The new Warp Records Web site is pretty impressive — fun if a little opaque. The cartoonish dimensionality is beautiful, especially in the lower frame navigation, but I’m not so hot on the dog-eared corner motif.

After dealing with the heat and pollution of Saigon — even when it’s not the hot season, it’s hot — I couldn’t take my long-ish hair anymore and went to have it chopped off yesterday.

Saigon was amazing and I had a great time. I took a load of photos, which I’ll post here soon. Last night (Singapore time) I got back into Singapore, and again felt an awkward lack of enthusiasm for this place. Oh well.

That’s Chinese for “Happy Lunar New Year,” or that’s what they tell me here anyway. It’s Tuesday in Singapore right now, and I’m heading off to Saigon in about thirty minutes. I’ll try and post from there.

The consistently excellent Ars Technica has provided probably the most consistently excellent coverage of Mac OS X development to date. John Siracusa’s in-depth look at Steve Jobs’ Macworld San Francisco 2001 keynote examines more closely the latest developments in Aqua, as well as Apple’s overall strategy. Good stuff.

Next week is Lunar New Year, often referred to (in the West and in Asia) as Chinese New Year, but known in Vietnam as Têt. It’s the biggest holiday of the year in Viet Nam, and I haven’t spent it there in over twenty-five years. Today I bought my ticket and received my entry visa to go and see my grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins in Saigon next Wednesday.

This is the great thing about being in Singapore — or being in this part of the world, at any rate. A trip that would have taken me nearly twenty-four hours from New York instead clocks in, according to my itinerary, at just 01:55. I mean, wow.

Love him or hate him, Steven Johnson’s writings on the social dyanmics driving interface design is top notch, and of incredible relevance to any experience designer working today. I was reminded of this when I read his recent article in FEED, “Long Live Analog,”which takes a look at the anachronistic UI metaphors of today’s most advanced digital music software.

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, but late last night I finally published a revised version of the home page. You’ll notice (if you’re reading this now) that it integrates my old Log into the main body. This just made a lot more sense. The old log was a little hidden.

Also, I’ve begun using the archiving features of Blogger to move items off of the home page and onto an Archive page.

“It’s just really difficult to call whether it’s a slowdown or a recession. There’s just an economic wet blanket over the world right now and we’ll see what happens when things pick up again.”
— Intel CFO Andy Bryant, on Intel’s poor Q4 results, as reported in The New York Times.

Yesterday, I posted a new entry to my Journal. This one is about how “being back in Singapore is weird, in unexpected ways.” Last week I also sneaked in a year-end round-up (albeit somewhat late) of the best media that I consumed in 2000.

When I left New York and moved away to Singapore the first time in July, I told my office coworkers not to be sad, it wasn’t as if I were leaving the family (which is to say, it wasn’t as if I were leaving the company); rather, it was more as if I were heading off to college. It was a convenient analogy then, and it’s kind of a convenient analogy now that I can use to describe how odd it is for me to be back here in Singapore, finally, after four months away. Imagine that, after the first month in your freshman year at university that you had to slip back and do four more months in high school.

This past Friday, William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard and one half of the team that pointed the way for the whole of Silicon Valley, passed away in his sleep.

The new logo for Feed Magazine rocks the house. And it’s orange, to boot.

“In all the linked lists and nicely-constructed graphics that show up online and in multimedia products, with the tendency to bullet-point and encourage skimming (as no one reads), it’s easy to forget that narrative is the original interface to enormous databases of cultural, economic, and historical information.”
&#151 From “Initial Thoughts About Narratives” in Ftrain by Paul Ford

I guess everyone loves the new Apple Titanium PowerBook G4, just announced on Tuesday. I admit that’s a slick little laptop, but I have to reserve judgement until I see the actual thing, up close and personal. At a distance, I’m not particularly enamored by its slavish devotion to squarishness. And at 5.3 lbs., I’m not particularly impressed by its weight economy, either.

The big question everyone should be asking is, what the heck is Apple’s long-term gameplan? This may be a fancy little machine, but it still leaves unmet most of the challenges facing the company today&#58 lagging processor speeds, poor price-to-features value, ever-shrinking marketshare. I’ve been down on this company that I care for so greatly for so long now, for the simple reason that the products they’ve delivered have seemed increasingly detached from reality. I know until this year, they’ve actually managed to prosper and show a profit, but I feel like the creativity is a pale ghost of what it once was.

If you grew up anywhere near Washington DC as I did, then the idea of a National Zoo without pandas just isn’t an idea that carries a whole lot of currency. Thank goodness for the arrival of Tian Tian and Mei Xiang.

Singapore’s

This is a little late, but in December, the lists came out—‘best of’ lists, what’s in and what’s out lists, lists of New Year’s resolutions etc. So I figured, what the heck, I may as well make a list. I mean, that’s kind of what Internet content is all about— realizing the compulsion to express an opinion, regardless of intrinsic value — right?

At the CES show in Las Vegas this weekend, Sony finally introduced consumer hardware that plays MP3s &#151 honest to goodness MP3s, not that unnecessarily complicated ATRAC3 junk. I’m in line to buy this, if for nothing else than to help gum up the works between Sony Music and Sony Electronics. Hee hee.

Okay, I guess I’m not ecstatic about being back in Singapore, but I’m not miserable about it either. There’s something here in this part of the world that makes a lot of sense to me. It’s the second day since I’ve been back, and at least the weather is milder than it was when I left at the end of August &#151 about 86° F/30° C, with periodic showers in the middle of the day. Just as humid as ever, too.

“…It’s nearly always the fake mourners and the fake lovers who take that last look, who wait waving on platforms, instead of clearing quickly out, not looking back. Is it perhaps that they love themselves so much and want to keep themselves in the sight of others, even of the dead?”
– From “The Third Man” by Graham Greene

After some delay, the circumstances around which I may explain to the general public one day but for now I’ll just conveniently skip over, I finally left New York last night (Wed 03 Jan). I’m in Amsterdam right now, one of the nicest airports I’ve ever traveled through. I should get back to Singapore by midnight on Thu evening.

Here’s a quick post written from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where I’m having a look at the exhibit for the New Guggenheim Museum planned for the southern tip of Manhattan. It’s an amazing and ambitious project, a tremendous promise that seems too fantastic to be taken seriously, but you hold out hope all the same.

Wait, what the hell am I doing in New York?!