This is going to be a hard post to write, so I’m going to keep it as short as I can, but forgive me if I run long. After pouring so much of my blood, sweat and tears into Behavior, I’ve decided that the time has come for me to leave this terrific company that, with a little bit of cash and a lot of ambition, my partners and I co-founded in the dark days of late fall, 2001. My last day at Behavior will come just a little more than four years after we legally opened doors — as of 31 December I’ll no longer be a member of Behavior LLC.

This decision is no cause for alarm; my departure is on completely amicable terms, and my partners at the company have been kind and gracious enough to wish me luck in my future endeavors. By the same token, I wish them great continued success too, and I’m absolutely confident that there’s lots and lots of great design work still to come from Behavior. I guarantee it.

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With any luck, this post will remain relevant for just about three weeks, when, hopefully, it will be made obsolete by a concrete announcement at Macworld Expo of OmniWeb 6.0’s imminent release. As a loyal user of that Quixotic Web browser, I’ve been waiting seemingly forever for a long-promised upgrade that will move OmniWeb away from its clever but problematic customization of Apple’s WebCore foundation and over to the more stable, more easily built-upon WebKit framework available in Mac OS X. I’m crossing my fingers that this will put an end to the memory leaks, imperfect page renderings and random crashes from which OmniWeb suffers (though to be fair, the OmniGroup does an admirable and timely job of continually hunting down and sorting out bugs) — even for all of those problems, it’s still my favorite Web browser.

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For a year-end round-up on the state of Web design that ran last week over at Publish.com, I provided, among other quotes, this little bit of crankyism: “There’s so little illustration, photography and adventurous typography going on [in Web design], that I genuinely worry that we’ll never match the heights of graphic design achieved in the last century.”

Now, I know that there are lots of terrific designers out there doing genuinely daring work today; I grant that freely. But it’s reasonable to say that the vast majority of that work can be tagged with the familiar descriptors ‘personal’ and ‘experimental.’ There’s absolutely nothing wrong with design created for those ends; I applaud and admire those who are making genuine efforts to push the medium forward with excursions into the non-commercial, because they’re doing important advance work upon which the rest of us will eventually feed.

However, with respect to what I was talking about — the commercial application of our craft — there remains, to my mind, a somewhat conspicuous gap in its practice: almost without exception, the Web is a medium in which all of us design and almost none of us art direct. I think of the former as a mode of work that’s closely wedded to execution, whether that means pushing pixels in Photoshop, bringing ideas to life in code or even ‘directing’ teams of designers in the development of a design solution.

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Without getting into whether I side with New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority or Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union in the labor strike that has put a halt to most commuting in New York City this morning, and at the risk of sounding too easily dismissive of the genuine hardship that this situation has dropped in the laps of average New Yorkers as well as the striking workers (who are, after all, average New Yorkers themselves), let me say there is a silver lining in this cloud: Manhattan, today, is less like its usual convergence of angry rivers of traffic, and more like a peaceful countryside of gentle streams of cars. It’s nice. And, to top it off, there are cones lining the major avenues running north and south along the length of the island — believe it or not, these are bike lanes, intended to let human beings get to and from without the aid of automakers or oil companies. I’ve always wanted to see cars sharing the city’s major thoroughfares with bicycle traffic.

There’s nothing revelatory in this post, and certainly nothing you won’t be seeing a lot more of at Nick Denton’s latest Web site, Consumerist, but sometimes one just has to vent: few things have consistently angered me more in life than the enterprise-level flavor of plausible deniability suffusing larger companies’ customer service operations.

I’m talking about the infuriating phenomenon of encountering a bewildering and apparently ridiculous oversight or mistake in a company’s services or offerings, and being told by a customer service representative that it’s a matter to be dealt with by another department entirely, that the person to whom you’re talking accepts no responsibility for the gap in spite of the fact that it’s all the same company, and that you need to go talk to that other department. Oftentimes, the representative won’t even do you the courtesy of transferring your call!

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Just a word to say that I’m back from my trip to Viet Nam. Technically, I’ve been back since about 11:30p on Sunday evening, when my plane touched down at the end of 22-plus hours of transit. But I’ve been dealing with the inevitable jet lag, as well, which accounts for why I’m writing this post at 6:30a (and I’ve been awake for two hours already!); in case I hadn’t mentioned it before, Viet Nam is exactly twelve hours ahead of New York, so you can imagine my body clock is completely off. Somewhere between the haze of insomnia, walking catatonia and catching up with work, I also managed to corral all my trip photos together into a Flickr photoset, and this morning I went through them all and added titles and captions, so if you’ve browsed through them already, it might be worth another look for more back story. More posts as soon as I’m all caught up on sleep…

Two years ago, broadband internet came to Viet Nam in a big way thanks to the country’s Ministry of Post and Telematics, which brought ADSL to most urban areas throughout the country. Today you’ll find dozens of small, ramshackle shops marked with signs that say “ADSL,” “Game Online,” or simply “Internet.” It’s hard to miss them because they’re everywhere.

The proliferation of this industry is fueled mostly by Vietnamese kids nursing increasingly pronounced addictions to online gaming. The most popular MMORPGs, like “Swordsman,” are ported from other culturally complementary sources (read: Chinese game publishers) by local upstarts like VinaGame. At just about US$0.19 for an hour of playing time, the result is an apparently ferocious gaming market that wasn’t in evidence just four years ago.

You can use the machines for anything you like, of course, and so it’s not uncommon to spot disproportionately tall and/or well-dressed Westerners surfing next to thin, gangly Vietnamese kids; the former playing at business, the latter at swordplay. Such sights are as close to an advertisement for technologically-enabled cross-cultural bridges as you’ll see this side of an IBM commercial.

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