An old interview with Alan Moore sent me running back to my old issues of his 12-part “Watchmen” series, probably the best comic books ever produced. To do this, I had to dig through three cardboard boxes of comics from the early 80s, a dusty, aging booty from my adolescence. In my mid-twenties I nearly threw them all out, not wanting to deal with the hassle of lugging them around as I moved from one apartment to another. Luckily they were stored at my father’s house and he didn’t have the heart to pitch them.

Well, it’s the end of March, which was the deadline that I gave myself for getting version Six.0 of this site all put together and ready for public consumption. The last major chunk of work that needed to be taken care of was importing the 200-plus remaining posts from 2002. This was probably more difficult than it needed to be.

Richard Ashcroft, who was responsible for three of the best albums of the nineties when he was the face and voice of The Verve, has lost it. His latest album, “Human Conditions,” is competent yet soppy and unremarkable, and utterly lacking in the bravura of his older work. It made me glad that I bought it for only five under-the-table dollars from a flea market vendor on Avenue A (I also got a cheap copy of “Run-DMC’s Greatest Hits”).

The extranets that we set up for our clients and projects at Behavior have always been rather low-tech. That is, they’ve been updated manually, with designers and technologists painstakingly editing HTML code each time a new posting was added. This has been a royal pain in the ass, but we’re trying to change this by creating an extranet infrastructure with Movable Type.

There are almost 13,500 posters promoting live performances by over 16,000 bands at gigposters.com, a testament to both the vibrancy of grassroots advertising arts and the futility of trying to break into the big leagues of music. Lots of these posters are terrible of course, and lots of them are great, but the site is suitably ambitious in its attempt to give credit to each poster’s designer. If you have enough patience to wait out the overburdened server, you’ll doubtless dig up some gems.

While doing some research on style guides at Behavior, I came across two interesting specimens from Apple and Microsoft. They’re both valuable references, but their approach to covering similar design concepts is indicative of the reputation each company has developed for design advocacy.

We’re incrementally losing the 20th Century: today, United Parcel Service has officially done away with its venerable, Paul Rand-designed logo in favor of a sleek, dimensionalized replacement. The new logo was created by Futurebrand as part of UPS’s strategy to become more than just a shipping and delivery service.

Signs are good for the 2004 cinematic debut of Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy.” Director and writer Guillermo Del Toro seems to be creatively invested in the character, and I’m so thankful that the title role will be played by an actor with a bit of real grit — Ron Perlman — rather than a vainglorious Hollywood drip like Vin Diesel or some such. The movie’s promotional Web site, cleverly called “Hellsite,” is even up and ready to go a year early. When’s the last time a Web site launched a year early?

Five random notes on the occasion of the 75th Academy Awards: 1. I saw “Far from Heaven” earlier today and while it was excellently made, there was almost nothing surprising about it. What’s more, Julianne Moore, while talented and beautiful, has a zillion teeth. 2. On the way back from a short vacation in Miami at New Year’s, I sat next to Adrien Brody on the plane. I remember thinking, “When’s his career going to go somewhere?” 3. What, exactly, is the point of the Best Animated Feature category if its only purpose is to honor these kinds of nominees? They may as well add a category for ‘Best Instructional Workplace Video.’ 4. “Adaptation” should have been nominated and chosen Best Picture. 5. I still hate the Academy Awards.

It wouldn’t take much to get me to admit that the way I’ve used Cascading Style Sheets for Subtraction.com Six.0 is a bit, er, ad hoc. My expertise with CSS is minimal, but with this redesign I made a concerted effort to look to the future and to try and learn as much as I can. My somewhat hazy goal was to follow the principles of transitional layouts and to wean myself off my dependence on nested tables. Though I’m nowhere near mastering CSS, I’m steadily climbing the learning curve, thanks to two books by noted expert Eric A. Meyer.

Al Gore has joined the Apple Computer board of directors, and now its position as strangest corporation on the planet is cemented. What Mr. Gore can offer Apple other than his huge, awkward, jury’s-still-out-on-me reputation remains to be seen. But I suppose I’m somewhat glad that Steve Jobs has no qualms about recommitting to the Democratic party during one of its darkest hours.

We’re going to war, and I sincerely hope that this war will be successful, swift and merciful. Like many Americans, I have great confidence that this will be the case. What really worries me is what we will reap from this doctrine of “preemption” that has come to the forefront of American foreign policy. Though it’s a bit late, both this major piece in Newsweek and this NY Times Column by Paul Krugman call the Bush administration on its bull-headed, unilateral intentions. This way of dealing with the rest of the world will clearly, inevitably lead only to more turmoil. We’re not securing our national interests at all with this action; rather, we’re all but ensuring many more years of global enmity towards the U.S.

Doggie daddyhood is way more involved than I realized. Not only is it terribly time-consuming and expensive, it’s also full of unexpected perils. Over the course of just three and a half months of daddyhood, I’ve had to help see Mister President through a worm infestation, a puncture wound from a dog fight, diarrhea, swallowed squeaky toys that aren’t meant to be swallowed, motion sickness during the course of just about every car ride he’s ever taken, and spraining my own ankle. The latest happened tonight at the park when another dog, unprovoked, snapped and tore Mister President’s ear — actually tore it — and now the poor guy needs stitches. At least I’m putting the veterinarian’s kids through school.

