I'm a country boy at heart. Summers would drift by lounging on a swingseat reading old New Yorkers and dreaming up punchlines to home-made jokes. But London marches to a different beat.

3.45pm last Thursday: the Mint office was buzzing. Both meeting rooms were taken. A sound system was being tested for the office-warming party. I had a presentation to write for a meeting at 5pm. I couldn't concentrate, so I nipped out to the park behind the office.

Last week, Ed was at Lebowski Fest with the Mint Conference Policy. While we await completion of his illustration so he can post as himself, here are his impressions.

Of all the events in the world that hold a cultural or spiritual significance to you, which would you choose to visit? Perhaps the Hajj in Mecca if you are Muslim, or maybe Kumbh Mela if Hindu. Perhaps the World Expo is more up your street, which when held in Shanghai last year gained the status of the largest peaceful gathering in history.

Last week, I made my own pilgrimage. Travelling from London, England all the way to Louisville, Kentucky to an event they call Lebowski Fest.

We’re deep in the midst of a design overhaul of the Mint site at the moment (keep an eye out for changes coming soon…), and I’ve been seeking inspiration from across the world of digital media. In the spirit of Jim Jarmusch’s advice – “don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it” – I thought I’d share some of my favourite agency sites from across the web.

1. Razorfish

Ever so slight creepy, but mesmerizing all the same, the Razorfish site allows you to change the background to view a live pixellated video stream of each of its offices around the globe. I always seem to catch the cleaners hoovering in San Francisco…

JustGiving, launched in 2000, often used to be held up as a UK dot-com success story.

Recently I've seen lots of people using their competitor Virgin Money Giving (Launched October 2009), including, ahem, young Ramzi Bell. I know, a sponsored swim for a 10-month-old is ridiculous.

Initially I thought it was a shame to see a big corporate like Virgin is ripping off a plucky little startup like JustGiving. But Virgin Money Giving is a not-for-profit. Unlike JustGiving, there's no monthly subscription and no charges on Gift Aid. They do charge 2% on transactions, but that is lower than JustGiving's 5%.

The Human Jukebox

Sometimes crazy works. Pause, an audio equipment store in Stockholm, took guerilla marketing tactics to the extreme (with the help of its agency, Åkestam Holst) by transforming the company’s CEO into a walking human jukebox. Pause wanted to spread the word about their customised sound systems with the craziest “show, don’t tell” stunt they could think of. They invited journalists to see CEO Fredrik Hjelmquist ingest the ‘gutPOD’, a custom-designed wireless receiver in a capsule; while customers could pick songs on Spotify for the belly beatbox to play.

Admittedly, the concept doesn’t quite work - Hjelmquist had to use a microphone and speakers for the music to be heard - but the “Is this for real?” buzz more than paid off: Sales soared by 112% at Pause stores, while visits to their website jumped more than 600%. Just don’t think about what happens when the gutPOD, er, runs its course...

Mint is awarding a scholarship of £4000 ($6000) to help a university leaver or recent graduate launch a business. We are looking for someone with a promising idea and the personal characteristics to turn it into a success.

If you win the scholarship, you will have two months to develop your idea, working in the entrepreneurial environment of Mint Digital.

At the end of this time the idea will remain 100% yours. We hope you'll want to develop it further with Mint, in which case we'll try to offer you a deal that will allow us to keep collaborating.

Why is Mint doing this?

We want to steer talented people away from a career in banking. We want to help create a new digital business. We think it might be fun.

What have you got against bankers?

We haven’t got anything against bankers. Our current CEO, our previous CEO and many talented Mints have worked in financial services.

It’s just that too many of the best and the brightest in the UK and the USA work for banks and other large companies, especially when they are first starting their careers. We believe there are better ways to enjoy capitalism.

This morning I attended a wonderful talk by Yancey Stricker, co-founder of Kickstarter, at Creative Mornings.

Admirably, Kickstarter has been thriving with no advertising or promotion of that sort. Their model is brilliant. When someone creates a project, they talk to everybody they know about it and that drives people to Kickstarter naturally. No smarmy, icky feelings necessary. Kickstarter takes 5% of successfully funded projects, as well they should for creating and sustaining such a worthwhile platform.

Welcome to the first in a semi-regular series of a few things that caught our eye recently.

