If you’re familiar with the concept of ‘jumping the shark’, a kind of death watch for the creative plausibility of any given television show, then you might be tempted to say that NBC’s “The West Wing” has seen the aerial view of a fin. See, they’ve gone ahead and had Matthew Perry turn in a few guest appearances, which is just the oddest ploy to boost ratings that I can imagine, in spite of the continued success of “Friends.”

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You’d think, from all the hype, that Apple’s foray into the online music business is some kind of spiritual epiphany, so potent is the Apple publicity machine. This new service, which debuted yesterday as a part of iTunes 4, breaks ground in that it has, for the first time, united all five major label record companies behind a single effort to sell and distribute music digitally in a kind of legally blessed Napster. As is to be expected from most Apple endeavors, the service is singularly elegant and overeagerly hyped.

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The latest iteration of this site, version Six.5, goes public today. Here is the quick take-away: The past several years’ worth of posts are now all available and tagged for easy browsing, thanks to SixApart’s wonderful Movable Type software. Everything has been pretty seriously redesigned and is now very nearly compliant with Web standards — no old-style HTML tables have been used in the layout. Yay! There are still a few stray areas that need to be incorporated into the redesign, and some last minute tweaking for CSS and XHTML validation, and that will happen soon.

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The problem with the record industry is not piracy, it’s that its primary product — the compact disc — has been completely devalued. There are some pretty convincing arguments for this that the RIAA obstinately refuses to acknowledge: principally, that the cost of CD’s is out of proportion with both recent inflationary history and the cost of competitive entertainment media like, specifically, DVD’s.

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Every Friday, I think that this will be the weekend that I finally finish this project and it never quite turns out to be true. But this weekend I really do think I’m going to be done, at long last. As I near the end of this redesign, I realize that I’ve dedicated unreasonable chunks of time to Six.5 (and Six.0 before it), so perhaps it makes sense to start considering what the heck kind of yield I’m looking get back from all this trouble.

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Enterprising shareware authors are writing terrific software for Mac OS X, and this stuff is not only powerful and handsome, it’s exceptionally easy to use. Witness Alexandre Carlhian’s MP3 Sushi, which allows you to broadcast your MP3 collection over a local network. The program makes prodigious use of Apple’s Rendezvous technology, making the process of sharing your collection with others on your network, or finding available collections on your network, literally as easy as flipping a single switch. Seriously, it took me less than 2 minutes to get MP3 Sushi running, making it perhaps the simplest server software I’ve ever dealt with, either as administrator or client.

Tonight I went with some friends to see the new movie “Confidence,” which stars Edward Burns and Rachel Weisz as a pair of con artists at odds with Dustin Hoffman. Before I get into commenting on the film, let me just tell you that what I’ll remember the most from this evening is that there’s no escaping advertising, even if you’ve paid the exorbitant ten dollar ransom on a movie ticket. Advertising is unstoppable.

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At Behavior we just finished an interactive demo of XM Satellite Radio’s new XMPCR product. This new device brings XM Radio’s programming content, which was previously available pretty much only in cars, to your Windows desktop. Click on the ‘View Interactive Demo’ link on this page, or go directly to the demo (but go armed with Flash).

When I came out of art school, I tried to take on lots of freelance work because I was impatient to build a portfolio full of real-world projects that I actually liked. Now that I am a part owner in my own business, freelance work doesn’t interest me much anymore. If it’s too small for Behavior, I tend to pass on it because it tests my physical stamina enough to run the studio. I’d much rather burn midnight oil working on Subtraction.com. But a friend asked me to throw together a little postcard for a weekly comedy show of which she’s a part at Chicago City Limits.

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For the sake of posterity, a few technical notes on how I built Six.5. First and most predictably of all, I’m proud to say that this whole endeavor has been a Mac OS X production (aside from browser compatibility testing on Windows of course). If you’ve read any number of posts here, you already know a few things that I’m head over heels about, and Mac OS X is one of them. This operating system has been a total pleasure to use, and completing a sizable personal project like this entirely with native X applications has me more excited than ever about the platform.

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Six Apart Ltd., who are responsible for Movable Type, have just announced the upcoming debut of TypePad, a hosted weblog tool based on MT technology that looks set to compete head-to-head with Blogger. This is terrific; I’m really happy to see that the MT engine will be broadening its reach.

TypePad is just one part of a frenzy of fairly major announcements today from the husband and wife team of Ben and Mena Trott; the company has also completed a round of financing, hired notable blogger Anil Dash as V.P. of Business Development, and formed a board of directors.

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Plenty of movies entertain me and manage to surpass my often limited expectations, but when I watch a film like “Talk to Her,” I’m reminded that there is an art to filmmaking and it’s capable of making my jaw drop. Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature begins as a tale of a female matador, shifts to an unlikely friendship between two vigilant and lonely would-be lovers of coma victims, interludes with a parody of silent films and concludes something like “Dead Man Walking.” From the very first few moments, I was transfixed by Almodóvar’s unpredictably elegiac, hilarious and disturbing roller-coaster ride. Its lingering power is one of emotional resonance, but I will gladly pay another ten dollars to see any movie that can even approximate the beauty of “Talk to Her“’s bullfighting cinematography — it’s one of perhaps two times that I’ve ever seen film look uncannily, rapturously like painting.

