My dog has a habit of demanding to go outside during the eighth inning of just about every afternoon ballgame I watch on TV, but during today’s Yankees-Red Sox match I had a solution that suited both man and beast: digital video recording. I pressed ‘Pause’ on the remote control, walked Mister President out to the dog park and let him run around for about fifteen minutes. When we got back to the house I pressed &#8216Play’ and watched Jorge Posada hit a crucial home run to win it for the Yankees with a final score of 10-7.

The front page of today’s Washington Post features a lengthy article on “Attorney General John Ashcroft. The article covers an incipient trend among politicians from the center and right of the political spectrum who have recently begun to question the A.G.’s approach to combating terrorism in the post September 11th world: “…[Ashcroft] finds himself at odds with some fellow Republicans from Idaho to Capitol Hill who are troubled by the extent of his anti-terrorism tactics and angered by his unwillingness to compromise.” I won’t hold my breath, but I hold out hope that Mr. Ashcroft will emerge as a major issue running up to the November 2004 elections. In fact, I credit the man for inspiring me to get up out of my seat and resolve to do everything within my power to see George W. Bush unseated; in my estimation, there has been no greater threat to the civil liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights for the last thirty years than this failed senator from Missouri.

Dan Cederholm’s weblog.

A technique for human-readable and semantically sound XHTML/CSS markup.

Moderately disturbing quiz of your gender radar.

And a reply from Douglas Bowman.

New York empties out for Labor Day weekend, when everybody who’s anybody heads out of town in order to avoid the ridicule of New York Magazine. Over the five years I’ve been here, I’ve actually learned that these are some of the nicest times to be here in the city (this partly explains why my girlfriend and I went away last weekend). Every year at this time, a general calm falls over Manhattan as there are fewer pushy assholes roaming the streets, less competition for the nine o’clock show at the movie theater, and thinner shopping crowds to take advantage of the temporary amnesty from taxes on clothing sales.

It’s also easier to reserve tables at the restaurants that stay open through the holiday, though finding a good restaurant through Citysearch remains as frustrating as ever.

I had more or less given up on the idea that I was ever going to find a replacement for Stickies when I read a very interesting article by Matt Neuberg in this week’s issue of TidBITS. Neuberg, in this latest in a series of articles on a sub-genre of software that might be called ‘snippet keepers,’ describes a supremely simple application that “…you can learn to use in about a minute — and [that] has an elegance and visual clarity that is simply stunning.” The software he was writing about is called Hog Bay Notebook.

I’m going to spare the patience of those who have no interest in Howard Dean by trying to summarize last night’s campaign rally in Manhattan very quickly: 10,000 very polite and genial supporters showed up at Bryant Park to hear Dean speak, which is a crowd count that just passes the bar for impressive but fell well short of staggering.

First of three new AppleScript books to come out this fall from various publishers.

This morning at about t 11:00a, the Dean fundraising monitor sat at about US$750,000, which left me a little skeptical that it would actually reach the one million dollar target. But here at 05:30p, the total is a robust US$919,482.38. It looks like the goal is well within reach and I’m feeling pretty enthusiastic about the whole enterprise, though the nagging skeptic in me wonders whether I’ve set myself up to be ultimately disappointed by Dean’s evolving platform. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I guess. For the time being, I’m more or less easing into a commitment to this candidate.

If you’re in the New York metro area and you have even a passing interest in this man’s prospects for winning the 2004 election (and especially if you have an interest in ensuring that George W. Bush does not win another four years in office) then you should come to Bryant Park this evening at 08:00p. That’s where the Dean campaign will be holding the raucous culmination to its “Sleepless Summer Tour.&#8221 It’s going to be a full-scale rally with Dean campaign officials, special guest speakers and live music which I’m sure to find completely cheesey. It’s going to be very rock ’n’ roll, or something. The Governor himself is due to make a speech (the event runs from 08-11:00p, but he has a private fundraising event earlier in the evening so I’m willing to bet he won’t take the stage until 11:00p or even later), and that’s what I’m really going for; I’m hoping that Dean in concert is as good as the records.

Largely positive analysis of Apple’s enterprise push.

Handy reference for finding cheap and often free IMAP hosts.

“Can we now please admit that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq are a terrible failure?”

Bush Administration estimates are for a US$475 billion deficit, but do not include the US$4.9 billion per month spent on military costs in Iraq. Together the Republican-controlled Congress and White House are far more fiscally irresponsible than any ‘big government’ Democratic bogeymen they could ever conjure up.

Key remapping and touch-pad tweaking for Mac OS X.

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean is accelerating the pace of his bid for president by trying to raise US$1 million before midnight tomorrow, ostensibly to match the enormous sums in big donor money being raised by President Bush during his highly specious, month-long vacation. This is a repeat of the stunt fundraising that the Dean campaign employed earlier in the year, when supporters unexpectedly raised US$500,000 in response to a challenge to match the US$300,000 then being collected from wealthy special interests by Vice-President Cheney.

