For those of you who do a lot of weblog surfing, and who frequently participate in discussions at those sites by posting comments, I think there’s a need for a centralized system to manage that content. I’m talking about a method of aggregating those contributions in a single location, ideally on one’s own Web site but perhaps also on a page hosted by a remote application, combined with some pinging intelligence and a facility for management by their original author — you.

Think about it like this; taken altogether, you can look at everything you’ve written on other people’s weblogs as a body of content that you’ve generated for free — it’s only fair that you should be able to maintain a centralized archive of it, and to be able to display the fruits of your labors. Of course, the archive would include abstracts or excerpts from the original weblog post, as well as a URL directly back to it. That way, everybody wins.

There are a lot of codes that I need to remember in order to get through a day of work. I’m talking about passwords, combinations, personal identification numbers, credentials of all kinds. Most of these, I keep in Web Confidential, a Mac OS X program expressly designed to encrypt and store this kind of data; it’s pretty much the best utility of its kind in my experience, but I’m no big fan of it. That’s why I notice acutely when I have to open it more often, and over the past six months, I’ve been looking up the 280 or so passwords I’ve stored in it almost constantly.

There’s a marketing person somewhere who should be proud of himself for pulling off a nice little feat at my expense yesterday. I subscribe to the email newsletters regularly pushed out by the folks at Definitive Jux Records, and because I rarely have time to properly read them, my usual pattern is to quickly scan their contents — perhaps without really retaining anything — before hitting the delete key. When I got the latest update yesterday, I noticed a big emphasis at the top of the email for the debut full-length album from The Perceptionists, this week’s hotly tipped hip-hop act. Being generally preoccupied with design and online geekery — and also being generally squarer than I was a decade ago — it was the first time I had heard of them.

The advice that some readers had for me in response to my complaining about Mac OS X’s tendency to develop troubles over time was: run a clean system and avoid third-party enhancements. It’s good advice and I’ve heard it lots of times over the years. At an old job, when the new Mac sysadmin first saw how many extensions and control panels I had running on Mac OS 9, he said, “Everywhere I go, there’s one guy that has like three rows of extension icons on the load screen. I guess you’re that guy here.” Guilty. I’m addicted to system utilities and enhancements, I must admit, but that doesn’t mean that I must resign myself entirely to the ill effects of them, does it?

Mac OS X is great and all, but I’m feeling a little down on its susceptibility to the effects of accretion. My experiences with both Jaguar and Panther have been that life starts out all hunky dory when you have a new installation, but over time things gradually start to break down — utilities stop working, mysterious crashes occur, speed takes a hit. This is to be expected with complex operating systems, but it makes me pine a little bit for the old days of Mac OS 9, when you could clean out a system simply by moving files in and out of select folders and then reboot — now you need to run the Terminal and invoke all sorts of arcane UNIX-style commands and shit.

Jason Fried made some waves at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference with a talk he gave entitled “How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams.” It’s a little uncomfortable for me to talk about a competitor in a weblog post, even (or especially) one I respect as much as Fried, a principal at the justly lauded 37signals — but he raised some excellent and also controversial points that bear further discussion. Equal parts advertisement for his company’s hit Basecamp product and a proposal for a new way to look at Web development, his presentation might be grossly summed up thusly: set aside almost all of the time-consuming, preparatory measures of user-centered design and start designing the final customer experience — the interface — as soon as possible. You might call it something like “iterative design.” Fried published some initial thoughts on this approach in this weblog post, and if/when I can find a copy of his slide deck, I’ll link to it here.

In my posts from South by Southwest, I’ve been very self-conscious about dropping names — as in, I’ve tried to avoid it — mostly because I was quite humbled by lots of the people I got to meet and don’t want to seem as if I’m trying to capitalize on the recognition value of their names. All the same, I want to capture some of these names and notes down for the sake of posterity, and also perhaps as an incentive for anyone who didn’t go to this year’s festival; it’s absolutely true that it’s a great place to meet lots of the most interesting people on the Web.

My brain was a little bit friend all morning in this, my last day at South by Southwest. I’m not sure I was optimally receiving all the information in today’s panels, but I count it a successfully day in that I got to have lunch with a small coterie of whip-smart people I’ve long admired, and I got to meet even more great people face-to-face for the first time. (I’m so fucking positive!)

Right now, sitting at the airport, I’m tired and I need some rest before taking on all the work waiting for me at the office tomorrow. So in spite of the fact that I’m missing out on some good panels this afternoon and tomorrow, I’m happy to be on my way home. Everyone I met at the conference was great, but I can’t wait to see my girlfriend and my dog. They’re hard to beat.

