Here’s a confession: I’m a terrible blog friend.

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to have met scores of really interesting people thanks to my work with my old company, my new position at NYTimes.com, and Subtraction.com — people inside and outside of these companies, nearby in New York and spread out all over the world. Lots of them have become good friends, and many maintain superb blogs and sites of their own; they’re the kinds of sites that I enjoy immensely, that in many instances I aspire to match with my own, and that I readily recommend to others.

When it comes to actually keeping up with them, though, I fall down on the job. I’m terrible at knowing what people are up to, even though they’re writing about it publicly and, for the more famous of my friends, even though their exploits are often guaranteed an echo effect throughout the blogosphere. On more occasions than I’d like to admit, I’m simply behind the curve.

I’ve been fighting what’s apparently a twenty-four hour bug since midday yesterday. Shivers and aches pained me all through the day and into night, and I didn’t even know if I could make it through a whole day of work today. But I underwent sustained, Cold-Eeze-powered counter-attack, and I feel loads better tonight, remarkably. Zinc is the magical cure for all my threatening colds, I’m finding.

Actually, I’m not back completely at one hundred percent. I’m still tired, and bound to my couch for the most part. But, at the very least, I have my senses about me enough to want to clear out some blogging items that have been hanging around for a while. So this is going to be another round-up style post. Get ready for random.

I saw the great American film director Robert Altman live and in person just once, in 2004, when he answered questions after a screening of his recently restored movie, “Secret Honor,” at Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater in Manhattan. That film, a fictional account of Richard Nixon in full bunker mode, might best be described as more endurance test than entertainment for all but the most die-hard Altman fans. It was a brave piece of work, but it demanded a certain patience from its audience.

To be blunt, I didn’t enjoy “Secret Honor” very much, but it didn’t matter, because I got to see and hear Altman in person. He looked old and frail, yet he remained razor sharp and unmistakably willful in his demeanour. Which, to me, mapped exactly to how I’ve understood his entire body of work: if ever there was a director who managed, through the sheer force of will, to bring fully realized worlds to life — complex, nuanced, incredibly engrossing worlds that eschewed special effects and Hollywood hyperbole — and then to subvert them with a masterful playfulness, it was Robert Altman. He was truly a giant among the many artists who have committed their visions to film.

A crazy week and a half. I’ve been overextending myself with work and life, and neglecting this blog. I’m going to try and pick up the pace this week and write some more posts, but heading into Thanksgiving, and then into the craziness that usually constitutes the December holiday season, I’ll be lucky if I can turn out a decent number before the year is out. I’m just sayin’, is all.

Let’s start things out with a little housekeeping, though: I’ve had some very generous help from Su at House of Pretty in trying to get my intransigent Movable Type problems in order.

We’ve tried a few things, like optimizing my templates, enabling Fast CGI, clamping down a bit harder on comment spam and search bots, all with varying degrees of success. The situation is a little better now, but the problem hasn’t completely disappeared. We’re groping our way towards a solution, and I hope to have things relatively ship-shape around here before too long.

A few people have recommended jumping the Movable Type ship for something a bit more modern and reliable, like perhaps Expression Engine, or even rolling my own via Django. My response is that I’d jump for joy if I could do that, but I’ve no idea when I’d find the time to rebuild everything within a new blogging framework. I mean, if I had the brains, talent and revenue-based impetus to roll out a brand new, custom blogging platform the way some people do, I wouldn’t be writing this post.

In the meantime, you’ll also notice some broken PHP includes here and there; thanks to those of you who have emailed me to let me know. And the site-powered search is broken too, though it’s been broken for a long while, and I need to find some time to remedy that. I guess what I’m saying is: please pardon this site’s appearance while improvements are being made. Thanks.

The last thing you want to do, if you’re a designer in a business environment who wants to be taken seriously, is spend your time in meetings doodling like an idle schoolboy. Rather, you should be an active and attentive participant in the conversation, someone whose mind is present and alert, and not lost in the meanderings of the scribbles in the margins of your notebook paper.

And yet, we’re designers, and we can’t help ourselves, right? Or, at least, I can’t. It’s like my drawing hand has a brain of its own, and it feels compelled to entertain itself when left to its own devices with a notebook, a pen and any idle moment. It’s a bad habit that I try to be discreet about, but I can’t deny that it’s a distraction I quite enjoy, too.

It’s no surprise that I spend less and less time these days executing design ideas in the customary graphic design applications like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Instead, I’m spending more and more time doing work about design, whether it’s on this weblog, in Microsoft Word or even just in a plain old email client. That’s management, I guess.

One of the programs I turn to with increasing frequency is Keynote, the presentation software half of Apple’s iWork ’06 suite (sometimes known as the company’s Microsoft Office-killer in waiting). Before joining The New York Times, I’d frequently use Keynote for sales and design presentations to clients. Now I use it all the time for internal presentations to our design group and to management, and of course I’m using it more and more for lectures and talks I’m doing in the outside world, too.

At first, I thought Keynote was little more than a glorified and beautified competitor to Microsoft’s PowerPoint. In time, though, I’ve come to realize it’s not just a better presentation-making tool for visual designers, but it’s something of an essential thinking tool for us too.

After all the build-up, everything comes to a head tonight. I mean, yeah, it’s Election Day and all, but I’m talking about our election coverage package over at NYTimes.com, where’ve spent weeks putting together a solid offering of results data. I just had a quick look around at the competition, and I gotta say, I think our designers really pulled it off; it’s the best looking presentation for elections results on the Web tonight.

It’s been almost ten months since I started my job at The New York Times, and I still regularly get asked how I like it, and do I really like it? The implication, I suppose, is that having founded and ran a little design studio would make a transition to a huge company with a century and a half of history challenging. Challenging, is a good word for it, yeah. But here’s the truth: it’s a terrific job, and I feel lucky for having it.

Part of the reason why I like it so much is that I’ve learned a lot — a tremendous amount — about a facet of design that I never thought was particularly interesting until now: work in a design group on the inside of a company. I spent over a decade on the outside, working in studios and agencies on the ‘consulting’ part of the business. Almost all of the projects I’d ever worked on lasted only a handful of months; I’d kick off a new assignment, design it, hand it off and then moved on to a new assignment — or just as often I’d move on to an entirely new client.

I always thought that was the kind of design career that I wanted, and that was the kind of design career that I would have forever. I may one day return to it, but I’ve really discovered that working in an in-house design team, if it’s the right one, has its upsides too.

Hey, it’s time for the Friday Free-for-All round-up again! Just kidding, this is the first one ever. A round-up blog post isn’t something I usually do, but what the heck, right? These are a few things I’ve been keeping in Mori that I’ll never be able to turn into full-fledged weblog entries before they go stale.

We were lucky enough at AIGA New York to get Jeffrey Zeldman to do a Small Talk event of his own a few weeks ago. It was a big success, but I still consider that event just one step in a larger effort to make AIGA an organization that’s more conducive to the practice of interaction design. After all, Jeffrey᾿s appearance, while a quietly momentous occasion in its own way, wasn’t the first time we’ve brought folks who work online in front of the chapter’s membership — among others, Joshua Davis has spoken in the past and Matt Owens will be appearing at our upcoming Passion/Payoff Student Conference in just a few weeks.

Effecting change takes more than just getting a few recognizable names to talk to chapter members, though. The trick, I think, is producing a sustained effort in which the kinds of events and content that are applicable and appealing to digital designers are treated on a peer level with those geared towards designers working within AIGA⁏s more traditionally recognizable discipline areas. That’s harder.