It’s no secret that the Dean campaign has been getting progressively bolder as its fortunes rise, but this million dollar gambit is not only an act of political hubris but also a symbolic demonstration that individual donors — and voters — can successfully challenge the monstrous Republican money machine. Hopefully. The results are being posted hourly (or almost hourly) at DeanforAmerica.com, and even if the final total falls short of seven figures, it will be a substantial monetary boost and a nontrivial rally.

When I donated my US$25 this morning, the figure sat somewhere around US$450,000. As of 10:00p this evening, the officially tally is just over US$677,00. That figure is the result of over 11,300 individual contributions of, on average, US$59 each. Which means that, roughly, some three thousand voters donated two hundred grand in the past twelve hours or so — a stunning statistic. A few weeks ago I worried for the flirting-with-disaster quality of supporting Howard Dean, but with each day that worry subsides a bit.

Terrific service from the Newseum displays 254 front pages from newspapers in 36 countries — daily.

Brilliant and sublime cartoons made in Flash.

Nice print design work.

Among surveyed, 49% against re-election versus 44% for re-election. Also approval ratings down 18% since April. This man can be beaten!!!

Tomorrow morning, my girlfriend, my dog and I are taking a rental car up into New England to go stay with a friend at Martha’s Vineyard. This will be another one of my attempts to relax, unwind etc., and to shake myself free of this semi-confused haze that I feel like I’ve been carrying around for months. Wouldn’t it be great if I could return completely refreshed and with a renewed zest for life?

Curiously, I’m hoping to use this little getaway from the city to catch up on my backlog of New Yorker issues. It’s mildly ironic that the city’s most prominent periodical namesake is often best read when far away from its five boroughs. Actually, it’s going to be a “New Yorker”-themed weekend, as I will also be trying to make it through a big chunk of Ben Yagoda’s “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.” I’ve been stuck at the hundred page mark in this excellent chronicle of the development of that magazine for a few weeks now, and I’m actually quite anxious to get back to it. So now you know.

Excellent illustration work.

Article available at The Register.

“If you can point and click with a mouse, you can make $100,000 a year or more as a desktop graphic designer.”

Using the same complaints lodged against Gov. Gray Davis in the impending California recall, President Bush would be susceptible to a recall — if such a law were in place. Darn.

If you’re a fan of Kelly Clarkson, Justin Timberlake and/or Coldplay, and you want to download their songs to your Windows computer, then you have my sympathies. Without signing on to one of the competing subscription-based services and committing to monthly payouts to the major label record companies, the only real choice you have is the recently launched BuyMusic.com, and it totally sucks. I know this because I used it for the first time today and my experience was very, very poor.

The premium prices that Apple Computer charges for its hardware are hard enough to justify when it comes time to lay down the big cash for a new desktop or laptop, but it gets doubly hard to swallow when shopping around for commodity peripherals. Granted, wireless networking — Wi-Fi, if you prefer — can’t yet be said to be so ubiquitous that it can be classified as a commodity, but while shopping around for 802.11g wireless base stations, it seems hardly very far off. For literally days, I’ve been trying to decide between buying one of the more sensibly priced offerings, like the Linksys WAP54G, or spending nearly twice as much for the luxurious Apple AirPort.

Advances in understanding the behavior of dogs. With a terrific illustrative chart!

With luck, opposition to the Attorney General will bring out the vote throughout the election.

“These guidelines will allow advertisers and their agencies the ability to develop advertising content with consistent specifications to be accepted by many of the leading interactive publishers.”

”A PG-13 rating is now almost slavishly sought after, even by filmmakers who may have shunned it 20 or 30 years ago as too chaste.”

“Macs reduce IT head count while Linux probably increases IT head count, simple as that.”

Here’s my collection of notes from the big blackout of 2003, but first a few thoughts on context: when I was growing up, I thought that the rough and tumble of American history was more or less behind us, and that the modern America of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century would be remembered as a time of calm, of society in repose.

Clearly, I was wrong; in the last five years, we’ve seen an impeached presidency, a stolen presidential election, the attacks of September 11th, an avalanche of accounting scandals, an impending gubernatorial recall in the sixth largest economy in the world, and now the largest blackout to beset urban America, like, ever. This is crazy!

About twenty-nine hours after the power went out in New York City, it’s finally returned to the East Village — we were one of the last neighborhoods to be revived, so to speak, and one of the remaining fifteen percent of New Yorkers still in the dark for hours after Mayor Bloomberg and that ridiculous, charlatan of a Governor George Pataki first started congratulating themselves for seeing the city and state through the most widespread blackout in American History. It was a grueling day and a half, which I’ll write more about later, but I’m just happy that the 21st Century has been restored. Hurray!

Wow, I had no idea this amazing resource existed.

Bayesian spam filter for Mac OS X has been receiving enough positive notices, and my spam problem has been getting sufficiently out of hand, that I’m starting to consider stronger anti-junk mail measures.

