Over the past few years, I’ve seen lots of stock agencies try to take a decidedly editorial approach to the creative strategy of their catalogs, mostly in an attempt to ingratiate their beautifully produced compendiums of pictures-looking-for-a-purpose into designers’s hearts. Nonstock and Photonica, notably, have produced some lavishly and slavishly designed tomes, but beyond the novelty of their approach, I always found them somewhat hollow; the design trickery that laid out their pages never seemed to be able to mask the emptiness of most of the photography they showcased, or if it did, any true creativity was spread too thin over too many pages. These books were generally as thick and heavy as a textbook, and the guilt of tree-killing, more than the books’ inherent usefulness, was probably what kept so many of them from getting pitched the minute they arrived.

Saturday night I was stricken with some of the worst digestive problems I think I’ve ever had, barring perhaps a horrific stomach bug that laid siege to me while traveling in Asia three years ago. I’ll spare the specifics for squeamish readers, and just say that I spent the twenty-four hours after dinner on Saturday and before “The Simpsons” on Sunday more or less in a doubled-over position. It was nasty and uncomfortable and it reaffirmed my suspicion that everything is slowly trying to kill me.

You can’t get enough of my amateur punditry, right? Good news for you: I have some further notes on yesterday’s third Democratic Presidential Debate, which I scribbled down after realizing that I hadn’t said everything I wanted to say in my last post.

At last night’s third Democratic presidential debate, held at Pace University in lower Manhattan, Senator John Kerry and Rep. Dick Gephardt both took swipes at Governor Howard Dean with the obvious intention of provoking him to anger. Dean, who has been nagged by a reputation for irascibility, took the bait.

Responding to an allegation by Gephardt that he had sided with former House Speaker and notorious Republican Newt Gingrich on health care issues (including some negative comments on Medicare), Dean shot back that the claim was “a flat-out falsehood,” that he had, “frankly done more than [Rep. Gephardt]” to deliver health care, that “nobody here deserves to be compared to Newt Gingrich,“ that the allegations were “not helpful” and distracted from “the real enemy: George W. Bush.”

Cocoatech’s Path Finder is a replacement for the Mac OS X Finder that provides a multitude of geeky file management tools. It has a counterpart in the Windows world in the form PowerDesk, itself a geeky replacement for the Windows Explorer. Both of these programs subvert the ‘keep it simple stupid’ conventional wisdom of file management by adding lots of bells and whistles aimed at power users, but they’re also a lot of fun, at least for nerds.

I’ve been using the recently released version 3.0 of Path Finder for a few days, and it’s almost a home run. Its combination of management innovations, shortcuts and user-centric rearrangement of standard Finder interface elements is really excellent, a superb example of how third party developers can improve on basic operating system functionality. The only caveat is that it’s occasionally slow to refresh directory listings — not a huge shortcoming except for the fact that it completely disqualifies the program from truly replacing the Finder. Which is a shame, because I like it a lot.

After complaints and criticisms last season that it had lost touch with the times, the new creative team of NBC’s highly decorated series “The West Wing” seems prepared to play catch-up — and furiously — in its first outings without creator and former executive producer Aaron Sorkin at the helm. For those who don’t watch the show or who can’t be bothered by the dramatic meanderings of network television, it’s not worth recapping the details of tonight’s plot, but suffice it to say that a show that was once engineered specifically as a liberal fantasia has been rudely awoken to the new conservative reality; the president that sits in this fictitious Oval Office is now a member of the Grand Old Party.

