You can hardly argue that there’s no connection between oil consumption and terrorism, but even if you can ignore all the evidence pointing to gasoline-fueled cars as the crucial link between American culpability and third world enmity, I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to make cars more fuel efficient. Led by Republicans and backed up by Democrats from auto-producing states, the Senate yesterday rejected a proposal to increase the mandated fuel-economy of passenger cars to 40 miles per gallon… by the year 2015. That’s a dozen years from now, and the opposition argument is that this sort of legislation is a danger to American jobs. C’mon! Saying that the American auto industry is incapable of gearing up for a new fuel economy standard over the course of twelve years is a kind of insult to American ingenuity and resourcefulness, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s a testament to laziness, greed and an obstinate unwillingness to really address the reality of our role in the world.

There was a stack of bills waiting for me on my desk at Behavior when I returned to work on Monday. It’s pretty amazing how quickly bills will accumulate even for a small business, and I wrote literally eighteen checks before the day was out. Paying vendors and utilities has been my responsibility since last fall, when we rented our office space and the monthly expenses started really racking up. In my dealings with countless of these statements, I’ve been keeping mental notes on the usability of invoices, what makes them easy to understand and easy to pay. Following is a sketch of an ‘ideal’ paper-based invoice.

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Now that I am more or less recovered from my unexpectedly debilitating, week-long bout with the common cold, I’m able to focus my energy on the daunting task of moving into a new apartment later this week. The bad news is that, against my better judgment, I’ve spent the past two and a half years loading up my current apartment with a ridiculous overabundance of books, magazines and computer equipment. Packing up all of this stuff is going to be a laborious process of purging items I can’t justify owning and sorting through items I’m not sure why I want to hold on to.

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After a few days of running a fever of 100° F, I’m finally back at good ol’ 98.6° again. But I’m still hardly back at full strength — this cold has been tougher than I thought. I missed a full week of work, which in some ways is probably something my body needed, but I’m sure I’ll pay for it dearly next week. And now I have to turn my attention to packing up my overcrowded pad for my move to a new apartment next Thursday. Posts may be thin in the meantime.

Still sick, I slept through most of today uncomfortably. By the mid-afternoon, I finally felt well enough to get up and cook myself some soup and park myself in front of the television for a while. As it happened, Encore was running Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film adaptation of “All the President’s Men.” I’ve watched this film about half a dozen times since I was kid, and each time I come away convinced that it’s one of the greatest movies I’ll ever watch.

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My cold’s worse today than it was yesterday, so I am laid up in bed over at my girlfriend’s where the level of care and babying is at least several notches higher than back at my lonely little pad. Aside from napping and consuming lots of fluids, I’m spending a lot of time on my PowerBook using remote access software. First, Microsoft’s very clever Remote Desktop Client for Macintosh allows me to access my Windows PC at Behavior, as if I were sitting right there at the office — a very handy way to work from home.

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Summer colds are just about the worst way I can think of to plod through a hot, muggy, New York July, though that may be because I started coming down with one on Saturday afternoon. At first I thought I was just completely wiped out by the previous work week, but then my sinuses started drying up and a soreness took hold of my throat, and now I’m sitting here in bed, blogging under the covers.

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My girlfriend’s Power Macintosh G4, formerly an ailing relic of the Mac OS 9.x era, is now a spiffy new Jaguar machine. A few days ago, I rolled up my sleeves, popped the tower’s side door open and installed the upgrades I bought at Macworld Expo: First, an additional 512MB RAM chip, which brings her grand total to 640MB. (To think, I once bought a pair of 16MB RAM modules for something around US$900!)

Second, I added a new IBM-Hitachi Deskstar 120GB internal hard drive. This saved me the hassle of having to pull off all the old data from the incumbent 20GB disk, and it gives her the added bonus of having two bootable internal drives. The Deskstar spins at 7200 rpm, which makes a much bigger difference than I had anticipated; the machine now seems to run much faster than its pokey old 450 MHz processor formerly allowed.

In fact, I had originally been skeptical about whether this Power Mac, which is already almost four years old, would perform acceptably under Mac OS X. Happily, I can report that with these additions its performance can be characterized as very responsive, and certainly more than sufficient for her not-unusual computing demands: email, Web browsing, MP3 playback, CD burning, instant messaging etc. Best of all, these upgrades cost a remarkably reasonable total of about US$210.

