In a few hours, I’ll be leaving for vacation, headed to Italy for the next week and a half. My girlfriend and I have rented a nice little house in Sicily. Not without a bit of regret, I’ll miss most all of the debates and the start of baseball’s post-season, but I’m sure I’ll find some way to compensate for that. Here’s the plan: eat, relax, sleep, repeat. It’s going to be awesome. In all likelihood, I’ll have zero or very limited access to the world wide internet highway until I return the week of 11 Oct — and the first post to come sometime later, after I de-jetlag myself.

In advance of tomorrow night’s first Presidential debate between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry, there’s a lot of talk going on right now about the reputation that the senator from Massachusetts has for ‘strong finishes.’ An article in today’s New York Times details Kerry’s history of coming to life in the final stretches his campaigns, most notably in his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1996 and in his unexpected resurgence against Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries earlier this year. If it happens, I’ll be delighted — I’ll be ecstatic — but at this point, in spite of the fact that I continue to pump modest amounts of money into the Democratic effort for a November victory (and so should you!), these tales strike me as bedtime stories whispered into the ears of frightful Democrats as they — as we — pray into the night.

Sometimes, in the course of fulfilling obligations to friends or family, you do design work that you otherwise never would have done, never ever, not in a hundred years. Like, you might find yourself somehow agreeing to build a little Web site for your girlfriend’s uncle, who is a just-published novelist trying to promote the recent release of his first ever book, a small-press thriller about murders and arson and suspense and stuff. And that book might feature a cover design which you yourself never would have art directed, whose typography and illustration style might be pretty far afield from the visual style and design rules you yourself prefer. It happens, you know. But you make the best of it and try to deliver as competent and effective a product as you can, something that does its job well, even if it doesn’t necessarily serve your own particular interests. And then you just launch it, like I did today with ShadowofGuilt.com… and you take a little bit of pleasure in knowing that, at the very least, you helped out someone you know personally, rather than a huge megacorporation, for a change. What’s more, it’s nice knowing that the whole thing (all three pages of it!) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

For a few days now, I’ve been using the beta release of Ranchero software’s NetNewsWire 2.0 RSS aggregator. I’d tried it before in its 1.x release, but its relatively straightforward approach to organizing subscriptions left me unimpressed, so I gravitated to the arguably more creative NewsMac, first, and then PulpFiction, which I’ve been using day in and day out for months. PulpFiction, which in many ways remains one of the cleverest pieces of software of its kind, allows a powerful level of control over subscriptions, which is something I really liked a lot. However, though it has improved over time, it unfortunately remains dogged by speed issues and, on my PowerBook at least, regular crashes.

At a somewhat casual information architecture event put on by NYC-CHI at Remote Lounge on the Bowery last night, I heard the featured speakers — a recruiter, an “information design consultant,” information architecture managers from Organic, Avenue A/Razorfish and Hot Jobs — give their views on ‘What’s going on with I.A. in New York.’ Their comments were fairly illuminating, but I balked when one of them mentioned that he’d seen some under-qualified I.A.s charge as much as US$125 per hour and some over-qualified I.A.s charge as little as US$75 per hour. The last bit, he said almost in a scoffing manner, and the audience, twenty or thirty I.A.’s from all over the city, seemed to nod in agreement — US$75 is way too little.

For a moment, please indulge a little bit of my ranting: Every day I fire up my newsreader and try to catch up on what my favorite authors are posting, and I’m amazed and bewildered by how much writing some of these authors can turn out. The load of my own business and personal obligations is hardly monumental, but if some of these authors are juggling even half of my what I do during waking hours while also turning out these reams of blog posts and, in many cases, producing beautiful design work too… well, then I salute them. They’ve mastered a level of time management that I have little hope of matching.

I can barely scratch out four or five posts a week, and it often takes a dogged determination to find a twenty minutes scattered between tasks to get them drafted, edited and posted. Mostly, though, it’s not the quantity that I lament… it’s the time. By and large, very few of the posts I knock out benefit from the time and care with which I’d like to invest any piece of writing I put in front of public eyes. Just this evening, I was hammering out that capsule review of “Elephant” when the dinner I ordered arrived, and immediately I felt compelled to wrap it things up quickly so I could put a little food in my stomach. That…s not a proper way to write anything.

