On my way home from a weekend trip to Washington, D.C., I passed a guy selling random goods — used books, used records, discarded knick-knacks — on the First Avenue sidewalk. I’m not talking about a flea market table, even; this stuff was literally spread out on the concrete. Among the items he had for sale was this beautiful 1974 NYC Transit Authority subway map, based on the original 1972 design by Vignelli Associates. He sold it to me for US$2, a real find! I’m totally elated to have a copy of this design classic.

WorldCom, only the most recent company to fess up to its scandalous accounting practices, has got me thinking. First, I can’t imagine that this is the last accounting scandal we’ll see, and not just in the corporate sector. There are lots of economic numbers that the government has been churning out for the past several years that will be similarly re-adjusted, further undermining our struggling economy. Much messiness lies ahead.Second, I think this terrible economic hangover is the result of an MBA culture run amuck. We’re emerging from an age now wherein corporate officers have no idea how to run the businesses for which they are ostensibly responsible; they’re self-styled deal makers who are interested only in moving money around, cutting deals and talking in the abstract about ‘vision.’ (I know this from working at my last job at a major Web services agency, where neither the CEO nor the COO had a clue about how to run a services company, much less how to put up a Web page.)The next generation of successful CEOs will be much more hands on, will know how to use and sell their own services, will roll up their sleeves and become engaged in the development and the marketing of their own products. Less the Jack Welch-style of leadership, more the Bill Gates or Steve Jobs-style of leadership.Finally, isn’t “WorldCom” a completely ridiculous name, when you stop and think about it? It’s the kind of name they’d give a fictional, evil multinational in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

For kicks, I installed a copy of the Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org 1.0 on my laptop running Windows 2000. The installation process is notably slick for an open source project, and it’s a nice feeling knowing that one can download, install and use this software suite for the price of absolutely zero. The programs performed acceptably, too — my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents were passably (though not perfectly) translated by their OpenOffice.org counterparts. With luck, this suite will become a viable alternative to Microsoft’s, but it has a long way to go before it can quit playing catch-up merely to achieve parity with Office’s ever-widening range of bloatware features. I wish them luck.

Last week I helped some friends out by resurrecting their original Bondi-blue iMac, which was dogged by corrupted system files and extensions conflicts. All it took was reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the system software — I updated it to Mac OS 9.1. It struck me how incredibly easy it is to perform maintenance on the ‘Classic’ flavor of the Mac OS, and how, in spite of its kludgey late history, it remains in essence an incredibly elegant system. I’m still looking forward to moving over to Mac OS X, but I’ll miss the structural transparency of its predecessor.

I saw “Minority Report” over the weekend, and was pleasantly surprised by most of it, though it falls apart in the fourth act (that’s a joke). I’ve never liked Spielberg’s work all that much, but I admit that he’s created a real vision here. If nothing else the movie, set in the year 2054, is filled with hypothetical user interfaces that are beautifully executed — for a change in a Hollywood film, they’re interfaces that actually look like they were designed by real designers.

Yahoo! is on a redesign kick, apparently. They’ve launched a public beta version of their Internet-based Yahoo! Mail service (Log in and click on the link on the home page), which actually looks pretty decent. They’ve even gone out on a limb and used Microsoft Office for Windows-style button/menus, rendered with JavaScript.

It’s hard to believe that this throwback to the era of random violence happened just three blocks from where I live now and just a block from where I lived for two years: “Patrons of Bar Veloce in the East Village were held hostage by a man who sprayed kerosene on them and then threatened to set them afire early [Sunday&#93, according to the police. Three people and the suspect were shot.” — Al Baker, The New York Times.

David Bordwell maintains an excellent Website on Cinema, a kind of primer for studying, thinking about, watching and enjoying movies.

The problem with “Scooby-Doo” — and heaven knows I should find more important things to worry about than this — is that the computer-animated Scooby doesn’t even look like Scooby-Doo! The CG animators fell into that old because-we-can trap: they tried to make Scooby as realistic as possible, thereby totally missing the point.

To share my Epson Stylus C80 over my home LAN, I bought a D-Link DP-101P+ Pocket Print Server on eBay. Snap it into the parallel port, plug an Ethernet cable into it and plug it into a hub, and you’re ready to go — theoretically. This thing was a pain in the butt to install. It took me hours to decipher the poorly written manual and figure out how to properly configure it. For the benefit of other DP-101P+ buyers, I documented what I learned on Epinions.com. Once I got it working though, it worked like a dream… almost worth the effort.

As it nears its first birthday, The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art is holding an Art Festival on Sun 23 Jun in New York. The list of featured attendees is long and diverse, and headlined by the legendary Jules Feiffer.

Yahoo! is redesigning, as shown in this beta page posted for user feedback. It’s hardly a radical overhaul of the portal’s venerable aesthetic but that’s to be expected — they’ll never not look like this.

The mafia took a step deeper into mythology today when John Gotti passed away. On the news, they showed images of Gotti in his heyday, parading down Mulberry Street in Little Italy, and that New York couldn’t seem further away — today Mulberry Street is an upscale shopping concourse paraded by fashion victims and moneyed hipsters.

Currently I’m reading “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,” an intricately-researched account of the Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty. I was inspired to pick this up by a really good article about Howell Raines, the current Times executive editor, in the 10 Jun issue of the New Yorker, which really, really needs to start providing archived content on its Web site.

This is encouraging: “ReplayTV customers represented by the [Electronic Frontier Foundation] have filed a lawsuit against the entertainment industry to protect their rights to skip over commercials and record television programs for later viewing using digital video recorders.” I’d like to see a series of publicity-damaging consumer lawsuits against the entertainment industry on all manner of digital fair use issues.

I just spent half an hour looking for a tutor in the New York City area to help me brush up on my sub-conversational Vietnamese skills. And I found nothing. Anyway, if you’re well-versed in conversational Vietnamese and you think you want to earn some money teaching it to me, send an email to desk@subtraction.com.

Citibank’s credit card division has a potentially great product in Virtual Account Numbers. Rather than use your real Citibank card number for online transactions, customers use a little application to randomly generate a virtual number that can be used instead. The numbers are good for one use only, so once the transaction is complete, they expire and your real card number is still safe. It’s a great security idea.

The San Francisco startup OQO is working on a micro-PC. It’s an iPod-sized device running Windows XP, featuring a touchscreen interface, 256MB RAM, a 10GB hard disk, FireWire and USB ports, WiFi connectivity and a proprietary docking port to synch with your desktop PC. Due in the fall, the target price is just US$1,500. Promises, promises…

My new custom-built HP Pavilion 701 is great, and I’m very impressed by Windows XP. I had some inscrutable problems with Outlook today, and after scratching my head for a while I decided to try XP’s System Restore feature, which allows users to easily “remove any system changes that were made since the last time you remember your system working correctly.” I hit a couple of buttons, and one restart later, I had reverted my system to its state from this past Saturday, and the Outlook problem was cured. This is brilliant stuff. Of course, it would’ve been more brilliant if my original problems with Outlook hadn’t ever happened.

“The idea is simple: A map of the city that shows where the bloggers are, organized by subway stop. Find out who’s blogging in your neighborhood!”