So yes, I got an iPhone. The story of how I acquired it is slightly amusing but not particularly interesting enough to excuse this fact: I had it paid for and in hand as soon as fifteen minutes after it went on sale yesterday at 6:00p, but I have yet to be able to activate it or use it.

Right now, I’m stuck in some kind of frustrating limbo between AT&T and Verizon Wireless, in which my new AT&T account isn’t yet active and my Verizon number hasn’t quite transferred over — I get a message that says “Your activation requires additional time to complete.” Because of the obsessively controlling way in which the iPhone experience was designed, it’s actually impossible for me to use any of the iPhone’s features — even those that have no need whatsoever for wireless service — until this situation is resolved.

My friends who transferred mobile phone numbers from other wireless carriers are already up and running with their iPhones. Not me. Instead, I’m spending frustrating hour after hour on the phone with customer service operators at both carriers with no luck. Meanwhile, my remaining time on this Earth is wasting away…

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I’m at a point in my life know where I actually know real authors of real books. It’s strange, because these are regular, ‘one pant leg at a time’ human folk like you and me, and yet somehow they’ve managed to articulate a real, honest to goodness view of the world… and they’ve convinced other folks to print it for them. Now you can buy these books via the Interweb and even hold them in your hand. It’s amazing to me.

So, having said that, now I’m going to plug two of them.

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The forthcoming movie adaptation of the toy franchise “Transformers” has somehow climbed to the very tippy-top of my summer movie-going list over recent weeks. I don’t know how it got there, because like many people, the esteem in which I hold the previous work of director Michael Bay can be best described as ‘minimal.” Still, it looks like the most promisingly satisfying of a sorry summer lot, even if the core of its offering is only a momentarily satiation. I’m really excited to see it. Oh, and I’ll go see the apparently not-badly-reviewed “Live Free or Die Hard,” too.

I just wanted to come out and say that. No more secrets, people.

Somewhere along the way during all of the build up and anticipation for this Friday’s release of Apple’s iPhone, I became personally invested in owning one on — or very soon after — the first day of release.

I had an ‘in’ for a while there, when a friend of mine who works at Apple assured me that he would help me procure one through internal means. But, as no sign of an employee purchase plan has yet presented itself, I’m realizing that I need to make alternative arrangements if I want to avoid the mortifying shame of getting caught still using my old mobile phone next Monday. I’d just about die of embarrassment. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.

Except… I’m cringing at the idea of queuing up outside the Apple Store to get my hands on one. That’s about where I draw the line, I think. Standing in line too easily dredges up memories of long spells in line at my local shopping mall trying to get decent tickets to see R.E.M. or some such act when I was sixteen — I guess I’m glad I experienced that kind of extravagant stupidity once, but I’m not about to do it again. Ever.

The fact that I’m more or less mentally committed to buying an iPhone at the first reasonable opportunity — regardless of what potentially scathing reviews its touch-based keyboard will undoubtedly receive — is enough, I think. I’m not going to physically plant myself on a sidewalk through heat, rain or multiple mealtimes just for bragging rights. It’s just too much; this personal investment in having an iPhone of my own by Saturday isn’t that important to me.

On the other hand, if you have a surefire plan to share queuing duties, let me know.

I’m leaving for Seattle, Washington this afternoon for an appearance at the latest An Event Apart conference tomorrow. The two-day design and technology event actually starts today, and I’m sorry to have to miss the opening, but duty calls here at the office. If you’re attending, please introduce yourself and say hello to me tomorrow, I should be around all day. I’m always happy to meet readers.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to stay in Seattle very long, as I’m heading back to New York on Saturday morning. I’d stay a little longer, but I’m a bit tired of traveling already for the year (though I’ve taken only a half-dozen trips or so) All those airport security measures really get to me, as does all that interminable waiting around — what I call ground time. Summer is short, and I really want to enjoy as many weekends as I can back in my new neighborhood. To be honest, the older I get, the more I appreciate just hanging out at home with Mister President.

Sheepishly, I admit to having had no idea whatsoever that people would be so interested in Ikea when I wrote my post about the massive home furnishings retailer earlier in the week. Something about the combination of reasonably presentable modern design and low, low prices clearly inspires passionate responses from consumers, both good and bad. Also, I admit that the positive notices on Ikea were more abundant than I anticipated.

This interest doesn’t strike me as being about affordability as much as it’s about design. There are plenty of cheap furniture retailers out there, but how many of them inspire the impassioned, trainspotting chatter of Ikeafans.com, where customers trade every possible detail about the products and the store branches? Or the enthusiastic inventiveness of Ikea Hacker, where all manner of novel uses and transformations of Ikea goods are showcased? (Thanks to readers Gong Szeto, AJ Kandy and Jason Beaird for pointing those out to me.)

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Holy moley, we managed to book the inimitable John Gruber to come speak for us tomorrow night in SoHo! By “us,” I mean AIGA New York, which thanks to events like this and others, is getting cooler by the minute — get yourself a membership today.

