If you’re in the Times Square area anytime between Friday and Halloween, look upwards to the nearly two hundred colorful banners hanging from the lampposts. They’s all part of the Urban Forest Project, a collaboration between AIGA’s New York chapter, Worldstudio Foundation, and the Times Square Alliance. The public art project features visual work from one hundred and eighty-five designers, artists, photographers and illustrators, including some by friends of mine and some by area students who have been mentored by professionals like my friend and colleague on the AIGA NY board, Emma Pressler. Emma has been a major force behind AIGA New York’s mentor program, and an article in yesterday’s Times talks about the work that she and her student partner, Wednesday Trotto (real name!) did for Urban Forest. It’s an event that ties together design, New York City, AIGA, The New York Times and a friend of mine… I call that a great story.

Being from Maryland and all — I grew up in Gaithersburg — I’ve got a soft spot for Baltimore, for its cozy, rough and tumble neighborhoods, for that special ‘small town trapped in a big town’s body’ feel that it’s got, for the tarnished glory of the O’s. So it’s especially flattering for me to have been invited by AIGA Baltimore to speak for them in just a few short weeks. On Thu 21 Sep 2006, I’ll be appearing at Villa Julie College and giving a talk about work, play, NYTimes.com, and a little bit of my grand, unifying theory on design in the twenty-first century.

Continue Reading

If there’s an indispensable kind of software that helps me keep my work and personal lives balanced during the day, it’s instant messaging. It’s absolutely integral to making impromptu appointments, clarifying questions, asking for quick-hit reactions, and planning my social calendar. Because of this, I take a very conservative view to altering my instant messaging tools in any way — I generally don’t like it. Whenever the software I use changes — whether a feature is modified or a new one is added — it can take me weeks of grumbling about its newness before I can get accustomed to it.

For the most part, my program of choice is the superb, open source Adium. As an instant messaging client, none of the others can touch it; Adium is elegant on the whole, extremely pliable in its customization options, satisfyingly capable of talking to multiple I.M. services, and a high bargain at the price of free. I also make it a habit to use Apple’s iChat while at home, more so that I can keep an eye on what Apple’s doing with their instant messaging platform than anything. If I had to choose between the two, Adium would win, hands down.

It’s likely going to stay that way, too, because I’m not particularly encouraged by what I see coming for iChat 4.0, the next major revision scheduled to ship next year with Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system update.

Continue Reading

Dear Apple Customer: Thank you for checking our Battery Exchange Program page for the eligibility of your 12-inch PowerBook G4’s accompanying battery for replacement. According to our records, your battery is is covered under this program.

So congratulations, it stands a better-than-usual chance of blowing up! And when we say “blowing up,” we mean it in the old school way, not in the way that young kids were bandying about five years ago as a euphemism for “getting really popular.”

Continue Reading

By way of recording for posterity, I thought I’d note that last night I attended “Revenge of the Bookeaters” at the beautiful Beacon Theater, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Bookeaters” is the revue of literary and musical entertainments brought together by the over-achieving Dave Eggers to raise money for the good works being done by his 826 Valencia organization, which is dedicated to tutoring children in the art of writing. Last night’s show was the kick-off performance for a series that will travel to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Ann Arbor, Michigan before it’s all over.

Continue Reading

For several months now, between my day job, writing for this blog and numerous other commitments, I’ve been working with some friends on a project called Shorty. Today, for the first time, it’s available as a free, public beta release over at Get-Shorty.com.

Shorty is a link redirection tool not unlike TinyURL or Url(x), which allows you to take ridiculously long URLs, like those you might encounter at Amazon.com for example, and create much shorter aliases for them. This is useful for all sorts of things, but handiest for passing these URLs along to friends and co-workers through email or in collaborative Web environments.

Continue Reading

For months now, I’ve been using the superb Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage my to do lists. I like it a lot. It’s a beautiful hack of the excellent-in-its-own-right OmniOutliner Professional that uses ingenuity and a healthy dose of AppleScript to turn that program into a fairly robust expression of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy of personal time management.

Yet it’s still a hack. Ethan J. A. Schoonover, the author of what᾿s commonly abbreviated as “kGTD,” has done a tremendous job of turning OmniOutliner into a malleable repository for categorizing and manipulating reminders and to do items. As good as it is though, I’m rarely able to forget its limitations when I’m using it; the fact that OmniOutliner Pro wasn’t conceived from the ground up to handle this kind of data and the way users interact with it is often too easy to see.

Continue Reading

One topic that I covered in my speaking appearance at An Event Apart NYC last month — and also in the interview I did for Signal v. Noise in which I compared workplace notes with Google᾿s Jeffrey Veen — was my meetings calendar. I attend a lot of meetings at The New York Times: standing meetings, impromptu meetings, managers’ meetings, work meetings, development meetings… lots of them. For better or worse, the company culture is one that breeds a surfeit of meetings.

A lot of people would think this is bad. The prevailing wisdom in business talk today is that meetings are uniformly counter-productive, maybe even destructive. I’m not sure that I would argue with that; I can’t deny that, with a schedule like mine, I occasionally sit in on some meetings that just aren᾿t all that necessary. But neither can I say that I agree that meetings are a wholly bad thing.

