Thanks to those who pointed out the mysterious, unsightly PHP errors that suddenly started appearing all over Subtraction.com this week. I went back through and fixed all the code (I think) so everything should be more or less back to normal. While doing so, I was reminded of all the fixes and tweaks that I’ve been meaning to find the time to implement… well, December has been a pretty poor month for posting frequency, to say nothing of under-the-hood changes, and January looks like it will be fairly hectic as well… but never say never. Happy new year!

Santa Claus (okay, my girlfriend) was generous enough to bring me a brand new Canon PowerShot SD10 Digital ELPH for Christmas this year. I’ve been wanting a new digital camera for some time, so I was pretty elated to find this waiting for me on Christmas morning.

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I found a copy of M. Sasek’s wonderful, recently reissued book “This Is New York” while browsing for holiday gifts in the children’s section at Barnes & Noble. Its pages exude an immediately gratifying warmth as soon as they’re opened; the illustrations, completed over forty years ago, are evocative of the urban, sophisticated-primitive style of drawing that dominated commercial art in the late 1950s, and which owed more than just a passing debt to the work of Ben Shahn. Though Sasek’s drawings depict a New York nearly a century out of date and are rounded out with more than a heaping teaspoon of naivete, they still communicate the precise pitch and tone of Manhattan᾿s noisy, cantankerous character. There’s no mistaking the sense of limitless possibility in these drawings for any other city, which makes this reprint seem remarkably current.

The so-called “SuperDrive” in my new 12" PowerBook G4, while not the first DVD-RW I’ve ever had access to, is the first one I’ve personally owned. So, with a little bit of free time this past weekend, I decided to sit down and see if it was possible to burn myself a copy of one of the movies that I own in DVD format — for fair use, back-up purposes only, of course.

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I’ve had to remove my iChat/AOL Instant Messenger screen name from my already fairly outdated About page because in the past month or two, I’ve become the victim of some pretty frequent IM spamming. There’s nothing interesting or clever about this junk advertising, aside from the fact that it gets delivered over a previously spam-free communications channel; in fact, it’s probably among the more banal and least innovative ways of capitalizing on a new medium that I’ve seen.

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For fans who don’t want the J.R.R. Tolkien “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to ever come to an end, director Peter Jackson has apparently done his very best to fulfill that wish with his interminable, ass-numbing, bladder-busting “Return of the King.” It clocks in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred hours and goes to great pains to bring satisfying resolutions to nearly every one of the bakers’s dozen of protagonists and almost all eight billion of the supporting characters in this epic tale of short people and cloak-lovers.

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All year long, I’ve been waiting for the FCC’s mandate on wireless portability to become law, so that I could switch from Sprint PCS without having to give up my number, and without having to send out one of those unseemly emails imploring friends and family to “Please note my new cell phone number.” This situation finally became reality on 24 Nov, but as I began to casually shop around for a new carrier I found that the coverage quality provided by the competition is generally even poorer than Sprint PCS.

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Just for posterity’s sake, I wanted to publish these two screen shots we took of a brand new Hewlett Packard computer we bought at Behavior. It’s a true eyesore — nearly half of this virgin desktop is littered with advertisements and junkware. The second screen shot is a look at some sort of umbrella program that HP includes with the machine, probably intended to help new users make their way through the confusing mess of meaningless icons.

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There’s something pathetic and familiar about the way Saddam Hussein looked when he was captured this weekend by coalition troops. It took me all day to figure it out, but I finally realized that, in that gray beard, nappy hairdo and especially those disheveled robes, he reminds me of ‘old Ben Kenobi,’ living like a hermit somewhere in the treacherous, dry hills of Tatooine. There’s nothing nearly as benign about this murderous former dictator, though, and for the fact that his capture will provide a more definitive kind of closure to Iraqis, this turn of events strikes me as significant, and in a storybook fashion, a real triumph of justice. On the other hand, I am bracing myself for the political ramifications, the trickery that the Bush administration will undoubtedly employ in order to reap the benefits of this big win, and the confused, panicked scurrying among Democratic contenders for the Presidential nomination as they try to make sense of their diminishing chances in 2004.

Right after Thanksgiving, I took a good hard look at December and even then I knew it would be a terrible month for regular posts to my blog. There’s just too much stuff to do during the last month of the year, from year-end purchasing and finances at Behavior to finishing up RFPs in the hope of lining up at least some new business for January, to say nothing of all the holiday commitments with empty checkboxes next to them. I wanted to do all of my shopping online this year because I will have virtually zero opportunity to go out into the real world for it, but even so, I’m finding that, today, I’m running right up against the absolute deadline for shipping in time for Christmas delivery. December is made of more impatient, entirely unaccommodating days.

Before I learned to like baseball, the race for the Presidency of the United States was all the baseball I needed: an intensive, protracted race that changed daily, full of odd twists and turns and intricate, obscure statistical bellwethers. The news that former Vice President Al Gore will endorse Howard Dean tomorrow is exactly the kind of grand, highly dramatic turn of events that makes this race so compelling, at least to me.

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We are under a blizzard of snow here in New York City. It’s not exactly twelve inches, but it’s a more significant amount of snowfall than the mid-Atlantic has become accustomed to getting this early in the season. I, for one, am not particularly excited by the sudden transition to sub-freezing temperatures, slush-filled sidewalks and skin-chapping, chilling winds, but I admit it was a lot of fun watching the dog frolic in the snowdrifts this morning — and yet another reminder of his recent anniversary in our household.

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Yesterday was my birthday, and we’re going to have a little bash at the office tonight to celebrate it, along with a few other December milestones: the two year anniversary of founding Behavior which happens today (I can hardly believe it), my business partner Jeff’s birthday on 08 Dec, and, somewhat more trivially, the one-year anniversary of adopting my dog, Mister President, which happened this past Monday.

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As a know-nothing, seventeen year old snob with an ill-informed set of rules for the way art and music should be made, I wouldn’t have given a second thought to completely passing by and paying no attention to a Donna Summer album. But after reading a recent interview with her, my thirtysomething curiosity was provoked, and I bought myself a copy of her disco-era classic “Love to Love You Baby” today. First of all, this cover is remarkable, a gloriously posed expression of emerging sexuality. And second, this music is beautiful, a lush and lilting dance-floor reverie. I regret how long it took me to open up to it.

It was a charming idea for The New York Times Magazine to commission nine prominent graphic designers to design posters for one of the nine Democratic candidates vying for the presidential nomination, but charming is exactly the problem. Each designer drew a candidate’s name from a hat, so there was no deliberate synergy in politics or artistic temperament, which may explain why most all of these posters are so flat and lifeless, but it doesn’t explain why, first of all, almost none of these designers really bothered to address the central challenge of the exercise, and second, why a disproportionately high number are all drawn from the same source.

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