Twenty days into a free 21-day trial license for the latest version of Cocoatech’s PathFinder, I’m still teetering on the fence, trying to decide between uninstalling this replacement utility for the Mac OS X Finder or paying the US$34 license fee to continue using it. On the one hand, PathFinder is still full of bugs and unexpected performance hiccups, something which should disqualify it immediately as a replacement as a file management tool. This was my initial reaction when I first took a look at the program last year, when it ran on Jaguar. The critical bugs I saw then have been fixed, but newer or different ones have taken over in prominence.

At yesterday’s opening game in the annual Yankees/Mets “subway series,” I realized that, in the twenty or so major league ballgames I’ve attended in my lifetime, I’ve probably only made it to the ballpark early enough for the first pitch perhaps once or twice. Yesterday was one of those days — we got there almost forty-five minutes early — and I found myself sitting through the pre-game ceremonies and wondering, “Is the beginning of every baseball game always so militaristic?”

There was an embarrassing pageant of military gung-ho on display, from an absurd, protracted series of daring-do landings by the U.S. Army’s parachute team to the presentation of colors by West Point cadets to — most egregiously — a noisy, ostentatious fly-over during the national anthem by a trio of F-11 fighter planes. There were more mini-ceremonies too, the details of which I didn’t catch, but all of which were received with vigorous enthusiasm by the crowd of 55,303 baseball fans.

Every gadget lover is, from time to time, tempted by the wiles of Sony’s industrial design. I myself succumbed to the then unnaturally thin profile of the VAIO F505 several years ago, and I enjoyed that machine for a while until it became so riddled with hardware problems that, eventually, I vowed never to buy another Sony computer again. So I was looking at Sony’s latest VAIO X505 laptop the other day, which bills itself as “featherweight” (1.84 lbs.) and looks about as thin as an issue of Newsweek (0.8 in.). It’s sexy, to be sure, but I’m reminded of the little calculation that I recommend for any prospective buyer of a Sony product: take the price tag and divide it by twelve to get the monthly cost of owning the product until it inevitably breaks.

With the help of my new television, on Sunday I parked myself on the couch and watched the last two first-season episodes of HBO’s western drama series “Deadwood.” I’m a bigger fan of westerns now than I ever was, thanks in part to the wealth of symbolic artistry that great directors have woven into the genre and which escaped me somehow when I was a kid. So I’ve been watching “Deadwood” with curious interest. If I can liken it to anything I’ve seen before, it would be an incredibly profane version of Robert Altman’s venerable “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” which also explored the brutal, unpleasant and dirty living inside of a frontier town.

For a year, our television’s picture has grown gradually more distorted at the top edge, such that the head of anyone who appears on it seems elongated and unnaturally tall — my friends call it the ‘conehead effect.’ I would’ve liked to have replaced it sooner, especially given that it’s often difficult to make out who’s winning a ball game if a network — like say Fox Sports — chooses to display the score horizontally, at the top of the screen; our aging, fake-wood paneled idiot box would cut off most of the runs, outs and innings at the top.

The final straw came on Friday evening, when the picture moved even further north, and left behind fully two-inches of unused black space along the bottom. I fiddled with it a little bit, then left it alone for the evening as we went to dinner. Saturday morning it showed the same result, and I finally felt justified in buying a new set.

I’ve been considering a television-like summer hiatus from blogging, what with all of the demands on my time that seem to have gotten more serious since the weather turned warm. My family was visiting from the West Coast last weekend, which wiped me out for the week, and now my girlfriend has friends visiting from Florida and Maryland and staying in our tiny, lower-Manhattan apartment. I’ve also been swamped at work, not just with projects, but with negotiating a hiring contract with a candidate to fill a major new position at Behavior.

If you were looking for a thought-provoking opportunity to “investigate how graphic design, visual persuasion, and the media will influence the 2004 election,” you would probably have walked away disappointed after this evening’s “Hell Yes!” event, sponsored earnestly by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

To their credit, the organization made it perfectly clear that the panel session would be biased in favor of liberal politics and, specifically, against the policies and track record of the Bush White House. So in that sense, I should have had lowered expectations for the content of the presentations, but I still felt like the whole affair had a sour taste to it.

Here’s a little bit of nerdery: last week at Behavior, we had to quickly generate lots of potential names for a branding project. To get the widest possible array of names, everyone in the office was invited to submit their ideas, and we ended up with over a hundred submissions. The problem was that they were all trapped in many different email messages, and I needed to get them into a nice, clean PowerPoint presentation.

At first I was thinking that I would have to manually retype them all in order to get them into the presentation in alphabetical order. Then I started thinking that if I could get the list of names out of the emails quickly, I’d be able to use a series of applications to create an XML version of the list that would be readable by Apple’s alternative to PowerPoint, the beautifully-designed Keynote.

My day started very, very early this morning, thanks to a gift certificate that my girlfriend gave to me last December for a recreational class in cooking at the Institute of Culinary Education. For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a one-time session called “Fulton Fish Market Tour and Cooking Class,” noting but not seriously considering the difficulty of its unseemly 05:30a start time.

So even before the sun could be bothered to begin its business, we took a taxi down to the southeastern tip of Manhattan, where the long-standing Fulton Fish Market operates until it relocates (reluctantly) to the Bronx in 2005. The instructor gave us a tour of the market and a quick primer on the varieties of fish sold and how to select them.

It always makes me feel a little silly to be writing here about movies that I’ve just seen on video or DVD, well after they’ve left the theaters and long after any initial excitement they may have stirred up has been dissipated. Unfortunately, with the way my life has worked over the past two years, I see far more films on my DVD player than at the cineplex. So more often than not, I’ll just choose not to write about them at all, but in the case of “School or Rock,” how can I resist?