My award for the worst interface in a best-selling, market-leading software application goes to Intuit’s perversely inelegant QuickBooks. This bookkeeping program is more or less ubiquitous among small-businesses, in spite of its opaque and unfriendly design, which I find to be really amazing because it’s truly, profoundly awful. As the finances at Behavior have gotten more and more complicated, I’ve been finding myself spending increasing amounts of time trying to figure out QuickBooks’ hidden corners and idiosyncratic organizational structure. For someone who has only a cursory understanding of accounting, I find that almost nothing I click on behaves as I expect it to, and it provides no clear metaphors for understanding how to navigate through a company’s finances. Even fundamental behaviors like scrolling and searches are unpredictable, having been half-heartedly implemented or incompetently reinvented by Intuit’s software designers. I just can’t say it enough: this program sucks.

My high school yearbooks are lost to me, fumbled somewhere over the past five years, during the course of one of my moves between apartments and cities. It gives me a very small pinprick of pain when I think about that — or about many lost things from my career at Gaithersburg High School — and then I push it out of my mind and try and think of more present matters.

Once in a while though, I’ll wake up in the morning having dreamt about some classmate or other that I might not have thought about since practically the day I took my diploma in hand. Try as I might, I can’t fathom why he or she made such a memorable guest appearance in my dreams; there’s almost no tangible connection that I can bring to mind, and yet I swear that, for a time between late night television and the morning alarm, they were as vivid to me as if I had passed them in the cafeteria the day before.

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One of the small but enduring benefits from my time in the dot-com boom was the pair of Sony MDR-7506 studio headphones that, in the early days of abundant venture capital and scarce foresight, one of my former employers handed out to every employee free. When I moved on from that job, I conveniently forgot to hand the headphones back in, and since then I’ve been using them more or less every day.

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These are the articles that I read this morning about former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke’s claims in his new book that President Bush had a fixation on invading Iraq and that he pressured his aides to produce connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda: an overview of the scenario in the Times, as well as that paper’s analysis of the accusations’ political impact: “At the worst possible moment, it undercuts Mr. Bush on the issue that he has made the unapologetic centerpiece of his administration and a linchpin of his re-election campaign: his handling of the global war on terror.”

In his regular column, Paul Krugman places this incident in the context of the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy and obfuscation. Similarly, in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen examines the administration’s habit of casting aspersion on its critics: “ The White House has opened its guns on Clarke. He is being contradicted and soon, as with poor [former Treasury Secretary Paul] O'Neill, his sanity and probity will be questioned.”

That paper also gives some background on Clarke’s character, noting that he is a registered Republican. The L.A. Times takes a more detailed look at the White House’s coordinated and notably aggressive attack against Clarke, and includes notes from an interview that Clarke gave the paper on Monday.

The enduring tension between work and life came to a head for me this morning when, almost literally on the verge of heading to the airport with my girlfriend for a long weekend away, I got an email that scrapped all of my plans. A colleague at Behavior had fallen ill, and I had little choice but to put away my suitcase and head into the office to cover the work that she wouldn’t be able to do under the influence of a 103 degree fever. I don’t mind shouldering the burden — this particular project is really my responsibility, and I’d be a poor manager to complain about having to do the work — but I felt miserable for bailing out of the weekend trip to see my girlfriend’s family. She ended up getting on the plane alone, and my stomach felt queasy; it was proof that when it comes down to it, work trumps everything, but is that any way to live a life? My partners and I started this business with the idea that we’d have more freedom — economically, creatively and personally. That’s not the case, at least not yet, and it’s killing me.

It just seems to me that a pretty clear case can be made against the credibility of the Bush administration if one just takes a clear, objective look at what they’ve said. The increasingly well-known MoveOn.org has demonstrated how powerful this approach can be with this commercial that features Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” trying somewhat lamely to discredit the notion that anyone in the Bush Administration ever used the term “immediate threat” in the run-up to the war in Iraq. For once, CBS avails itself of its responsibilities as broadcasters and as a news organization and calls Rumsfeld on his blatant untruth. The effect is very, very potent.

