It’s no trick. I have a Halloween treat for all you Illustrate Me fans out there: for once, I’m publishing a new entry in this ongoing series early. That’s right, no weeks-long delay this time. Before the last day of October even closes out, the month’s archives have been beautifully illustrated by Ray Frenden, an illustrator from rural Illinois. You can see it right now in all its gruesome glory on the October archive page.

An analysis of which sites were prepared — and which weren’t — for Internet Explorer’s new-spanner goodness.

“A pen-based tablet that doubles as a monitor.”

One thing that I like about my new iMac (in spite of its problems) and my iPod— is that they’re both basically hunks of cheap plastic — and neither tries to be anything else. This is a beautiful thing.

By way of contrast, consider my Treo 650. Or, for that matter, consider any of the many, many pieces of digital hardware currently available on the market that, like my Treo, share the absolutely cringe-worthy characteristic of being pieces of plastic that are painted to look like metal.

“Gives your mouse cursor capabilities it never had before, allowing it to move, resize, or identify windows without having to first switch to them and then reach for particular window pieces.”

Beautiful conceptual remote control device. Via Signal v. Noise.

Good blog post.

A browser-based, stripped down text editor (similar in concept to Blockwriter) by Luca Mearelli. Really slick.

If you can believe it, I disappeared over the past few days to Paris, France. Yes, that Paris, France: land of unconscionably good baked goods, storybook architecture and head-shakingly beautiful women. Since my father now lives there, I’ll be visiting fairly often (even if my last trip there was nearly a year ago), which poses a semi-interesting question for blogging purposes: should I even bother posting about a trip to a romantic locale when those trips are common-place enough to be not particularly romantic? It wouldn’t seem to make for particularly good reading if I did, which is part of the reason I didn’t even bother to leave a ‘Gone to France’ post last Thursday afternoon, when I flew out.

The venerable design author and historian goes online.

It’s funny… right?

September’s Illustrate Me comes from an unexpected source: Alissa Walker, design author extraordinaire and one-half of the tireless design reporting staff at Mediabistro’s Unbeige blog. It’s a gorgeously raw, hand-written illustration that really caught me off guard. You can see it for yourself now on September’s archive page.

Something’s up with my installation of Movable Type and/or the MySQL database powering it. Often, during the publishing process — after hitting Save or Rebuild — the application will fail in its attempt to get a response back from the server. What results is a message that says, “Internal Server Error.” Fun, right?

This was something I started to see a few months ago, about the same time that I upgraded, after much delay, to Movable Type version 3.3. (To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that the upgrade was the cause of the problem.)

At first, I thought I was only seeing it on the administrative end, when I was editing posts, creating new ones, or managing comments. Then I started to realize that users were seeing it, too, because I suddenly started to get multiple copies of comments, often published in quick succession. Obviously, people were — and in fact, all evidence indicates that they still are — submitting their comments, encountering this error, and then, thinking their remarks weren’t successfully published, submitting them again until some sort of confirmation indication appears.

Now it can be told.

“This trend, so the thinking goes, allows customers to ‘own’ a brand by creating their own uses and extensions of it… Like all quick-hit trends, [customer-led marketing is) as delicious as the maraschino cherry on top of a sundae; and about as nutritious, too. Taste it, perhaps, but don’t forget the ‘meal,’ no matter how everyday or unglamorous it may seem::providing a simple, basic customer experience.”

Simplifies the ability to host multiple virtual domains via Mac OS X’s built-in Apache server.

Despite an ugly night of non-stop rain, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Small Talk event for AIGA New York went off without a hitch this evening. In fact, it went great; Jeffrey’s always entertaining, and he gave a spirited, insightful and often hilarious talk on the nature of selling great work to clients. The subject was a perfect match for the mixed audience of Web designers and print designers, and I think everyone got a little something out of it, regardless of how they earn their design dollars.

Just how many of each kind of designer attended, it’s hard to say. During one question, Jeffrey asked for a show of hands, and it looked like most of the room was populated by designers who work primarily online. Still, this is a salient question for AIGA that I’m keen to get an answer on. As I mentioned last week when I was promoting this event, we’ll be surveying the attendees for their opinions starting tonight, so if you attended, check your email.

As promised, we’ll be giving away some prizes to randomly selected survey respondents: two copies of Jeffrey’s “Designing with Web Standards (Second Edition),” each of which have been signed and dated by Jeffrey to commemorate tonight’s talk, and a free season pass to all four of next spring’s Small Talks.

Speaking of future Small Talks, we have three more coming up before the end of the fall 2006 season: Marc Joseph in November, Peter Arkle and Amy Goldwasser in December, and Emmanuelle Linard in January. All of these events take place in the beautiful venue generously provided for us by Bumble and bumble, and all of them are not-to-be-missed if you enjoy listening to incredibly sharp people talk about design.

Now this is the way to debut a new application. Beautiful work.

Monitoring the wardrobe of Maria Sansone of Yahoo’s “The 9 Internet video show. Also via Plasticbag.org.

Why lectures bore people and how lecturers benefit from giving them. Via Plasticbag.org.

Just an update on my 24-inch iMac troubles: as soon as I got serious about removing Rosetta-reliant applications from my system, things got better. My conclusion, though, is that the whole machine suffers from a woeful lack of system memory… there was some confusion with the order when I bought it, and I ended up with only one gigabyte of RAM. What I need to do, ultimately, is to max it out to its full three gigabyte potential. Cha-ching!

