Google’s Orkut has gotten the lion’s share of recent attention paid to Friendster-inspired social networking sites. My interest in this form of community-making has pretty much waned, but the one derivative that actually does excite me is — somewhat embarrassingly — Dogster. Yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like: Friendster for dogs. Here’s Mister President’s page. I know, I know.

For no good reason, I neglected to write about RonyShram.com, a site that Behavior launched about two weeks ago. It’s an online portfolio that we built for an old colleague that we knew in the dot-com boom, who went on, somewhat surprisingly, to build a career photographing beautiful women. (And all I got was this lousy LLC!) The site was authored in Flash, which is practically de rigeur for photographers’ sites, but the back-end uses some clever PHP to make administration dead easy; all that’s required to reorder, replace or remove photos is simply moving JPEGs in and out of directory folders.

There’s still no way to get online access to archives of The New Yorker’s rich bounty of essays, articles, reviews and humor — not even if you’re a subscriber, nor even if you want to pay for it — so you’d better hurry over there and read Hendrik Hertzberg’s contribution to this week’s Talk of the Town section before it’s no longer available. The piece is called “Unsteady State,” and it nicely wraps up President Bush’s troubled first few weeks of 2004, bookended by his weak and disingenuous attempt at re-igniting the space race and the partisan polticking of his State of the Union speech.

Continue Reading

The good news is that there’s less than a year to go in the disastrous, one-term presidency of George W. Bush. Next 20 Jan a new president will be sworn in, a Democrat, and we’ll finally put an end to the far right’s ideological foreign policy and avaricious economic roadmap.

Granted, here after the New Hampshire primary, I have very little idea of who that Democrat’s going to be, except to say that it won’t be Joseph Lieberman or Wes Clark — the former is dogged but pathetic, and the latter has proven to be too ill-prepared a candidate to last the long haul.

It just goes to show that I know jack shit about politics, because I am perplexed by the underwhelming nature of John Kerry’s momentum — in spite of his convincing win this evening, there’s still a fragile quality to his candidacy, as if that stony face would crumble under just a few degrees more of intense scrutiny.

Continue Reading

It’s not very often that I fly these days — at least not nearly as often as I used to — but each time I do, I’m reminded of the declining quality of consumer aviation. Halfway through last week I flew to California to see family, and the service on America West was roundly disappointing: to begin with, my ticket was no bargain, but they charged me US$100 to alter it in order to accommodate some changes in my schedule. It was a cross-country flight, but they served only soft drinks and peanuts — not even a single meal. I’m no fan of airline food, but when one spends an extra hour cooped in a plane cabin, waiting for takeoff, a five-hour trip becomes pretty hunger-inducing at somewhere around five hours and thirty minutes. One might be tempted to turn to the in-flight movie to preoccupy one’s time, but there’s something humiliating about being asked to spend an additional US$5 for the indignity of whiling away the airline’s delays. And when we were delayed in landing, the cabin crew couldn’t even apprise us of gate information for our flight connections. I can hardly think of another consumer product that, dollar for dollar, represents less in the way customer care.

To take the edge off the Iowa caucuses and Howard Dean’s somewhat shocking third-place finish, I preoccupied myself with the humdrum task of getting rid of all my CD jewel box cases and replacing them with DiscSox DJ sleeves. They’re the only sleeves I could find that hold all the materials that come in a standard CD package: the disc, the booklet and the tray card. So, in spite of the fact that the kind of politics I personally tend towards were slapped silly this evening, I can at least rest assured that I’ve been able to reclaim a few shelves’s worth of storage space for my music collection. Sigh.

For someone who has been more or less rooting for Howard Dean since last summer, the sudden tightening of polling data in the Iowa caucuses this weekend is somewhat worrisome. In fact, when I first heard that a Zogby poll put Senator John Kerry in the lead, I scoffed at the absurdity of the idea and loudly called into question the dependency of Zogby in general. I was talking out of my ass of course, basing my reaction more on my investment in the idea that this race has had an air of predestination for months than on any attention paid to the very recent events in Iowa. To paraphrase a friend’s characterization of my inability to focus on the primaries of late: “It’s a tough week to have a job and be a political junkie.”

Continue Reading

We’ve had a copy of the Adobe Creative Suite in the office for a few weeks, but it was only today that I got around to installing it on my PowerMac G4. I spent the afternoon trying to knock out some comps for a project using Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS, using essentially the same techniques and methods that I would normally use with their predecessors. In fact, there is nothing dramatically different about these revisions, which is a kind of disappointment to me given the rather pronounced rebranding effort invested into this software suite by Adobe.

Continue Reading

One of the disappointing things I noticed during last week’s Macworld Expo announcements was Microsoft’s sketchy details about their impending Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh release. Specifically, there was nothing said about integration of the contact management component of Entrourage with Apple’s built-in Mac OS X Address Book.