It’s day three at South by Southwest, and by yesterday at midday, I was already a little weary from all the panels and seminars. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t see some good stuff, because I did. It’s just that there’s only so much sitting still in an overly air-conditioned room for hour after hour that I can do. At lunchtime yesterday, we took off for Threadgills for some down home country cooking, and that helped. The more I see of Austin, the more I like. If it were as walkable a city as New York, I’d almost consider it a place I could feasibly move to one day, maybe.

Too much going on here at South by Southwest for me to compose a fully coherent report of what’s going on. But I’d be guilty of dereliction of geek duties if I didn’t at least post some random notes, so here we go.

Ack, American Airlines! To get to Austin, they had me on a connecting flight through Houston. But on my way there from New York, the captain let us know that the connection had been canceled for reasons unknown — or never revealed. (On top of that, they tried to charge me US$3 for a “snack box”!) When we landed, passengers heading on to Austin — and there were lots of us SXSW-types — were handed taxi vouchers and instructed to hail cabs to our final destination. So after flying for four hours, I just spent another three on the road, trawling the lonely midnight highways of Texas. As it happened, my cab driver was gregarious and entertaining, and we had a nice little chat until I laid myself down and caught some sleep. I’m just into Austin now, and my first impressions are that, damn, this is a college town. It’s not as bustling as Manhattan, but there are a surprising number of young kids dressed in their best Gap gear, wandering the streets a little drunk and enjoying themselves. Not me, I’m beat.

On my way to South by Southwest right now, and I’m noticing some things not to do at the airport gate if you don’t want to look like a complete dork: Don’t listen to music on your iPod while conspicuously displaying your white ear buds for all to see. Don’t pull out your shiny Apple PowerBook and start working as if you were putting together a plan for a corporate merger when really all you’re doing is just writing emails to your friends or, worse, writing a weblog post. And, above all else, do not whip out your teeny tiny mobile phone and engage in a conversation with a business associate about something really important sounding — and if you do, don’t ask the other person on the line to, “call me back and leave a message on my voice mail so I remember?” Basically, try not to do anything I do or look like me — just another thirtysomething gadgeteer with an iPod, a laptop and a mobile phone. At least not until you get to Austin, when you’ll probably blend right in.

It was about 11:00p the other night when I sat down in front of my computer, ostensibly to add a few new songs to my iTunes database so that I could load them onto my iPod photo. While I was at it, I decided to grab the attendant album cover artwork too, something that I’ve been doing more frequently since buying the iPod photo — these models displays covers nicely if diminutively on their color screens. There’s no rational motivation for wanting the artwork, except perhaps as a small way to compensate for the complete dissolution of visual design as a component of music in the digital age… but I’m not bitter about that.

I had to appear in criminal court today to answer a summons given to me by a NYPD officer in Central Park back in January. It was early on a Saturday, and I was walking Mister President off-leash, which is permitted before 9:00a. But I had unwittingly wandered into The Rambles, a section of the park that technically qualifies as a nature preserve, meaning dogs are never allowed off-leash there. How I was supposed to know that isn’t particularly clear to me, either.

The judge was kind enough to dismiss the charges contingent on six-months of me “staying out of trouble,” and no fine was levied. In spite of my worries that the process would consume the better part of a day, I was done in about ninety minutes. So all told, I have little to complain about.

But I did notice a few things: First, the whole court house was a dilapidated mess, an embarrassment to the idea of justice, and bore only faint resemblance to any courtroom you’ve seen on television. It was clearly underfunded and overworked, and it was depressing just to be there. And second, when I looked around me at all the other people who, like myself, were waiting to stand trial for relatively minor offenses, almost all of them were males of African American or Hispanic descent. It was a stark illustration of who is targeted most often in criminal proceedings, and in what kind of building society feels like those people deserve to be tried.

Amid all of my relentless Apple boosterism, I still feel it important to periodically speak out about where the company is wrong and where it behaves maliciously, a self-appointed duty of which I have not been particularly conscientious, admittedly. But, if you’ve got any streak of blue-blooded American fight in you, not to mention a hint of that brand of indignant pride for the primacy of the First Amendment in Our Way of Life, then it’s difficult to ignore this putrid lawsuit that Apple Computer has filed against several online journalists publishing their work on, well, Apple-boosting Web sites.

