I spent a good chunk of time this weekend writing an article for Andy Arikawa’s Design in Flight magazine, an upstart PDF publication covering the wide world of design. I’m a big proponent of scrappy digital publishing endeavors like DiF, so it was a real privilege to have been asked to contribute. After considering a few overly ambitious article ideas, I settled on a simpler approach for my first contrubution. My article is a more thoughtful, better-researched take on a post I wrote last month about improving your interviewing technique, and it will be published in the magazine’s April 2005 issue. Eventually, I’ll make a copy of the article available online here at Subtraction.com, but for those of you who can’t wait, four-issue subscriptions are available for only US$10.

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While cleaning out some files on my hard drive this evening, I came across a discarded navigation bar for the version 7.0 redesign of this site that I had nearly forgotten about altogether. It was one of the first gee-whiz improvements that I pulled off in prototyping the redesign — I should say “nearly pulled off,” actually. Ultimately, I tossed it out entirely from my plans for the site, considering it too cumbersome to update (it requires no fewer than six separate images to be manually generated each time the cover image is changed) and woefully inadequate in terms of manipulating CSS to conform to my intentions.

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I went to art school at what’s now known as Otis College of Art & Design, a small institution with a head count, among all four undergraduate levels, totaling only around 800 people. It was probably a bit smaller than would have been ideal for a young kid trying to get through the madness that was Los Angeles in the early nineteen-nineties. I saw earthquakes, droughts, gang warfare and civil riots during my four years there, and by the time I left I was so embittered by the awfulness of that city and the intensity of my experience at that school that I tried to leave it all behind me and to think about my collegiate past as little as possible.

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The New Yorker’s 14 Feb double-issue features a profile of David Milch, co-creator of “NYPD Blue” and the man responsible for the riveting, foul-mouthed and thoroughly excellent HBO series “Deadwood,” an intensely brutal Western set in a real South Dakota boom town in the late 19th century. As is the New Yorker’s wont, the article is unavailable online — or if it was at one time, I was, as always, too late in catching up on my issues to be inspired to go seek out the online version.

If you can find a copy in your therapist’s waiting room, you could do worse than read this article on Milch; I’m not much of a fan of the magazine’s pieces on entertainment personalities because they seem lightweight and shallow compared to some of the genuinely interesting stuff the magazine continues to turn out even in its old age, but this one happens to be about an interesting fellow. Or, at least, Milch has some interesting things to say about how he writes.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park installation “The Gates” is terrific. I saw the work this morning in clear February sunlight, and understood instantly why they chose to erect this spectacle in bright orange (or saffron, if you must): the long, winding sequence of gates makes for a brilliant, fire-like trail snaking through the leafless trees and gray paths of Frederick Law Olmstead’s naturalist vision in mid-winter. It’s not the kind of art that makes you reconsider much of anything, superficially, except perhaps for how feasible it is after all to have a crowd of thousands converge in the cold to enjoy something that does not involve alcohol, advertising, big media or a sports championship. Which is to say in terms of challenges of attendance, at least, it’s a triumph.

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Because I’ve invested so many hours into watching the preceding seasons of “The West Wing,” I’ve more or less felt compelled to watch its wandering, sometimes agonizingly listless course since the departure of creator Aaron Sorkin in 2003. Under the now exclusive guidance of Sorkin’s producing partner John Wells, the show has lost a lot of its crisp nature and has appeared, many times, to be wheezing along, looking for some new purpose, and in doing so, almost wantonly inflicting severe physical distress on its characters — torturous kidnappings, deadly explosions, heart attacks and advanced stages of multiple sclerosis, for example, have all been visited on familiar characters in the past two seasons — in the hopes of revealing some re-invigorating, ratings-friendly momentum.

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Okay, I’m kind of fixated on iPods right now, so bear with me. Since getting my new iPod photo, I’ve been in turns pleased with the way the user interface has been rounded out with new features — rating songs right in the iPod, for example, is terrific and something I didn’t have in my old iPod — and also I’ve been a little frustrated that a few fundamental changes haven’t been put in place.

A friend of mine wishes that, when in shuffle mode, the U.I. would allow him to take the currently playing song and shift out of shuffle mode and into that song’s native album. That sounds handy and I’d be happy to see it, but not before I’d want to see the addition of something much more fundamental: the alphabet.

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If you live in a town where most traveling to and from places is done by auto, you might not experience this phenomenon, but I see it every day: when I walk down the street I pass person after person plugged into a pair of white iPod headphones. In New York, this is almost a given feature of pedestrian life, a subtle way in which Apple has left a mark on the character of the city. The other day I started wondering how many iPods I actually see during, say, my walk from home to work in the morning, was it just a few that seemed like many, or was there really an iPod consumer on just about every block?

