As of yesterday morning, there’s a new NYPost.com, and I like it a lot. It’s miles away from what we do at NYTimes.com, and it’s not exactly my taste in terms of graphic design, but its unabashed appropriateness and surprising sense of wit is kind of irresistible.

Then again, this is just me talking. A few people with whom I’ve expressed my enthusiasm about this site aren’t quite as enamored of it as I am. Like my good friend Liz Danzico, Director of User Experience Strategy at AIGA and editor of the information architecture magazine Boxes & Arrows, for one. Her reaction to my endorsement of the site was, “REALLY?” — all caps and everything.

The first batch of my Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee-shirts are just arriving in mailboxes today; if you ordered yours before last Thursday, you should be seeing it soon.

So far the shirt has been selling way beyond my expectations; I’m terribly grateful to everyone who’s shown their support or just liked the shirt enough to order one for themselves. As I mentioned, I printed just one-hundred and fifty of these tee-shirts; in just the first week, about a hundred of them had been sold to lucky buyers, and they’re still selling briskly. Supplies are limited, so you’d better act fast if you want yours.

Just a reminder for those in the Baltimore/D.C. area: I’ll be giving a talk on Thursday night at Villa Julie College for the Baltimore chapter of AIGA. I’m going to cover a wide gamut of stuff from what happens at NYTimes.com to my extracurricular projects to my philosophy on design management to a quick tour of my thinking on using typographic grids online. It’s going to be fun; so if you can make it, please come up to introduce yourself.

In other — much bigger — AIGA news, I’m very pleased — ecstatic, actually — to announce that the one and only Jeffrey Zeldman will have a night of his own in mid-October for the New York chapter of AIGA as a part of our Small Talks series. Small Talks is a long-running tradition of the New York chapter, in which we invite a series of highly esteemed design figures to talk about subjects near and dear to their hearts in intimate settings. We purposefully limit the number of seats available to these events in order to allow the speakers to do their magic in as casual and friendly an environment as possible, so book your ticket early before they’re sold out.

It takes a little time to get back into the swing of things after summer. At least that’s the reason I’m giving for why this announcement for the August Illustrate Me is so late. But it may be some consolation that this latest entry in my ongoing series featuring custom illustrations for my blog archives is a contender for the title ‘best yet.’

The creator is Louise Ma, an extremely talented young designer who’s in her last undergraduate year at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art here in New York. I can’t take any credit for being so well tuned into emerging talent that I zeroed in on Louise before she’s even made a splash in the professional world. Rather, she was recommended to me by Mike Essl, who runs Cooper’s design program, at the beginning of the summer for an internship with us at the NYTimes.com design group.

Things have been quiet here because my new iMac arrived at the end of last week. I’ve been diligently getting it set up so I can do some serious work with it; it’s kind of amazing how many little utilities, tweaks and additions to the operating system have become must-haves for me to get things done.

After owning laptops for so long — and after having spent nearly three years with a diminutive 12-in. PowerBook — working on a desktop takes some getting used to. Having such an emphatic statement of computing power displayed so prominently on my desktop is a new experience; this iMac is a beautiful thing of no particular shyness. It’s bright, bold and immense — I mean huge. Mousing up to the top right of my screen feels like an unnaturally long trip; it’s a little like reaching for a jar from the top shelf in my kitchen.

Finally, right? Those long-awaited “Hel-Fucking-Vetica” tee-shirts that I printed this summer are done and available for sale. You can buy yourself one this very minute over at the brand new Store.subtraction.com. There’s only one hundred and fifty of them — that’s all I printed this time around — so hurry and get yours now.

My apologies to those of you who have been waiting patiently for them; I had to put a little extra effort into this to make the shirts really worthwhile. It’s pretty important to me that they all sell, and not just because I don’t want to be stuck with dozens of profane tee-shirts on my hands.

Notwithstanding my own lack of clarity regarding the five year anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, I’m not immune to the occasion’s obvious significance. It’s as moving a date for me as anyone, and as it approached, I personally wanted to make sure that the NYTimes.com design team should make our own, humble contribution in honoring it. That’s why I wholeheartedly agreed when one of the designers in my group suggested he put some extra hours over the weekend towards some special presentations of the home page for Monday.

