This past week, I read Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with Internet entrepreneurs, edited by Jessica Livingston.

Actually, I devoured it! This book is amazing. I like the insightful questions, and I like the length of the interviews, they’re longer than the usual “ten questions” style you often see on blogs.

I can’t think of a better book to read if you’re just getting your business going on the Internet these days. There are interviews with the founders of 37signals, PayPal, Six Apart, Flickr, Yahoo, Craigslist, Blogger, Apple, and many more. Very highly recommended reading.

A client of ours called us up late this afternoon to complain about his website. The problem? Seems he’s been getting far more orders on his website than he’d expected, and wanted to have someone else in the loop, to help with them all.

Now that’s a complaint we love to hear.

We’re very excited to welcome Jodi Geren to the Needmore Designs team. She’s been with us one week today.

Jodi comes to us with tons of experience with finance, writing, and project management. She’s worked with Stumptown Coffee Roasters here in Portland, as well as Victrola in Seattle.

We’ve been hoping to work with Jodi for some time now, and we’re really excited about this opportunity. We’ve got great things planned here at Needmore, and we’re glad that she can be a part of the team!

Joyent’s BingoDisk continues to amaze me. Basically, it’s web-based file storage. You can serve up just about any kind of content, but it’s ideal for things like video. You can also use it like a normal disk, right from your desktop, via WebDAV.

Not only did they add two new plans today (one that’s just $19/year), but they’ve removed all bandwidth restrictions altogether. Wow. That’s a pretty neat offer.

I just finished reading “Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win”, by William C. Taylor and Polly G. LaBarre. It’s about how organizations of varying sizes still manage to innovate. The authors are very good at identifying trends and common elements, and end several sections of the book with simple lists that summarize what they’ve found. It strikes me as a book I’ll read again, months from now, just to be sure it all sunk in.

The best part was the variety of companies they profile, including Pixar, Cranium (the board game makers), a construction company, a financial services company, Weiden and Kennedy here in Portland, Cirque du Soleil, and more. What do all these companies have in common? Read the book to find out!

The nice people at Freeverse have released a free utility called Think that basically lets you make any Mac application “full screen.” You pick an application, and then it puts a black (or any color) backdrop behind it, helping you to concentrate on what you’re working on. Handy!

The headphone jack on my MacBook started having problems last week, and since it’s still quite covered under AppleCare, I took it in to The Mac Store here in Portland, to have it serviced. I don’t much care for The Mac Store, but it’s convenient to take a computer in there for repairs.

The Good: I was really impressed with all the work Apple did for such a small problem. Sadly, the entire logic board must be replaced for a problem like a damaged headphone jack, which Apple did very quickly. Not only that, they also noticed that my computer was one of many that suffered from a temperature-triggered discoloration problem beside the track pad, something I wasn’t even aware of, so they also replaced the entire inside face, keyboard and all. In other words, they replaced at least half of the computer, just because I was having problems with the headphone jack! You’ve got to appreciate that.

The Bad: If you don’t “unregister” a computer from the iTunes Music Store, that’s one less computer you can play your purchased media on. And apparently, replacing the logic board means I have a new computer, in the eyes of the iTunes Music Store! So now I have an unused license out there somewhere, and no way to revoke it. That’s fine, I’ve had this happen before, and it just requires contacting Apple. However, knowing this might happen, Apple should either have the employee who takes your computer un-register it on the spot, saving all the trouble, or Apple should do it when they replace the logic board. It just makes sense, and it would save me some time and effort I’d rather not devote to this kind of nonsense.

But all in all, another good experience with AppleCare. Good stuff.