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Everybody seems to know what a singing telegram is, but few people have ever received one; heck, the one that I sent to my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day today was the first one I’ve even been involved in. It’s dead simple to book if you have a credit card and a sense of mischief, and the performer showed up promptly at her office around 10:30a this morning and serenaded her in full public view of her entire office — and to her great personal embarrassment — with chocolates and a rendition of “Hello Dolly.” Why they chose that song, I have no idea; it completely escaped me that I could specify a song when I was giving the details to the booker so I guess he just chose a favorite. One thing I did specify, though, was the pink gorilla suit. I spotted it on the Web site and I thought to myself, “What says ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ better than a singing telegram delivered in a pink gorilla suit?” I’ll tell you what: nothing.

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Rather than my customary modus operandi of burying myself in work and letting opportunities to meet living and breathing people out in the real world pass me by, I’ve decided to head on over to Austin, TX for this year’s South by Southwest Festival. I just booked my tickets yesterday, and I’ll be there basically from late on Fri 11 Mar through that Sun 13 Mar. As I mentioned last week, Behavior was fortunate enough to have two of our entries tapped as finalists in this competition, so there is at least some incentive for me to show up, though in all honesty that’s just an excuse to go see all the hot shot speakers slated to appear. Also, I’m hoping to meet at least a few people with whom I’ve been corresponding over email or through blog comments — this means you! If you’re going to SXSW yourself, please drop me a line so that I may humbly put a name to a face. I can’t wait!

Here’s some quick, back-of-the-envelope math to tally my recent Apple-related purchases: US$99 to renew my .Mac subscription for another year, US$79 for the iWork suite to get my hands on Keynote 2, US$79 for iLife ’05, US$19 for an extra iPod cable and US$29 for a Contour brand iPod case — both to complement the king of my recent Apple acquisitions, a brand new 40GB iPod photo. That last one goes for US$499 retail, which brings the total value of my spending to US$804, before tax.

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There’s a bit of throwback enthusiasm going on right now among the otherwise digitally inclined for the mystique of Moleskine. These decidedly analog, leather-bound notebooks and sketchbooks are a counterpoint to the foundering PDA market: they are idea keepers and organizers that can capture fluid, organic meanderings of the brain in a way that neither the Palm OS nor the Pocket PC can hope to approximate. What’s more, rather than losing their value and technological currency with age, they are built to grow more precious with repeated use, as their owners invest ever more care and time into filling their pages.

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My copy of Apple’s iWork productivity suite arrived the week before last, just in time for me to get it installed and running before leaving for Nashville. I’ve done little more than install, open, and briefly monkey around with one of the templates in the suite’s Pages word processing and layout application, so the jury’s still out on it. But for the past ten days or so, I’ve been putting its other component, Keynote 2, through its paces.

In anticipation of a big meeting last Thursday, I used that program to prepare a major presentation, replete with about 20MB of screen shots and perhaps two dozen informational graphics constructed in Adobe Illustrator. Understanding that no software upgrade will ever embody that elusive ideal of perfectly balanced features, elegance, performance and ease of use, I have to say that I’m pleased with the upgrade, but also impatient to see the next revision.

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Finalists in the South by Southwest Festival’s 2005 Web Awards were announced earlier this week. I’m really proud to report that two of the projects that Behavior launched in 2004 made the cut as finalists. Happily, both finalists happen to relate to our intense interest in last year’s presidential campaign: the site we launched for P. Diddy’s Citizen Change was nominated to the Green/Non-Proft Business category. And in the Educational Resource category, I’m really pleased and humbled to say that Vote: the Machinery of Democracy was also tapped. I’ve lost a little bit of my taste for Flash as a delivery method for substantive information, but I still like this project because we had access to some truly illuminating content taken right from the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s rich archives. Read more about it in my announcement post.

Time is a weird phenomenon when you’re holed up in a week-long series of business meetings, as I was this past week in Nashville. On Tuesday evening, it felt as I’d been there for a whole two weeks rather than just two days. Nearly every minute of every day was scheduled; if we weren’t meeting, we were preparing for the next meeting, and by Friday morning it felt like it had been a whole month we’d been there. But now I’m back in New York, and I can’t believe it was almost an entire week ago that I was leaving for the airport; I remember the sandwich I was eating just before walking out the door last Sunday like it was just two hours ago. Very odd.

Though I’m freakin’ exhausted, I have to say though that it was probably one of the most productive kick-offs in which I’ve ever taken part. We met with some forty-odd stakeholders and cranked through a huge requirements and information gathering agenda, led principally by our information architect. We do projects of all kinds of sizes at Behavior, but even the big ones aren’t always as intensive and well-structured as this, so it has me in a pretty positive state of mind about getting started on the design. It makes such a big difference to have properly conducted the necessary research at the beginning of a project. Now comes the hard part. Actually, now I take it easy for a day and a half first.