Three of my partners at Behavior are due to make a huge pitch for a new project to our biggest client tomorrow morning. To do my part, I played the part of the production lackey this evening. This entailed not even typing a single paragraph of the proposal nor laying out a single spread in the elaborate leave-behind book they prepared for the client. Rather, my duties included making a run to two paper stores, two art supply stores and a visit to Staples, printing six copies of the 50-page document on our rather leisurely-paced color printer, trimming all the copies down to the custom size we had determined for the book, collating the pages, assembling the pages in the uncommon binder we purchased to house them, and affixing tab dividers to mark the eight sections in each book. I’ve done manual work from time to time since starting Behavior, but rarely to this extent. I’m not complaining, though — in fact, despite its physically laborious demands, I found a kind of meditative quality in the whole endeavor. If nothing else, it was a semi-pleasant flashback to the days when I was an intern and even my first few years as a professional, so-called ‘junior designer,’ when fully half of every working day must have been spent cutting, trimming and affixing things to be given to people. After ten years (yikes!) in the business — including two as an owner in an independent design business — there’s a kind of irony in that, right?

Here’s a quick complaint about online ticket purchasing for highly popular events: it has a long way to go. Unable (and, by principle, unwilling) to camp out all night for post-season Yankees tickets, I decided to try and make an online purchase yesterday when tickets to the division and league championship series went on sale right at 12:30p sharp. I set an alarm on my computer to remind me to log in at the appointed time, and I was pleased to be able to secure a spot in the virtual queue right away — especially knowing that probably tens of thousands of other fans were trying to do the same thing either online, at Ticketmaster outlets, or at the stadium.

There’s a case to be made for the inherent clumsiness of the the Portable Document Format — better known as PDF, and most often associated with Adobe’s Acrobat software — but I really like it. At least in the interim, while the principal delivery medium for most documents is still paper, PDFs make a great replacement for stacks of letter-sized, stapled or paper-clipped documentation. Last night, while trying to figure out how to get my VCR to tape a show saved on my DVR, I suddenly realized that I could replace most all of the paper user manuals that ship with the consumer electronics devices I own with simple PDFs.

Following is the text from an email I wrote today to a friend about the prospects for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark. We exchange messages every few days updating one another on our thoughts on the race for the 2004 Democratic Presidential nomination, and whether these Democrats really have a chance of beating Bush.

My free time has been whittled down to next to nothing, but I still, somewhat wistfully, keep a list of books I’d like to read and movies I’d like to watch. In fact, I’ve been fantasizing of a week-long break away from everything and spent reading my way through a shelf of books, catching up on a stack of New Yorker issues, and watching a ton of movies. This is sad, because several years ago, I was reading two books a month. That was when I first to New York, and I was commuting into the city from Westchester. If nothing else, I miss that interminable daily ride on the Metro North for all the reading time it used to afford.

A friend of mine has been talking up the long-awaited entry of General Wesley Clark into the race for the Democratic nomination for so long now, it seemed almost anti-climactic to me when it happened yesterday. Notwithstanding Clark’s impressive résumé, I’ve been a bit skeptical of the concept of an ideal candidate that the politically flirtatious Clark has been cultivating for the past few months. My take on it is that, before a candidate jumps into the race, it really doesn’t matter what they’ve done before, for better or worse. Once the hat is in the ring, as it is now, that’s when we really find out if there’s a credible case to be made for him. And besides, one has to wonder why the hell he waited so long to join the fray.

Clark has enjoyed no shortage of enthusiastic press coverage, but I predict that won’t last very long. The field of Democratic contenders is crowded and, except for Howard Dean, mostly unremarkable from the perspective of newsworthiness. Clark opens up the story considerably, at least for the short term — he represents a new wellspring of potentially juicy headlines, and the press corps is going to tear him apart.

Politics is one thing I can’t seem to get enough of these days, so I was happy to see the debut of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s “K Street” earlier this week. Conceptually, this new ongoing series is something like a verité mockumentary, a kind of cross between the work of D.A. Pennebaker and Christopher Guest — I realize that putting it like that would seemingly confound distinction, but there’s not an easy way to describe the tone of a series that pits a small handful of fictional characters mingling and interacting with real-life politicians and Washington power brokers, and that is designed to be conceived, written, shot, edited and aired all within the span of a week. It’s a bold concept, and the result is generally worthwhile; “K Street” is by turns revealing and lightly comedic, but it also bears the creakiness of an improvised enterprise.

