Remembering back to the last set of on-the-street sketches I did in Paris, I made sure to bring my little Moleskine pocket book and a pen with me just about everywhere I went last week. I managed to knock out several pages of drawings, the highlights of which I’m posting here. There aren’t as many as I’d like, but I came up with some stuff I was happy with.

I had a good time with these doodles; I always do have a good time doodling. I don’t know exactly why it takes traveling all the way to Europe for me to actually do something I enjoy so much. Well, I guess the obvious reason that, I’m usually not working when I’m in Paris, and when I’m in New York, I usually am working. Funny what a little bit of free time can do for one’s more artistic pursuits.

Chris Messina proposes standard markup for displaying photos or illustrations (he calls them ‘figures’).

Wise-acre comics.

On my brief hop through London and Paris, I started thinking about the idea of touristic usability. Isn’t that an awesome term? It’s got eight syllables and I just made it up.

Aside from being a mildly absurd extension of our professional design vernacular, there’s actually a real idea behind this phrase: given any new city, there are certain things that should be easy for tourists to comprehend without assistance.

These things might include: how and when to use the subway or bus, how and where to buy fares for public transportation, how to make a call at a public telephone, how and where to flag a taxi, what to expect upon entering and leaving the airport, how and where to find postal services, how and where to find a police station, et cetera.

Of course, these are things you can find in any decent tourist’s guide, and any sensible traveler will pack such a book. But it struck me, while muddling through my first trip to London in seven years (and even, to an extent, on my third visit to Paris in less than twenty-four months), that these are things that should be inherently usable, as well.

Includes one of my favorites, Oslo Buzz.

Excellent examination of the iPhone debut in Steve Jobs’ January Macworld Keynote. Fine job of detective work done by Actioncorp TV.

“A place where those who are interested in becoming speakers (particularly, but not exclusively, in the Web world) can come to get advice, mentoring and help.”

Kind of a sad story.

“Using the dark arts of JavaScript and Flash, swfIR gives you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your Web site.” From the mind of Dan Mall.

Another of the indispensable blog posts that Jason periodically publishes.

I start out with the best of intentions when I travel, but as you can see, I haven’t blogged nearly as much as I’d have liked to while on this trip — which, ideally, would have been more than zero posts. Tomorrow, it’s back to the States, winding up this London/Paris tour after just over a week, so I’m squeezing in this update.

London was lots of fun, but a little stressful; spreading a panel appearance, a solo talk and a half-day workshop across three days turns out to be one of the less relaxing ways to see a city, as it turns out. Still, I had a great time there, thanks in part to the warm hospitality of the folks at Carson Systems, who really know how to put on a terrific conference. It’s pretty amazing what their small team manages to pull off, and if you’re thinking of heading to their upcoming Future of Web Design or Future of Online Advertising conferences, you’ll be just as impressed, I’m sure of it.

I did a lot more kicking back here in Paris, where the food, wine and décor is a world apart. Amazing, is the word. No offense meant to London town, but this city gets further under my skin with each visit; it’s thoroughly — at times unconscionably — beautiful. I like it here a lot. If only I’d paid attention in eighth grade French class, I might actually be able to carry on a conversation here, as well. At the very least, I was able to be here for my father’s sixty-ninth birthday, which makes me very glad. All around, a worthy leg of the journey.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’m off to get one more ridiculously, ridiculously good meal. I’ll be back in the blogging seat within a day or two, and before too long, publishing some more substantive posts in which I’ll share some of what I presented in London.

At the moment I’m getting all my things together to head out to London for Carson Systems’ Future of Web Apps conference. I’m speaking there on Wednesday on the subject of “Managing User Interfaces,” and then giving a workshop on Thursday morning about designing with grids. It’s going to be great fun, but unfortunately, it’s sold out if you’re looking for tickets.

Also, while in London, I’ll be appearing on a panel assembled by Nico Macdonald called “Who Wants Tomorrow’s Papers?,” in which we discuss the state of online news design. That event will take place on Tuesday night, and it’s free, so come on out.

I’ll be turning this trip across the pond into a little getaway, too. On Thursday afternoon, I’ll fly to Paris for a few days to see my father and hang out with some friends. I’ll be back in New York a week from this Monday.

As always, my schedule on these trips is going to be pretty tight, so I apologize in advance if I can’t catch up with folks in London or Paris, though I will try. Posts here at Subtraction.com will be somewhat erratic too, if they happen at all… though that will also be due, in part, to the fact that just thirty minutes ago, with only an hour left to leave for the airport, the hard drive in my laptop died. Crashed. Kaput. I’ll be trying to resuscitate it in London, but the prognosis is grim. Ain’t that always the way?

The Tribune’s Internet critic on linking practices, with several quotes from yours truly. This story ran in the print edition of Friday’s paper.