If like me, you’re new to the concept of RSS, here is the lowdown: ‘Really Simple Syndication’ is an XML dialect that allows Web content to be easily re-purposed. Just about anybody, including me, can publish content in RSS format and have it effortlessly re-used by any number of RSS-compatible means… like, for instance, the terrific NetNewsWire, a news reader for Mac OS X that “can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news.”

Something prompted me to go back and watch the first two installments of Christopher Reeve’s “Superman” movies over the weekend. The first film is fondly remembered by critics, and while I enjoy it still, I could never quite explain its enduring quality. On the other hand, its sequel, which held together so well for me when I was in grade school, is a lazy disaster.

Today was the last day for Motorola’s somewhat self-serving “Mobile” show in SoHo, an “exhibition of international mobile phone culture.” I managed to make it to the venue, which was curiously empty and suffering from a power outage, and have a look for myself.

There is a mysterious ‘respiratory illness’ wending its way through Southeast Asia. No one is quite yet sure what it is, but there is speculation that this is a new, deadly strain of influenza. It’s touched Hong Kong, China’s Guangdong province, Singapore, and Hanoi — that last city is not only sensitive for me because of my heritage, but also because my girlfriend, currently backpacking through the region, just left that city less than a week ago.

The current temperature in New York is 49º F, and tomorrow it may reach as high as 59º F — I can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting for this. This winter was cruelly, unnecessarily long, and made tougher by the fact that I had to raise, train and walk my new puppy in the worst of it. The last week or two I was nearing my breaking point with the incessant cold weather, and I was feeling tremendously down and beleaguered. But today I took a long walk for no better reason than it was absolutely pleasant out, and I finally feel like myself again.

  In a rare sign of industriousness, Congressional Democrats have assembled a damning catalog of President George W. Bush’s disingenuousness. One of my favorites is Bush’s grandstanding pronouncement just this past fall that, “One of the ways we’ve got to make sure that we keep our economy strong is to be wise about how we spend our money. If you overspend, it creates a fundamental weakness in the foundation of economic growth. And so I’m working with Congress to make sure they hear the message — the message of fiscal responsibility.” Not long thereafter, his administration proposed a budget that would plunge the nation into a $300 billion deficit.

Clark MacLeod: “Saigon Poster Art is a growing collection of pictures of hand painted posters found displayed all over Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.” MacLeod has done a good job; it’s a charming little assemblage of street imagery that’s well worth a look.

I remember this kind of advertising/propaganda from my travels in Viet Nam as well as Thailand. It was an uneasy feeling when I came to the realization that the reason these posters were hand-painted and not printed is because human labor is cheaper than technology in that part of the world… and even in attempting to emulate technologies like photography and printing, human labor can produce weirdly beautiful results.

The trend of software interfaces taking on more and more properties of the Web (e.g. underlined links, Flash-driven interactivity) is nothing new, but I think my favorite feature migration is the integration of the ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons commonly found on Web browsers into traditional ‘offline’ applications.

The SXSW Web Awards winners were announced last night, and Gain 2.0, which Behavior designed for the American Institute of Graphic Arts, was a finalist in the ‘Content/E-zine’ category. Unfortunately we were beat out by Polar Interia. Not to sound like a sore loser, but that site is not only barely legible (even to my design-friendly eyeballs) it also crashes Safari repeatedly. Hmpf.

The debut of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole’s Point-Counterpoint revival on tonight’s “60 Minutes” was innocuous if basically shallow. But its most disappointing facet was the almost complete lack of ambition on display from one William Jefferson Clinton. The man is a victim of Johnny Marr syndrome if ever there was one, which is to say, he’s become an aimless dilettante.

The act of porting Subtraction.com over to Movable Type has taken several weeks now, but every day I get a little closer to getting the job done. Recently, my attention has been devoted to bringing all of my old Blogger entries over to this new system. The first two months’ worth — Dec 2000 and Jan 2001 — are available now, and the rest are coming real soon now.

While watching the Brazilian film “City of God,” I was struck by how much the sheer ferocity of Fernando Meirelles’s direction reminded me of Martin Scorcese’s early work. Like “Mean Streets,” this movie has been accused of favoring style over substance, but it too is driven by a torrid determination to record a lost history.

Damn closed email accounts! The domain registration for Subtraction.com expired recently and I almost didn’t even reallize it — I had used a now-defunct email address as the main contact address and had totally forgotten that the term was expiring, so my registrar was unable to reach me. The Internet really needs a reliable forwarding service. In any event, my apologies for the errors when surfing or emailing to Subtraction.com over the past few days. Everything should be back to normal now.

This is not made up: the State Department is distributing these crazy matchbooks — bankrolled by a private nonprofit called ‘Rewards for Justice’ — advertising the $25 million bounty on “Usama bin Laden.” The design has the aesthetic quality of a check cashing joint, and it is clearly and cynically aimed at the same constituency.

The venerable PBS documentary show “Frontline” is celebrating its twentieth season. To mark the occasion, its producers have made over a dozen full-length episodes available online. Each episode is available in six, stamp-sized QuickTime segments — it’s not exactly the broadband future we’ve been promised since the nineties, but it’s still a feat that public television can deliver content in this way, while the major networks continue to wait for who knows what.