As I’m typing this, my girlfriend is sitting here next to me on her computer, valiantly trying to install Movable Type on her server. She has a moderate level of experience with Perl and configuring CGI scripts, but she’s been struggling with it for hours. It makes me glad that I spent US$35 (back before the cost went up five dollars) to have the Six Apart team install it for me, especially since I have so little expertise in the back-end details that a Movable Type installation requires. And it makes me think, too, that Six Apart’s upcoming TypePad, a kind of hosted version of Movable Type, is going to be a huge hit. The service will effectively help more people like me, who have only a passing knowledge of the ins and outs of Web servers, clear that hurdle and get on to creating interesting blogs.

The number one thing I will be doing this weekend is worrying about the impending vote at the FCC on relaxing the rules of media ownership. Most people who know me will readily agree that I am starting to harp on this subject, but it pains me greatly. The vote takes place on Monday, but the attendant media coverage is so wildly disproportionate to the vote’s significance to the health of American democracy for the next generation (which is to say there’s very little coverage ) that it’s all I can do to just complain aloud about it.

Actually, it brightened my day a little today to see Ted Turner come out publicly against relaxing these rules, even though he is a major shareholder in and board member of AOL Time Warner, a company that will clearly benefit greatly from these proposed changes. But I still dread Monday afternoon and the almost assured kick in the groin of free speech that the results of this vote will bring. Have a nice weekend!

Unexpectedly, one of the sharpest sources for political commentary on the Web is The Note, from the ABC News ‘Political Unit.’ Written with a tart, often gossipy insider’s tone, this daily journal is a heady fix for hardcore political junkies and those who, like myself, are merely enticed and not quite yet enraptured by politics. A friend turned me on to this several weeks ago, and I was at first overwhelmed by its loquacious onslaught of links, commentary, analysis and rumors, all of which revolve mostly around the 2004 Presidential campaign. Though its length is still daunting (I would say that the page for each day’s Note is as tall as ten or fifteen screens), I find myself eagerly reading as much as I can of it each morning. That’s also a sign that I’m starting to get worked up for next year’s Presidential race.

Serliazer.net, which I stumbled onto while poking around Ethan Persoff’s Web site, is a vibrant experiment in online comics. A subscription goes for the almost ridiculously affordable price of US$2.95 per month and gives you access to hundreds of pages from 25-30 regularly updated strips. I bought a subscription last night and so far one of my favorites is the beautifully drawn “Pup” by Drew Weing.

Back in the day, Razorfish used to bandy about the slogan “Everything that can be digital will be.” I was never a big fan of the ’Fish, but I did like that slogan because I thought it carried a significant amount of truth. After paying my Sprint PCS bill this morning, I’m even more convinced that is the case.

If you’re in your late twenties or early thirties and looking for the absolute bleeding edge in chic ironic pastimes, then Advanced Dungeons & Dragons may be your thing. The inaugural game was organized by my Behavior co-founder Chris Fahey and held a few weeks ago out in Brooklyn (naturally!) — I would’ve been there had I not been out of town. Chris writes: “We thought that now, well into our adult years, maybe now we had the rich imagination — and comfort with our own identities — necessary to ‘properly’ play a fantasy role-playing game. We were bored with video games, we were high on Lord of the Rings hype, and we wanted to have a Dungeons and Dragons party.”

“The Atomic Revolution” is a gorgeous relic from America’s early love affair with its ability to split the atom. A kind of promotional brochure for the wonders of the atomic age that highlights the concepts and history behind what was then a brave new frontier, it was copyrighted in 1957 and has been apparently forgotten until now. The comic book artist Ethan Persoff recently happened across a copy at an estate sale and has kindly published some wonderful scans of its contents on his site.

Just added to my Amazon.com shopping cart: Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” an up-close look at the Oakland Athletics and GM Billy Beane’s use of sophisticated statistical analysis to build a remarkably successful team from one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball. This unorthodox method, which Lewis likens to value equity investing, is one of the most interesting ongoing stories in professional sports and has the potential to dramatically remake the game. Having read his past works, I’m convinced that Lewis is one of the most talented non-fiction storytellers working today, and I’m excited to see him tackle this story.

Another casualty of my time away last week was the timely announcement of the latest site launch from Behavior: the official Web site for Can Do Fitness, a chain of high-end health clubs in New Jersey. We built the site entirely in Flash, and it’s driven by a custom content publishing tool on the back-end to make class schedules available online. You can also explore interactive floorplans, newsletters, trainer biographies, ‘smart’ directions and more… it kinda makes me wanna get up from in front of my computer.

