Archives

Fantastic Voyage (of Sorts)

Here’s a little bit of nerdery: last week at Behavior, we had to quickly generate lots of potential names for a branding project. To get the widest possible array of names, everyone in the office was invited to submit their ideas, and we ended up with over a hundred submissions. The problem was that they were all trapped in many different email messages, and I needed to get them into a nice, clean PowerPoint presentation.

At first I was thinking that I would have to manually retype them all in order to get them into the presentation in alphabetical order. Then I started thinking that if I could get the list of names out of the emails quickly, I’d be able to use a series of applications to create an XML version of the list that would be readable by Apple’s alternative to PowerPoint, the beautifully-designed Keynote.

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Teach a Man to Fish

Fish ClassMy day started very, very early this morning, thanks to a gift certificate that my girlfriend gave to me last December for a recreational class in cooking at the Institute of Culinary Education. For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to sign up for a one-time session called “Fulton Fish Market Tour and Cooking Class,” noting but not seriously considering the difficulty of its unseemly 05:30a start time.

So even before the sun could be bothered to begin its business, we took a taxi down to the southeastern tip of Manhattan, where the long-standing Fulton Fish Market operates until it relocates (reluctantly) to the Bronx in 2005. The instructor gave us a tour of the market and a quick primer on the varieties of fish sold and how to select them.

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Late to School

School of RockIt always makes me feel a little silly to be writing here about movies that I’ve just seen on video or DVD, well after they’ve left the theaters and long after any initial excitement they may have stirred up has been dissipated. Unfortunately, with the way my life has worked over the past two years, I see far more films on my DVD player than at the cineplex. So more often than not, I’ll just choose not to write about them at all, but in the case of “School or Rock,” how can I resist?

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Money for Nothing

John Kerry for PresidentSo I put a little bit of money where my mouth is today and donated US$100 to John Kerry for President. I’ve been thinking about the gap in time since my last donations to a campaign, way back in the heat of the Democratic primaries, and how the relatively long dry spell might actually be an indication that perhaps I’m just as lukewarm about Kerry as half the American populace seems to be. This, in spite of my professed staunch advocacy of his campaign over that of George W. Bush.

I guess I lost a little bit of enthusiasm for the Democratic bid for the White House after Howard Dean dropped out (though in retrospect I consider my flirtation with the Dean movement to be more daydream than pragmatism), but only a little. In every way, I still believe strongly that Kerry is far, far better qualified to be president than George W. Bush. I’m pretty sure that it won’t be the last hundred dollars I’ll be sending John Kerry’s way.

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Philadelphia First

I’m just back from a day trip to Philadelphia, the first time I’ve actually ever been to the city proper, though I’ve passed through it countless times on my way back and forth between New York and Washington, DC. I went for a business meeting, but afterwards I took a little time out and met up with an old friend from junior high school. We had a quick drink, shot some pool, and I had my first, authentic Philly cheesesteak. Though I took the late unreserved train back to Manhattan, on the way there this morning, I took the Acela for the first time. It was a pleasant experience, though I’m not sure I’d ever pay for it out of my own pocket, given that it actually felt more cramped than the less tony trains that Amtrak runs along the eastern seaboard. Anyway, the real highlight of traveling today was spending some time in the gorgeous confines of the restored 30th Street Station, an enduring testament to a time when cities, people and architects used to imagine public spaces as truly grand specimens of human achievement. I wish I hadn’t forgotten my camera at home.

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One Word to Rule Them All

MellelThere’s no denying that Microsoft Word is the de facto standard for word processing documents, but every once in a while I will entertain a daydream for a more streamlined, less buggy alternative. Had it not been for the terrible name, I might have turned earlier to Mellel, which is a smooth, elegant and powerful multilingual word processing contender from RedleX. It was written for Mac OS X from the ground up, which makes it seem a thousand times more fluid than Word, in spite of its admittedly butt-ugly, brushed metal interface.

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Plugging Holes

I’ve always thought it was an act of hubris for Macintosh fans to brag too loudly about the allegedly more secure construction of Mac OS X, but I secretly enjoyed it, too. Compared to the onslaught of malicious forces consistently threatening the Windows platform, managing a Mac OS X system is like living in a gated community. I rarely have to worry about viruses, worms or exploits, and that has been a huge part in making the user experience so much consistently better than Windows.

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Stop Trek

EnterpriseI’ll admit a fondness for “Star Trek,” having enjoyed the original show in reruns as a generally geeky youth and its many successors as an only moderately less geeky adult. But after having caught five minutes of an episode this season wherein the crew of the latest show, “Star Trek: Enterprise” were shooting it out with aliens on a world that resembled America’s old West (crazy!), even I will admit that the whole franchise is just begging for a bit of television euthanasia.

For about five minutes at the launch of the series, “Enterprise” seemed to promise a new, fresher take on the tried and true Trek formula, in which a cadre of futuristic office co-workers spreads free market principles around the galaxy. But it too has succumbed to retreading the same old territory as its predecessors, and just a glimpse of the show reveals it to be hackneyed to distraction. Now word comes that, apparently, UPN has acquiesced to fan pressure and renewed “Enterprise” for another season. Please, someone make it stop.

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Facts on ’Fiction

PulpFictionWhile everyone was getting all riled up over the pricing terms for Movable Type 3.0 late last week, I was eagerly keeping an eye on Freshly Squeezed Software’s Web site for the release of their entry into the Macintosh news aggregator market, the unfortunately titled PulpFiction.

After a fair amount of hype — or routine buildup, depending on how you look at it — the small software outfit made PulpFiction available for download on Saturday afternoon. I was out most of the day, but as soon as I got home, I dutifully installed a copy on my PowerBook.

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A Little Bit of Nice

Since I’ve disparaged a New York bodega in the past, it’s only fair that I should mention a little bit of understated kindness that I saw this morning at New Andy’s Deli at 873 Broadway, where I stopped to buy an egg sandwich.

Ahead of me in line was a little kid, must’ve been about ten years old, wearing an oversized backpack that one could say was adorably out of proportion to his pre-adolescent height. This was a city kid, to be sure, on his way to school and unintimidated by the adult world. He asked the woman behind the counter how much it would cost to get an egg and sausage sandwich on a roll, and when she answered “Two-fifty,” he looked away and took a step towards the door with a quiet kind of resignation — it wasn’t dejection or even a ploy for pity, just a wordless acquiescence.

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