Bright Ideas

AdobeIt takes a lot of energy to write new weblog posts regularly, and last week I just didn’t have it, between working some long days and flying out of state on a business trip that began with a Thursday morning flight at 5:00a and returned that same day around 8:00p. Whew. Anyway, it’s over, and I spent the weekend recuperating, which left me fresh and alert for today’s Adobe Ideas Conference here in New York. It was an interesting affair that brought together lots of different kinds of Adobe users — illustrators, designers, artists and business people — for seminars, mingling and, as it turns out, the celebration of the announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 2.

I saw some interesting speakers, but the best was the “holy shit” moment I had when I realized that the legendary illustrator and designer Paul Davis was sitting at the table next to me at lunch. I’ve actually met him in person once before — he’s the father of a friend of a friend — but that did nothing to diminish the awesomeness of the moment. The free swag wasn’t bad either — Adobe gave out shoulder bags to all attendees which, rare for a conference giveaway, is actually useful: it’s made by Brooklyn’s YAKPAK and fits my laptop and doesn’t look completely cheesey.

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A Commentary on Comments

For those of you who do a lot of weblog surfing, and who frequently participate in discussions at those sites by posting comments, I think there’s a need for a centralized system to manage that content. I’m talking about a method of aggregating those contributions in a single location, ideally on one’s own Web site but perhaps also on a page hosted by a remote application, combined with some pinging intelligence and a facility for management by their original author — you.

Think about it like this; taken altogether, you can look at everything you’ve written on other people’s weblogs as a body of content that you’ve generated for free — it’s only fair that you should be able to maintain a centralized archive of it, and to be able to display the fruits of your labors. Of course, the archive would include abstracts or excerpts from the original weblog post, as well as a URL directly back to it. That way, everybody wins.

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Keeping Secrets

LockThere are a lot of codes that I need to remember in order to get through a day of work. I’m talking about passwords, combinations, personal identification numbers, credentials of all kinds. Most of these, I keep in Web Confidential, a Mac OS X program expressly designed to encrypt and store this kind of data; it’s pretty much the best utility of its kind in my experience, but I’m no big fan of it. That’s why I notice acutely when I have to open it more often, and over the past six months, I’ve been looking up the 280 or so passwords I’ve stored in it almost constantly.

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A Matter of Perceptionists

The PerceptionistsThere’s a marketing person somewhere who should be proud of himself for pulling off a nice little feat at my expense yesterday. I subscribe to the email newsletters regularly pushed out by the folks at Definitive Jux Records, and because I rarely have time to properly read them, my usual pattern is to quickly scan their contents — perhaps without really retaining anything — before hitting the delete key. When I got the latest update yesterday, I noticed a big emphasis at the top of the email for the debut full-length album from The Perceptionists, this week’s hotly tipped hip-hop act. Being generally preoccupied with design and online geekery — and also being generally squarer than I was a decade ago — it was the first time I had heard of them.

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