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If you’re in the downtown Portland area tonight, stop by ISITE Design, they’re gracious enough to host tonight’s PDXWI meeting where Dietrich Ayala is going to be speaking about Firefox 3. RSVP on Upcoming and come say hi!

UPDATE: Big thank you to ISITE for hosting (Will, you’re a hell of a host), Adam for organizing and stepping into the role of de facto leader and Dietrich for speaking – learned a lot about the inside of Firefox plus how Mozilla works as a company, really interesting stuff.

In an effort to remember and record some of the things I read, especially magazines, I’m going to start posting a series called “Takeout”; blips & links of things that caught my eye.

• Grant Makers: allowing employees the freedom to grant cash gifts to other employees as a reward for a job well done. While the $50 is large enough to make some sort of impact, I wonder if the real reward comes from the recognition that your co-worker appreciated what you did. Do you need to pony up $50 to give “thank you” the same weight?
• Dear Microsoft: Do you really think that we’re all going to drop “widgets” in favor of “gadgets”? When will you realize you’re just confusing your customer base?
• to investigate further: Creative Capital
• to read: Then We Came to the End
• “If you want people to like you, first decide who needs to hate you.” – Dan Heath & Chip Heath (I’m about 3/5th through Made to Stick, great read but all these guest spot articles popping up from them are doing a much better job of getting the point across…)
• Only 21% of professionals always feel that search engines understand their queries. 10% always find exactly what they want on the first attempt … 93% of users tend to search again using a new query with similar meaning at the same search engine rather than switch to a new one. (21% always feel…? These people must be googling gods…)
• inspiration: JDK
• to build me a house, an office, an anything: Tom Kundig (”…renowned for his embrace of inexpensive and reclaimed materials (”dirt cheap!” is a term of endearment)…”)

Unfortunately, Fast Company restricts access to the current month’s content to subscribers or people that purchased the magazine off the newsstand, so these links won’t work unless you meet one of those conditions. When the next issue comes out, all of this content will be open to the public. PITA, I know.