This core application is the closest thing to a system-wide contact manager you’ll find in a consumer operating system, and I’ve been patiently waiting for such a thing for years. Being a dedicated Entourage user, I’ve felt frustrated that this very robust Microsoft product can’t take advantage of the Address Book. I have no desire to manually maintain two separate contact databases — something I’ve tried to do in the past and found to require too much effort — so I’m desperate to find a way to link them.

Continue Reading

If it weren’t the beginning of another crazy week at Behavior (where we’re looking to hire freelance designers, by the way), I’d spend some time writing extensive praise for Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” I watched it for the first time this past weekend on a newly minted DVD version, and it was magnificent. Perhaps a very brief outlining of my thoughts are in order anyway because, at heart, this is a ninety minute film stretched out to a very long two hours and forty-odd minutes.

Continue Reading

Despite the best efforts of a colleague who went out of his way to help me, it took nearly a week to reformat my troublesome Hewlett Packard Pavilion 701 and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows XP on it. This machine had been on its last legs for months, sputtering along with an installation of XP that had been painfully accreted with innumerable Microsoft patches and who knows what kind of damage inflicted from countless crashes and errant programs.

Continue Reading

Where have all the cub reporters gone? Fictional enterprises no longer seem to harbor the fantasy of underaged journalists risking life and limb in the pursuit of a hot scoop, something that seemed once to be a fairly commonplace — or at least somewhat plausible — pretext for throwing likable young adult characters into unspeakably dangerous situations.

This was the absurd and yet intoxicating premise behind the indefatigable cub reporter Tintin, the Belgian comic strip character who celebrates his 75th anniversary today. My father, who spent a good chunk of his childhood growing up in France, introduced me to the oversized collections of Tintin’s adventures when I was a kid, and I was blown away by the sure artistic hand of the character’s creator, writer and illustrator, Georges Rémi — he signed his work simply as Hergé — and I was sure then as I am now that he was some kind of genius.

Continue Reading

Here are my quick thoughts on some of Apple’s announcements from yesterday’s Macworld Expo. Nearly everyone with whom I’ve discussed the new, slick and inevitable iPod mini feels that it’s over-priced at US$249, and I agree. I think the consensus was hoping for something in the US$150 range, but heck, they could have priced it at US$200 and everyone would’ve been happy. There’s something psychologically forbidding about that extra fifty dollars, but it’s just like Apple to hit a home run like this and twist its own ankle while rounding the bases.

Continue Reading

Vadim Perelman’s “House of Sand and Fog” begins with the very end of its story, a narrative device that has become so popular in recent cinema that it provoked in me a feeling of dread. The idea of enduring yet another movie that spends the bulk of its time in flashback has by now a tired, depleted promise to it, and I was seized, in the opening sixty seconds, with a sense that I was embarking on 126 minutes of bad cinema. And in fact, there is a good deal of this movie adaptation of Andrew Dubus III’s novel that is perfunctory and predicated on only unambitious attempts at storytelling, from its cast of not quite fleshed out supporting characters to its sometimes implausible leaps in narrative logic.

Continue Reading

A friend of mine squeezed in a last minute tax deduction in late December and bought a brand new 15" Apple PowerBook G4 for her freelance business. She brought it by my apartment this weekend to take me up on my offer of helping her get it set up, and just for a laugh, we sat it down next to the Christmas gift that I bought for my girlfriend: a brand new Olivetti Lettera 35L manual typewriter.

Continue Reading

Non-disclosure agreements and a general respect for our clients’ privacy generally preclude any mentions of current Behavior projects here, but I’m going to make an exception of a sort for the work we’re currently doing for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Since late last summer, the AIGA has been working on a major overhaul of their core Web sites, and we’ve been privileged enough to take part in redesigning one of the major hubs of aiga.org (I’m not going to say exactly which one). We’ve had the pleasure collaborating with my pal Naz over at Weightshift, and to design alongside the likes of Flat, which has made for one of the most interesting design processes I’ve been through. After some hiccups, I think we’re getting close to a really sharp solution, one that draws not only on the work of our aforementioned peers, but also on some of the ideas we started playing with on Gain and the work I’ve been doing here on Subtraction.com. There’s a long way to go, but I’m pretty excited about it.

Lots of people I know decided against joining any kind of large-scale New Year’s Eve celebrations in public places this year. For me, at least, a quiet evening spent at home after a hectic December sounded more enticing than any drunken bash. So right up until about 10:00p, my girlfriend and I were still on the fence about attending a few parties to which we’d been invited. But ultimately, we couldn᾿t resist the coziness of our apartment, so we stayed in and watched Hal Ashby and Warren Beatty’s truly excellent “Shampoo” and played two rounds of Scrabble.

I used to be really good at that game about ten years ago, but something happened to me in the intervening years — I might be tempted to blame the Internet — and my girlfriend handily beat me two times in a row. All the same, I really enjoy Scrabble, and it seems odd to me that it hasn’t been properly translated into an online version. Its simplicity makes it seem pretty well-suited for net play, but after some cursory searching, I could only find a fairly kludgy Java-based approximation called “Word Biz” (Windows only) and a knock-off at Yahoo! Games called Literati.