After a ridiculous number of fitful starts and delays, Apple Computer’s next generation operating system, Mac OS X, is finally released today.

Two Fridays ago, I went to the Musuem of Modern Art to see the Workspheres exhibit, which was a pleasant distraction though a little disappointing. What made the whole trip worthwhile was the Andreas Gursky exhibit showing upstairs — an amazing photographic tour de force. I’ve seen some write-ups of this show that included reprints of the works, in a recent issue of Architecture Magazine for instance, but none have been able to capture either the vivid, stunning color quality or, more understandably, the immense scale of the originals. Go see it for yourself.

Everybody asked me over the weekend if I intended to watch the Oscars on Sunday night. With “Gladiator” walking away with the big prizes, isn’t it pretty apparent why I stay away from this ostentatious celebration of mediocrity?

I’ve been meeting a lot of new people in New York, some socially, others through the painful urban raindance known as the apartment search. When the question comes up of what I do for a living, I’m painfully reminded of the state of our industry. Where once a new acquaintance might have been impressed, now he or she just laughs. Ha ha. Sigh.

This morning I finished Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which holds up as a snapshot of the decadent Eighties. I’ve since made it thirty pages into Lorrie Moore’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” a stunningly well-written remembrance of a childhood friendship. Next on the list is Joseph McBride’s book-length interview with Howard Hawks, titled (logically enough) “Hawks on Hawks,” loaned to me by a friend.

I found myself in New York again last Friday and I’m still here. At every juncture when I think I’m going to plant myself down for at least a good amount of time, I end up leaving sooner rather than later. At any rate, it looks like I’m sticking around New York for a while.

The world’s largest offshore oil rig, owned by Pertobas, is sinking off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, and there’s a possibility of a major oil spill. So, how was that drive in this morning, yo?

Today’s issue of Circuits from the New York Times has an interesting how-it-works piece about touchscreen computing. Click on the “Multimedia” sidebar and you’ll get a pop-up window with a beautiful dissection drawing of a Handspring Visor PDA touchscreen, illustrated by by Frank O’Connell.

Lately I’ve been using the font Superpoint Rounded quite a bit. It was designed by Sven Stüber, who runs Superlooper.de as well as Vectorize.de.

You certainly don’t need to turn to Subtraction.com to hear this news, but I thought I should mention that the market had a miserable day anyway. The Dow Jones fell a dizzy 436 points, while the NASDAQ fell below the psychologically frightening 2000 mark. A friend of mine, using MapStation from SmartMoney, sent me this visualization of what happened today with the NASDAQ. Red indicates equities that lost ground today. The one green bar is Compuware (CPWR), who must have cut a deal with the devil or something.

Goldman Sachs chief investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen thinks the worst is over and says it’s time to load up on equities.

I’ve spent some time lately fooling around with my digital camera, and thinking about how its immediacy and next-to-nothing output cost (after the original cash investment) have impacted how I perceive my surroundings.  That’s lead to some new techniques in Photoshop, a new approach to the imagery that fuels my visual vocabulary. I’ve got a handful of new pieces in development, but right now, here’s a sampling.

The New York Times doesn’t so much overhaul its site as it does periodically tweak it. So it’s notable when they launch a newly-tweaked design, as they did this morning. It’s very similar to what came before it, but it refines a lot of the horesy typography that accompanied last year’s revision and revamps the article-level templates. Still the best newspaper on and off the Web.

Australia has made it illegal to forward an email without the permission of its author.

It’s definitely a driving life here in Los Angeles, and as a result, I spend a lot of time sitting in my rental car, staring at the backsides of other people’s automobiles. I’ve almost never been the sort to notice one car over another, but in the past few days I’ve been struck by how many Lexus RX 300s there are out on the Southern Californian roads. And also by how attractive — in a suburban kind of way — they are too. If I had to haul a kid to and from soccer practice, or even drive a date to the Olive Garden, well I guess I’d want to do so in an RX 300.

I’ve never seen anything this bad before, ever. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but things are pretty bad. Everyone I know in the Internet industry is scared to their boots, and with good reason, apparently. Sapient, the Internet consultancy leader, just announced 720 layoffs.

The thing about the Internet is that sometimes things sitting right below your nose day-in and day-out just reach out and slap you across the face. Take instant messaging, for example — I’m a habitual user of AOL Instant Messenger. I’m rarely ever online and not logged onto that service, which is to say that I depend on it heavily to communicate with a lot of the people in my professional and personal lives. And yet, I never really thought through all of the potential that the instant messaging medium offers.

The engineers over at ActiveBuddy have. They’ve developed an amazing product that allows anyone with an IM client to retrieve information from a bot (send an instant message to the screen name “SmarterCousin” on AIM to see for yourself). You can get the usual portal stuff: news, weather, sports, stocks, movie listings etc. That alone is kind of impressive, though also weirdly reminiscent of command-line interfacing with remote servers through a dumb terminal. What’s really cool though is to think about combining this with some really kick-ass AI. Wow…

Thanks to Eddie at The OFP for the tip.