Greatly Exaggerated

Here’s what happens sometimes: you try your hand at blogging. You get kind of good at it and get on a roll for, oh, six or seven years. You start getting more enterprising with your blogging, maybe even launching a second or third blog, and you start to upgrade your blog software, with plans to make everything faster, better. It all looks like it’s going to be great. You’re unstoppable.

Then you get incredibly busy at work. Ridiculously busy. And then maybe you meet a really awesome new person, and you rearrange most all of the priorities governing your free time. And then you and your new girlfriend even decide to shack up, get an awesome new place and make a happy little home together. Then you spend several weekends in a row packing, then moving, then unpacking and setting up the new apartment and making runs to Ikea and Home Depot.

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Graphic Design Goes to the Games

Fuwa, Mascot for the 2008 Beijing OlympicsOver the past two weeks or so, I have for some reason been mistaken a few times for someone who is actually paying attention to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But, sadly, I’m not paying much attention to them at all, mostly because I’m getting ready to move to a new apartment at the end of this month. (For those who are paying attention though, you can find few richer sources of coverage than the truly multiple-media reporting we’re painstakingly publishing at NYTimes.com/olympics.)

I have nothing against the Olympics, though. In fact, it makes complete sense to me how the combination of the West’s growing fascination with China and the spectacular winning performances of Michael Phelps makes for a damn compelling international spectacle. Especially when viewed in high-definition; these are really the first games being watched by the newly prevalent audience of HDTV owners, which I think accounts at least in part for NBC’s unexpected rating success — and by the way the games look great at 720p.

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