John, of course, is the author and proprietor of Daring Fireball, which is, hands down, my favorite Macintosh punditry blog, period. Not only does he offer some of the most penetrating business and technical analysis of the Macintosh ecosystem available anywhere, he’s uncommonly insightful about the dark art of interface design. In fact, he’s promised to reprise, at least in part, a wonderful talk he’s given before about the difference between consistency and uniformity in the interfaces that Apple users interact with everyday.

If that’s not enough for you, John is just back from last week’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference where amazing, amazing things were supposed to have been announced, it was rumored, but for some reason they were not. Hmm. If you’re curious about what went down in Steve Jobs’ town, this is the event to attend.

This talk is the latest in our Design Remixed series, and it too will be held at the Apple Store in SoHo. (If you think it’s an accident that I suggested an uninhibited Apple pundit for an appearance at Steve’s downtown Manhattan outpost, well I’ve got a bridge to sell you. At any rate, it’s going to be interesting.) These events have been pretty popular, so come early to get a seat in the store’s roomy but definitely limited auditorium. The good times start at 6:30p sharp.

A few years ago I read an interview with Saint Bono of the Irish mega-group Bono and the U-2’s in which he justified his then-recent purchase of an exorbitant, fully-furnished new Manhattan apartment — even the silverware and bath towels were waiting at the ready for his family the day they walked in the door for the first time — using this reasoning: when wealthy rock musicians become preoccupied with furnishing their houses, buying table linens, choosing wallpaper, etc. instead of focusing on their craft, they will consequently produce absolutely crap records. By purchasing the house in a ready-to-live state, he hoped to avoid sapping his creative energies with domestic busywork, allowing him to devote his attentions fully to his art instead. And then the band released “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” Oh well.

I have neither fame nor wealth — nor even an artistic temperament on par with Bono’s, it can be argued. But I do have a relatively new apartment that I’ve been devoting considerable time toward furnishing for the past several weeks. And I can attest, at least, to how thoroughly the act of setting up a new apartment can drain one’s creative energies.

Which is how I found myself in Elizabeth, New Jersey yesterday, trolling the huge showroom full of singularly contemporary and inexpensive furnishings at Ikea, along with a few friends who had also recently moved or will soon move into new apartments.

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The blog post I wrote yesterday was really hard to write, as it turned out. There were lots of revisions, and I nearly abandoned it once or twice because it kept going on and on and on. In its final form, it clocks in at about four hundred and fifty words. I’m not saying that’s svelte, exactly, but in one earlier draft, I was pushing well past eight hundred words without an end in sight.

I get caught up a lot over-explaining things when I write. It took me several tries to compress that post’s third paragraph, which outlines the basics of my critique of the new elevator system at my work, down to a relatively compact hundred-plus words. At one point, I was detailing my usability complaints in almost excruciating detail — recounting every minutiae of interacting with the system — the prose equivalent of watching a slow motion replay. It was so bad it was tiring even for me to type it, so be glad I didn’t make you read it.

Why do I do this? I blame design. A lot of my job is about creating visual and interactive presentations that accurately and effectively communicate information. In practice, that often calls for simplicity and explicitness, constantly reminding myself that I must go through great lengths to ensure that users understand every component of the experience I’m constructing.

When I transfer that value to writing though, it seems too often to inspire a long-winded, expository style that feels like homework: laborious, plodding, overly careful. Writing should be fun; the more fun it is, the more fun it’ll be to read. Anyway, it goes back to something Jeffrey Zeldman told me once: it’s a lot harder to make something short than it is to make something long.

Among many modern innovations that we have at the new Times building , we’re using a fancy method of managing elevator ridership. Rather than having riders push a directional button (up or down) take the first elevator car that arrives — which is what practically every other elevator bank in the world does — ours takes a different, more ambitious tack.

At our building, a rider pushes a button on a keypad before getting on an elevator to tell the system what floor she’d like to go to. The system then directs her to a specific car which, in theory, will also carry other riders going to that same floor. The idea is to get riders to their floors faster by ‘batch processing’ them, so to speak, rather than serially processing them.

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Let’s stick with television a bit longer. As a New York Yankees fan, I watch a fair number of televised games on George Steinbrenner’s otherwise unimpressive YES Network. Part of watching those games means grinning and bearing my way through the commentary of regular team broadcast voice Michael Kay, whose gift for inaccurate, specious and scowl-inducing narration deserves a designation of its own among the many, many things that annoy me. Like nails on a chalkboard.

So I’ve been wondering if there’s a good reason why we can’t have alternative game commentary via the Interweb? Why shouldn’t Major League Baseball — or any professional sports league — let anyone who wants to provide a commentary track for any given game — using the same basic digital audio tools that hundreds of people are using to create podcasts already — do so easily?