The situation in Iraq is often referred to as resembling or possessing the potential to become ‘another Viet Nam,’ which is a phrase that really, really frustrates me. It’s not that I don’t agree with the spirit of this statement, because there are indeed some striking similarities in the case for this country’s continued involvement in Iraq and the United States’ prolonged motivation for waging war in the country of my birth… similarities which don’t necessarily help the case of either those supporting or opposing the Bush administration. As a historical lesson, the war we fought in Viet Nam in the 1960s and 70s can yield some valuable insight if we’re careful in our consideration of its legacy.

If you were at Union Square Park in Manhattan today, you would’ve seen a lot of dogs, like mine, and a lot of crazy dog people, like me and my girlfriend. We were all there for The Great American Mutt Show, a non-profit event designed to encourage the adoption of mixed-breed canines from animal shelters and rescues. There were several booths for dog adoption as well as cat adoption, and booths for dog training companies and local animal activists, too. I even got handed a flyer from a group promising “political action for animals,” who are dedicated to advocating animal issues and animal-friendly advocates in the state legislature and the city council.

Though the nature of recent posts might suggest that I’ve become exclusively preoccupied with politics and baseball, I’m still heavily invested in other interests like music and movies. Well, not exactly movies, because a busy schedule at Behavior has pretty much precluded me from very many two-hour blocks of cinema or DVD time. I’ve been keeping a mental list of movies I want to be sure to find the time to watch, but I have no idea when that’s going to be.

As for music, well, thanks to my iPod and the fact that the act of designing is conducive to concurrently listening to music, I’m still a steady consumer of pop. Looking back at the past month or so, I’ve downloaded a ton of tracks from Emusic. Not all of it has been particularly good, but I’ve found a few gems, including “The Tyranny of Distance,” a two-year old album from Ted Leo/Pharamacists.

I’m not sure how this happened, but I’m now a pretty dedicated follower of baseball, having recently got into the habit of checking the American league standings nearly every day to see if the Yankees can hang on to their precarious lead over the Boston Red Sox. This is unremarkable except for the fact that professional sports in general, and team sports in particular, have left me cold for most of my life. But as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a real soothing quality to this sport, and what’s more I’ve been seduced by the endless depths of its statistical undercurrent.

On the other hand, my progress has been slower in developing an appreciation for the somewhat lackluster personalities of baseball’s ‘stars.’ These guys generally don’t have a particularly interesting message to communicate to the world beyond the expert feats of athleticism they commit on the field. After watching ball all season, I’m at a point now where I’m pleasantly indifferent to the worldview of most major league players, which isn’t such a bad way to enjoy the sport, really. Until, that is, one of them opens their mouths and says something substantially uninformed about the world beyond the ballpark.

A year ago today, we informally closed our office on the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, from fear of some recurrence of terrorist activity and, at least on my part, out of a sense of confusion. It wasn’t clear to me how we as a nation should act or behave, how we should honor the dead, and what bearing my personal enmity for the way that the Bush administration had been prosecuting the war on terror should have on the way I conducted myself on 11 Sep 2002. It seemed best to sit out the day quietly, abstaining from anything remotely inappropriate.

There was a lead-up of anxiety to that one year anniversary, but this year, the milestone seems to have practically snuck up on us without fanfare or expectation. I’d wager that today, much more so than last year, so many of us woke up this morning and headed off to work with virtually no compunction or sense of danger, even those living in or heading to lower Manhattan. Now that it’s here, we still mourn the day’s historical loss, but otherwise we feel a kind of detachment from it, too. To some degree, we seem to feel safer, or to be willing to resume our illusion of safety.