Five years now since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and, for me, the distance from the event has left me even more at a loss for what to say than before. Time hasn’t clarified much of it at all, good or bad, right or left, right or wrong, at least not much more than what I knew in the days after those planes hit those towers. Whatever the final judgment of history might be on the way the twenty-first century opened for us, it’s my suspicion that we’re not close to knowing it yet. In certain spells — by myself, in crowds, walking around downtown — I feel like we’re almost further from knowing how future generations will regard us — any of us — than we were four years and three hundred, sixty-four days ago.

So I hadn’t planned on writing anything here on this anniversary. But, after walking around lower Manhattan yesterday evening with my dog and feeling that unavoidable, lingering sense of loss, my brain unexpectedly started turning over the lyrics for David Bowie’s “Five Years.” I’ve been listening to this song forever, it seems, and I’ve never known why Bowie wrote it in the first place, what the story behind it was. None of it seems to matter for today, though, because on this date it seems appropriate in a frightening, open-ended way.

The latest version of OmniWeb, which is perhaps best described as ‘the Macintosh browser you pay for,’ is out on the streets, just now emergent from its long beta gestation period. Version 5.5 finally brings us a third-party browser based on Apple’s now open source WebKit framework, which puts it nicely in line with Safari with regard to rendering fidelity and Macintosh fit and finish. On top of that, it faithfully re-creates virtually all of OmniWeb 5’s winning features: visual tabs, page source editing with instant previews, expandable text-entry boxes, etc.

Finally. Finally! Last December I walked into Tekserve, my local Apple retailer and my favorite place to buy anything Macintosh related, with a credit card in hand, ready to buy myself a brand new iMac G5. At the very last moment, I demurred a bit, frozen, for some reason unable to commit to buying the machine. Ultimately, I left empty-handed. Something in me was shouting out loudly, “This is not the time to buy a new computer.”

Ever since, I’ve been waiting for Apple to release just the right machine. The Intel-based iMacs they shipped earlier in the year seemed intriguing, but for whatever reason I still felt disinclined to commit. Now, today, they’ve upgraded the entire iMac line and even added a new model: a super-sized, 24-in. iMac with a healthy Intel Core 2 Duo processor at its heart. I came across the news this morning, when I sat down at my desk after a very early meeting that lasted several hours, and I knew — somewhat instantly — that this was the one I had been hoping Apple would release. I placed my order just after lunchtime. Now, the trick is to wait for it to arrive.

I’m no one special just because I get a boatload of spam every day, but I do, and it’s annoying. My mail host provides SpamAssassin protection at the server level, trapping most of the incoming junk messages before I ever get a chance to review them. If it catches some false positives once in a while, I long ago decided that life is far too short to bother wading through its harvest, even irregularly, so I leave them there for eventual deletion by the system.

There are plenty of junk messages that do make it through, though, and those are filtered through the reasonably effective junk filters provided in Microsoft Entourage. I’ve always liked this application-level protection; using a custom view, I can easily monitor the spam filter for messages erroneously marked as spam. It’s really the way I prefer to manage my mail.

Over time, though, the number of junk messages that make it through SpamAssassin has gradually increased, as has the number of false positives I see in Entourage. One has to admit, spammers are Darwinian fighters if nothing else; they adapt and re-calibrate with great persistence — their uncompromising vision of a low-finance, Viagra-fueled utopia just won’t be denied. After seven years of this kind of noise level, I’m just getting weary of combing through my email every day.

I know I could add a utility to my computer like SpamSieve to help improve this error rate; I tried it once and didn’t really like it that much. And I know I could move over completely to Gmail or some other Web-based mail program with purportedly much better, centralized spam protection, but I have a low tolerance for webmail as a general rule. So I’ve been thinking about using a challenge/response spam protection system. Is that totally awful? I know there are many drawbacks, but is anyone out there using such a system successfully?