All I wanted to do when I got out of school was be a graphic designer, so in that respect, I’m pretty happy with my job. As I get older though, I wonder if perhaps I pursued that goal a bit too single-mindedly, too much to the exclusion of other career choices I could have made. I wanted to be a writer for a long time, and in self-indulgent moments — like when I’m writing these overlong and unnecessarily complicated blog posts — I still fantasize about renting a house in Saigon or Hanoi and writing a book. I also wonder sometimes if I should have pursued my adolescent goal of drawing comic books for real money, before id lost out to superego and I decided to pursue ostensibly more serious matters.

Lately, I’ve been mentally compiling a list of careers I might have pursued if I had the opportunity to magically return to, say, sixteen, and completely reconstruct myself from scratch. Almost all of these would strike anybody who knows me now to be pretty absurd, but here is an incomplete accounting of them: film director, television producer, comedian, professional baseball player, career officer in one of the military services, foreign correspondent for a cable news channel, Capitol Hill lobbyist, police officer. Some of these I take more seriously than others, of course, but for some of them, it wouldn’t be completely outside of the realm of possibility for me to suddenly take them up. But, here in my early thirties and deep into a job that is threatening to become my life’s work, I guess if I’m going to make a career change then the time is now.

As one of my gifts to my girlfriend for her upcoming birthday, I went the extra mile to obtain tickets to today’s taping of “The Daily Show with John Stewart,” of which she is a big fan. In-studio seats are booked solid through the end of this coming summer, but I was lucky enough to grab a pair of canceled reservations last Friday by calling the show’s booking line. Having a reservation still doesn’t guarantee you a seat though, and I had to show up at the theater about ninety minutes ahead of time to wait in line, and even then, we barely made it into the studio made the cut-off at a hundred audience members. It was worth it, though; I saw nothing in the studio that would contest the idea that this is the most consistently funny and certainly the politically sharpest show on television. Still, I was surprised by how small their stage set is.

“Kill Bill Vol. 2” is a really good movie. I liked it a lot. I liked when Uma Thurman’s character actually killed Bill. That was good because it made the title make a lot of sense. If she had killed all those people but never killed Bill, then the title would have been wrong. They might have had to name the movie something like “Kill a Lot of People.” But they didn’t have to, because Uma kills Bill at the end. It was actually kind of sad when she killed him, but he deserved it because he tried to kill her first. Whoever tries to kill someone first, the other person has a right kill them back. That’s the law. That’s why George W. Bush wanted to kill Saddam so bad, because Saddam tried to kill him first. Well, Saddam tried to kill his dad first but his dad has the same name as him, so it counts.

Having recently gotten through a huge project at Behavior, I’m finally getting some evenings and weekends back. Some of that time is spent hanging out and some of it watching movies; I’ve definitely missed being able to watch movies with frequency, and in the past two weeks I’ve finally been able to squeeze in a good number of them. Here are some quick thoughts on some of them.

In the old days of the Macintosh’s System 7, I used to use a suite of products called Now Utilities which added a host of widget-style enhancements to the operating system, most principally for the purpose of helping users get to files faster. The first great benefit the suite offered was being able to add custom menus to various locations which would allow me to get to recently accessed folders, files and favorite applications. Another component of the utility suite greatly enhanced the Open and Save dialog boxes, again allowing me to access recent items.

As the old Macintosh operating system got long in the tooth, Now Software shuttered its operation, but the same products essentially lived on in the form of the Action Utilities suite from Power On Software. Still, neither suite ever truly made it over to the newer operating system, and for a while, I actually resisted upgrading to Mac OS X, holding out hope for some equivalent.

Amongst all the obfuscation, double-talk, evasions, stuttering, awkward pauses, rote repetitions of talking points and tongue-tied sputtering in President Bush’s news conference this evening — only his third ever prime time conference, by the way — I think my absolute favorite line came during an answer to a reporter’s question about… I don’t even remember what it was about. But Bush went down some long, confusing tunnel of rhetoric and, in seeking to illustrate his assertion that America, apparently, has been charged by God with spreading freedom all over the world, he uttered this lovely gem: “I think the American people will find it interesting that we're providing food for the North Korea people who starve.” I don’t even know what that means.

