My initial thought on Apple’s new iMac, which was announced today at Apple Expo in Paris, is that it’s a nice bit of engineering, but unfortunately it amounts to little more. That the product team seems to have jumped through some nontrivial technical hoops in fitting a G5-based CPU on the back of an LCD screen seems insufficiently impressive to me — I wanted something more groundbreaking. The form factor of the iMac line has, since its inception in 1998, always represented the vanguard of Apple’s consumer thinking; both the net appliance cutesiness of the original and the elegant, sunflower-like articulation of its 2002 successor were new ways of thinking about consumer computing.

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Using a fifteen dollar pack of Avery Ink Jet Transfers and some ten dollar Old Navy tees, my girlfriend and I turned out a couple of these “Mister President for President” shirts tonight. It was super-simple; we just ran the transfers through our cheap ink jet printer and then ironed the designs right to the tees, and we were done in fifteen minutes. Now we have something to wear to this Sunday’s march up to Madison Square Garden.

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Like at least a few geeks, I’ve been waiting a long time for a Verizon Wireless mobile phone that features a built-in Bluetooth chip. That’s because, first, Verizon’s coverage in the New York metropolitan area is the best by far of any of the mobile carriers — at least in my experience — and second, I’m still enamored of the promise of wireless synchronization and data exchange via Bluetooth (in spite of the imperfect performance of the Bluetooth-enabled Sony Ericsson T608 that I bought last month). And really, it’s just one phone that I’m asking for Verizon to release.

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Unfortunately, I don’t make it out to the movies on opening night as much as I used to, so by the time I get around to seeing a new movie — in the theaters or, if I’m really behind the times, on DVD — and then actually to writing about it here, the point seems lost. My movie reviews have never been the most popular posts anyway, but I do get a kick out of writing them because I still get a kick out of cinema. Anyway, all of this is by way of excusing this glaringly untimely review of “Collateral,” which I just saw last week.

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A few weeks ago I mentioned that Behavior helped Sean “P. Diddy” Combs launch Citizen Change, his voter registration initiative with an extensive, Flash-based multimedia show that accompanied his press conference. Today, I’m happy to say that we’ve just re-launched CitizenChange.com too. It just went live, like, this morning — after a ton of blood, sweat and tears from our design team (I wasn’t a part of it, but it was easy to see that those folks worked their tails off, and with terrific results). Go check it out.

The epicenter of the second annual Howl! Festival of East Village Arts is directly across the street from my apartment building on East Ninth Street, in Tompkins Square Park. Along the west and south fences on the park perimerter, the festival organizers have hung a series of makeshift canvases, which, starting yesterday, have been hand-painted and decorated by locals. It’s a democratic idea, but it yields perhaps the most clichéd artwork imaginable — a plethora of artistic bombast and political rants, few of them executed with all that much in the way of imagination.

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I’m beginning to think that I’ve given up the world of Web design for a career in business presentation graphics. For five weeks now, I’ve been making a regular Friday presentation using Keynote, Apple’s would-be PowerPoint killer. By now, I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of the ins and outs of both this program and its Microsoft-published competitor. Everyone knows how frustrating PowerPoint can be. But switching to Keynote is more like trading in a bag of a hundred problems for a bag of about fifty — it’s an improvement, but it’s not a solution.

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I’m cheating a little bit this evening, because I had written most of this post before I headed off to dinner and then to the movies to see Michael Mann’s “Collateral” (a review to follow soon) — so I’ve back-dated this a bit. Please don’t sue me. In any event, I wanted to say thanks to the very nice response that’s come over the transom to my post from Monday, “New Boxes, Same Arrows.” I really hadn’t expected it, but I was more than happy to see incoming links from the nice folks at Mezzoblue, Airbag and Waxy.org. The traffic and kind comments are very much appreciated.