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If you watched the series finale of “The Sopranos” tonight, then you know by now that creator David Chase has the sense of humor of some kind of sadistic auteur. The heavily anticipated denouement was startlingly, almost hilariously abrupt and unformed. If you haven’t watched it, no need to worry: there are no spoilers in this post — as if spoilers would have made any difference with this episode, anyway.

The only interpretation of the events that I can muster after recovering from my dumbfounded shock is: life goes on, and a series finale, while tremendously weighted with the audience’s expectations, is nevertheless only an arbitrary stopping point. The series ended just where it happened to end, outside of dramatic logic. Or at least, it ended according to the logic of Chase’s final, defiant assertion that this show was an artistic endeavor, not an entertainment enterprise — and in accordance with no other agenda.

That this complex and engrossing series could end this indiscriminately is undoubtedly a let-down to millions, but at least someone had fun. That someone was Chase, who in the final minutes seemed to delight in sending up the idea of nail-biting suspense, of an operatic climax that would bestow meaning on much that had gone before. We all wanted that, but it’s clear that’s not what Chase wanted at all — tomorrow’s New York Daily News might as well read “Chase to Fans: Drop Dead.” Me, I happen to think he got a huge kick out of sending countless people home from “Sopranos” finale-watching parties all over the country in a state of stupor, disappointment, even anger… if you ask me, that’s the kind of behavior that suggests the guy could use some therapy.

Did you hear that Apple Inc. is planning on releasing a new product that combines the features of an iPod and a mobile telephone in one device? It’s true, and they’re calling it “the iPhone.” Looking at the commercials they created for it, I’m even thinking that I might want to buy one for myself when they’re released at the end of this month. Crazy, right?

We might even see some more news about the iPhone next week when Apple kicks of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. There’s no telling what announcements if any that the company will make, but if there’s one iPhone-related thing that I can point to as being at the very tippy-top of my list, it would be to improve .Mac.

That product, a collection of Web-based tools and services available to consumers for an annual subscription fee of about US$100, has been long in need of help. In fact, I’ve written about it before, and as many of my friends know, it takes only the barest of conversational provocations to get me to launch into a tirade on my frustrations and disappointments with it. Oh, too late, you got me started!

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There’s a good interview with Erik Spiekermann over at the design blog Ideas on Ideas. Spiekermann, the famous designer, typographer, co-founder of Meta Design and now principal of Spiekermann Partners always has something interesting — often divisive, frequently inspiring — to say about our profession.

There’s one quote from the interview that caught my attention: “I have a bad history of neglecting my private life. One of the main reasons my first wife divorced me was the fact that business always took precedence over anything else. I have often had to leave her and my son in the middle of a vacation and go to see a client.”

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For those who haven’t come across it already, earlier this year I made a fairly complete summary of my approach to designing online with a grid, presented in conjunction with Mark Boulton at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. There’s one crucial idea buried in that slide show, though, that I felt was important enough to pull out into its own blog post, if only so that I can have a URL to which I can point people when I’m explaining it. Here it is…

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We’ll never be able to defeat the onslaught of email. At least, that’s my impression. We’ve essentially signed on for a world in which we can be regularly assaulted by communiqués from anyone at any time, and in which those communiqués pile up more quickly than we can address them. As much as we can try to develop coping methods for better managing that continuous inflow, I just don’t seriously see a way for us to ever fully tame it.

In spite of the basic futility of the idea, people will feel compelled to try to tame email. Creative Good co-founder Mark Hurst, one of the smartest people I know, advocates aggressive management of one’s email store in his new book, “Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and Email Overload.” His advice is to “empty the in-box at least once a day,” arguing that a full in-box “demoralizes users with feelings of overload.” The ideas that each email represents can be relocated to more appropriate contexts — to do lists, or folders in your email client — where they’re less obtrusive.

That’s great advice for many folks, I’m sure. In fact, about a year and a half ago, it was my practice to dutifully empty my in-box regularly, filing away emails in a complicated hierarchy of folders labeled with clients, projects, subject matters, or groupings of some sort. But, I soon came to realize that, for me anyway, it was more work than reward.

Today, I use Apple’s Mail program to manage my email, and I keep everything in my in-box, regardless of who sent it, what it’s about, or in what future context I might need it. And I’m much happier.

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Depending on how “The Sopranos” concludes its eight-year, six-season run in next week’s series finale, it will rank somewhere in the top three of my list of the best television shows of the past decade. Which is to say that it’s up there for sure, just not necessarily in that top spot that so many television critics almost reflexively assign to it.

I’ve been watching “The Sopranos” faithfully for years, enjoying it the vast majority of the time, and remaining highly invested in the show’s motley band of indelible characters throughout. But I admit that, over the course of its eighty-five odd installments, it’s had its share of digressions, missteps and shark skipping, if not outright shark jumping. Let’s not mince words: there have been awful, tone-deaf episodes and ill-advised plot lines (though the good ones have far outnumbered the bad ones).

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