The ridiculously gorgeous weather of spring — the reward for months of crappy winter weather — is starting to visit the New York area now. Though it was overcast and raining today, it was gorgeous on Saturday, when my girlfriend and I took Mister President up to Fahnestock State Park, where we hiked about 6 miles, part of it along the Appalachian Trail. We made the trip as much for us as for the dog, who we let off the leash (probably at the risk of a fine from a park ranger) for the entirety of the four hours.

Just so you know, there is in fact a new version of Behaviordesign.com forthcoming. In what little spare time our current workload has allowed, we’ve been tooling away on a redesign that will, hopefully, ease our continued embarrassment over the way the current site looks on its face and the way it’s structured beneath the surface. This new version will be a hundred percent XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, and I’ve been having fun playing with alternative CSS files for various media.

Here’s how my Web surfing habits have changed: somewhere along the way, I got completely out of the habit of reading the various design Web sites like K10k and Surfstation every morning, possibly because I so often find that their purposely terse and cryptic language leaves me wanting. This is also because I’ve been spending more and more time every morning reading political news, most prominently at ABC News’ excellent The Note, which has just started a new spin-off column that intends to offer the same brand of Beltway insiderism on a ‘real time’ basis. And then there’s the Progress Report from the Center for American Progress, which is exhaustive in compiling cogent cases against the Bush adminstration’s errant policies every morning. And of course there’s all those political blogs, too: Talking Points Memo, Political Animal, Instapundit and Wonkette, and wherever they lead me.

Most of the people with whom I’ve casually discussed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” have insisted that I should put aside my prejudices — specifically my unwillingness to get suckered into another attempt at reinventing Jim Carrey’s heretofore painfully unwatchable career, first, and my aversion to watching yet another ridiculously hip music video director’s transition to the silver screen, second — so as not to miss one of the brighter offerings in this year’s crop of movies. “I was skeptical too, believe me, but it was really good,” said one of my friends last week. I just can’t do it, or at least I haven’t been able to yet, and if I do, I’m pretty sure I won’t be writing about it here unless I find it sufficiently unworthy of all the praise it’s got. Something stubborn in me finds the whole enterprise just too plainly offensive.

I found a little bit of old New York in the Flatiron building this morning, when I took my girlfriend’s malfunctioning Olivetti Lettera 35i typewriter to the Gramercy Office Equipment Company for repair. This 70+ year old business is run in a little hovel of an office on the eighth floor by an impeccably groomed, kindly gentleman with a pleasing Brooklyn accent and a preternatural understanding of what makes a typewriter, er, type. Every available surface in the office is stacked up with aging typewriters, office equipment and unfiled paperwork, and when I walked down the very narrow yard of floorspace with the Olivetti, he pulled out a small writing extension from a hulking old steel desk, slapped it with his palm and instructed me to “Set it there. That’s all the space I got.”

My award for the worst interface in a best-selling, market-leading software application goes to Intuit’s perversely inelegant QuickBooks. This bookkeeping program is more or less ubiquitous among small-businesses, in spite of its opaque and unfriendly design, which I find to be really amazing because it’s truly, profoundly awful. As the finances at Behavior have gotten more and more complicated, I’ve been finding myself spending increasing amounts of time trying to figure out QuickBooks’ hidden corners and idiosyncratic organizational structure. For someone who has only a cursory understanding of accounting, I find that almost nothing I click on behaves as I expect it to, and it provides no clear metaphors for understanding how to navigate through a company’s finances. Even fundamental behaviors like scrolling and searches are unpredictable, having been half-heartedly implemented or incompetently reinvented by Intuit’s software designers. I just can’t say it enough: this program sucks.