For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the luxury of unfettered access to my mail server for Subtraction.com from wherever I’ve happened to work. This has allowed me to maintain a clean separation between personal and business correspondences, as I’ve always been able to receive POP3 message traffic right into a separate mail database at my office (usually in a different email client from the employer’s official, sanctioned email client), without having to rely on my workplace email address to keep in touch with people.

That’s no longer the case. For security reasons, POP3 traffic is restricted to me during the workday now, so now I have to rely on Web-based email clients, a genre of net software for which I’ve never managed to drum up very much enthusiasm. Managing my email box over the Web is a bit like providing technical support to my mother over the phone; it’s halting and inelegant at best, and frustrating and time-consuming at worst. No matter how many gigabytes of free storage and no matter how much Ajax-goodness is conscripted into the service of the user interface, Web-based mail clients can’t hold a candle to the experience of a desktop email client — even one as convoluted and inscrutable as Microsoft Outlook. And that’s saying a lot.

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It’s fun to get tapped to participate in a blog meme like the one I’m about to lay on all a’y’all, but it’s distressing, too, especially when my new job leaves hardly any time for that blogging stuff I used to do more freely before. I blame Jason Santa Maria. Not for the new job, but for passing on the meme. And for other stuff, too, but I won’t go into it. For now, some lists of four…

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Quite unexpectedly, I woke up this morning to an email from Nikolai Nolan alerting me to the fact that Subtraction.com is one of five finalists nominated for the title “Best Designed Weblog” in this year’s Annual Weblog Awards — it’s amazing, but I can now make an authentic claim to being “Bloggie-nominated.” I’m quite flattered by the whole thing of course, having never expected to achieve enough notoriety to ever register on the same level as a site as universally well-read and well-regarded as fellow nominee Kottke.org.

Of course, it’s a short distance from incredulous surprise to shameless self-promotion, so I’m beggin’ you: won’t you please vote for me? Head on over to Bloggies.com and cast your vote to make this the most successful colorless Web site ever. And be sure to attend the 2006 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, where the Bloggies award ceremony will be held in person with a real audience and everything — the single funnest place where you can find out for yourself whether or not a roomful of bloggers really do glow in the dark. Thanks for your support.

Is it just me or did things just get really slow all up in here? It’s probably true that the usable speed of any given computer, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, is ninety percent mental with the other fifty percent being megahertz. Which is to say that if you think your computer is slow, then it’s going to start feeling slow. This is especially the case if Steve Jobs announces a brand new computer, claiming that it runs twice as fast as its predecessor, which itself ran probably twice as fast as the computer you’ve been slogging away on for the past two years.

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You have no shortage of options if you’re looking to alias extremely long Web addresses into snappier and more email-friendly forms, converting URLs as long as three dozen or more characters and loaded with database and cookie values into a succinct form that even a human might be able to memorize without a Johnny Mnemonic download. The most popular of these seems to be TinyURL, but my favorite is LessLink, because it allows a user to create meaningful aliases by entering her own descriptors, which are then used to construct the URL itself. A typically lengthy link to an Ebay auction, say, might be easily condensed as lesslink.com/obsolete/already/. Other services even allow link tracking and other meta-services to track the traffic passed through your alias.

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One of the fruits of my long two weeks of self-directed labor is done: there’s a brand new MisterPresident.org up and running now, where you can see the ten most recent pictures of my dog as posted to Flickr. Surely, it’s the least productive of all the productive hours I’ve spent at my desk since the start of the year, but it’s cute, at least. Plus, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, which I know you didn’t know that you ever needed to do, but here it is at last. Yes, I know, I’ve become a crazy dog person, but at least I didn’t add a Mister President blog. Yet.

Way back when I had no idea how cool the information superhighway really would be — this was the mid-1990s — I was trying to make my way in life as a print designer. I did some lamentable work at a small advertising agency in McLean, Virginia and then at a slightly more glamorous design studio in downtown Washington, D.C., basically graduating from real estate advertisements at the former to stylistically fickle marketing work at the latter. Neither position was particularly satisfying for my creative aspirations.

For a while, I took refuge in freelance work, mostly doing work for the small army of independent bands hiding out in the outer-reaches of Northwest Washington. This meant designing album covers, CD covers, tee-shirts and posters on little or no budget, but getting a fair amount of creative license. I only did this for a few years and, because my day job at the time was so time intensive, I never became particularly prolific, producing only a handful of pieces during my four years in D.C.

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Though I left Behavior at the end of December, I won’t start my new position at The New York Times until next Tuesday, 17 January. This has left me with roughly two weeks off, the first such period I’ve had to myself — with no getaways to exotic locales, no long trips to see family, and no short excursions to New Jersey to see Joy’s family — in a long time. One might have expected me to spend this two weeks watching movies, meeting for social lunches and/or drinking nightly, but I can’t imagine feeling like I have less time for those sorts of distractions.

Rather, I made a long list of Things to Do, goals large and small that have been nagging at me for attention for ages: sell some old junk on Ebay, buy new shelves, re-organize my file cabinet, buy that long-delayed wedding gift for a friend who got married last summer, and tie up a few loose ends remaining from my commitments at Behavior. Every morning I go over the list again, then spend my day putting check-marks next to as many items as I can; unfortunately, I’ll inevitably add as many new tasks as I finish. The net result is that I feel busier, and in some ways more productive, than ever. I don’t know how I ever found time for a real job.

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On the last day of 2005, I walked all the way from my apartment to the best Apple retailer in New York City, Tekserve, with a credit card burning a hole in my pocket. I was all ready to buy myself a brand new iMac G5, having settled on that model of new Macintosh as the big purchase that would help me take advantage of year-end tax write-offs.

But when I got there, I was frozen with inaction; for thirty minutes, I stood around debating whether I really needed a new computer at all. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t, that the iMac, while attractive, didn’t truly do anything all that different from my trusty 12" PowerBook G4 — at least not enough to warrant the purchase. I realized I didn’t need the new machine, and to the amazement of my girlfriend, I left the store and returned home empty-handed.

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You’d be hard-pressed to find an offline publication that’s had a more fitful and ambivalent attitude towards digital media than The New Yorker. I’m not talking about antipathy or outright scorn for online publishing; plenty of magazines openly eschew the Internet and, whether one agrees or not with that tact, at least those publications are resolute and unambiguous in their positions.

The New Yorker, on the other hand, seems intent on embracing the digital availability of its work, but in its actions, has demonstrated such an obvious hesitancy as to be maddening. Reportedly, internal debate over whether the magazine should have even a nominally substantive Web site was so heated, the site didn’t launch until early 2001, long after most of its peers had ventured online and well into the fallow period that followed the dot-com bust. Even then, its offering was generally stilted and paltry, with content from each issue available only during the week of its newsstand date; with some alterations, the same general dearth of online enthusiasm remains to this day.

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I’m completely humbled by all the congratulatory wishes everyone sent my way after I announced my departure from Behavior and my impending job at The New York Times. Really, it’s touching, and I thank everyone for their kind thoughts; I also take seriously the sentiment perhaps most eloquently expressed by my friend Todd: one of the most important things I can do with this opportunity is to not fuck it up.

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