Earlier this evening I went with some friends to see “How to Kick People,” which is perhaps best described as a combination of comedic short story reading and variety show. I say ‘comedic’ rather than ‘comedy’ in an attempt to do justice to the idea that the show is not preoccupied with generating laughs in the style of an out and out comedy revue, and yet it was still remarkably funny.

There’s a special if perhaps unfair sense of shame that I feel for knowing that the USA Patriot Act was authored by a fellow Vietnamese immigrant. When I first saw Viet Dinh speaking about this legislation in 2002, a shock and a deep, hot flush came over me, and since then I’ve mostly tried to put it out of my mind, only periodically recalling the private embarrassment of my highly tentative and peripheral connection to this landmark abridgment of civil liberties. Anyway, for a beginner’s primer on Mr. Dinh’s position on the USA Patriot Act, you can have a look at the rather facile interview he recently gave to Wired.

When conservatives complain about “activist judges,” I wonder if they would include the growing number of adjudicators who have been systematically destroying consumers’ fair use rights (or, for that matter, those appointed under Republican presidents who have been diligently repealing environmental protections). The latest of these is Judge Susan Illston, who sits on the federal bench in San Francisco, and who last week in a suit between 321 Studios and the Motion Picture Association of America, ruled that DVD-copying software is illegal.

You may not need another Web site devoted to link after link of Internet miscellany, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that’s better designed than the plainly named List. It’s yet another site from the brain and indomitable sleeplessness of my pal Nazarin Hamid. He’s also produced a series of promo graphics which look about as close to a Web-savvy version of Massimo Vignelli’s style as you could hope for. Anyway, I’ll be contributing some links to List here and there, though given my increasingly threadbare amounts of free time, it’s probably good that, given the unaccedited format, you won’t be able to tell how few I’ll be adding.

The way the race for the Democratic nomination has turned out, I feel that my “amateur pundit’s license should be revoked,” as a friend of mine put it in reference to his own opinions on recent events. Certainly, I had no idea that the last men standing would be Senator John Kerry, he of Central Casting Presidentiality, and retiring Senator John Edwards, graduate of the Alex P. Keaton School of Law and Grooming. Who woulda thunk it?

If you have something to say about design and you’re looking for a place to say it online, you now have the added option of saying it at the new AIGA Design Forum, which just launched today and is vastly improved and much easier to use. At least, that’s my humble opinion, as it’s yet another project from your friends over at Behavior. I first alluded to this major undertaking about a month ago, which is some indication of how long I’ve been excited about getting it launched. We actually started talking with the good folks at the AIGA about this when the weather was still warm and before the leaves completely abandoned the trees, so it has a relatively long history. A little bit of which I’ll go into here.

Valentine’s Day, which passed innocently over the weekend, got me thinking about gay marriage. It’s all well and good to protect marriage as an institution between a man and a woman (as lots of right-minded people who obviously have learned how to prioritize the truly important issues facing us as a nation are doing), but has anyone stood up in defense of the great tradition that we owe to Saint Valentine — whoever the heck he was? This cherished holiday is clearly intended to celebrate romantic transactions between a man and a woman — and only between a man and a woman — and anyone who tells you otherwise, I’m sure, had better think twice about his or her relationship with the Big Guy. I swear, if I hear of even one gay couple exchanging candy in heart-shaped boxes, filling out little pink greeting cards, or buying individually wrapped roses as a way of expressing their romantic intentions to one another on the Fourteenth of February — all of these being blatant attempts at undermining one of the founding Hallmark holidays or our society — then they’d better be ready for the onslaught of protest letters sent to newspapers and on-air call-ins to radio shows that only the dedication of all my bountiful free time can produce. Also, don’t even make write a letter to my congressperson with the words “constitutional amendment” in it. You just don’t want that.

As horrific an application as PowerPoint is, it can’t be denied that it’s achieving a kind of critical mass in our modern culture, if all the recent attention paid to it by the likes of Edward Tufte and David Byrne is any indication. I’ve been thinking about this because at Behavior, we’re working with a client to help craft their PowerPoint presentations by juicing them up a bit with some embedded Flash movies and other design trickery.

It’s not the first time we’ve been asked to do it, and painful as it is, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s clearly one of the best ways for a company to spend its design dollar. Given how unremittingly horrible are the majority of PowerPoint presentations given by businesses, one surefire way to hit a home run is with a lucid and visually stunning slideshow.

Herewith, a few of the user interface widgets that I’ve been tinkering with lately for a Behavior project; only sliders/scroll bars and buttons here, but I’ve recently turned out four or five entire interface comps that wouldn’t look particularly conspicuous alongside most any Aqua-friendly Mac OS X application. Well, that’s my humble opinion, anyway, because I’m still getting comfortable with working in this aesthetic.

A new version of the resurgent Mozilla project’s Firebird browser was released yesterday under the new name “Firefox,” which seems to me to be an even dodgier moniker than Firebird, but I guess they had a good reason for the switch. I downloaded the Mac OS X version and played around with it a bit today, and it seems buggier than previous versions of Firebird that I’ve used; I had some trouble scrolling through a few Web pages, troubles that seemed caused by the application’s user interface, rather than the rendering engine.

I finally got my hands on ten of the twelve tracks that make up DJ Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album,” a remix of Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” in which he backs the megastar M.C.’s vocals with loops and samples lifted entirely from the Beatles’s “The White Album.”

Bear with me through a thirty-two year old’s indulgence in pop idols past: the best ‘best of’ compilation CD that I’ve ever owned is Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ “Girls Girls Girls.” On a whim, I pulled it out of my newly sleeved collection the other day and brought it with me to the office, and I’ve been listening to it all day with a bit of nostalgia and a bit of renewed amazement.

I’m already on record with the contention that the high-touch, rendered and shaded school of aesthetics — as most prominently represented by Apple’s Aqua — is the inevitable future, probably, of user interface design. For a new Behavior project in which we’re building a series of interactive demonstration modules with Flash, we decided to take a crack at producing some really lush, ornate design comps as a possible visual solution. This is really my first concerted effort at this kind of Photoshop jockeying, so it’s entailed a good deal of extra time trying to learn the ins and outs of making dimensional widgets look convincing. It’s not all that difficult, but it’s not all that easy, either. I’ll tell you one thing, though: when I looked at the clock and saw that I’d spent almost six hours working on two buttons and a slider, I realized that this kind of work takes a long, long time.

Today was a good day to be a user of Apple’s much praised Safari. First, Apple released a new update to it, pushing the version number to 1.2 and, most significantly, adding full keyboard navigation, thereby allowing users to fully interact with Web pages without mousing (if they so desire). This is the latest in the very slow conversion of Apple’s philosophy on keyboard versus mouse access to user interfaces; the company is incrementally acquiescing to the generally accepted principle that, more often than not, using a keyboard is much faster, at least for advanced users.