Also, I wanted to correct one point on which I feel that I’ve been unduly clear or on which I’ve been unintentionally misleading: these comps aren’t mine, at least not in their entirety — they were a joint effort. I’m a hundred percent sure that there wouldn’t have been an entry at all without the help of my good friend and Behavior co-founder, Chris Fahey, who provided at least half the brainpower that went into the comps... and really, I think the brains are what makes them. It was also his idea to enter the contest in the first place... so he's really the one responsible for that fourteen-hour working stretch of my life that I’ll never get back. Thanks, Chris.

For the week or so since the final release of the Omni Group’s upstart Web browser OmniWeb 5, I’ve been trying to integrate it into my workflow, using it as a replacement for my normal full-time browser, Safari. It’s been a decent experience, and generally, I remain as impressed by the aggressively innovative feature set that Omni has rolled out as I was back when I tested the beta version.

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Internet Explorer users: you have my pity, first, for using the worst modern browser available on the market today, and my apologies, second, for insufficiently ensuring that all of my posts render properly in your browser of choice. It appears that some of the div classes I’ve been using to include illustrations, which render competently in Safari, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Opera and OmniWeb, refuse to show up in Microsoft Internet Explorer, for some reason. I guess it’s a measure of how few of the visitors to my site use IE that no one has complained to me until today. On the other hand, it might speak more loudly to the size of my audience... and not necessarily in a flattering way. Heh. At any rate, I think I’ve fixed most of those entries (they don’t look perfect, but they work) so the 95% of Web users who were staying away from Subtraction.com due to Internet Explorer incompatibilities — y’all come back now, hear?

Well-respected online information architecture magazine Boxes and Arrows announced an open redesign contest last month, the deadline for which was extended until just this morning. I found this out last Friday, when my Behavior colleague, Chris Fahey, suggested that we try to put together a submission.

Initially, I resisted the idea of taking part in this, mostly because of all the work that it was going to involve. The I.A. documents they provided were appropriately high-level for an audience of devoted, would-be contestants ready to finesse every little detail for themselves. For me, on the other hand, they were sufficiently lacking in detail that I knew it would take me a huge chunk of my weekend to sift through all the brain challenges required to get a coherent set of comprehensives designed.

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Herewith, five boxes drawn with Microsoft PowerPoint on a document Slide Master. All of the boxes are .25-in. square, according to the program’s Format AutoShape dialog box, which allows users to specify these values precisely — in theory. The boxes are also all spaced exactly a quarter of an inch apart from one another and they all reside exactly .3-in. from the top edge, again using Format AutoShape.

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We needed another laptop in a pinch today at the office today, so I walked down the block to Best Buy and picked up a brand new Toshiba Satellite A55. We’ve had several Toshiba notebooks at the office, and they’ve been sturdy, reliable machines, as far as Windows machines go. So I didn’t put a whole lot of thinking into the purchase, though it’s clear to me now that I should have.

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Always late to the party, I finally took out some time last night to install the various libraries on my server that make it possible for me to run ecto, the desktop weblog editor and management program. It’s nice, very slick and I can see why it’s gained such a devoted following among advanced weblog authors; it sports some features — like its very handy Upload Manager — that vastly simplify working with Movable Type. Already it looks well worth its US$17.95 price tag, in spite of the fact that its globe icon is so generic I sometimes find myself staring at my Dock, not able to focus enough to identify it.

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A couple of quotes from Porter Goss, President Bush’s nomination to head the CIA, made me nearly choke on the pen cap I was chewing at work this afternoon. I was in the middle of an afternoon spent wrestling with PowerPoint when I heard these remarks, taped earlier this summer at a Republican breakfast, on a profile of the nominee during All Things Considered, and they sent a chill through me.

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My girlfriend’s nephew — all of nine years old and a fount of irrepressible energy — came to stay with us for the weekend, and his new obsession is learning the magician’s trade: dice, disappearing cups of water, card tricks, magic wands, etc. He had a kids’ magic set that his grandmother bought for him, all plastic and barely serviceable enough even for a nine year-old, so on Saturday we thought we’d try to do a little better than that. We looked up “magic” in the phone book and headed to midtown to Tannen’s Magic, one of the oldest magicians’ shops in the city, and newly relocated to 45 West 34th Street.