Among the nominees announced yesterday for the 55th Annual Emmy Awards was Jonathan Corn for “Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Comedy Series.“ Specifically, the nomination singles out his work on the semi-infamous “Krazee Eyez Killa” episode of Larry David’s painfully hilarious HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” It was a brilliant episode, but the real reason I’m posting this here is that I’ve known Jonathan since the 8th grade, when we attended, first, junior high and, later on, high school together. I also saw him off with a books-on-tape copy of O.J. Simpson’s “I Want to Tell You” when he packed up his bags, left behind the East Coast and headed off to Hollywood in search of fame and fortune. Congratulations, Mr. Corn!

In order to send an email to President George W. Bush, it’s no longer possible to simply break out your favorite email client and dash off a message to president@whitehouse.gov. Those concerned citizens wishing to express some opinion or pose some question to the most secretive administration in modern times must now jump through a series of technological hoops in the form of an unnecessarily complicated and laborious series of forms on the White House Web site.

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Two reasons why I’m sure there will be another Internet boom (though hopefully one that is not as out of hand as the last one): the continued bursts of creativity in the browser space even in the face of Goliath-like domination by Microsoft, and the incremental yet determined progress of just-in-time product manufacturing. In plain English, I’m talking about Web browsin’ and book readin’.

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Macworld Expos have not excited me very much since the mid-90s, though every summer, when the East Coast edition rolls into New York City, I make it a point to head over to the Javits Center and see what the Mac industry has to show for itself. Inevitably, I find myself bored after no more than an hour or two of browsing the aisles, and this year was no different. Actually, that may be good news, considering the comedy of PR errors that preceded this year’s New York show (which demonstrated that Apple has no particular desire to see an Apple-focused trade show in New York thrive). It’s kind of a success story in itself that the show floor looked crowded and that everyone seemed pretty upbeat.

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In just a few days of having a trial membership to EMusic, I’ve already downloaded more songs than I have in months of browsing the Apple iTunes Music Store, and this in spite of how much my bias towards all things Apple wanted to like the that Mac-only service. Once or twice a week, I would browse its catalog, hoping that I would come across some music that was remotely interesting enough for me to shell out 99¢ or more, but more often than not, I came up short — the albums I wanted were missing, or their track listings omitted crucial songs. I think I bought one album and three individual songs from the iTMS, for a grand total of about US$13.

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Yesterday was a beautiful day for my friends Nam and Shirley to get married — they were blessed with uncommonly temperate, sunny July weather, and an allaying series of breezes rolled in off the Hudson River and over the deck at Battery Park’s American Park restaurant, where both the ceremony and reception were held. The wedding was kind of a reunion of lots of people that Nam and I used to work with, which made it a lot of fun for me. As a groomsman, my duties included carrying a thick envelope of cash and checks to pay off the various musicians, photographers, videographers and lighting technicians, and also standing around with a big smile on my face while outfitted in a tuxedo — I have a distaste for the pilled blended fabric and ill-fitted tailoring of rented formal wear, but the whole affair was more than enjoyable enough so that I was hardly ever reminded how awkward and unpleasant my senior prom was.

That was yesterday. Today, Monday, was a bad day to go back to work — everyone at Behavior went to the wedding and so just about everyone strolled into our offices late and/or hung over. I drank hardly any alcohol — I hardly ever do anymore — but I need another day to recover, and a long, long time before I ever get married myself.

Friendster hardly needs an introduction, but for the remaining uninitiated: it’s not, as I assumed when I first heard the name, a file-sharing network dedicated to the illegal trade of pirated episodes of “Friends.” Rather it’s an online method for meeting new people through your existing, real world network of friends, and it’s so frighteningly complete that there are people I know who swear it’s merely the most public expression of John Aschroft’s evil genius for total information awareness. The Village Voice wrote a more accurate and less flippant explanation in their piece on the service last month.

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As vices go, an addiction to Coca-Cola is pretty timid stuff, which may be the reason I developed one so easily. Because of the long hours we work at Behavior, it was only natural that we decided to carry on the dot-com era tradition of stocking our fridge with dozens of bright red cans of Coke. It became a habit for me to drink at least one or two cans of it during the workday, then go home and drink a half-liter more with dinner and another half-liter while I worked on my computer late into the night. It was a nasty habit and I knew it, but I swear Coke tastes so damn good, and I found it incredibly difficult to convince myself to cut it out.

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If you’ve used Windows XP, MSN Messenger, AOL 6.0 or a host of other programs, you’ve already been exposed to the exquisite work of The Iconfactory. This small group of iconographers has spiritually led, if not dominated, the business of designing icons for the past several years. They’ve demonstrated again and again that they’re more than just talented icon artists; they’re also savvy marketers. Their latest venture, StockIcons.com, is another example of their gift for expanding the market and mindshare of computer iconography.