Here’s an example of the perils of blogging day in and day out (or some schedule reasonably close to it) and succumbing to the tedium of constantly searching something at least mildly interesting to say. This morning I sat down with the intention of writing about the Booqpaq that I bought online last month. I’ve been toting around my laptop, digital camera, PDA and assorted other encumbrances in it for several weeks now, and I was pleased enough with it to want to write something nice about it on my site.

“htaccess files are text files (ASCII) that define certain rules and behaviors         for directories on an Apache server.”

I’ll tell you one thing: August is a bad month for blogging, especially when one is setting up a new apartment, juggling too many projects at work and trying to go about the business of life all at once. I’ve been too frazzled to sit down and compose a decent post lately, so I will rattle off a few random thoughts that I’ve had over the past few days.

Excellent opinion piece on possible strategies for the Dean campaign.

Allows you to “‘try out’ some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.”

Behavior collaborator Ford on the frustrations of working on the new Web.

This morning my girlfriend and I moved all of our boxes and furniture into our new apartment — finally! It was back-breaking work, but we managed to do it without having to hire movers again (because the apartment wasn’t ready on 01 Aug, we had to move the bulk of our belongings into the basement of the new building for a week). And, against all odds, the cable guy just finished running new coaxial through the apartment, and we’ve got digital television and cable modem connectivity. Hurray! I haven’t always got nice things to say about AOL-Time Warner, but I will say unreservedly that their Time Warner Cable NYC operation is top-notch.

Cranky list of over-used news terms.

Bruce Tognazzini wants to rally the ‘interaction designers,’ contends that “This is the most important column I have ever written.”

What kind of crowd do you expect to find at a political rally held in a trendy bar located in New York’s too-cool-for-school Lower East Side? It would be a safe bet to guess that you’d come across mostly Caucasian, mostly youthful and mostly well-educated voters, and that’s more or less what I encountered at last night’s Dean 2004 Meetup.

Her husband is Howard Dean.

Incredible text-only animation.

Part of my recent diffidence towards design is the looming fear that George W. Bush is going to be re-elected in next year’s presidential contest, and that sitting here at my desk and designing Web sites is probably not a sufficiently effective way of doing all I can to prevent that from happening. That’s why I have been spending a lot of time trying to parse the recent media buzz that’s dramatically increased the attention paid to former Governor of Vermont Dr. Howard Dean, once an awkward long-shot and now a kind of lightning rod for the Democrats’s hopes and fears for 2004.

Part of the recent cover story on the Little Democrat Who Could.

“Free general purpose utility” for improving Mac OS X system performance.

“…Celebrate Apple Computer’s historical contribution from its inception in 1976 through 1993.”

After a decade of working as a designer, I’m not sure that I’ve done much more than refine my ability to make things presentable in anticipation of a sale — I’m the rag full of spit and polish that buffs a showroom car. I’m not putting that down as a way for making a living, as lots of the smartest people I know have dedicated themselves to much the same thing… but in my darker moments, when I’m indulging my inner Holden Caufield, I wonder if 21st Century American society amounts to nothing more than a roomful of salesmen all trying to sell things to one another.

Beautiful illustration work.

Long-awaited update finally means I can ditch Outlook… and reduce 95% of my Windows XP usage. Hooray!

By the way, I think that term is one of the worst misnomers in politics, as recent history has proven that conservatives are hardly fiscally responsible.

This was the weekend that my girlfriend and I were supposed to be unpacking boxes in our new apartment, but because of contractor delays, that won’t happen for several days. Instead we whiled away our limbo-induced frustration by watching more movies than we probably should have, but we did so not entirely without reward. We started with “Bloody Sunday,” a remarkably intricate re-creation of the 1972 British-led massacre of the same name in Derry, Ireland; it was expertly made and grim, though more historically faithful than cinematically singular. To lighten the mood, we watched Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful 1932 “Trouble in Paradise,” a sweet and absurd fable of thieves and millionaires which is perhaps best likened to the most delicate, most memorable dessert ever served in a five-star restaurant. Next up was Mario Monicelli’s 1960 heist comedy “Big Deal on Madonna Street,” an occasionally laborious spoof of “Rififi” that culminates in a single moment of comic perfection. The weekend’s cinematic highlight, though, was not rented but actually viewed in a theater when, on the recommendation of two friends, we went to see the emotionally overwhelming documentary “Spellbound.” You may never have thought that the National Spelling Bee competition of 1999 would make for riveting, hilarious and touching film, but it does, believe me, and what’s more, it’s one of a handful of films that I will probably remember vividly for months and months.

Online tutorials for AppleScript beginners.

On the other hand, its sales continue to fall precipitously.

Things we were talking about at Behavior today: My move, the relative merits of the moving company I used, and how I won’t be able to get into my new apartment for another week yet. The horrific reviews of the Ben Affleck and Jenifer Lopez vanity project “Gigli.” Al Pacino’s miserable performance in the far over-rated “Scarface.” The new backpack I just bought from BOOQ. The good taste and bad calories of Ranch 1, where we went for lunch. Mister President’s upcoming appearance in The Great American Mutt Show. Oh yeah, we talked about design a little bit, too.

Spam-blocking service requires senders to be human.