So I’m sitting there in New York Superior Court this morning, patiently waiting to serve out my jury duty — yeah, I got a summons for jury duty — and I keep thinking back to the last time I was called up for it. That was about ten years ago, when I lived in Washington, D.C., and I’ve never forgotten how I basically punted on my civic responsibility at the time — giving answers to the judge and lawyers that, while not untruthful, probably ensured my dismissal. To this day, I remain pretty ashamed of my behavior then — I can᾿t even remember the rationale behind my need to skip out on jury duty at the time, but it was certainly an insufficient justification.

Now’s my chance to make it right. I found myself feeling not a little bored and uncomfortable on the cold benches of the court room, also actively hoping I’d get chosen this time. The process of selecting jurors from the pool to question is random, but each time they pulled a name out of the hat, I was basically praying it would be mine. Much to my chagrin, it didn’t happen. That᾿s not to say I’m looking to get assigned to an epic, Jacko-style case, but I wouldn’t mind a week or two of court room action. Getting a trial of any greater length than three days, under recently revised state laws, would also have the added benefit of exempting me from further jury service for six years; that’s what you call a great deal. But more than that, I think I just feel compelled to perform this civic duty now. I’m not the irresponsible kid I was at twenty-three, when I was ostensibly civic-minded but more greatly preoccupied with my personal calendar. Basically, I’m an adult now.

Notwithstanding the fact that I’ve been publicly dismissive of both PDAs and data services over wireless phones, I somehow successfully convinced myself that I need a Treo 650 and ordered one last week from Verizon Wireless. I’ve had it only a handful of days and haven’t yet tapped its full potential, but already I’m pretty happy with it. At the very least, it’s an improvement in speed and responsiveness over my Sony Ericsson T608 which was pretty much a piece of crap. Also, the change in carriers has finally, after some five years or so, brought me back to Verizon — I have no particular affection for the company as a whole, but their customer service is leagues above that of Sprint PCS, and they also really do have the cleanest voice signal of all the wireless carriers operating in the New York area.

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I don’t get to do it very often, but this weekend I sat down and took care of some maintenance on Subtraction.com. The first order of business was to get the majority of the pages on the site to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict — finally. This modest goal had been made inadvertently difficult by my frequent inclusion of links to New York Times articles. In order to provide stable links to articles that might otherwise be removed from the Times’ public archives over time, I process nearly all of them with Aaron Swartz’s invaluable New York Times Link Generator.

Unfortunately that free service produces validator-hostile URLs; if before today you had run a typical page from the Elsewhere section through the W3C Validator, you’d get about a jillion errors back. So I installed Nat Irons’ excellent Amputator plug-in for Movable Type, which allows me to automatically reformat those NYT links so that they will fly through the validator, and with only a bare minimum of edits to the Movable Type publishing templates. Fantastic.

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At the very beginning of a design project, before any boxes have been drawn or pixels have been pushed, there’s the nerve-wracking ritual known as ‘the kick-off.” For larger engagements, clients may set aside as many as four or five full days to sit down with a design team and impart as much knowledge as possible, and it’s up to the design team to make that time worthwhile. To me, this has always been one of the most difficult — and least documented — parts of the design process, because it demands a confluence of skills that you can’t pick up in front of a computer screen. To run a successful kick-off, you have to ask probing questions and carefully parse the answers that come back, taking into account corporate culture and stakeholder agendas. You have to be an assiduous gatherer of information while also a gentle tutor in best practices. And on top of it all, you have to be able to guide conversations and keep things lively, while transitioning issues logically and productively. I’ve done it about two dozen times in my career, and every time I sit down to plan one, it’s almost like starting over from scratch. Really, what makes kick-offs truly difficult is that each and every one is different.

To some extent, you’re forever doomed to listen to whatever music you favored in your formative years. For me, from college up to my late twenties, I spent a lot of time listening to music from the United Kingdom — the dance-rock graftings of Madchester, the so-called “shoegazing” brand of droning indie experimentation, and then the more distinctive, less obscure — and less characteristically independent — brand of traditionalism known as “Britpop.” These days, I can sport all the Arcade Fires and Ying Yang Twins I can muster, but at heart I’m most inclined towards the catchy, knowing and facile hooks of pale British youths from the early to mid-1990s.

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If ever there was a perfect summer book for me, it’s Jonathan Mahler’s “Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx Is Burning,” which I finished last week. It’s a completely absorbing tale of New York in 1977, when the city was besieged by fiscal crisis, arson, serial murders, blackouts and divisive politics, a time when New York seemed literally on the brink of a final, catastrophic end. Through meticulous research and a masterful feat of narrative contrivance, Mahler posits that year’s Yankees ballclub — itself stricken with internal strife between the erratic paranoia of manager Billy Martin and the outsized ego of new addition Reggie Jackson — as a metaphor for the city’s troubles, and uses the team’s progression over the course of the year to tell profound, fascinating stories about baseball and an iteration of New York that, in its very character, is almost unrecognizable from its twenty-first century self. New York, politics and baseball — what’s not to like?

We need an upstart challenger to bring simplified, elegant interaction design to the consumer financial software market and, in no uncertain terms, to completely upset the dominance of Intuit. That company’s industry-leading software is powerful, useful and ubiquitous, but it’s also clunky, overly-accreted and no fun to use. I have a contemptuous relationship with their business accounting package, QuickBooks, whose menu item for closing an accounting file is labeled — I’m not making this up — “Close Company,” and I have only moderately more affection for its personal accounting package Quicken.

So I’m happy to see the talented folks over at Firewheel Design produce a product like Blinksale, a soon-to-be-released, Web-based invoicing tool for small to medium size businesses. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at its extremely well-designed interface, and picked up its basic principles in literally just a few minutes — five minutes from log-in to sending out my first test invoice. All told, it’s a beautiful piece of work.

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As a delayed response to some boosterism over at Jon Hicks’ weblog, I was inspired to download and install the Camino Web browser today. It’s slow and somewhat awkward and it lacks the polish of Apple’s own Safari, to say nothing of the outstanding feature set of the Omni Group’s superb but flawed OmniWeb. Still, the browser remains in development with regular builds of its code, working up to its official 1.0 release, and it would be unfair to characterize it as anything less than a terrific piece of work.

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