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Behavior is printing a special-purpose marketing piece for which we need only about 50 copies. Taking this to a traditional offset printer — the old school kind, with huge, dangerous, finger-eating mechanical presses, unionized staff brimming with arcane printing knowledge, and storerooms full of noxious chemicals — would have made absolutely no economic sense. We also priced this out with one of the new breed of printers, the kind that straddle the line between traditional shops and digital service bureaus, and even that quote was pricier than we’d anticipated.

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It amazes me how people can find the time, energy and wherewithal to maintain more than one Web site. It’s hard enough for me to keep up with just this one, never mind trying to generate enough content for a second. Tonight was one of those nights when I looked at my watch, saw that the little hand was way closer to twelve than I thought it was, and realized that I hadn’t yet posted anything to this site.

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My iPod has instilled in me a disturbing insatiability for more music, more often. Where once I was satisfied with a new CD or two each month, I now find myself on an endless trawl for MP3s to add to my hard disk. It’s a sickness; I have more music now than I could possibly have time to enjoy — my iTunes library alone is 8.5 GB, and I have stacks of Squat CDs that haven’t been ripped yet, plus all my old CDs from my pre-MP3 days — and yet it never seems enough.

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I have some tips for those beachgoers entrusted with the keys to their rental car. First, don’t forget to take the keys out of the pocket of your swim trunks when you go swimming in the ocean. If you do that and, by some minor miracle, the keys haven’t been extracted from your pocket and swept up in the ocean foam, you should immediately take the keys back to a safe place, along with your wallet, house keys, sunglasses, lucky rabbit’s foot, Palm OS device and other valuables.

Do not think to yourself, “There’s a lot of wet sand all over these keys, perhaps I should wash it off quickly in the water before taking it back to my beach towel,“ because the tumult of some crashing wave may inadvertently knock the keyring out of your hand, swallowing the keys up in the briny depths of the shore, causing expletives to drop out of your incredulous, gaping jaw.

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For the Fourth of July, I’m planning to take it easy, recuperate from my trip to Montréal, and grill myself a nice fat steak. This may mean that I don’t get to post to this site too much over the three-day holiday, so as a minor consolation, I’ve posted a new masthead image of some nice, fluffy clouds. Here’s a tip for budding design critics: any time you see a designer use clouds, hands or close-ups of an eye in any significant way, it’s a pretty good sign that he or she is out of ideas and is coasting on hackneted metaphorical shorthand. So maybe when I’m back in the full groove of things, I’ll replace it with something more meaningful. Also on my list is creating a little gallery of all these masthead images; coming soon.

The problem with a movie like “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” is that it will clearly fail the critical metric applied to films like “The Pianist,” or even “The Matrix Reloaded.” This sequel is too loud, ridiculous and calculated, and yet it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. I’ve been thinking about this problem lately, about how film criticism always needs to be parsed, and how the difficulty in parsing a film review can obscure the value that an average moviegoer — someone like, say, me — might get out of watching three beautiful women shake their moneymakers and kick some ass.

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Someone I was talking to over the weekend was saying that he felt that design is currently “over-supplied,” meaning, I guess, that in this market there is an overabundance of available design services, talent and studios. I started thinking about what that meant, really, and I have a feeling that a lot of thinking and postulation about the design business relies too heavily on the idea that design is basically the same as a service business — like say McKinsey — or a product business — like say Nike.

But I’ve started thinking — and this theory is still less than a week old, and I have yet to properly flesh it out — that design is most like the restaurant industry, which is a multibillion dollar business, and which allows for the co-existence of multiple levels of success, from mass-market chains to speciality boutiques. The more I think about it, the more I like this model, because the restaurant business is highly varied, is not a zero sum game, and everybody needs to eat, just like everybody needs design.

I have a soft spot for utility software — especially for the Macintosh — because the authors, engineers and publishers who work in this niche almost always seem to be real fans of the computing experience. The very nature of utility software — those little add-ons and enhancements that subtly or significantly alter the behavior of the operating system — is one of tweaking, of altering the way of things in a particular, sometimes obscure way so that the universe seems just a tad bit more in order… and it’s usually the most devoted computer geeks who will tweak.

Utilities make computing more efficient and personal, and especially with those programs written for the Macintosh, they make things more fun. Which is why I’m so sad to see longtime Mac utility publisher Casady & Greene shutter its operations.

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