When I was posting to this site with Blogger, and when the blog portion of the site was about 250 pixels wide, my posts were much shorter. Now they’re longer, sometimes much longer — this isn’t necessarily a good thing, but it illustrates the by-now-old saw that the medium is the message. In contrast to Blogger, Movable Type practically begs for more words for each post.

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Movable Type is probably among the top five best pieces of software I’ve ever used, whether online or on my desktop, but it has its shortcomings. But before I get into them, let me reiterate my continuing awe at its flexible, ingenious feature set, all of which is available for the princely sum of free. Ben and Mena Trott’s generosity is truly a marvel, and they’ve engendered a wonderful, vibrant community of users.

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Radu Darvas is the grand prize winner of the WThRemix contest, in which contestants were asked to redesign the W3C home page using valid, table-free XHTML and CSS. Among the five winners, Darvas’s design clearly deserves the grand prize. Unfortunately, the overall quality of the contest entries is a bit disappointing, with many devoid of personality or attention to typographic detail, and many more employing questionable design tricks. This is the danger of CSS, I suppose: its toolbox of layout tricks is plentiful enough to override good taste; in a way, the standard’s novelty factor echoes the early days of Photoshop, when everything was marbleized, drop-shadowed and/or embossed.

Most of the major work on Six.5 is done. Late last night I finished the template for each individual post (the page that results when you click on the the post’s title or the “This post continued…” link). This was one of the main motivations behind Six.5, as the new template allows for a lot more design flexibility than its predecessor.

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Last night I took Subtraction.com offline to start implementing the new redesign that I’ve been talking about for some weeks, so most of you will be reading this either via RSS feed or on Monday (or sometime thereafter). It’s been an interesting process, and it occurred to me that it would be entertaining (to me, anyway) to document a bit of it. So I’m going to use the next few days’ posts to talk about some of the improvements that this new redesign introduces.

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The 20 Gigabyte iPod that I got as a holiday gift in December broke about two weeks ago when I yanked on the earphone cord just a bit too hard and the audio jack molding cracked and chipped. It was still possible to get clear sound from the jack, but the remote control, which also plugs into the same port, only functioned intermittently. When I returned it to Apple for repair, they were kind of enough to replace the entire unit with a new one. The replacement just arrived this morning.

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After our client meeting in Northern Virginia yesterday, I am now charged with, among other things, the creation of a series of click-through wireframes. The idea is to model the page ‘flow’ in order to provide a rudimentary demonstration of the experience we’ll be building. This is definitely information architecture territory, and while I flatter myself that I am qualified to participate in IA activities, I certainly do not participate in them often enough. What’s more, I gotta say that I’m not all that hot on using Visio.

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Apple has just released the second public beta of its upstart Safari Web browser with the prominent addition of tabbed browsing. This is a user interface feature that’s old hat to users of Netscape 7, Camino, Opera etc. It’s relatively new to me, having only recently emerged from my seclusion inside of the Internet Explorer tank, and I’m already a huge fan. There’s a camp that dislikes tabs but I can’t even imagine why. First, tab usage is entirely optional and second, it’s so much more efficient and organized than toggling between multiple windows.

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Later this afternoon I’m leaving on a train for Northern Virginia, where a colleague and I will kick off our first project with a new client. We’re excited about this client (though we’re not yet at liberty to say who it is) and hopefully it’ll be the start of a great new relationship. I’ll be in Reston through tomorrow, and hope to return to posting on Thursday.

Just one day left to go until taxes are due. This evening I walked past the H & R Block on 23rd Street and it was standing room only. My own tax return has turned into something of a headache. As a partner in a limited liability corporation, the line between company revenue and personal income is very blurry, and trying to understand how much of each dollar goes to the tax man is a bit like trying to read uncommented code. The punch line of it all is my final tax bill — suffice it to say I won’t be treating myself to any post April 15th vacations or spending sprees.

Things may be a bit wonky for the next few days. I’m trying to shoehorn a new redesign into this site and there may be some downtime. It won’t be ready to go live for a few days yet, but things are going well so far and I’m pretty excited about it. (“Yay CSS!”)

So this afternoon I was sitting here at my desk working on the next redesign of this Web site (coming soon) with the TV turned on in the background, tuned into the Mets/Expos game in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I’ve never been much into team sports, but in the past year or two, I’ve become steadily more intrigued by baseball, and now I’m even happy that the season has started again — I never would’ve imagined this a few years ago.