What transpired was this: before this past January’s Macworld Expo, several highly accurate rumors about then unannounced Apple products appeared at the rumor-based Web site Think Secret. Wasting little time, Apple quickly filed a lawsuit against the publisher of Think Secret and other “unnamed individuals,” ostensibly to smoke out the rumor sources but, in effect, attempting to put a chill on rumor activity in Apple fandom at large. (This particular lawsuit also happens to be just the latest in several similar actions the company has taken to protect its proprietary rights.)

Macintoshes in my apartment, right now: A 12-in. PowerBook G4, which is my principal machine, on which I do nearly all of my work. A 15-in. Titanium PowerBook G4, which I retired a year ago, but which I still use for miscellaneous tasks and as an impromptu file server. A Power Macintosh G4, aging but still remarkably serviceable and running Mac OS X Panther quite nicely — this is my girlfriend’s workhorse, but it too will soon retire as she makes plans to buy herself a PowerBook G4. And finally, tucked away someplace where my girlfriend can’t complain about it, an ancient PowerBook 3400c/180, a relic of the nineties with a busted motherboard that I’m toying with getting repaired just for the heck of it.

There’s not enough time in a month for me to watch twenty dollars’ worth of Netflix movies, so I can’t bring myself to subscribe to that service. Economically speaking, I still prefer the old school method of putting on my shoes and heading down to the local video shop when I happen to have a free evening that might be nicely consumed watching a movie. Two Boots Video is only about four blocks away, so I haven’t got much to complain about… except when there’s no DVD copies of the movies I want.

The past few times we’ve gone, my girlfriend and I have resigned ourselves to choices in — hold yourself — videotape format. These are older movies that the store clearly has little immediate intention of upgrading to DVD format. In some cases, like Eric Rohmer’s perversely mannered “Marquise of O,” I’m even a little surprised that someone bought them in VHS format to begin with. But in other cases, it’s a disappointment to me that the store is still resigned to providing them only on crappy videotape. I’m about three episodes into Ken Burns’ beautiful, nine-part “Baseball” documentary, and it’s a shame to watch it on such an inferior medium.

There are few feelings of dread worse than that first indication of a sore throat in the middle of a steady barrage of intensive plans for your immediate future. The idea that the roll you’re on — all the tightly paced contingencies and deadlines you’ve scheduled over the next few weeks — can be interrupted by time resigned to bed, or at least complicated by the discomfort of sneezing and coughing, is a rude reminder of human fallibility. That’s how I felt on Wednesday afternoon, as my throat grew noticeably more and more constricted when I swallowed, and all the deadlines staring me down over the next week suddenly looked dicey.

About a year and a half ago I triumphantly kicked Coca-Cola, something I did to assuage my concerns about my own long-term health. Happily, my soda consumption is still relatively light — I’ll have one every few weeks, perhaps, but I no longer crave that particularly satisfying bite of a glass of cola. But as I get further along into my thirties, I realize that, as methods of arresting one’s incrementally declining health go, giving up soda is hardly a comprehensive plan for long life.

Right now, I’ve got it in my head that I need to kick beef, too. It’s always struck me that consuming red meat is something like trying to get a train wreck through one’s body; it’s spectacular and awful and a mess to clean up. I’m sure there are arguments in favor of beef consumption in moderation, but I’m not sure I buy them. What’s more, I’ve been haunted lately by the ethics of the entire slaughter process — how horrific it is to think about the thousands of cattle being led to their demise, and how much sheer force is required to take a cow down (forgive the crude terminology). I know there’s nothing egalitarian about poultry or pork production, either, but something about beef gives me shivers.

One of my new rules for getting more things done in the incredibly limited time I have between waking and sleeping is: don’t sit there trying to come up with something to post about on your weblog if you have nothing to post about on your weblog. That’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past ten minutes, when I realized that, shit, I could be answering emails to people who have been very patiently waiting for replies. Or I could be making some of the little tweaks that constantly need to be made to this site. Or I could be watching another episode of Ken Burns’s “Baseball” documentary, which I’m enjoying immensely. Or I could be working on any of the several Web projects I’ve been scheming in my head for months.

I spent a good chunk of time this weekend writing an article for Andy Arikawa’s Design in Flight magazine, an upstart PDF publication covering the wide world of design. I’m a big proponent of scrappy digital publishing endeavors like DiF, so it was a real privilege to have been asked to contribute. After considering a few overly ambitious article ideas, I settled on a simpler approach for my first contrubution. My article is a more thoughtful, better-researched take on a post I wrote last month about improving your interviewing technique, and it will be published in the magazine’s April 2005 issue. Eventually, I’ll make a copy of the article available online here at Subtraction.com, but for those of you who can’t wait, four-issue subscriptions are available for only US$10.