I’m spending the week in Nashville, TN, kicking off a project with a brand new client. This happens to mean we’re back at the Opryland Hotel, which is still pretty crazy and great. A colleague likened it to “Bio-Dome” because the hotel is an environment of its own, a self-contained ecosystem of artificial waterfalls and fauna, miniature roadways, restaurants, cafés and even an adjunct convention and business center. And it’s true, since arriving here by airport shuttle on Friday night, we haven’t breathed more than 60 seconds of truly exposed Tennessee air. We’ve eaten, bathed and worked within the confines of this little universe almost exclusively. It’s weird, but oddly reassuring. Except for the fact that I have limited Internet access — there’s a nice high-speed line in my hotel room but it restricts access to unapproved SMTP servers, so sending email is pretty difficult. It’s certainly a case of more work than play, too, which means postings here will be limited this week. Y’all c’mon back now, ya hear?

It always seems like we could use another designer at Behavior and so we’re continually interviewing candidates, whether for immediate hire or down-the-road gigs. My partners do it more than I do, but it’s not unusual for me to sit in on a few from time to time. I’ve never been a big fan of interviews, though I admit the formal, almost adversarial constraints are a necessary evil of finding qualified designers to join our team.

Anyway, I’ve compiled a short, non-definitive list of things that have made interviews go well — for me. These are things that can improve the emotional temperature of an interview, i.e. they help a candidate ensure I’ll walk away with a positive impression of his or her wherwithal, presence of mind, and ability to interview, at least. These tips won’t necessarily improve someone’s chances for hire if the work is no good — and we’ve met candidates who have flouted one or more of these tips and still interviewed successfully — but every little bit helps.

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In a roundabout, flirty kind of way, what I was asking in yesterday’s post was, “What is a weblog?” The question itself is so open-ended and suggests no definitive answers that even those who pose it seem to do so a bit wearily, which explains why I didn’t come out and state it that way. It deserves to be asked though, and I think a reasonable if still evasive way of answering it might be, “What is a book?” The most literal answer might be: it’s a technological vehicle for the delivery of ideas. But the form itself suggests few inherent purposes, uses or opportunities beyond the very basic one of communication, so why should a blog? Both a book and a blog can take just about any form that can be contained within their own rudimentary technical limits.

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Last Friday my girlfriend and I drove to Northern Virginia to see family, leaving just before the “Blizzard of 2005” hit and returning just after the snow finished falling. Before I left, I didn’t get a chance to update my weblog with one of those “Gone fishin’” posts to let readers know I was going to be away from my keyboard for a few days. I’ve never liked those kinds of posts, especially the times I’ve gone back over them while performing housekeeping tasks on my archives — they seem irrelevant and superfluous beyond the immediate present. I’m a bit precious, I suppose, about the idea of making my archives readable, free of that kind of cruft.

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I was in a lousy mood at the office today, grumpy and dissatisfied and feeling undirected and just plain lousy, and I didn’t know quite why. And then, I remembered why.

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It’s not often that I read fiction anymore, unfortunately. I blame this on a schedule that imposes unhealthy restrictions on leisure reading in general and also the ‘always on’ nature of my home internet connection, which beckons me to read more and more blogs when I should be spending the evening on the couch with a good book. From time to time I’ll make a concerted effort to read something in ink and paper format, but more often than not, I’m drawn to non-fiction.

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Having been, for nearly a week now, on the cusp of buying myself an iPod shuffle, I was reminded by my girlfriend that the principal mode of listening to music through this new device is antithetical to my own listening nature. That is, by habit, I still listen to songs in the mode of albums, and that I rarely will put iTunes in shuffle mode across my entire music library. When she said this, my reaction was first, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” But then I thought about it for a moment, and I realized that she’s right. When I’m sitting here at my desk in our apartment, I’ll launch iTunes and play whatever albums I’ve recently acquired over and over — and over and over.

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For news aggregator jockeys out there: I’ve just spent the afternoon overhauling the main Subtraction.com feeds (and brushing up on my meagre XML skills). You’ll notice, on the home page, a new little table in the right-hand column which lists links to the XML feeds, available in the standard RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors. They even describe what you can expect in terms of feed content, so there are no surprises. (If you’re looking for a different kind of feed, perhaps one with comments appended, just let me know, and I’ll pass the request on up to the Feed Development and Publishing Department.)

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Someone, somewhere may have come up with this before me — if they did, I never saw it, I swear — but I’m nevertheless proud of this little trick that I developed for version 7.0 of this site. It applies unique styles to individual articles from within Movable Type in a more or less automated way. This post is an example of the trick in action: a little bit of PHP, a little bit of Movable Type hackery and a little bit of CSS all conspire to apply a completely arbitrary variant on the standard, black and white Subtraction.com article. Translation: this page looks different from the others.

