John Lasseter, Creative Executive VP for Pixar Inc. and director of the “Toy Story” movies, is on a publicity tour, talking up the chances for “Monsters Inc.” to win an Academy Award next month. He’s due to appear on NPR’s “Fresh Air” this evening. I heard him yesterday on WNYC’s “New York & Company,” when he said something really interesting. At the outset of every movie, there’s always some large piece of the story that they have no idea how to accomplish, some creative challenge that has no clear technological solution. Their approach is to back themselves into a corner and innovate through it. I like that aggressiveness, that willingness to create circumstances that demand innovation.

Behavior is taking over my life. Or at least trying to run several Behavior projects while also helping to run the company is devouring my waking hours. In spite of the long hours, it’s a heck of a lot of fun. Anyway, in the interest of time, I’m going to clear out some random links I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.After (or perhaps in spite of) much needling from Steve Jobs, Adobe Systems has finally announced Photoshop 7.0 for Mac OS X. It’s got me pretty excited.Text-Image.com is a really great little engine that converts GIFs and JPEGs to ASCII. It’s an old trick, but this one does it beautifully, using colored text to approximate tones and shades.Gamespot.com has a nice history of the videogaming industry.

Every kid, regardless of age, lost something yesterday when Chuck Jones passed away.

David Levine: “This is a virtual online gallery I've created to display and share the best items in my collection of 1920s and 1930s travel-related ephemera.” There’s some really beautiful stuff available here, including terrific pieces from masters such as Herbert Matter and Piet Zwart. This one is probably my favorite.

This is a detail from the very first scan from my brand new Canon CanoScan N1240U, now sitting cutely in my home office. Though it’s not the speediest scanner (as mentioned in this PC World roundup of current models) it’s ideal for my tiny apartment; first it’s remarkably thin and second it keeps things dead simple by using just a single USB cable for both power and data. That’s real progress.

As a kind of respite from the suffocating second Bush era, I rented “The War Room” the other night. This documentary of the 1992 Clinton campaign, shot by the legendary husband-wife directing team of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, is still remarkably good, the kind of film that continues to stoke fires of optimism and excitement with each viewing. Is it in bad taste to get nostalgiac for the early nineties already?

David Rees’s “My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable” first came across my desk last year, and even then I thought it was side-splittingly hilarious. But now it’s even more awesomer thanks to the recent inclusion of Enron and Voltron into its storylines.

Though its promise is greater than its reality, the movie rating and recommendation engine MovieLens is at least a lot of fun. Users rate a slew of movies (I was able to quickly rate about sixty-five) and MovieLens returns a list of recommended current features and recent video and DVD releases. It’s a project from the University of Minnesota, but it’s practically begging for a deal with Amazon or Citysearch.

I posted some notes on how cool Google is a few days ago, but I keep finding further evidence. Not long ago the company announced their appliance server, which offers plug’n’play (allegedly) search capability to enterprises — a bold move for a search engine. Google also collects loads of interesting meta-data at their Google Zeitgeist page. Their recap of last year’s zeigeist is fascinating.

Make something sweet (but not exactly edible) for your sweet with the ACME Heart Maker. Happy Valentine’s Day, too!

Sherron Watkins’s testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee today was thrilling to listen to, and I admire her bravery. This Enron thing gets more and more interesting with each day. I hope Lay, Fastow, Skilling et. al. get their due. In other news, did you hear there’s another Olympic scandal, and if you didn’t are you really surprised? If there’s anyone out there that believes the Olympics are anything more than a circus of graft, exploitation and marketing, let me sell you some shares in ENRNQ.

This is really nice: all the Life Magazine covers from 1936 through 1972, databased and searchable. I wish every magazine would use the Web in this way with its archives.

It’s the lunar new year!

Noted legal braniac Lawrence Lessig has a great idea and it’s called Creative Commons. As reported at SFGate.com, “Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work.”

Eve Andersson, a founding member of Ars Digita, has published a scalding recounting of the rise and fall of the Internet consultancy and software publisher. It goes into great detail on how the venture capitalists and MBAs destroyed the company and its culture. I had very similar experiences in terms of being led astray by deceitful executive officers, so if nothing else I can attest to its emotional accuracy, and I can say I’m more inclined to sock an MBA across the jaw than I am to trust him with any piece of an enterprise I care about.

Many Wintel fans may insist that what matters in computing is specs and not looks, but deep down they all wish their hardware looked as good as Apple’s — and now here’s proof. Intel’s “Concept PC Gallery” gets an A for effort, but it ultimately amounts to a motley showcase for some of the ugliest hardware designs ever seen, real or hypothetical.

Facetmap is an interesting look at the possibilities of a multi-filter approach to browsing hierarchies.

Now that I work at home and I’m here nearly all day and every day, I’ve been thinking a lot about adopting a dog from a rescue like BREW Inc. (There are some adorable dogs shown on this site, like Juan, that need good homes.) Maybe I’m just a softie at heart, but getting a pet just seems like something I want to do now.

Another excellent “Frontline” special and Web site. This one’s all about porn, and includes this excellent essay from Laura Kipnis, “The Eloquence of Pornography.”

Google is one of those Web success stories that seems truly deserved. They have a great core product in their search engine, which surpasses so many of its competitors in accuracy that I now use it exclusively. And in the past year or so they’ve extended their business in truly interesting ways too, e.g. bringing online a huge archive of Usenet postings. Their latest scheme is a programming contest that opens up a database of 900,000 Web pages and asks contestants to do something clever with it — anything clever. “Part of your job is to convince us of why your program is interesting and why it will scale; other than that, you’re free to implement whatever strikes your fancy.”

We’re starting to have some success in lining up clients at Behavior. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but the day is fast approaching when we’re going to need to hire interaction designers, preferably with mid-level to senior-level expertise. If this is you, send your resume to jobs@behaviordesign.com (not to me!).

Two reminders of the Eighties crossed my desk this morning. The first, a photographic document of a meeting of the minds, cracked me up. The second, a return to deficit spending, is somewhat less happy.

Professional corporate pest and documentary film maker Michael Moore, who directed “Roger & Me,” has published an excoriating public letter to George W. Bush regarding his involvement in all things Enron.

Cisco has a vision for the future. It’s one of those visions that is going to seem really quaint and silly really soon — and which future young adults will probably fetishize ironically.