I’ve been an erratic fan of Gus Van Sant’s work for years, mostly because the work itself has been somewhat erratic — witness “Psycho” and “Good Will Hunting,” two movies I’d just as soon never watch again. But I was really, really floored by “Elephant,” which I skipped in theaters due to the somewhat uneven critical response it garnered. After two jaw-dropping hours, it baffles me that this film, which is meticulously directed and gorgeously shot, failed to become a sensation in its original run. Then again I think of the deliberate, almost Kubrick-like coldness with which it forgoes any kind of judgment over the characters caught in its Columbine High School-like construction, and it makes a certain kind of sense to me that the public would shun it. We like tragedies written bold in history and reductively in drama, and this movie fits neither of those criteria. It’s subtle and familiar and also deeply frightening.

In spite of my continued enthusiasm for OmniWeb, I’ve found myself using the 1.0 Preview release of Firefox more and more often. I spend about half my day in each browser, and it makes me wish that I had a system-level utility that would intercept every link I click on to let me decide whether to send it to OmniWeb or Firefox. Surely, somebody has already whipped up something like that, and I’m missing it, right?

It was a year and a week ago that I wrote about Ted Leo/Pharmacists to little notice, but I’m still listening to these records, “The Tyranny of Distance” and “Hearts of Oak,” at least once a week. If anything, I think that what I once saw as Leo’s self-imposed and short-sighted limitations — his obsessive desire to re-create a sound and an energy often deemed lost to the 20th century — now seem more like a very selectively chosen milieu, a platform for an oeuvre. It was always that, of course, but I was reluctant to see it. Now, having watched the rise of a horde of bands who have worked out the science behind a way-back machine down to a decimal point, it’s more apparent to me than ever that Leo’s work is, first, classier and more thrilling than anything else in thrift store clothes, and second, actually forward-looking.

I’m freakin’ exhausted after a weekend spent driving up and down the Jersey shoreline, and waking up at 04:00a this morning to slog all the way to Gateway National Park — but I shouldn᾿t be complaining. After all, it wasn’t me who swam, biked and ran the 2004 New York Metro Area edition of the Danskin Women’s Triathlon Series on the coldest day since spring broke. That was my girlfriend, who saw the culmination of 2+ months of early morning training come to a very satisfying end when she finished her first of this kind of event in a very respectable 1 hour and 31 minutes, ranking 124th out of all 701 competitors. She did great, and I’m very, very proud of her. I’m also happy that I get to go to sleep very soon.

The folks at Media Temple have always been responsive and courteous when I’ve had problems, but I᾿m at the end of my tether with them right now. In case you haven’t noticed, access to Subtraction.com has been markedly unreliable since Tuesday, owing to a series of vaguely explained technical issues they’re having with my shared server — whatever the problems are, they refuse to subside. You’re probably reading this now thanks to a spell in which everything᾿s running fine, but if my experience this week has been any guide, you’ll be lucky to find the server responding in, say, forty-five minutes from now. It’s very, very frustrating. I’m pretty sure this is going to put me in the market for a new host provider next week.

Thanks to a still-valid half-price deal at Belkin.com, I bought myself a Media Card Reader for iPod last week — so that, during an upcoming trip my girlfriend and I are taking to Italy later this month, we’ll be able to offload photos from my digital camera onto the relatively spacious confines of her 15GB iPod. At its full price, I doubt I ever would’ve bit on it, because it seems like a kludgy solution to the problem of limited digital camera memory. Prices for a one gigabyte flash memory card are coming down, after all, and I’m not sure when I’ll ever take that many photos. So in all likelihood, I’ll eBay the gadget when we’re back and recoup some of the cost.

I’ve been back from California since late Monday evening, but yesterday my host provider had a ‘hardware malfunction’ with my server, which caused some major downtime. Even after it came back up, I had some MySQL errors that prevented me from getting into Movable Type and therefore from publishing new posts here. Things looked resolved this afternoon, and then the server went down again and required a complete replacement. Though I create back ups of my site regularly, the whole incident gave me a fright — I need to come up with a more rigorous schedule and better habits for backing up what’s on my server. Too generously, I put a lot of trust into hosting providers… I suspect I’m not the only one who does this.

The ups and downs of this election are really wreaking havoc with my emotional health, and I’m almost at the point where I can no longer afford to devote this much attention reading a dozen weblogs and a dozen news sites every day. It’s the same way I feel about high-stakes sporting events: it takes a tremendous strain out of me to get too invested in something over which I have very little, if any, control. This weekend, at least, I’ll get a little bit of a break, as I’m heading out to the airport right now for a trip to see some of my family in Oakland, California. Internet access will be intermiitent, so there will be few if any posts until I’m back on Monday night or Tuesday morning — and maybe few if any chances to follow the race.

