Last night I went to see David Fincher’s new movie, “Panic Room,” which is no “Fight Club,” for better or worse. Actually, it’s a tautly made thriller, enjoyable if unambitious. But what made the trek all the way up to the hellish Times Square area worth it was a single scene halfway through, when Fincher turns the movie virtually silent — and the opening weekend crowd that I saw it with went completely wild, hooting, hollering, screaming at the screen. It’s the kind of rare, visceral, communal moviegoing experience that few directors can achieve, and it was spectacular.

The latest addition to my hardware family is the Epson Stylus C80 color printer. The reviews for it have been uniformly excellent and the price is a steal (US$150 after rebate) — and yet I’m wondering if I really need or even want this thing. Since losing my job last fall and going on the start-your-own-business frugality plan, I’ve been averse to making large purchases and it feels uncomfortable to make one like this that, while nice to have, is not entirely necessary. Right now the printer box is sitting on my floor, still unopened.

Shawn King’s weekly “Your Mac Life” net radio show is a Mac geek’s playground and a guilty pleasure in its one-sided, fanboy enthusiasm.

So I got off my ass today and wrote three letters: one each to both my Senators and another to my U.S. Representative. This was prompted by Senator Fritz Hollings’s ridiculous, egregiously wrong-headed and greedy Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act.

More newspaper stuff: Ad Age recounts the rumors around the top-secret redesign of the Wall Street Journal. Set to launch on 09 Apr, this will be the first major overhaul of the print edition since 1941. Wow. One week later, New York gets a new daily in the form of The New York Sun.

It’d be hard to describe how distasteful I find the Oscars. The funniest thing I heard this Oscar season was that, in spite of all the unusually vociferous bad blood that preceded last night’s show, the most important thing was ‘to preserve Oscar’s integrity.’ Ha! All the same, I was pleased to hear that Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won big last night.

The New York Times has an article about Chinese-language newspapers changing their reading orientation from vertical to horizontal. It’s a fascinating design issue involving fundamentals of legibility, culture, and politics.

De-construct, a UK Web design shop that rose from the ashes of Deepend UK, has an ingenious Web site that plays on the firm’s name in a super-smart way: rather than explicitly cataloging the site’s contents in the form of a navigation (which is what 99% of sites do), they offer a dead-simple Q&A prompt. With each keystroke, the interface auto-completes your typing with possible terms inside its “library.” Totally brilliant. It makes me a little jealous too that they have such a great site — looking at their story, I realized that they began life at the same time as Behavior.

For the past six months or so, I’ve become increasingly addicted to NPR. So, after much procrastination and quiet guilt, I finally made a donation to WNYC yesterday — my first ever. They have some good swag, too; I got myself a copy of “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies” and an entry in a Tekserve-sponsored drawing for a brand new iMac andiPod.

From The New York Times: “The Senate gave final approval today to an overhaul of the nation’s campaign finance law, and President Bush said he would sign it, putting the political system at the cusp of the broadest change in a generation.” Also, read their editorial about the bill’s success. I’m pretty happy about this.

San Franciscans have approved the use of instant runoff voting to decide their next County Supervisor. This is an idea that, in spite of its surprisingly slow propagation since the 2000 Presidential election debacle, is still bound get more traction in the years ahead. In instant runoff voting, rather than selecting just one candidate on a ballot voters rank candidates as first choice, second choice and so on. Essentially, it’s “a winner-take-all system that ensures that a winning candidate will receive a majority of votes rather than a simple plurality.” Come to think of it, perhaps the fact that its concept is not easily summed up in less than a few paragraphs accounts for its slow mindshare growth.

Hey, I like that new Andy Richter show.

Vindigo, one of the best pieces of software for the Palm OS ever, is moving to a subscription model. My prediction: Walking from free, ad-based revenue model, go South on fee-based subscription model road (the first street you should pass is massive subscriber defection). Proceed for 6 to 8 months. Turn right on Mergers & Acquisitions Boulevard and go 100 yards to Citysearch.com.

