Seen Any Good Designs Lately?

Along with a few other design figures — each of whom have much, much more impressive reputations than myself — I’ve been been invited by one of New York’s major art museums to help select pieces for inclusion in their permanent design collection. For now, I’m going to be a bit cagey about this and refrain from revealing the name of this museum. But suffice it to say that, to be selected for inclusion in this institution’s collection is a pretty prestigious affair, and I’m more than a little stunned that I was asked for my opinion.

That said, part of my responsibility in this matter is to submit a few possible candidates by, like, a few days ago. I’m late. I’ve been sitting on this for a good time now, and though I have some ideas I’m definitely a little stumped, so I thought I would open it up to my loyal readership.

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Living with Chronic Hard Drive Failure

Hard DriveThe portent of doom implied by my hard drive failure scare from several weeks ago turned into an ugly reality this past Saturday morning: I woke up to a locked-up operating system. When I tried to reboot, the resulting sound coming from beneath the laptop’s keyboard was loud, whirring and not very confidence-inducing. By then I had more or less made peace with the fact that the hard drive was dead, and another long walk to Tekserve confirmed it.

The PowerBook is still under AppleCare extended warranty protection, and it will be back within the week (I hope). I feel very fortunate, though; immediately after the first signs of trouble, I quit my procrastination and scheduled full backups of the hard drive on alternating nights to two different external FireWire drives — aided in no small part by the sheer awesomeness of Shirt Pocket Software’s invaluable SuperDuper! product. As a result, I lost less than a day’s worth of work; not perfect, but it could have been loads worse.

SuperDuper! made it exceedingly easy for me to create a complete, bootable mirror of my hard drive, which actually allows me to continue to use the same system — with all of my files, preferences and software tweaks intact — with another Macintosh. I pulled my old Aluminum 15-inch PowerBook G4 out of retirement and booted it from one of the backup FireWire drives. This allows me to continue to be productive — in theory. It’s a trooper, but this old PowerBook is painfully slow, and the whole setup is just a shade too far to the dangerous side of fragility for me to be willing to do much work on it. All of which is to say that, until my PowerBook returns from Tekserve, I’m doing only a minimal amount of extracurricular computing, surfing, blogging, etc. I hope to be back on my feet again next week.

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Mail of the Species

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had the luxury of unfettered access to my mail server for Subtraction.com from wherever I’ve happened to work. This has allowed me to maintain a clean separation between personal and business correspondences, as I’ve always been able to receive POP3 message traffic right into a separate mail database at my office (usually in a different email client from the employer’s official, sanctioned email client), without having to rely on my workplace email address to keep in touch with people.

That’s no longer the case. For security reasons, POP3 traffic is restricted to me during the workday now, so now I have to rely on Web-based email clients, a genre of net software for which I’ve never managed to drum up very much enthusiasm. Managing my email box over the Web is a bit like providing technical support to my mother over the phone; it’s halting and inelegant at best, and frustrating and time-consuming at worst. No matter how many gigabytes of free storage and no matter how much Ajax-goodness is conscripted into the service of the user interface, Web-based mail clients can’t hold a candle to the experience of a desktop email client — even one as convoluted and inscrutable as Microsoft Outlook. And that’s saying a lot.

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