Continue Reading

This is going to be a very brief overview of what I learned about installing Ubuntu on my Macintosh. Remember that my proficiency with all things Linux is very low on the list of impressive bodies of knowledge; I learned all of this from scrounging through Google searches, forums and Ubuntu’s own well-meaning but scattered documentation.

Continue Reading

Sooner or later, everyone gives in to Netflix, and I now count myself among the weak. The Web-based, DVD-by-mail service now offers, in addition to all those hard-to-find movies available in just a day or two through the U.S. Postal Service, the debut episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” And this, months before it will first air on NBC’s Fall 2006 schedule. Broadcast television is dead.

I’ve been very eager to see this show, in no small part because I think that Sorkin’s two prior shows, “The West Wing” and “Sports Night,” represent nearly unmatched high-water marks for consistently produced, intellectually challenging and genuinely surprising commercial television.

What’s more, “Studio 60” has all the apparent markings of a return to the basic premise of the cruelly short-lived “Sports Night.” It concerns the behind-the-scenes machinations of a television show — this time an aging sketch comedy franchise not unlike “Saturday Night Live” — and explores the moral quandaries laying just beneath an enterprise designed to anesthetize millions of households on a regular basis. Fun stuff! Seriously, it is; you owe it to yourself to hole up for a weekend with a freezer-full of Hungry Man dinners, a microwave and the complete DVD collection of “Sports Night”’s two vastly under-appreciated seasons if you haven’t already seen these shows.

Continue Reading

Having had my curiosity piqued by recent, high profile defections from Mac OS X to the Ubuntu Linux distribution, I decided to see if I could get it running on my old Titanium PowerBook G4. Ubuntu bills itself as “Linux for human beings,” designed in a “it just works” fashion that brings the open source operating system as close as it’s ever come to being as simple to set up as, well, Mac OS X — the operative word being “close.”

To be sure, I know almost nothing about Linux, nothing about the functional distinctions between distros and desktops, nothing about sudo or the command line or how to install packages. That said, I’m reasonably savvy when it comes to technology. I have no trouble getting around the thornier corners of Mac OS X and administering it short of entering commands into the Terminal, and I can generally acquire most new technical concepts fairly easily.

Continue Reading

Things are moving quickly for me since joining the board of directors for AIGA New York. I’ve been hard at work putting together some events that I hope will spark a bit of interest from designers who, until now, might not have thought of AIGA as being the sort of organization that pays a lot of attention to their particular needs. This was the number one concern I heard when I first informally polled readers about the organization a few months ago, and I’m doing my best to fix the situation. The first of these events will take place in October and it’s going to be small yet huge; it’s too early to talk about it in any detail now, so stay tuned.

Continue Reading

Hugh Forrest and his tireless team over at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival are soliciting community feedback on programming for their next annual conference (09-13 March 2007, for early planners out there). There are one-hundred and seventy-three panel proposals in twenty-three categories up for consideration, and tons of them look fantastic. The challenge is to pick just ten of the proposals that appeal to you most, and submit them to the main pool — all of this is done through their Web-based Panel Proposal Picker .

Of course, I hope that four of your top choices happen to be the ones that I proposed. For quick reference, here’s a quick rundown of those ideas.

Continue Reading

Apple’s 2006 World Wide Developers Conference, taking place in San Francisco as I write, seems to have disappointed a lot of people with its relatively paltry array of cool new announcements during Steve Jobs’s keynote speech. Many Mac fans, it seemed, had expected to see one or all of the following: an Apple-branded mobile phone, an iPod with a larger, wider display for viewing movies, and a new version of Front Row incorporating TiVO-like features, finally transforming it into what it so obviously wants to be: a fully-fledged home media center solution. None of it happened.

Continue Reading

It took me a little while to get this all cleaned up and ready for release, but I’m finally making the expanded RSS buttons that we’ve started to use at NYTimes.com available to everyone. You can grab the PNG file here (right- or control-click on the image at the start of this post to save it to your computer) and start using it right away, or you can download the artwork as an Adobe Photoshop file and start customizing the label to suit your particular needs.

Continue Reading

With only seven entries written and posted here last month, things were a bit quieter on Subtraction.com than I typically like. I was just too busy to blog very much, what with my appearance at An Event Apart NYC and my vacation to California late in the month.

But I can make up for it with a treat: the incomparable Veerle Pieters graciously agreed to create original artwork for July’s edition of Illustrate Me, the ongoing project where I invite designers and illustrators to dress up the Subtraction.com archives. You can see Veerle’s artwork right now on the archive page for July; it’s a really fun illustration that combines soap bubbles, cycling and a pretty girl for a satisfyingly summery effect that almost makes you forget about the heat.

Continue Reading

After my interlude at Comic-Con International in San Diego, I spent the rest of my week-plus vacation visiting my family in Irvine, California. It was a blast; I sat by the pool, took my nine year-old nephew to a magic shop, and watched a ton of movies. I’ve been back home since late Sunday night, but I’m really freakin’ swamped here, not just with work, but also with all manner of extracurricular and personal activities.

Which explains the lack of blog posts here at Subtraction.com (and this mea culpa post, the likes of which I normally avoid), at least in part. The other part is this damnable heat that dogged me in California and that’s dogging me again here in New York City. Temperatures have routinely been in the upper nineties, with the heat index breaking 105 F. Lovely. Makes it uncomfortable to do much of anything.

Continue Reading