My little getaway last weekend denied me the opportunity to go see “The Matrix Reloaded” on opening night, a consumer ritual of which I’ve become very fond. Last night’s crowd for the 10:20p showing of the movie was tamer than I’d have liked, less prone to hoots, hollers and moments of mob ecstasy. I’m pretty sure I would have enjoyed the movie significantly more with an opening night crowd, but in some ways it was a better context in which to have viewed it; less peer excitement to augment the absurd hype with which the movie has been promoted.

The most recent manifestation of the AIGA’s new emphasis on demonstrating the business value of design is AIGA DESIGNING. This initiative’s centerpiece is a kind of universal framework for the development of design solutions — not necessarily a prescriptive approach to tackling any design challenge, but a method for structurally understanding how design solutions become reality. [Full disclosure: The AIGA was a client of Behavior when we developed Gain 2.0 for them in Fall 2002.]

If there’s a holy grail for wireless telecom companies, it’s the successful combination of mobile phones with something, anything else — digital cameras, MP3 players, personal digital assistants, whatever. The idea has a kind of fait accompli quality to it, but attempts to date have failed to yield major successes, at least within the U.S. That may change though with Nokia’s N-Gage, a hybrid mobile phone and gaming system. This is probably the smartest convergent device yet, combining a Symbian OS-based phone, networkable gaming system, Bluetooth, MP3 player… the list goes on and the spec sheet is very impressive. The missing ingredient is the pricing, which has yet to be announced and will be determined by carriers and retailers. If they can bring this thing in under US$500, it’s a winner.

For my extended weekend getaway on the New Jersey shore, I packed my laptop and about a half-dozen unread copies of The New Yorker. I had high ambitions: I would check my Behavior email periodically, continue posting to my blog, and catch up on those back-issues. Somehow, it didn’t work out that way.

I’m heading out of town for a few days, and so new posts may be itermittent or delayed until I return early next week.

In January, Newsweek ran a cover story on the two “Matrix” sequels. Premiere Magazine featured the first of those sequels under four “collectible” covers. Keanu Reeves is on the cover of GQ Magazine. Britian’s Empire Magazine has four holographic covers featuring The Matrix. Reeves, Carrie-Ann Moss, Lawrence Fishburne and producer Joel Silver all appeared on The Charile Rose Show” last night. This week’s issue of The Village Voice includes an article called “Hacking the ‘Matrix’ Master Code.” The New York Times ran a puff piece on Sunday about the movie’s origins and influence on contemporary cinema. Atari’s companion videogame “Enter the Matrix” has sold 4 million copies in its initial order alone. A DVD of animated shorts called “The Animatrix” is being marketed now for an early June release. Officially sanctioned Matrix swag is now available for online purchasing at TheMatrixShop.com. This list is hardly exhaustive, even. I’m still looking forward to “The Matrix Reloaded,” but all this media saturation is starting to turn me off.

New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts is showcasing the works of students in its Interactive Telecommunications Program in their annual spring show. It includes works from over 200 students skirting the boundaries of digital media, including my good friend Will Lee. Unfortunately, it’s only up for two days, and it opened earlier this evening.

My trusty, first-generation Titanium PowerBook G4 is starting to show its age, even though I bought it just two and a half years ago. At 500 MHz, it was never a screamer, but when I made the transition to Mac OS X entirely, the laptop began to feel slower and slower. It’s sometimes painful to get anything done on it now.

A major defeat for democracy is imminent at the FCC, which is just three weeks away from voting on significant changes to the rules that govern media ownership. FCC Chairman Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has not only withheld information on these changes to the agency’s five commissioners, but he has also refused to make documentation on them available to the public. In all likelihood, they will relax these rules, allowing even greater consolidation of media control among the huge corporations that already dominate television and radio.

Several years ago, I came across a link to these video clips of a seminal 1968 presentation by Douglas Englebart. This was before I began blogging, so I lost the link somewhere in Outlook, but today I happily rediscovered it while browsing Ramana Rao’s “Information Flow Newsletter.” In the presentation, Englebart, who led a group of researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA., was demonstrating an ‘online’ system, an information console that was designed to be ‘perfectly responsive.’ This occasion was not only the public debut of the computer mouse, but it also showcased several key concepts, now commonplace and familiar: hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file addressing and remote collaboration.

