What Do Sports Center, The White House and Saturday Night Live All Have in Common?

Studio 60 on the Sunset StripSooner 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.

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Ubuntu for Dummies

UbuntuHaving 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.

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AIGA Wants YOU

AIGAThings 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.

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