or local taxes. No taxes on earnings. Nada. The business owners will pay income taxes on their personal income they pay themselves, but not corporate earnings


The only taxes they would collect and remit are sales taxes, the employee's portion of payroll taxes and of course they would still file personal income taxes on their individual earnings.

Make this available only to individuals, and only for a single company (to prevent gaming the system by having multiple 25 employee and under companies)

The impact on the economy would be amazing and immediate. Those without jobs would be able to work for themselves, they would be able to join together and start companies. They would be able to take risks with far less capital. Sweat Equity would be all it takes to start a business.

Not only would we see hundreds of thousands of new businesses started seemingly overnight, with millions of new hires, but from those new businesses would come new ideas that hopefully would give us our next "Internet", an engine for economic growth that super cedes today's ideas.

In today's climate, its politically expedient to volunteer taxpayer money as a solution to all problems. That's wrong. Instead, we should open the door to our country's Intellectual capital and the entrepreneurial energy that separates us from the rest of the world. Make it easy for entrepreneurs to do what entrepreneurs do, and great things happen. Voters and politicians alike seem to have forgotten what has made this country an economic powerhouse.

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Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
[Case Study] Interior design firm: “I cannot tell you how much Highrise is helping me work”
“I create a case for each mini-project or design project. Then I assign the contacts I usually require for that type of case and begin assigning tasks. I like using the next week or later choice when I don’t have an exact date for completion. Each day I focus on my due tasks or overdue to clear them or re-assign them.”

Backpack
“37signal’s Backpack Journal is a great illustration of the Twitter principle, as applied to business”
“A lot of people don’t get Twitter. A lot. They ask me why I love it, use it, and why I tweet so much. I think it’s one of those things that you have to do in earnest in order to appreciate, but I think this screenshot of 37signal’s Backpack Journal is a great illustration of the Twitter principle, as applied to business. What if you could see what everyone was doing, without having to ask? Exactly.”

“Backpack is awesome for wedding planning”
Jessica Merritt offers up “Wedding Planning on the Web: 100 Tools and Resources for Brides to Be.” Backpack is on the list and it’s described as “awesome for wedding planning.”

How one team sends SVN commit emails to a Backpack page
“I realized that I could make it a bit easier for my client to read when we make a change, and what we changed. We use SVN and so I just forwarded my SVN Commit emails to a Backpack page, which my client could then subscribe to the RSS feed of that page.”

Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Email replies can now include file attachments
Now you can attach files to your replies and have those files attached to your comment. So, for example, if you are commenting on a message about a logo redesign, and you have a new design to share, you can just include that new design with your email reply. The file will be posted to the project and attached to your comment. Plus, if the file attachment is an image (gif, jpg, or png) a thumbnail of the image will be posted to the project as well.

Getting Real
Entrepreneur says Getting Real provided guide for translating ideas and passion into a succesful web app
“The Getting Real ethos of keeping things simple and uncluttered has been invaluable…We have a small team, few meetings, and relatively few features. Our limited resources force us to be creative — yet we are starting to garner positive reviews on some of the most popular blogs on the web. I’m also enjoying myself immensely, and am happy to have found another avenue for helping students succeed.”

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