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Inflation Architecture

At a somewhat casual information architecture event put on by NYC-CHI at Remote Lounge on the Bowery last night, I heard the featured speakers — a recruiter, an “information design consultant,” information architecture managers from Organic, Avenue A/Razorfish and Hot Jobs — give their views on ‘What’s going on with I.A. in New York.’ Their comments were fairly illuminating, but I balked when one of them mentioned that he’d seen some under-qualified I.A.s charge as much as US$125 per hour and some over-qualified I.A.s charge as little as US$75 per hour. The last bit, he said almost in a scoffing manner, and the audience, twenty or thirty I.A.’s from all over the city, seemed to nod in agreement — US$75 is way too little.

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The Secret to Writing…

For a moment, please indulge a little bit of my ranting: Every day I fire up my newsreader and try to catch up on what my favorite authors are posting, and I’m amazed and bewildered by how much writing some of these authors can turn out. The load of my own business and personal obligations is hardly monumental, but if some of these authors are juggling even half of my what I do during waking hours while also turning out these reams of blog posts and, in many cases, producing beautiful design work too… well, then I salute them. They’ve mastered a level of time management that I have little hope of matching.

I can barely scratch out four or five posts a week, and it often takes a dogged determination to find a twenty minutes scattered between tasks to get them drafted, edited and posted. Mostly, though, it’s not the quantity that I lament… it’s the time. By and large, very few of the posts I knock out benefit from the time and care with which I’d like to invest any piece of writing I put in front of public eyes. Just this evening, I was hammering out that capsule review of “Elephant” when the dinner I ordered arrived, and immediately I felt compelled to wrap it things up quickly so I could put a little food in my stomach. That…s not a proper way to write anything.

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Elephant in the Room

ElephantI’ve been an erratic fan of Gus Van Sant’s work for years, mostly because the work itself has been somewhat erratic — witness “Psycho” and “Good Will Hunting,” two movies I’d just as soon never watch again. But I was really, really floored by “Elephant,” which I skipped in theaters due to the somewhat uneven critical response it garnered. After two jaw-dropping hours, it baffles me that this film, which is meticulously directed and gorgeously shot, failed to become a sensation in its original run. Then again I think of the deliberate, almost Kubrick-like coldness with which it forgoes any kind of judgment over the characters caught in its Columbine High School-like construction, and it makes a certain kind of sense to me that the public would shun it. We like tragedies written bold in history and reductively in drama, and this movie fits neither of those criteria. It’s subtle and familiar and also deeply frightening.

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Set My Firefox

FirefoxIn spite of my continued enthusiasm for OmniWeb, I’ve found myself using the 1.0 Preview release of Firefox more and more often. I spend about half my day in each browser, and it makes me wish that I had a system-level utility that would intercept every link I click on to let me decide whether to send it to OmniWeb or Firefox. Surely, somebody has already whipped up something like that, and I’m missing it, right?

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Live Leo

Ted Leo/PharmacistsIt was a year and a week ago that I wrote about Ted Leo/Pharmacists to little notice, but I’m still listening to these records, “The Tyranny of Distance” and “Hearts of Oak,” at least once a week. If anything, I think that what I once saw as Leo’s self-imposed and short-sighted limitations — his obsessive desire to re-create a sound and an energy often deemed lost to the 20th century — now seem more like a very selectively chosen milieu, a platform for an oeuvre. It was always that, of course, but I was reluctant to see it. Now, having watched the rise of a horde of bands who have worked out the science behind a way-back machine down to a decimal point, it’s more apparent to me than ever that Leo’s work is, first, classier and more thrilling than anything else in thrift store clothes, and second, actually forward-looking.

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Just Did It

Joy’s TriathlonI’m freakin’ exhausted after a weekend spent driving up and down the Jersey shoreline, and waking up at 04:00a this morning to slog all the way to Gateway National Park — but I shouldn᾿t be complaining. After all, it wasn’t me who swam, biked and ran the 2004 New York Metro Area edition of the Danskin Women’s Triathlon Series on the coldest day since spring broke. That was my girlfriend, who saw the culmination of 2+ months of early morning training come to a very satisfying end when she finished her first of this kind of event in a very respectable 1 hour and 31 minutes, ranking 124th out of all 701 competitors. She did great, and I’m very, very proud of her. I’m also happy that I get to go to sleep very soon.

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Hit in the Temple

Media TempleThe folks at Media Temple have always been responsive and courteous when I’ve had problems, but I᾿m at the end of my tether with them right now. In case you haven’t noticed, access to Subtraction.com has been markedly unreliable since Tuesday, owing to a series of vaguely explained technical issues they’re having with my shared server — whatever the problems are, they refuse to subside. You’re probably reading this now thanks to a spell in which everything᾿s running fine, but if my experience this week has been any guide, you’ll be lucky to find the server responding in, say, forty-five minutes from now. It’s very, very frustrating. I’m pretty sure this is going to put me in the market for a new host provider next week.

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Smaller, Lighter, Better

Media Reader for iPodThanks to a still-valid half-price deal at Belkin.com, I bought myself a Media Card Reader for iPod last week — so that, during an upcoming trip my girlfriend and I are taking to Italy later this month, we’ll be able to offload photos from my digital camera onto the relatively spacious confines of her 15GB iPod. At its full price, I doubt I ever would’ve bit on it, because it seems like a kludgy solution to the problem of limited digital camera memory. Prices for a one gigabyte flash memory card are coming down, after all, and I’m not sure when I’ll ever take that many photos. So in all likelihood, I’ll eBay the gadget when we’re back and recoup some of the cost.

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Back, Sort Of

I’ve been back from California since late Monday evening, but yesterday my host provider had a ‘hardware malfunction’ with my server, which caused some major downtime. Even after it came back up, I had some MySQL errors that prevented me from getting into Movable Type and therefore from publishing new posts here. Things looked resolved this afternoon, and then the server went down again and required a complete replacement. Though I create back ups of my site regularly, the whole incident gave me a fright — I need to come up with a more rigorous schedule and better habits for backing up what’s on my server. Too generously, I put a lot of trust into hosting providers… I suspect I’m not the only one who does this.

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I Keep Going, and Going, and Going…

The ups and downs of this election are really wreaking havoc with my emotional health, and I’m almost at the point where I can no longer afford to devote this much attention reading a dozen weblogs and a dozen news sites every day. It’s the same way I feel about high-stakes sporting events: it takes a tremendous strain out of me to get too invested in something over which I have very little, if any, control. This weekend, at least, I’ll get a little bit of a break, as I’m heading out to the airport right now for a trip to see some of my family in Oakland, California. Internet access will be intermiitent, so there will be few if any posts until I’m back on Monday night or Tuesday morning — and maybe few if any chances to follow the race.

PowerBookGoing off on kind of a wild tangent: I’m on the train right now, and when I popped open my PowerBook and booted it up, I was reminded of a question to which I’ve long wanted to know the answer. That is, when embarking on a trip with a laptop, does it save more energy to shut down before unplugging and leaving home and then booting up, say, two hours later while on the road? Or, instead, is it more energy efficient to put the laptop to sleep first, and then simply wake it later while on the road? I would assume that booting up off the battery is more energy consuming than keeping a laptop in sleep mode for two hours, right? See, I’m already starting to focus on less weighty issues…

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