Going off on kind of a wild tangent: I’m on the train right now, and when I popped open my PowerBook and booted it up, I was reminded of a question to which I’ve long wanted to know the answer. That is, when embarking on a trip with a laptop, does it save more energy to shut down before unplugging and leaving home and then booting up, say, two hours later while on the road? Or, instead, is it more energy efficient to put the laptop to sleep first, and then simply wake it later while on the road? I would assume that booting up off the battery is more energy consuming than keeping a laptop in sleep mode for two hours, right? See, I’m already starting to focus on less weighty issues…

I watched Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes II piece on the renewed questionability of George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard this evening with great interest. Two quick things occurred to me: first, that it’s highly unlikely that the network would have allowed Dan Rather — who is synonymous with the credibility of their news organization, for better or worse — to lend his imprimatur to this report without being pretty confident that they were right on the facts. This is an important point, because CBS is notoriously weak-willed, having caved into Republican pressure on everything from a harmless Reagan made-for-TV movie to commercials from MoveOn.org. It means something when a lapdog like the Eye bites back.

The second thing I considered was that, hey, maybe the reason George W. Bush didn’t show up for duty is that he came across one of these discs in his mailbox back in 1969. Could be.

Okay, so fifteen months later, I’ve begun a major redesign for Subtraction.com. I’m pretty satisfied with the progress, though I admit it’s going slow enough that I’ll be surprised if it’s all done by Halloween. The new overhaul will maintain essentially the same information architecture that you see here from a site and page perspective, but I’ve made some usability improvements so that it will be easier to read, which has become increasingly important to me as I get older — I’ve started that inevitable old codger’s shift away from a young designer’s fascination with teeny, tiny text.

Okay, the Kerry campaign had a terrible August, but let’s be clear: the recent Time and Newsweek polls were inaccurate in declaring a double-digit lead for President Bush. Doing a little bit of the kind of vetting that, disturbingly, few news outlets are willing to engage in, Rasmussen finds that the President’s bounce was a nontrivial but still manageable 4 to 5 percent. There’s still 57 days left, enough time to turn this around.

The consensus is that the Kerry-Edwards campaign has let Bush-Cheney define the debate over the past few weeks, and allowed Kerry’s fitness to lead to become the question. They hit first, which sucks, but it gives Kerry an opening to fight back and with great ferocity. I say, call Bush’s own competence into question by saying what everyone already knows loud and clear — Bush is an intellectual lightweight, who can barely grasp the enormity of what’s going on around him, and it’s this unsuitability for handling the weighty issues at hand that have led us so far astray.

I would’t discourage anyone from trying any of the Vietnamese restaurants in New York, but even the most well-regarded of them pale next to what can be had in Westminster, California’s Little Saigon area. Being Vietnamese, I’m more critical of these establishments — and of how closely their cooking methods resemble my mother’s — than the average customer. But it’s not just a cultural thing, it’s a matter of dollar value, too. What you can get in Manhattan, in finer restaurants like Cyclo and Blue Velvet 1929 isn’t bad; it’s just disproportionately expensive given the inaccurate and uninspired dishes they bring to your table.

Just a moment to say goodbye to my Sony VAIO PCG-SR7K, which I once called “the best computer I’ve ever owned” Ha! Was I really ever that young?

Seriously, I’ve had this ultra-compact notebook since the fall of 2000 (since the Clinton administration!) and it just passed away this past week when I put it in my bag and took it home from the office. I have no idea why it decided to leave for another plane, because I was gentle with it on the way home. But those VAIOs, as I discovered in my second year of ownership, are exceedingly fragile. In fact, they’re junk, and while 3.5+ years is a decent lifespan for a Windows machine, I find it not a little shameful that the machine, for the past two years, has been pretty much unusable.

In spite of its imperfect feature set, I still find myself using the Omni Group’s OmniWeb 5 browser day in and day out. I like it, and I want it to succeed. But I can’t help but keep a mental tally of tweaks I’d like to see made to the interface. So last night I took a screen shot of the browser (using my trusty copy of Snapz Pro X), sat down in front of Photoshop, and started mocking up some of those ideas.

Two things, which are completely out of my control, have me in a foul mood this evening, and I wonder half-jokingly if they’re somehow linked. If you were the sort to gloat, you might say that they’re exactly the kind of things that an East Coast liberal should be rightly suffering over. There’s lots of things I could say in response to that, but I’ll just say that that’s what makes this country great, right?