Douglas Bowman has a great, in-depth writeup about the work he did coming up with the custom buttons used in Google Reader and Gmail (as of this week).

That is pretty draconian — $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus.

James F. Reda - regarding the proposed $500k salary cap for execs at companies getting bailed out

Speaking of Daemon, here’s a video with the author, Daniel Suarez, speaking at Google recently.

I try to keep my sports posts here to a minimum because, for some reason, it drives me nuts reading other blog posts about people’s favorite sports teams. Or maybe it’s just Gruber, who’s obnoxious sports posts tend to drive me bonkers (sorry man, love the rest of your writing).

Anyhow, congrats Steelers! What an amazing game. Even if you weren’t a fan of either team, at least it was an exciting contest - unlike most Super Bowls. Nobody was giving the Cardinals much of a chance, but I thought it would be closer than they were saying. I just wish it wouldn’t have been that close. Oh, and a Buckeye gets Super Bowl MVP honors for the first time ever. Congrats on not letting a little wacky tobacky misdemeanor ruin your year Santonio! Hey if it works for Michael Phelps… just sayin’.

So, the commercials. Pretty lame overall, IMO. The remake of the old Coke commerical with Mean Joe Green, this time featuring Troy Polamalu, was a great idea but sorta fell flat. My favorite was the E-Trade golf baby which aired during pregame and then again after the game. I’ve watched it at least a dozen times and I still crack up every time. Props to the writing team on that one.

A couple of nice looking tools: a script that actually makes nice looking toolips and yet another IE6 PNG-fixing script.

Michael Angeles (purveyor of fantastic OmniGraffle stencils and templates) has posted an interesting wireframing exercise for an alternate Gmail workflow. I don’t agree with having this sort of interruption-driven alert system, but it’s still a nice look into other people’s design process.

One of the first designers I followed online many moons ago.

Last spring, I gushed over a book called “Daemon” that I had stumbled across and devoured in a couple of days. A few days later, the author Daniel Suarez (aka. Leinad Zeraus) emailed me to thank me for the kind review. Even though he was actively trying to drum up interest in his self-published book, I thought it was incredibly cool of him to drop me a line.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Daniel emails me again to let me know that Daemon has been picked up by a larger publisher (Dutton, apparently an imprint of Penguin) and that a new hardback edition is being printed. Not only that, but that Dreamworks has recently acquired the movie rights.

Daniel asked me to give him my mailing address so that he could send me a copy of the new hardback. Sure enough, last week a box arrived with not only the hardback, but also the original trade paperback - both autographed.

In just the past two days, I’ve seen Daemon mentioned in the books section of the Sunday paper as well as in Time magazine. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a geek. If you’re a geek, you’ll probably love Daemon - so go check my mini-review and pick up a copy for yourself.

Daniel, if you come across this, thanks again and best of luck with your next book(s) and the Daemon movie!

A look at how NASA goes about developing it’s most critical software.

Tagline: Because every IA has something funky up their sleeve (via Konigi)