Net-a-Porter Live

Net-A-Porter's live fashion map shows one way the theatre of real world shopping can be re-created online. The execution perhaps falls slightly short of the rest of their site, and certainly short of Uniqlo, who've set the pace with these type of projects, but there is real energy to it. Clotaire Rapaille, in his half-genius, half-batty book The Culture Code, says the subconscious motivation for shopping is 'reconnecting with life'. With shopping such a social activity and e-commerce such a valuable activity, this is an area that is sure to be pushed further in the next few years.

It says on our jobs page that everyone at Mint is encouraged to attend two conferences a year. Most people choose ones that are relevant to their professional development. Popular choices are SXSW, RailsConf, RubyConf and FOWA.

it is interesting to see how far this policy can be pushed, especially as Mint's CEO Cameron Price has a strong libertarian streak.

Comic-Con?

Yes

We've just released a new interactive quiz for Sexperience, the website supporting Channel 4's Sex Education Show.

The result - Are you Sexperienced? - takes two minutes to play, and is fun, slightly shocking and both a little bit wrong and a little bit right. And there’s some technical magic on show: in our tireless quest for maximum accessibility, we've pushed JavaScript to the limit to make it 100% Flash-free. So, before you read on, go and play it. Go on, it really is worth it.

And we’re back! Hope you enjoyed it.

For anyone curious about the thinking that went behind the quiz, here’s how the project took shape:

1. Metaphor

We took inspiration from the informal approach to sex implied by toilet graffiti.

On 19 June, eight cycling rock stars from Mint Digital - Team Extra Strong Mints - will be throwing their legs over their bikes to ride the 54 miles from London to Brighton.

They're doing it in aid of the British Heart Foundation. Please help them reach their target on the JustGiving page. All sponsorship appreciated.

Go Adam, Andy, Colin, David, Edd, Paul, Kejia, Tom!

After a search that began in April last year, a spat with the Crown over a potential property and a two-month build, this has been a long time coming. But here we are. Last week saw Mint London move into its fancy new digs in Exmouth Market.

“In Q4 of 2010, smartphone sales surpassed desktop sales.... The average user visits up to 24 sites per day on their phone.”

Luke W proclaimed in his presentation at An Event Apart Boston. In short, more people will be visiting your site on their phone than on a desktop, and it’s happening faster than we think. We’ve heard about the growth and importance of mobile, but this makes mobile the first priority, right now.

AssetHat makes Rails 3.0 websites load their CSS and JavaScript faster.

In the figure below, Websites C, D, and E handle about 400,000 views/day. AssetHat saves users of these sites 91.8 hours each day. That’s 91.8 collective hours of staring at a screen, waiting for the internet to respond, that can now be put to more productive use.

We just released version 0.4. Read a full introduction on Mint's new tech blog. Or visit the AssetHat site for docs and download.

New Mint recruit Ed Ellson gained 15 minutes of fame in 2004 by wearing a skirt to school. As Ed explained:

We received a letter from the school saying trousers or, for girls, skirts, and it made me think, why not boys, so I wore one. But then I was told it wasn't allowed.

This instinctive distrust of authority coupled with fearlessness in the face of ridicule are great attributes for someone joining the Quality Assurance team.

If you've got a similar spirit, we are still looking for a mid-level tester and junior tester (no experience required) to join the New York team.

In order to explore interesting topics around mobile and meet new folks working in mobile in New York, Mint Digital and the Pocketmints crew are hosting a series of monthly talks.

This month Mari Sheibley, the lead designer of foursquare, is joining us to discuss Mobile UI Patterns.

Early this month, everyone at Mint Digital decamped to Dorset for the 2011 Web App Weekender. This year’s challenge was to drive engagement to Quotables using the new API in four sleepless days and nights. Team Coupland have created Debatables: a brand-new debating platform which is raising the tone of online debate one quote at a time.

Mint Digital spin-out Picklive has been nominated for a Guardian MEGA award in the Breakthrough Technology Business category.

Congratulations, guys!

If you've never tried it, you can play along at 7.45pm tonight to Marseille v Manchester United. You get 3 free plays and you could win a tracksuit.

At Mint we spend so much time in the digital space, it's a breath of fresh air to take a step back and embrace the permanence of print.

The end of 2010 represented a suitable opportunity to re-vamp our business cards so I thought I'd share a little about how we set about refreshing the design.

We don't normally announce our new hires on the Mint blog but then it's not every day we get job applications quite like the one we got from Shoshi Roberts.