For me, what’s saddest about that day, beyond the tragic deaths we shouldn’t ever forget, is the lasting damage that the attacks have had on the fabric of our life, principally taking the form of a government run amuck, one bearing less and less resemblance to the America that our forefathers envisioned with each passing day. The attacks have, in many ways, achieved their effect of undermining democracy by essentially brokering a willing exchange of civil liberties — the defining trait of American character — for an illusion of safety. I wouldn’t even describe it as safety, but rather a kind of comfort in which danger is displaced to more convenient locales. The attacks effectively installed a regime of mendacity at the helm of American government, and they have led us dangerously off course. We need to replace George W. Bush in the 2004 election for President of the United States.

When I get the time, I’m going to make a few fixes to the Movable Type templates running Subtraction.com, including: Fixing the cookie problem on the Remarks feature so that it will actually remember information like it’s supposed to. Fixing the Search templates, which have become a total mess since upgrading to MT 2.64 (and possibly moving over to a Google search). Fixing the Elsewhere section’s archives, which doesn’t currently allow direct access to individual posts. Also, I’m hoping to tweak and/or add a few new features, including: Integrating the Elsewhere archives — at least in some fashion — with the main posts. Establishing a ‘glossary,’ which is an idea I’ve come up with for cataloging concepts and ideas that I refer to regularly. Adding a widget that will allow readers to email links of their favorite posts to friends because, hey, who doesn’t want to do that? And finally, one day I’m going to get around to creating a gallery of masthead images from the home page, and maybe those old covers from version Five.0 of the site, too. All of this will happen as soon as I figure out how to stop sleeping.

A lot of my friends didn’t even realize the second Democratic Presidential Debate was being held this evening in Baltimore. In fact, I hadn’t thought that a second debate would even take place until Thu 25 Sep, owing to the fact that the schedule of debates on the Democratic National Committee’s Web site said as much. It took some hunting on the Web to find when exactly it would be aired and where I could watch it.

Conspiratorially speaking, there might be a case that there was deliberate lack of media attention paid to this event when you consider that it was sponsored by the Congressional Black Congress, and held on the grounds of the principally African-American Morgan State University. To be fair though, the debate isn’t even mentioned on the CBC’s official Congressional home page, nor on the CBC Foundation’s own Web site.

Thanks to the handy-dandy new DVR in my cable box, tonight I was able to watch Showtime’s dramatization of the Bush White House in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, “D.C. 9/11: Time of Crisis.” Oh man, this thing was a hoot. I would almost say that it’s a completely worthless, clumsy piece of right wing propaganda, to say nothing of its shallow command of scripting, acting, filmmaking and drama… But there is in fact some inherent value to be found in its jingoistic melodrama, and that is a level of camp not seen since the days when Adam West ran around Southern California in a pair of gray tights.

The script for this historical fiction is loaded with groaners so heavy with histrionics (and pock-marked with innumerable dramatic pauses that never seem to want to end) that the final result is gut-bustingly hilarious. Take, as but one example among dozens and dozens, this line uttered by Bush — who has been wildly reimagined as an heroically intelligent, even-handed and profound statesman — utters to the uncharacteristically reserved and deferential Cheney: “I'm going to need you at my side at all times… consigliere.” Truly, this is the stuff of drunken, riotous midnight movie screenings. Good job, Showtime!

There’s a rule of thumb that I’ve picked up in my ten years or so of buying digital toys of all sorts, from PCs to peripherals to PDAs: every device has its own quirky, unintended operational shortcoming that, if it’s not readily apparent at the time of purchase, will make itself known soon enough, and will drive me completely bats.

The latest evidence of this is my Sony Cybershot DSC-F505, a digital still camera that’s pretty long in the tooth now anyway, but has been repeatedly beset by a few infuriating defects over the three years or so I’ve had it. First, the battery it shipped with started failing to hold any meaningful charge, and I’d get only a minute or two of power from it.