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Because it’s exceedingly easy to do so, because I like to tweak and tinker, and because I am procrastinating from various other design-related tasks today, I spent a bit of time this afternoon creating my own style sheet for Freshly Squeezed Software’s mixed-bag RSS aggregator (and the one that’s become my regular RSS client), Pulp Fiction. It’s called “Subtraction” and, as the name implies, it’s designed to look something like Subtraction.com. You can download it here for the cost of absolutely zero, but it’s also presented absolutely as is, with no warranties of any kind.

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It appears virtually certain that the Montreal Expos, who have been waiting to find out where their new home will be for a brief eternity, will end up somewhere in rough proximity to Washington, D.C., at least according to recent reports. That they were headed to that part of the country was not news to me, but I was surprised to hear that it’s going to come down to competing proposals, one from the city proper — hoping to replace their long lost Washington Senators — and one from the more affluent suburbs further west and south, in Loudoun County.

I resist posting entries here about baseball, mostly because I feel under-qualified when trying to make the same kind of snotty, dismissive pronouncements about the sport that I am able to make about other subjects about which I know slightly more. But I don’t mind coming right out and saying that I’d rather not see baseball come to the Washington Metropolitan area at all than see the Expos move to Loudoun County.

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Here and there, I’ve been fixing little details in the Movable Type configuration for Subtraction.com, trying to remedy some of the many, many imperfections and shortcomings on which I’ve procrastinating for so long. The comments feature is now much more reliable than before, when I had coded the form fields in a manner that might suggest a drunken night in front of BBEdit. And this evening I made some alterations to the long-neglected XML feed so that you can read the full entirety of every entry. I’ve been getting back into trying to make Pulp Fiction work for me — I’ll have some notes on that soon — and one of the things I’ve discovered is that I much prefer it when a news source provides the full text of an article, rather than just a snippet. Anyhow, more later… hopefully much more, as this low rustle of activity is a warm-up to a redesign. Soon. I hope.

As a kid, when I would to take out the trash as part of my chores, I remember operating on the assumption that garbage collection was free, that it was a part of city services or something and that no one really payed for it directly, but rather it came out of local taxes or some big garbage collection fund in the sky or something. It seemed so basic and essential that I was surprised, later on, to discover that it most decidedly is not free, that lots of neighborhoods and communities bill you for it directly, and in lots of co-operatives and condominiums, it’s a discrete line item on a resident’s monthly maintenance bill. This is the story that came to mind yesterday when I got an email from my hosting provider, Media Temple, announcing their new MailProtect Anti-Junk Email Service.

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Two minor flirtations with fame today, one for me and one for my four-legged companion.

First, the prolific Mike Rundle has posted an interview with me at Business Logs, in which you can learn more about my secret origins, recent Web standards stirrings at Behavior and the future of weblogs as we know them (caveat emptor). Combined with a dollar bill, the answers I give to Mike’s questions may not get you more than a cup of coffee, but it’s still worth poking around the Business Logs Web site, where they’re trying to use weblogs to bring real business benefits to the organizations that are forward-thinking enough to capitalize on this still-evolving medium.

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This is how frazzled I am of late: in recounting recently completed projects we’ve launched at Behavior, I completely forgot to mention a project in which I invested a lot of blood, sweat and tears myself: Vote: The Machinery of Democracy is a new online companion to the recently opened physical exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Behring Center.

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The Virgin College Megatour must have rolled into town this weekend or something, because when I climbed into a cab last night with some freinds on our way to a comedy show, we found an unopened compact disc sampler that someone had inadvertently (or not) left on the seat. The disc was labeled “Feel the Intensity,” and it’s one of the most absurd pieces of marketing that I’ve ever come across.

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