Just a rumor, but one can hope.

Really good insights, and accurate, too, as a Wii just entered my life. Via Daring Fireball.

“A community where people share stories about mistakes they’ve made in life and their advice to others.” Nicely designed, too.

My local public radio station, WNYC, is in the midst of its winter pledge drive. You know, that all too familiar time of year in which they interrupt “Morning Edition,” “On the Media,” or any of my other favorite radio programs to ask for financial contributions from listeners — over and over and over again.

Ever since I was a kid, when I was watching “Sesame Street” on PBS, I’ve lamented the necessary but irredeemably boring nature of public broadcasting’s pledge drives. I find them incredibly difficult to listen to, and I often turn off the television or radio entirely during the weeks when they’re on the air.

A while ago, I had this brainstorm: once a viewer or listener makes a pledge, the station ships out a special gadget that tunes into a members-only frequency — one in which the station broadcasts without the interruptions of its pledge drive. Parallel programming, in essence. If that option were available, I’d pledge money on the first day of the drive, for sure, and I bet lots of other people would, too. The ability to forgo the tedium of a week’s worth of nagging shouldn’t be underestimated.

“Yoda One for Me.” Ha!

Archive of record jacket artwork from the Belgian label Les Disques du Crépuscule. Via Veer.

One of my favorite features in the recent 1.0 release of the Adium instant messaging client is a low-level visual alteration in the display of multiple selections in the contacts list. In previous beta releases (which I’ve used faithfully for some time), when you selected a contact in the list by simply clicking, that name would be highlighted with a gradated color bar. It’s nothing unusual. In fact, it’s perfectly in keeping with the Mac OS X look and feel.

If you selected multiple names, though, that same colored, gradated bar would be repeated once for each selection, creating what I found to be an undesirable Venetian blind effect. True, it’s not so visually offensive that I ever thought much about it, but it wasn’t going to win any awards, either.

Take a look at this Akismet graph charting the precipitous rise in comment spam across the blogosphere over the past few months, and you’ll see one reason Subtraction.com has been recently besieged by similar problems. Whatever percentage comment spammers are finding in what many might consider a sisyphean activity, it appears to be enough incentive for them to persist, and persist, and persist still, and their commercial litter is everywhere.

I thought I had my comment spam problem more or less locked down late last year, when my friend Su from House of Pretty helped me install AutoBan for Movable Type. That managed to tamp down the flood of comment spam for a while, but as per the aforementioned Akismet graph, the Internet-wide volume of this crap has increased nontrivially in just the past three months.

“It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.”

Allows you to put all of your retail affinity cards (e.g., discount memberships at the supermarket) onto one card.

For some time now, everyone’s been crazy for Twitter, a kind of hub for digitally checking-in with your friends, where everyone alerts one another of what they’re up to, sometimes as frequently as from moment to moment. If that’s a bit of an obscure description, it’s because there’s nothing else quite like it. Actually, ‘cute’ may be the best and most succinct descriptor I can come up with.

More Web service than Web site, I had a hard time remembering to post the short, punchy updates that are Twitter’s principal currency until the advent of Icon Factory’s free, desktop-based Twitterific utility for Mac OS X.

Twitterific puts a persistent kind of ‘heads up display’ right on your Mac OS X screen so that your friends’ posts are immediately available, and that you can easily add new posts yourself. No more having to load the Web site, or remembering to visit that tab in your browser where you’ve got Twitter.com running.

Online collaborative tool for sharing design comprehensives.

Beautiful, limited edition screen prints of posters from the legendary designer.

I don’t watch much football, and by “much,” I mean any. Come Super Bowl time, I look for alternative programming on the television set. This year, for the third year in a row, I find myself tuned into Animal Planet’s suffocatingly adorable “Puppy Bowl.”

Some programming genius got a big promotion for this brainstorm, I’m sure: Puppy Bowl is three hours of aimless and irresistible lingering over puppies wrestling, jumping over each other, chewing toys, and just being plain ol’ cute inside a miniature football stadium. It’s also disturbingly pornographic — not libido-wise, you sicko, but rather in its plotless, sensationalistic ability to titillate your innate powerlessness before pure, unadulterated adorability. “Puppy Bowl III” runs back-to-back, apparently, throughout the evening, so you can tune in at any point and discover for yourself just how much of a softie you are.

Mac-to-Mac synchronization of contacts, calendars, tasks, memos, etc. Not quite a replacement for .Mac, unfortunately.

“…Motorola is learning a cruel new lesson about consumer tastes in phones. An industry that has focused more on microchips, screen size and data speed is finding it has more in common with the fashion business.”

Two music videos in one day! Anyway, this one is superb and hilarious. Via Jon Hicks.

This music video proves that old technologies become the fodder of art.