In spite of the beautiful weather, I spent a lot of this weekend indoors, seated in front of my computer. Since we moved into this new apartment, it was the first full weekend that I’ve had complete use of my workspace, thanks to the wireless networking that I did a week ago. I’ve been working on a new project, a Web site for a new client, that’s driven entirely by a series of Movable Type weblogs.

A good chunk of my Saturday was spent sketching out the site with a paper and pen, trying to get my head around a clear method for interweaving at least three and possibly as many as six separate weblogs into a single, seamless site. The hardest part was figuring out a clear, concise method of visually representing the relationships between each; it was a fun challenge, and I think I was able to bite off a good chunk of it pretty successfully by the time I called it quits earlier today. Inside of thirty-six hours, I had a reasonably robust prototype up and running, and many of the major conceptual and technical challenges had been sorted out.

It made me think that I miss this part of Web design, the part that’s intensely personal, where a single person can take an idea from paper to Web in just a matter of days. This immediacy was the quality that originally drew me away from print design and to the Web, when I found that my ideas could be rendered online without interference or obstacles. It’s nice to be intermittently reminded of this original seduction; each time it happens, I rediscover at least a little, well-preserved part of my tarnished passion for this business.

What I was thinking during tonight’s Democratic Presidential Debate in New Mexico was mostly that there are a heck of a lot of candidates, and that the ones on stage weren’t even all of them! The Reverend Al Sharpton was a no-show due to travel difficulties, and Wes Clark has yet to end his painful teasing and toss his hat into the ring. I also wondered if anybody could really tell these people apart; I don’t mean political junkies like myself, I mean any average person flipping around on the television and hearing most of these candidates speak aloud about their positions on the major issues for the first time.

Finding favorable writing about the Mac on the Web is easier than finding the names of your senators and representatives in Congress. Though the platform has a relatively minor share of the computing marketplace, there’s no shortage of highly enthusiastic voices — old and young, articulate and visceral — generating an endless litany of pro-Macintosh rhetoric.

Yet the nature of this writing, while invigorating, often fails on the point of making truly persuasive arguments for buying a new Macintosh instead of a new Windows machine, and certainly on the point of providing objective or sound reasoning. Which is to say, most of what you’ll read on the so-called Mac Web amounts to a kind of benign dogma. In the last few weeks, however, I’ve noticed a small number of articles of notably impressive quality, all of which are worth reading for Mac diehards, interested computing agnostics and maybe even for inveterate Windows users.

Apparently, this September inherited very little from July and August, and summer has left town. Weekend trips to the beach and vacations in New England are past, and now made to seem too swiftly squandered and insufficiently savored by today’s cold, wet introduction to autumn. When I left my apartment this morning for work, the sky was an underbelly of cloud cover and depressingly gray, and it promised soon there’d be morning commutes with no light at all. It made me think of kids reluctantly, crankily returning to school for the first time today, and how this cold weather is an unfairly frank harbinger of a long schoolyear. Without a week or more of warm weather in September, to say nothing of an Indian summer, there’s no transition away from the luxury of summer vacation and into the grim schedule of the fall semester. Instead, there’s just a cold, wet abruption. What I mean to say is, today I’m glad I’m not a kid. Tomorrow might be different.

After bringing home a DVR on Saturday, I made a second significant technological upgrade to our household on Sunday in the form of wireless 802.11b networking — finally. Our cable modem connection, which sits in the bedroom, now broadcasts a clean 802.11b signal throughout the apartment, thanks to a new Netgear MR814v2 wireless router which I managed to buy for a remarkable US$40, after rebates.

It astounds me that the price point for wireless networking has dropped so quickly, but it makes sense now that the slower 802.11b standard is rapidly being superseded by the faster 802.11g standard. At forty bucks, an 802.11b router is an incredible bargain, as most home networking needs will almost never exceed its 11Mbps limit. Even if, through some dramatic and unforseen alteration in my computing habits, my home network traffic demands 802.11g within a few months, then I’ll be able to comfortably discard this Netgear router knowing that it provided me a very economical entryway into the wireless world.