The Hewlett-Packard shareholder vote on the proposed HP/Compaq merger is tomorrow. This kind of corporate intrigue is fascinating and I’m on the edge of my seat — and against the whole idea as I’m usually against most mergers.

Macromedia Flash-based applications are the next wave, the closest realization of Java’s “write once, run anywhere” promise we’ll see before George W. Bush finishes his one-term presidency. Ultimate Flash Face, a playful toolkit of facial parts, is an impressive feat and it bowled me over, but it’s still just the tip of the iceberg of what we’ll soon see with the release of Flash MX.

Boxes and Arrows is a new Web magazine which aims to be the “definitive source for the complex task of bringing architecture and design to the digital landscape.” What’s even cooler is that it’s built using Movable Type, one of the growing crop of free content management solutions.Over at The Gamers Press, John Hummel has an interesting article about converting from Unix to Mac OS X and liking it.The Smithsonian Archives of American Art has an exhibition right now called “Getting the Picture: The Art of the Illustrated Letter.” There are some beautiful drawings here, including this one by Charles Sarka. I just wish the scans were larger.Cal State Fullerton is offering a program in Visual Journalism, which “…expands the professions of photojournalism, reporting, writing, and graphic design.” I’m just starting to learn about this field, but it has my interest piqued.

Sony Japan has announced some beautiful new Palm OS devices, the Clie PEG-NR70 and PEG NR70V (Palm Infocenter has more information in this article). Aside from their shiny, metallic fit’n’finish, they feature a slick flip-open miniature keyboard. At first they reminded me of miniature Titanium PowerBooks, but when I thought more about it, I realized they’re really tricorders in training.

Harald Belker has done some amazing illustration work. Have a look at his Web site to get a good look at his portfolio, including work for the upcoming “Spider-Man” movie, which is looking better and better.

The cover story from the latest issue of Magnet Magazine, which unfortunately does not post its editorial content on its rather thin Web site, tells the tale of that nearly-forgotten, early-nineties musical fad sometimes known as shoegazing. It’s very well-written but also bizarre to read as an historical account, having lived through that time period, having bought those records as they were released, having trekked to the clubs to see those pale, undynamic English people perform that music in the flesh before the mid-nineties swept them away. Most of those records seem insignificant now, or at least too self-conscious and non-committal, but it does make me sentimental to think of a very brief time when the formula was: the weirder the music, the greater the chance for success.

Last night I went with my girlfriend to see “Scratch,” which was as exhilirating and well-crafted a documentary as one could hope for. It was our first visit to the new Landmark Sunshine Theater on Houston Street, an art house theater with honest-to-goodness stadium seating and a hell of a lot preferable to the Angelika.

Wow, terrific way-back zone over at ExcitementMachine.org, where they’ve scanned in an entire J.C. Penney catalog from 1980.

Behavior is still itching for some good visual designers, so if you’re smart, talented, can lead a design team, are not a primadonna, then please send us something friendly at jobs@behaviordesign.com.

We’ve pretty much just started doing interviews, and now that I’m an owner in my own business, I find that I take the process much more seriously than I did before. Or, at the very least, my questions are much more specific and I listen much more attentively. It’s interesting meeting candidates though, and chatting with them about how they work… looking for similarities and differences in the way everyone does design. The genral process seems to be: mood boards, comps, iterations, slice up the art. It sounds so simple when it’s put like that.

Macromedia officially announced the next version of Flash today called Flash MX. I guess it’s pretty much impossible to launch a new product these days without including an “X” in its name somewhere. It looks great nevertheless, and I’m actually onboard with Macromedia’s ambitions to make it a full-fledged development platform. The product has come a long way from its beginnings in the pen computing market, as detailed in this historical account by creator Jonathan Gay.

The Onion’s A.V. Club has an interview with acclaimed Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang.