A long holiday like this one would have been the perfect time to get lots of work done on redesigning Subtraction.com, but I'll be heading out of town this afternoon to spend Thanksgiving with Joy's family, then we're off to the Jersey shore through Sunday afternoon. We'll be taking advantage of the off-season quietude to relax and take Mister President onto the beach. So, the redesign goes on hold, at least for a few more days. Have a nice holiday!

Lots of very, very generous people have written to me to say that we was robbed, that our entry in the redesign contest for the noted information architecture magazine Boxes and Arrows deserved better than to take the bronze in the final judging. I really appreciate all of those comments, so thanks to everyone for your kind thoughts. Thanks too, to Boxes and Arrows for holding the contest, and congratulations to the top prize winners. I can't wait to see the finished product. By the way, if anybody out there is looking for a new design for their information architecture-focused online magazine, drop me an email. I’ve got one handy.

Between balancing my personal life, my office responsibilities, my blogging schedule and my attempts to redesign Subtraction.com, something had to give. So I’ve decided to cut out the blog posts and concentrate instead on implementing a redesign that’s been brewing for months on my hard drive. These interim posts will keep you up to date, but they’ll be narrowly focused on the redesign’s progress only. With luck, I’ll be done in a few weeks

Guess what, I think I’m going to become a Republican! Just kidding. But right now I’m in Nashville, TN for the first time ever, and in a red state for the first time since whatever it was that happened way back on 02 Nov. No time for a full-length entry right now, but a couple of observations: everybody is really freakin’ nice here and I actually get a really good vibe from the place. Also, last night we stayed in the Opryland Hotel which is like a little bit of Las Vegas served up with some Southern hospitality. It’s a hotel that aims to be a self-enclosed reality — when we checked in, they handed us a map to our room, and we followed the trail through faux roads, past tons of fauna, across a huge courtyard, and beneath a magnificently huge glass ceiling. It has a touch of absurdity to it, but it’s easy to forget (and dismiss) from the limited square-footage living of Manhattan that this is America too.

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Over at Ars Technica, there’s a terrific review of Delicious Library, the hotly-tipped new media collection management software just released last week. It’s actually a fantastic review, the kind that manages to give a larger context to its subject, and shows how Delicious Library is a testament to the dramatically different mindset of Macintosh programmers. I wish I could find the time and the skill to write that kind of review, but in fairness to myself, John Siracusa’s many other articles for Ars Technica clearly demonstrate that he has a singular and probably God-given talent for ambitious, far-reaching essays on technology. Some geeks get all the breaks.

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There’s a lot to like in “The Incredibles,” which I just got around to seeing last Thursday night, and there are a lot more people than me who have the time on their hands to cogently explain what’s so good about this latest movie from the egghead animators’ trust at Pixar. So, rather than try and hobble together a half-baked review that’s little more than the sum of a series of random comments, I’ll offer up just the random comments here.

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Last night I took about 180 snapshots with my new Nikon D70, trying to get a handle on the way the thing works. It was a blast; I was up until 2:00a tinkering, experimenting and poring through books. The books themselves have been a revelation, too. On Naz’s advice, I went looking for an older photography reference that would help me get up to speed on the basics, rather than something brand new off the shelf at a mega-sized bookseller.

He said there were some brilliant layouts to be found among the forgotten photo texts out there, and he was right. I’m enamored with one that my girlfriend took out for me from her school library: the first edition of Barbara London’s “A Short Course in Photography.” It’s a masterful example of traditional design in the modernist school, featuring a page grid executed with a gritty, low-level genius. Though I have a bias towards all things digital, there is a warmth to this book — the black ink on these pages is blotchy and malformed, and the typography and diagrams all lack the inhuman precision and passionless perfection in their edges that can be had effortlessly with today’s design and production techniques. Sometimes it’s nice to see that.

Thanks to an unnecessarily complicated income tax situation, I was only able to receive — and spend — my 2003 refund recently. Feeling a little despondent after last week’s big Democratic loss in the election, I took a WTF the attitude and splurged on a Nikon D70 digital SLR camera. It arrived today, and I just spent the last two hours figuring it out; there are a million things to learn about it, but at this point I’m totally thrilled. Following, the first decent picture I took with it.

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The past two days, I’ve been spending more time than usual in Adobe InDesign. While I’m still no fan of designing for print (or the process of it, anyway), I’m really finding that I enjoy using InDesign as a tool. Maybe it’s because I kind of grew up using QuarkXPress, but I find the mode of thinking that a layout program like InDesign uses to be very intuitive. The program’s style sheets feature is a good example; defining and using these text-styling rules is exceedingly simple and logical. It makes we wish that there was a way of manipulating Cascading Style Sheets similarly. Of course, CSS is far more powerful a medium than InDesign’s style sheets, but there must be a way to balance its raw power with InDesign’s brand of plainspoken logic.

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The USB 1.1 standard, which in theory allows ‘hot swapping’ of scanners, mousing devices, external hard drives etc. without necessitating the reboot of your Macintosh, has always been a frustrating experience for me. With three or four USB devices for each of my computers, I rely heavily on the hubs that I own — two cheap Belkins that I bought at Staples a few years ago — to get all those devices working properly so that I can get my own work done.

But every time I hot swap a device — like my digital camera — I get over-current error messages. And not all of my devices seem to dependably register each time I start up; I regularly have to unplug and re-plug my Griffin iMate-enabled ADB Kensington TurboMouse in order to get my Mac to recognize that it’s attached. The implicit promise of this standard is that working with these peripherals should be painless, but it’s far from the truth.

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By and large, it’s not my opinion that weblogs should chronicle the minutiae of an author’s everyday life, but I’m going to ignore that rule for a moment and let it be known to the entire world that I cleaned out my file cabinet yesterday. For years, I’d been moving around a set of hanging file folders stuffed with the accrued paperwork of my personal business affairs; I’d relocate these bulky files from apartment to apartment the way you might move furniture that you never use. And each time I had to open the drawer to retrieve some crucial document or file a document that seemed vaguely significant, I’d make a mental note: “Gotta clean out these damn files soon.”

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It’s fuckin’ gloomy around here. Everyone’s pissed off or depressed or angry or sulking. To get a little respite, I’m retreating to the fantasia of the comic book world with Gerard Jones’ “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.” I picked it up over the weekend while browsing the aisles at my local bookstore, stocking up on fodder for my culturally elitist reading list (my duty, as a citizen of a blue state). I’ve never really left behind the familiar comfort of comic books, in part because they almost bring me back to the less prickly reality of childhood, but these days I think I enjoy the idea of them more than anything; I’d rather read about comic books than actually read them.

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Setting aside this awful feeling for a moment: here are a few of my favorite electoral maps — from an information design perspective, not from an electoral math perspective — from this Election Day just past. It’s mildly interesting how the various news outlets and independent sources each tackled the challenge of visually assessing how the country voted. I say “mildly” because as a design problem, the electoral college is almost banal in its limitations. There are only so many ways you can show this data.

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Not many of my friends seems to want to talk about the Kerry/Edwards loss in any great detail, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only one taking it as hard as I am. To be honest, I’m devastated, and furious and overcome with melancholy, and I’m not sure what to do with myself. It fills me with dread to consider what George W. Bush will do with a second term; I get physically ill when I consider the long-term damage that might be done by forty-eight more months of his diplomatic myopia, his economic irresponsibility, his craven Attorney General, and his retrograde Supreme Court appointees. It’s going to take some true grit not to succumb to complete despair over the next few days.

In spite of all the tension coursing through me today, and in spite of all my previous bad-mouthing of John Kerry’s campaign performance in late summer, I think that I’m cautiously optimistic about his chances for winning this election today. I know there are something like thirty-three ways that the various electoral lots can add up to another bitter tie between Bush and Kerry, but I just don’t see that happening somehow. In my gut, I think there will be a relatively decisive victory, whether it’s for one side or the other. This is fueled in part by the early reports of immense voter turnout and the leaked mid-afternoon exit polls I’ve seen — crack for those of us who can’t bear the suspense. I’ll heed the cautions that early exit polls are tremendously unreliable, and I have little doubt that Bush supporters can still manage a clear late-inning victory, but right now, I’m just going to throw aside my rational self. I’ve been waiting four years to cast a ballot for a Democratic challenger and against George W. Bush; so I’m just going to enjoy the lingering sensation of that act for at least a few more hours.