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Everything that Steve Jobs announced in today’s Macworld Expo keynote address can be thought of as a kind of second helping. There’s a sequel, like the iLife ’05 suite of digital lifestyle products. There’s a second taste of Apple’s teasing foray into a full-productivity suite, in which the new version of Keynote is bundled with a brand new word processing program under the name iWork. There’s a new, lower-priced version of Apple’s winning digital music player called the iPod shuffle, which almost seems as if it’s being sold as an accessory to its larger siblings. And there’s the Mac mini, which is being pitched as either a replacement for a Windows PC or a companion to an existing Macintosh. In an unexpected way, you could even say that it’s a kind of sequel, too.

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Some people just think that my efforts to warn Internet Explorer users that the fidelity of this site is compromised when viewed in that Web browser is just a showy way of picking a fight. Maybe a little. But I’m being genuine when I say that the way Subtraction.com renders in I.E. is maddeningly imperfect, and I just haven’t the time or patience really to try and troubleshoot the problems. What I do have time for is a nitpicking catalog of those imperfections.

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At work we had a debate late in the day today about whether the links to projects in our portfolio should, when clicked upon, open up in a new browser window. My feeling is that, no, they should not, citing various usability recommendations against the practice (more here and here), and also the fact that the way the Web is evolving, popping up new windows is a practice most often used in hard-sell situations (insert links to any given hard core pornography site here).

Personally, it annoys the heck out of me when a Web site opens up a new window, as I think it’s bad manners and has the feel of amateurishness. But I admit that viewpoint could be just a combination of a skewed, blog-centric view of the Web (few if any weblogs open links in any new windows, by my count) and my own personal capacity for stubbornness.

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The 2005 edition of Macworld San Francisco is next week, and the Mac-focused Web sites are all worked up, as is their wont, over various, rumored announcements that may or may not come during the keynote address. There’s talk of a “headless Mac” in the US$500 price range, and also murmurs (and circumstantial evidence) of a productivity suite called “iWork.” These completely unqualified murmurings have me a little worked up too.

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Since about 1998, I’ve been using the prepaid calling services at Big Zoo which, for my money, was one of the best long distance deals to be had anywhere: 3.9¢ per minute to phone anyone in the continental United States, and extremely cheap rates for international connections. Given those prices, I would spend as little as US$5 a month (paid through their Web site at my discretion and in increments of US$10) on calls to friends and family scattered around the country.

Big Zoo did require the inconvenience of dialing an 800 number and then entering a PIN to access my account, but I didn’t mind it, especially given that, over the past several years, the service was remarkably reliable. But then the company announced in December that they’d be shuttering their doors at the end of this month due to excessive competitive pressures with which they couldn’t keep pace. Bummer.

The idea of returning to plain old long distance rates as sold by AT & T now seemed ridiculous to me, so I decided to look into Vonage, a leader in the much ballyhooed voice-over-IP market. Through their Web site, I signed up and ordered a home connection kit, which was delivered to me in less than a week. I received it just after Christmas, and tried to hook it up this past Thursday night.

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Lots of people have been singing the praises of the Matias Tactile Pro Keyboard, which bills itself as the resurrection of “the best keyboard Apple ever made.” According to Matias, the Tactile Pro is built from the same “premium keyswitch technology” behind the original Apple Extended Keyboard, which many longtime Macintosh users tend to remember with great affection. That one had a satisfying ‘clickety-clack’ quality that suggested solid construction and a definitive level of responsiveness to typing fingers. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say it had a very macho quality in comparison to today’s more cheaply made keyboards, which are often referred to as ‘mushy.’

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Eagle-eyed readers may notice that I used to boast of having started posting here way back in December 2000, but with this redesign, the Quick Access area in the right-hand column now says July 2000. The reason is an early, abortive attempt at an online journal — a kind of proto-blog — that I tried to keep that summer, without the aid of any kind of blogging software. It started when I was under the illusion that the great heights of the Internet bubble were sustainable enough to set me up in style at my then-employer’s new offices in Singapore. Ha. That turned out to be not quite the case.

As I prepared to leave the States, it occurred to me that an online journal would be a good way to keep friends and family abreast of my progress in the East. This was before I was smart enough to use Movable Type or any kind of software that might have made my life easier. I wrote and produced this journal over the course of the next six months using only BBEdit and a painfully time-consuming willingness to code the pages by hand. The entries were fairly long and heavily edited, and each one took way more time than I spend on a typical post today.

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This is it, the site is launched. As soon as I’m done posting this, I’ll send out an email announcement and update the feeds so the new posts will start showing up in news readers. Not everything works perfectly yet, but it’s mostly here. If you’ve been patiently waiting for this day, I thank you for coming back.

Things have changed around here fairly dramatically, but I’ve tried to keep some sense of the old design. For comparison, here’s a post from last year with the Six.5 design, and here it is again with the version 7.0 design. Different but the same, right?

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Users viewing Subtraction.com with Internet Explorer will now see a notice just above the navigation that says, effectively, that that browser won’t “display this site quite as it was intended.” This is obnoxious, I know, but when I made a game plan to produce this redesign, I deliberately chose not to take too seriously the way it would look in Microsoft’s still-dominant Web browser.

This is partly because it’s loads easier to design for modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and OmniWeb, and with so little time with which to make the redesign a reality, I decided to save myself an additional 20% heartache and pretty much ignore IE.

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