Sometimes I’ll come across a site that I just wanna bookmark for myself, which might not be the most remarkable curiosity or design specimen ever, but connects with me all the same. A site like Workbuyconsumedie is a good example.

A lot of my time this past week has been spent laboring over a major redesign for Subtraction.com, which mostly accounts for the lack of postings here. With luck, I’ll be able to relaunch within a few weeks. It won’t be a moment too soon either, as the shortcomings of the current design continue to pain me.

That’s not the only thing on my mind though. I’m simply at a loss to know what to think of all of this entire situation. My initial reaction to the World Trade Center attack was swift retaliation. Then everything got grayer and grayer the more I learned about Afghanistan and our role in its torturous past and now who knows what we should really do in order to remain on the side of the right and just. What’s more, like many of my peers, I’m jobless and adrift in an uncertain economic sea, which is its own level of personal discomfort.

Novelist and sometime Wired contributor Po Bronson had some thoughts on his own complicity in inflating the dot-com bubble, published yesterday in the New York Times Magazine.The article, entitled “Calculating the Loss and Blame in Silicon Valley,“ has been trumped along with most of yesterday’s issue by a special edition of the magazine focusing on the World Trade Center tragedy. Bronson has a copy of it posted on his own Web site here.

He says, “I was publicly associated with the entire shebang, parties and billionaires and IPOs. I leveraged the hype to build my career. At the very height of the fever, in the summer of 1999, I posed alongside some of my subjects for a cover of Wired magazine. So if apologies are to be made, I’ve lately come to think, I should be apologizing myself.”

I find that sentiment mildly laudatory, but I won’t hold out for similar acts of contrition (even at much smaller scales) from the mendacious snake-oil salesmen that turned a tremendous amount of genuine potential into this pathetic mess.

Tomorrow it’s Monday, and hopefully the nation will have finally crawled out from under the misery-fueled lethargy of the past week. The mandate now is to return to normalcy, because anything else would be tantamount to an acquiescence to terror. It remains to be seen whether, as a society, we know how to do that yet, whether we know how to leave behind the truly disorienting aftermath that gripped us for days. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget it. I don’t mean just the two crashes that felled the World Trade Center towers — that goes without saying. What I mean is, I’m not sure I’ll be able to leave behind the stupor, the silent confusion that followed it. Or at the very least, I’ll never be able to forget the site of Manhattan’s normally bustling First Avenue on the day immediately after the terror, when it was six lanes abandoned to nothingness.

Every time a manufacturer tries to unleash a hybrid mobile phone/Palm device, I get a little excited. Then, when I finally get to see the thing in person, I get disappointed by its inevitable bulkiness. Five’ll get you ten that’s what I’m in store for when I finally get to see the Samsung I300.

So I had a little bit of a distraction from the news and the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster when my PowerBook arrived. I’d been without a Mac since I lost my job a few weeks ago, living solely on my Sony PCG-SR7K VAIO laptop. Thanks to my sister, I lucked across a great deal on a Titanium PowerBook G4. Granted, I’d disparaged this laptop when it first debuted, but with just four models of Macs to choose from, Apple doesn’t leave its devoted many choices. This was the one that suited my needs most, and now that I’ve got it here in my hands, I don’t seem to have quite so many complaints as I did before.

I can’t stop watching the news.

I woke up a little late today, so by the time I made it down to lower Manhattan (on foot), most of the area had been cordoned off, and the twin towers had collapsed already. I was only able to photograph the aftermath, the monstrous, slow-moving mass of smoke as it digested the blueness of the sky. It was misery to behold, but what newscasters didn’t talk about was the strange juxtaposition of tragedy and calmness.

New Yorkers, known to the outside world perhaps best for their excitable nature, are also capable of a staggering brand of indifference — sometimes out of spite, but sometimes too perhaps out of a numbness resulting from years of aggressive living and living among aggressors. That was very much in effect just outside of ground zero, beyond the police perimeter — people walked and chatted on their mobile phones (contrary to reports, I saw dozens of people using their phones successfully), some laughed mildly, some looked disturbed or quiet, but no one was in hysterics. I don’t say this to condemn my neighbors or take away from the tragedy, but to offer an added layer of depth to what’s available through news sources. It was a truly bizarre day.

Blogdex is the kind of clever idea only those whiz kids at the MIT Media Lab could dream up. The site crawls an open registry of blogs (you can add your own; I did) and determines the most linked-to URLs from among them. The results are actually somewhat interesting.

My dad is visiting from California for a few days. To keep him entertained, we took a cruise completely around Manhattan. It was actually and for real a three-hour tour, and it was a beautiful day to do it today too. I found out about it through Citysearch  (which also, apparently just this minute, launched a redesigned interface), and at first I was a little wary of the overtly tourist-oriented air of the cruise’s operator, Circle Lines. While the guide on the boat was remarkably cheesy, he was also remarkably well-informed, and I found out a lot of things about Manhattan that I had never known before. Next time I find myself in a position of trying to entertain out-of-town guests, I’d happily take this cruise again.

Nearly two weeks ago my job came to an end, for incredibly stupid reasons — not the least of which is the company had been mismanaged and downsized to near liflessness. Suffice it to say that I’m trying to put it all behind me, and my main focus now is the next stage of my life. I’ve been collaborating with some friends on a side project in the meantime, and in the course of it we’ve tried out Groove, a peer-to-peer collaborative platform geared towards businesses but available free to consumers. It’s amazingly robust and, aside from a few issues with speed, a pleasure to use.