So I put a little bit of money where my mouth is today and donated US$100 to John Kerry for President. I’ve been thinking about the gap in time since my last donations to a campaign, way back in the heat of the Democratic primaries, and how the relatively long dry spell might actually be an indication that perhaps I’m just as lukewarm about Kerry as half the American populace seems to be. This, in spite of my professed staunch advocacy of his campaign over that of George W. Bush.

I guess I lost a little bit of enthusiasm for the Democratic bid for the White House after Howard Dean dropped out (though in retrospect I consider my flirtation with the Dean movement to be more daydream than pragmatism), but only a little. In every way, I still believe strongly that Kerry is far, far better qualified to be president than George W. Bush. I’m pretty sure that it won’t be the last hundred dollars I’ll be sending John Kerry’s way.

I’m just back from a day trip to Philadelphia, the first time I’ve actually ever been to the city proper, though I’ve passed through it countless times on my way back and forth between New York and Washington, DC. I went for a business meeting, but afterwards I took a little time out and met up with an old friend from junior high school. We had a quick drink, shot some pool, and I had my first, authentic Philly cheesesteak. Though I took the late unreserved train back to Manhattan, on the way there this morning, I took the Acela for the first time. It was a pleasant experience, though I’m not sure I’d ever pay for it out of my own pocket, given that it actually felt more cramped than the less tony trains that Amtrak runs along the eastern seaboard. Anyway, the real highlight of traveling today was spending some time in the gorgeous confines of the restored 30th Street Station, an enduring testament to a time when cities, people and architects used to imagine public spaces as truly grand specimens of human achievement. I wish I hadn’t forgotten my camera at home.

There’s no denying that Microsoft Word is the de facto standard for word processing documents, but every once in a while I will entertain a daydream for a more streamlined, less buggy alternative. Had it not been for the terrible name, I might have turned earlier to Mellel, which is a smooth, elegant and powerful multilingual word processing contender from RedleX. It was written for Mac OS X from the ground up, which makes it seem a thousand times more fluid than Word, in spite of its admittedly butt-ugly, brushed metal interface.

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I’ve always thought it was an act of hubris for Macintosh fans to brag too loudly about the allegedly more secure construction of Mac OS X, but I secretly enjoyed it, too. Compared to the onslaught of malicious forces consistently threatening the Windows platform, managing a Mac OS X system is like living in a gated community. I rarely have to worry about viruses, worms or exploits, and that has been a huge part in making the user experience so much consistently better than Windows.

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I’ll admit a fondness for “Star Trek,” having enjoyed the original show in reruns as a generally geeky youth and its many successors as an only moderately less geeky adult. But after having caught five minutes of an episode this season wherein the crew of the latest show, “Star Trek: Enterprise” were shooting it out with aliens on a world that resembled America’s old West (crazy!), even I will admit that the whole franchise is just begging for a bit of television euthanasia.

For about five minutes at the launch of the series, “Enterprise” seemed to promise a new, fresher take on the tried and true Trek formula, in which a cadre of futuristic office co-workers spreads free market principles around the galaxy. But it too has succumbed to retreading the same old territory as its predecessors, and just a glimpse of the show reveals it to be hackneyed to distraction. Now word comes that, apparently, UPN has acquiesced to fan pressure and renewed “Enterprise” for another season. Please, someone make it stop.

While everyone was getting all riled up over the pricing terms for Movable Type 3.0 late last week, I was eagerly keeping an eye on Freshly Squeezed Software’s Web site for the release of their entry into the Macintosh news aggregator market, the unfortunately titled PulpFiction.

After a fair amount of hype — or routine buildup, depending on how you look at it — the small software outfit made PulpFiction available for download on Saturday afternoon. I was out most of the day, but as soon as I got home, I dutifully installed a copy on my PowerBook.

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Since I’ve disparaged a New York bodega in the past, it’s only fair that I should mention a little bit of understated kindness that I saw this morning at New Andy’s Deli at 873 Broadway, where I stopped to buy an egg sandwich.

Ahead of me in line was a little kid, must’ve been about ten years old, wearing an oversized backpack that one could say was adorably out of proportion to his pre-adolescent height. This was a city kid, to be sure, on his way to school and unintimidated by the adult world. He asked the woman behind the counter how much it would cost to get an egg and sausage sandwich on a roll, and when she answered “Two-fifty,” he looked away and took a step towards the door with a quiet kind of resignation — it wasn’t dejection or even a ploy for pity, just a wordless acquiescence.

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Often, it takes me a while to warm up to software features that more savvy users begin taking advantage of as soon as a publisher unleashes them. Case in point: I’ve been running Mac OS X for over two years and Panther practically since the first weekend it was launched, but it’s only been in the past few weeks that I’ve been using the operating system’s improved Full Keyboard Access feature.

This addition to Mac OS X 10.3.x allows users to control just about anything you can click on with a mouse by using only the keyboard. It’s something that Windows has had for a long, long time, and in spite of my frequent dismissive remarks about that OS, this is one area where Microsoft has a long usability lead; Apple is a latecomer and it shows.

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One of the most frustrating tricks that conservative politicians manage to actually get away with is the inversion of indignation, i.e., taking an offensive position on issues where clearly, all good sense would indicate that they should be defensive. In the awful bellyflop that was President Bush’s most recent press conference, I remember Bush answering a question about the paltry international support that the United States could point to in our ongoing operations in Iraq, and how when one took a close look at the numbers, it becomes apparent that, after U.S. and British troops, the single largest demographic of allied troops on the ground is “ private contractors — literally, hired guns.”

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Greg Storey posted an interesting and thoughtful exercise on information design last month over at Airbag.ca, in which he suggests that a better sense of design might have benefitted the Bush administration in August of 2001, when they apparently underestimated — or wantonly disregarded — a series of warnings that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had intentions to attack the United States.

His post is altogether earnest and well-intentioned, and I applaud him for it. The point he’s making is a good one that designers have been trying to get the world at large to understand — and with increasing seriousness — over the past few years: good design can have monumental impact on the effectiveness of information. Still, I can’t help but be a smartass about it.

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Over the weekend, I picked up a copy of the 01 May 2004 issue of the New Musical Express, a long-running, weekly British music tabloid that I once read at least twice a month but that I now rarely ever glance at. Though the roster of bands that the NME covers has changed over the past decade, the tenor of the journalism is remarkably the same: patently snarky, often hilarious, willfully dismissive and still composed primarily of hot air.

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Wow, what a bust the last week turned out to be, at least for blogging. I took the Amtrak train to Washington, D.C. very early on Monday morning for a meeting with a new client. Even the unreserved coach cars now feature electrical outlets, so I was able to plug in and get some work done on the way down and the way back — compared to flying, the simplicity and convenience of traveling by Amtrak is almost a luxury. Our client visit went well, and I managed to find some time to meet up with some old friends, so in spite of actually dreading the long day, I had a pretty good time.

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