In the meantime, one of the things that’s really seemed to help is ditching Microsoft Entourage for Apple’s Mail program. I did this with something of a heavy heart, as I’ve been an Entourage user since day one, at least six years. In spite of how clunky and ineffective I think most of the Microsoft Office suite is (on any platform), Entourage has always struck me as a class act. It’s frequently showcased the very best of what Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit had to offer, and I’ve been very comfortable inside the program for a very long time.

A proposed amendment to the code will help ensure that owners may still let their dogs run off-leash during early morning and late evening hours. If you live in the city, please consider writing the Board of Health to voice your support.

“ Without the air needed by conventional tires, Tweel still delivers pneumatic-like performance in weight-carrying capacity, ride comfort, and the ability to ‘envelope’ road hazards.”

Some enterprising soul wrote this WordPress plug-in to display archives similar to my archives. See it in use.

Pretty cool. I just wish my phone were faster.

After using the Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage all of my to do items for months, I ultimately had to set it aside. I’m just not up to the task of maintaining the system anymore; not that it was particularly difficult, but it did, on occasion, ‘hiccup’ on me, and to do items and projects would fall out of sync with one another. I just don’t think I have the energy in life right now to troubleshoot things like that that just shouldn’t need troubleshooting.

(This is really the fault of the whole damn concept of synchronization, which, at this stage in the maturity of software, is unbelievably anemic. But that’s another discussion entirely.)

Instead, I’m turning to Mori, a simple note-keeper application from Jesse Grossjean’s Hog Bay Software. Mori is a descendant of Hog Bay Notebook that adds some nifty new features like robust Spotlight support and, er, some others that I don’t really use. Mostly, I turn to Mori because it does what Hog Bay Notebook did so very well: conveniently bundle together what are essentially RTF-based TextEdit files into a hierarchical file system. Put more simply, it takes a bunch of not particularly fancy text documents and allows you to edit and manage them in a single window. There’s no context lists, no project hierarchies, no synchronization or database — none of the things that kGTD does. It’s dead simple.

There’s a witch hunt going on inside my new iMac; last night I made the resolution that I would excise from my hard drive as many applications as possible that rely on Apple’s Rosetta. That’s the supposedly invisible translation layer that Apple provides on its Intel-based Macintoshes in order that users may run programs originally written for the platform’s previous motherboard tenant, the PowerPC chip.

The reason is that, after several weeks of usage, I’m sufficiently fed up with the slow application switch times, the spinning beach balls and the unfortunately frequent crashes that I encounter using this Intel-based machine. I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to blame Rosetta (I suppose it could be the relatively paltry 1 Gigabyte of RAM that I have installed, but if that’s a more accurate cause of my troubles, I’ll also say it’s an unreasonable one) but forgoing as much ‘dynamic translation’ as possible seems like as good a tactic as any for increasing the responsiveness of my machine.

Here I was thinking how clever I am. I came up with this idea to conduct a brief interview with Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman to build up a little advance buzz for his Small Talks appearance next Tue 17 Oct for AIGA New York.

Since the Small Talks series is a forum for design leaders to discuss subjects close to their hearts (and not necessarily expansive career overviews) in relatively intimate surroundings (only about a hundred seats are available for each event), I figured it would be a good opportunity for Jeffrey to preview some of the things he’d be talking about, sort of whet everyone’s appetites. And, wanting to make this event as much of a success as it can be, I also thought it would be a great way to help sell some tickets, too.

I don’t know what I was thinking, because Jeffrey Zeldman, clearly, needs no additional salesmanship. Before I even had the opportunity to publish the interview I’m running here today, and just one business day after the event’s promotional poster even went out in the mail to AIGA members, the event has sold out. All the seats are filled. I should’ve known better.

For real!

Real time geographic mapping of current police incidents.

“Digital technology has exploded narratives — they are more malleable, slippery, unformed. They are often imperfect. And I love this: flaws, asymmetry. I think we — and the next generation — are really embracing the idea that "perfectly formed" media as lacking in personality”

Really impressive new method for allowing readers to comment on blog posts.

Offensive and hilarious.

“Think of the answer you want. Then, start typing and count how many keystrokes it takes before you get what you want.” It doesn’t take many.

Though I follow it passionately, I don’t write a lot about baseball here. This is mostly owing to the fact that, in contrast to those others in the blogosphere who write both more eloquently and/or more precisely about the subject, I generally feel that anything I have to offer runs along the lines of ‘blowing smoke out of my ass.’ I came late and unexpectedly to this passion, and while I have a lot of opinions about it, I feel much more like a student of the game than a sage expert.

Which is why I hesitated, really, to write about the Yankees’s 6-0 loss last night to the Detroit Tigers in the American League Division Series. They’re down in this five-game set now, 2-1, and they must win the next two games or summarize another season as a dismally oversold failure.

Billy Beane wouldn’t budge on salary when he re-hired Ken Macha, and what businesses can learn from that.

Lighting a firecracker under a bear’s ass.

Several weeks ago, at his personal Web site Design by Fire, former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk published an open letter to John Warnock, co-founder and spiritual father of Adobe Inc. In it, Herasimchuk proposed the idea of making a selection of Adobe’s highly popular typefaces — Caslon, Franklin Gothic, Helvetica Neue, and others — available to the public under an open source license. The idea would be to reshape — and improve — the typographic climate for Web designers through a newfound ubiquity of these generally well-regarded typefaces.

It’s a terrific concept that I fully support, but it’s probably best described as ‘a long shot’ in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that Adobe would generate a tremendous amount of good will by open sourcing a slate of very useful typefaces, but I think I have an even better idea for Adobe to totally hit a home run in the near term, and without compromising any of their existing businesses. Ready for my crazy idea? Here goes; make the next version of the company’s Creative Suite software not totally suck. Crazy, right?

Excellent overview for MySQL beginners.