As my sort of half-assed response to Swissmiss’ kind passing to me of the “Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me” meme, I’m going to offer just one trivia item: I generally like happy music.

This surprises a lot of people whose initial (and admittedly sometimes continual) impression of me is that I’m very serious, stern, forbidding and, well, uptight. I’m not. Well, I am, sometimes, but in general, I try to take a relaxed attitude about most things in life when I can, and music is one which I can. I like my fair share of downbeat music, sure, but given the choice, I’m more consistently amazed and enraptured by music that can capture those fleeting essences of joy and elation that occur far too infrequently in life.

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This past weekend I went to The Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to see two companion art exhibits: “Masters of American Comics,” and “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics.”

The latter is a survey of the early development of the super-hero as popular mythological figure, and focuses on no single comics creator. It’s a pleasant enough show, but in essence it’s a ghetto to its neighbor in the next gallery. “Masters” follows the ‘godheads’ theory of group retrospectives, rounding up a dozen or so indispensible comics creators from the past seventy years or so and going on at great length about how totally awesome they are.

It’s as serious and significant an art show as any the medium has ever seen. In fact, what’s showing at The Jewish Museum is just one half of two parts, with the second half showing concurrently at The Museum of Newark in New Jersey. If you don’t know the geography of New York City, suffice it to say that some people make it to Los Angeles more often than they make it across the Hudson River to our closest neighboring state, so I’m unlikely to see that second exhibit any time soon.

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This just in: social networks are awesome. But.

If it isn’t here already, we are, in all likelihood, counting down to the end of the first phase of social networking, that stage in the Internet’s maturation that will be remembered for its behemoth social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. Thirteen days from today, the end of the year, would be as good a time as any to mark the official closing of the era.

These networks will continue to thrive, no doubt, and continue to be influential. But it seems to me that next year what we’ll see is the emergence of the post-social Internet, in which the tools of social networking take on the qualities of ubiquitous givens, and in which the previous style of expansive, cross-demographic digital hubs like those mentioned above are going to be joined by a score of smaller, more focused niche networks catering to narrower tastes.

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For more than a decade, I’ve been using Intuit’s Quicken for Macintosh to manage my personal finances. Once upon a time, it was an elegant piece of software engineering — for anyone who’d ever balanced a checkbook, Quicken’s user interface, at least in the early days, was eminently intuitive. It worked exactly the way you’d expect it to.

Nowadays, it’s arguable whether the application has successfully retained that ease of use, or whether it’s driven off the cliff of bloat and accretion. But I know a few things for sure: for me, the Quicken franchise feels neglected, even while, as a user, I feel continually taken advantage of.

To begin with, I don’t think anyone would argue the fact that the Macintosh version consistently lags behind the Windows version in development and sophistication, and it only barely feels like a truly well-behaved software citizen on my Mac. In spite of this poor state of affairs, I feel regularly bamboozled by what I call ‘the Quicken tax,’ a combination of additional online fees that my bank charges me for accessing my account via Quicken, and the regular, forced software upgrades that Intuit demands I purchase from them every few years when they cut off support for older versions.

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Well, I guess the Cold-Eeze I mentioned last week didn’t really do the trick after all. That “twenty-four hour bug” has turned out to be a week-long cold, and even pretending I wasn’t sick for four or five days didn’t do much good; it finally caught up to me, and I’m sitting in bed today, just trying to give my body a day to recuperate.

That’s not going to stop me, though, from posting a brand new Illustrate Me for November’s archives. This month’s illustration is the handiwork of the extremely talented Rob Giampietro, one-half of the design studio Giampietro + Smith, located in downtown New York City.

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