The shame doesn’t end there; Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has commissioned a report on all the misleading statements made by the five most prominent war supporters in the Bush Administration, from George W. on down. The results are again incredibly damning, and they are available not only in PDF form, but as a searchable online database, which lets anyone plainly see what specific statements have been made about Saddam Hussein’s danger to the United States. In the end, I just hope the public pays attention to all of this.

The reigning king of Macintosh XML news readers is NetNewsWire from Ranchero software. It really is a solid piece of software engineering, but I’ve been looking for something that will let me organize all the XML feeds I’ve been collecting in a more orderly fashion. A search on VersionTracker led me to NewsMac, which has lots of great features but has been riddled with a few nagging bugs in its latest incarnation. But the author has been really responsive with fixes and updates, and has even laid out a pretty detailed road map for the application (when’s the last time a shareware developer laid out a road map?). This level of support has, over the past few weeks, gradually won me over, and I’m pretty sure that I’m settling on NewsMac as my reader of choice now.

Since last fall, I’ve been working on developing a new Web site for Hog Bay Software, makers of the very fine Hog Bay Notebook software that I wrote glowingly about way back in August. I’m excited to say that it’s finally launched today, along with a new version of Hog Bay Notebook. It’s the fruit of a lot of late nights, weekends and some personal strides in improving my Web authoring skills.

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If you have a penchant for stilted, muscular dialogue illustrating the passionless relationships between men steeped in their work, then you’ll probably get a big kick out of David Mamet’s latest exercise in elaborate, procedural sleight of hand. It’s called “Spartan,” and what it boils down to is basically a Tom Clancy plot adapted with Mamet’s signature dialogue style and his almost goofy obsession with charade.

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For several months, I’ve been working on and off in my free time on developing a small Web site for a shareware developer, and part of that process has, recently, entailed trying to construct a reasonably attractive user forum using phpBB. This free community software is impressively powerful, but after having spent several hours today trying to make sense of its template construction, I have to say that it’s a mess. Have a look at the source code on a phpBB board and you’ll see a soup of embedded styles and nested tables that is mind-numbingly confusing to get through, to say nothing of the style sheet, which raises organizational distraction to an art.

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The most consistently funny program on television is “The Daily Show with John Stewart.” For some proof, have a look at “Hail the Armies of Rove” on this page. It’s a gut-busting bit of reportage from Stephen Colbert and serves as just one example of this cast member’s remarkable comedic genius. So I was eagerly anticipating tonight’s showing of “These Just In,” which features a series of four short films from a few of the show’s staff writers. To be honest, I was mildly disappointed, as their overall hilarity was noticeably milder than just about any episode of the show they produce at their day jobs.

Remember how I created those Aqua-style sliders and buttons a few weeks ago for that project at Behavior? After having finished designing them in Adobe Photoshop, I had come to the realization that they needed to be built using Adobe Illustrator instead, so that the buttons would scale easily and be less processor-intensive when used in Macromedia Flash.

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In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman published a damning, evidentiary indictment of the Bush administration’s wantonly optimistic — and highly inaccurate — jobs forecasting. It’s wonderfully concise, to the point, and heavily reliant on a powerful graphic that charts predictions that the White House has made for “nonfarm payroll employment” in 2002, 2003 and 2004 against the actual data provided in a joint report from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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When it comes to getting a real, living and knowledgeable person to have a look at whatever troubles I might be having with my Macintosh, I feel fortunate that our office is just four blocks away from Tekserve, hands down New York City’s most prominent Apple reseller and authorized repair center. I’ve always preferred it over the sales and support at the Apple Store (if for no other reason than they have a much more sensible and liberal attitude towards letting Mister President in the store), but when I’m at home on the weekends and I need the help of a technician, it’s far easier for me to walk over to SoHo than to Chelsea.

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I went home sick at midday on Monday with a sudden fever and spent the next twenty-four hours curled up in bed, shivering or sweating. I’m not sure what it was that got to me. There were no cold symptoms, and though my stomach felt uneasy and I lost my appetite for two days, it didn’t seem quite the same — or nearly as bad — as bouts of food poisoning I’ve had in the past. There’s no conclusive evidence to support this, but in my mind I’ve made a link between my malady and the then-delicious Prosciutto di Parma that I bought in Little Italy over the weekend. All I know is whenever I think of cured Italian ham now, my stomach turns.