I’ve been looking for a good replacement for Stickies, the free Post-it Note-like application that’s been a part of the Macintosh for years. I use it to capture random bits of information, from URL’s and serial numbers to code snippets and lorem ipsum text, but I also need search-ability across notes, which Stickies does not offer, and, less urgently, the ability to assign meta-tags to each note. There’s no shortage of software in this all-purpose information organizer category, but I’ve yet to find the perfect application.

Congress is set to approve the third-largest tax cut in history … yet another political victory for the Legion of Doom that is the Bush administration and its collaborators in Congress. Everything that was bad about the second-largest tax cut in history, also engineered by this administration just two years ago, still applies to this one: deficit spending, disproportionate benefits for the rich, deferral of fiscal responsibility to the next generation of tax payers, and a general absence of plausible logic.

My girlfriend is due back from her ~3-month backpacking tour of Asia tomorrow evening. She was away for her birthday on 25 Apr, and in spite of the extra few weeks of present-shopping time, I still hadn’t bought anything for her until this afternoon. At Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, I passed this kid with a card-table full of cheap baseball caps. He was customizing them in a graffiti style with paint pens, charging customers on a kind of sliding scale of decorative typography: simple tags for five dollars, block letters for ten, and shading and filling for fifteen.

Behavior is located on West 27th Street, just north of Chelsea and the Flatiron District. It’s not generally considered a dangerous neighborhood, as evidenced by the several luxury high-rise apartment buildings that have been built here recently. And yet, we were made aware today that there have been two very recent rapes within five minutes walk from our offices, both thought to have been committed by the same suspect, and one of them happening on 27th Street itself. (As reported by The New York Times here.)

As hard as it is to believe, I used to draw. A lot. This thought struck me today while I was doodling in a notepad during a meeting; I wondered why those doodles weren’t being penned into my sketchbook, rather than on some random piece of paper that would get lost in a day or two.

Senator Bob Graham has joined the race for the Presidency, formally announcing his candidacy in his home state of Florida today. If this event and the first debate among Democratic candidates from Saturday are any indication, the 2004 campaign trail is starting to heat up, and I’m starting to try and get a handle on who the front-runners are, who has the best chance to win, and who deserves it.

I swear this is not turning into a blog about my dog, but I want to offer a little closure to the past few posts and let people know that Mister President is back from the dog hospital this afternoon. He’s pretty alert, his appetite is as healthy as ever, and I fully expect him to be causing trouble again by the end of the week.

I went to see Mister President today during visitors hours at the Animal Medical Center. They brought him in to an examination room walking on his own accord, groggy, a bit sedated and wearing an ignoble Elizabethan collar. The sutures holding together his stomach definitely look like serious business, and I felt so bad for his discomfort. He looked pitiful and unhappy, but the doctor said his condition is good and with luck I’ll be able to bring him home tomorrow afternoon. She gave me a little present, too.

Those who are unsympathetic to the plight of animals, squeamish at even descriptions of bodily discomforts, or generally indifferent about the details of my personal life should skip over this post. The subject is my dog, Mister President, and his continuing medical misadventures.

The summer movie season effectively kicked off last night with Bryan Singer’s “X2: X-Men United.” With these would-be blockbusters, it takes a dogged determination to avoid being inundated by advance publicity; I tried my best over the past few weeks to avoid trailers, television commercials, critical reviews and entertainment journalism, all in an attempt to preserve as much novelty as possible for the 10:00p show on opening night. What little publicity I was unable to avoid seemed really positive — the ‘buzz’ was good, sometimes outrageously positive. I worried that my expectations were already being inflated but I shouldn’t have, as “X2” is a complete success.

For several months my consumption of new music has been pretty tame, but this past week saw a surge in album acquisitions; there are currently about six new sets of tracks in heavy rotation on my iPod. It’s not just the buzz around the iTunes Music Store that has me playing the part of the good consumer; I’m also gearing up to make another Squat mix, which entails gathering lots of new source material.

Having now actually made two purchases at Apple’s iTunes Music Store, I can report that the service, once you get it running, is frighteningly easy to use. It took me a day or two to register with the store because the initial frenzy of its debut had Apple’s servers tied up in knots. But once I did, I found that downloading a song was really as simple as clicking on a single button. Dangerously simple.

If you’re familiar with the concept of ‘jumping the shark’, a kind of death watch for the creative plausibility of any given television show, then you might be tempted to say that NBC’s “The West Wing” has seen the aerial view of a fin. See, they’ve gone ahead and had Matthew Perry turn in a few guest appearances, which is just the oddest ploy to boost ratings that I can imagine, in spite of the continued success of “Friends.”