There’s no shortage of praise for the game’s subtle beauty, but one thing I can say is that baseball is a wonderful game to design to. There is something peculiarly soothing about its ambient soundtrack and its pace that is conducive to long hours spent at the keyboard. I keep my back turned to the set, and when there’s a notable play, I’ll swing around and have a look at the replay. It’s a peculiar but satisfying way to break the monotony of staring at a computer screen. The closest thing I can liken it to is working in one room while a small, well-behaved cocktail party is taking place in the next room, and every once in a while someone comes over to tell you about something particularly funny or notable that was just said. Actually, that sounds weird. It’s more enjoyable than that.

When I first moved to New York five years ago, it was already too late for the venerable subway token. Though I had used tokens for access to the subway system on most all of my prior visits, by 1998 the Metro Card had already become practically ubiquitous and, like so much else at the end of the nineties, tokens had begun to seem unnecessarily awkward in the new, digital age. After fifty years of use and at least five years of descent into obscurity, tokens are finally laid to rest: as of today, the MTA will no longer sell tokens at all, and by 04 May, they will no longer be accepted anywhere in the system.

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At Behavior, we tend to have this same discussion over and over again every few months: “We need some good designers. How come there are so few good designers out there?” It drives me bats. There were record numbers of design graduates at the end of the last decade, and in theory when the Internet bubble burst, they all flooded the job market, looking for work. Though we have a small stable of talented, dependable visual designers, we’ve found it difficult to expand their numbers.

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Not only has the advent of Mac OS X brought about some of the best software development in years, but it’s also inspired some of the best tech writing about the platform since its heyday in the late Eighties. To begin with, Mac OS X’s Unix foundation has made the folks over at O’Reilly stand up and take notice, and their MacDevCenter is a rich technical resource. Over at Ars Technica, John Siracusa has been plugging away with a series of thorough and very engaging articles about Mac OS X since its developer previews way back in 1999. These are easily among some of the smartest critical assessments of the platform’s progress out there, and his latest, a powerful discussion of what’s wrong with the Finder, is no exception. I’ve also recently come across Daring Fireball, which bills itself as a source for “Mac punditry and crumudgeonry.” Its author, John Gruber, offers smart, lengthy and very detailed rants on everything Mac-related. I was particularly impressed by his thoughts on anti-aliasing in Safari.

During the Internet boom, I counted myself among the many legions who switched over entirely from Netscape — then at version 4.something and a disaster of a Web browser — to Microsoft Internet Explorer. With its monstrous and seemingly unstoppable marketshare, IE became a de facto standard, and it just struck me as being so much easier to design Web pages for IE than to strive for cross-browser compatibility. Now, I see the error of my ways.

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Posters for the upcoming film “Identity” can be seen all over town these days. And though the trailer doesn’t look too promising, this poster is brilliant, easily the best I’ve seen yet this year. It’s the kind of conceptually dense illustration that used to feature more prominently in commercial graphics, and I think Columbia Pictures deserves a pat on the back for approving such an unorthodox approach.

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Though the redesign of this site isn’t quite complete (the About and Links subsections need to be overhauled yet, one day) I’m already starting to think about version Six.5. There are a few basic motivations behind this. First is my newfound, gung-ho attitude about CSS; I want to rebuild this site using nothing but XHTML and CSS, as valid as I can get it. More than that, I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging and about designing blogs and blog content.

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There’s been a lot of talk in the Macintosh community about LaunchBar, so today I downloaded and installed the free demo. Wow! A kind of search field augmented by powerful auto-completion capabilities, LaunchBar is eerily evocative of the prescient, absurdly intelligent computers we tend to see only in the movies. That is, it manages to know pretty much exactly what you want with barely any input.

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The first mobile phone I bought was a Qualcomm QCP-1900 in 1997, when the devices were the size of a case for your eyeglasses and were just beginning to achieve mass appeal. That was six years ago and mobile phones seemed new to me then, but one thing I’ve since learned is that technology is always older than one might suspect. In fact, the very first mobile telephone call was placed thirty years ago today, which makes the cell phone roughly as old as the Walkman, as hard as that is to believe.

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“Commodification of Buddhism“ is a group exhibition featuring, among others, my fellow Behavior partner Mimi Young and some guy named Nam June Paik. It opens tomorrow (with a reception this evening) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and is sponsored in part by The Buddhism Project.

“Taking a fresh approach, Commodification of Buddhism will explore the growing phenomenon of the appropriation of Buddhist symbols and their widespread circulation in the commercial domain…The pervasive spread of Buddhist iconography in the commercial domain indicates the extent to which such images have become detached from their original significance.”

Mother Nature’s little April Fool’s Day joke for New York this year is unseasonably cold temperatures to follow the past week and a half of beautiful, moderate weather. It was 34º F when I walked to the office this morning! Crazy. In any event, one origin of April Fool’s Day asserts that the tradition is based on ridiculing those societies who continued to celebrate 01 Apr as the first day of the new year — as per the old Julian Calendar — long after the Gregorian Calendar, as it was implemented by the British, had designated that day as 01 Jan.

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