Be Your Own Boss

Sat 20 Mar 200412:15 AM

The enduring tension between work and life came to a head for me this morning when, almost literally on the verge of heading to the airport with my girlfriend for a long weekend away, I got an email that scrapped all of my plans. A colleague at Behavior had fallen ill, and I had little choice but to put away my suitcase and head into the office to cover the work that she wouldn’t be able to do under the influence of a 103 degree fever. I don’t mind shouldering the burden — this particular project is really my responsibility, and I’d be a poor manager to complain about having to do the work — but I felt miserable for bailing out of the weekend trip to see my girlfriend’s family. She ended up getting on the plane alone, and my stomach felt queasy; it was proof that when it comes down to it, work trumps everything, but is that any way to live a life? My partners and I started this business with the idea that we’d have more freedom — economically, creatively and personally. That’s not the case, at least not yet, and it’s killing me.

The Tangled Web They Weaved

Thu 18 Mar 200409:39 PM

It just seems to me that a pretty clear case can be made against the credibility of the Bush administration if one just takes a clear, objective look at what they’ve said. The increasingly well-known MoveOn.org has demonstrated how powerful this approach can be with this commercial that features Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” trying somewhat lamely to discredit the notion that anyone in the Bush Administration ever used the term “immediate threat” in the run-up to the war in Iraq. For once, CBS avails itself of its responsibilities as broadcasters and as a news organization and calls Rumsfeld on his blatant untruth. The effect is very, very potent.

The shame doesn’t end there; Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has commissioned a report on all the misleading statements made by the five most prominent war supporters in the Bush Administration, from George W. on down. The results are again incredibly damning, and they are available not only in PDF form, but as a searchable online database, which lets anyone plainly see what specific statements have been made about Saddam Hussein’s danger to the United States. In the end, I just hope the public pays attention to all of this.

All the News That’s Fit to Feed

Wed 17 Mar 200411:35 PM

The reigning king of Macintosh XML news readers is NetNewsWire from Ranchero software. It really is a solid piece of software engineering, but I’ve been looking for something that will let me organize all the XML feeds I’ve been collecting in a more orderly fashion. A search on VersionTracker led me to NewsMac, which has lots of great features but has been riddled with a few nagging bugs in its latest incarnation. But the author has been really responsive with fixes and updates, and has even laid out a pretty detailed road map for the application (when’s the last time a shareware developer laid out a road map?). This level of support has, over the past few weeks, gradually won me over, and I’m pretty sure that I’m settling on NewsMac as my reader of choice now.

Out of the Bay

Tue 16 Mar 200409:05 PM

Since last fall, I’ve been working on developing a new Web site for Hog Bay Software, makers of the very fine Hog Bay Notebook software that I wrote glowingly about way back in August. I’m excited to say that it’s finally launched today, along with a new version of Hog Bay Notebook. It’s the fruit of a lot of late nights, weekends and some personal strides in improving my Web authoring skills.

The Sum of Its Parts

Mon 15 Mar 200411:50 PM

If you have a penchant for stilted, muscular dialogue illustrating the passionless relationships between men steeped in their work, then you’ll probably get a big kick out of David Mamet’s latest exercise in elaborate, procedural sleight of hand. It’s called “Spartan,” and what it boils down to is basically a Tom Clancy plot adapted with Mamet’s signature dialogue style and his almost goofy obsession with charade.

Board to Death

Sun 14 Mar 200411:42 PM

For several months, I’ve been working on and off in my free time on developing a small Web site for a shareware developer, and part of that process has, recently, entailed trying to construct a reasonably attractive user forum using phpBB. This free community software is impressively powerful, but after having spent several hours today trying to make sense of its template construction, I have to say that it’s a mess. Have a look at the source code on a phpBB board and you’ll see a soup of embedded styles and nested tables that is mind-numbingly confusing to get through, to say nothing of the style sheet, which raises organizational distraction to an art.

News Flashes

Fri 12 Mar 200412:42 AM

The most consistently funny program on television is “The Daily Show with John Stewart.” For some proof, have a look at “Hail the Armies of Rove” on this page. It’s a gut-busting bit of reportage from Stephen Colbert and serves as just one example of this cast member’s remarkable comedic genius. So I was eagerly anticipating tonight’s showing of “These Just In,” which features a series of four short films from a few of the show’s staff writers. To be honest, I was mildly disappointed, as their overall hilarity was noticeably milder than just about any episode of the show they produce at their day jobs.

To the Vector Go the Spoils

Wed 10 Mar 200409:15 PM

Remember how I created those Aqua-style sliders and buttons a few weeks ago for that project at Behavior? After having finished designing them in Adobe Photoshop, I had come to the realization that they needed to be built using Adobe Illustrator instead, so that the buttons would scale easily and be less processor-intensive when used in Macromedia Flash.

How to Chart Untruths

Tue 9 Mar 200407:45 PM

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman published a damning, evidentiary indictment of the Bush administration’s wantonly optimistic — and highly inaccurate — jobs forecasting. It’s wonderfully concise, to the point, and heavily reliant on a powerful graphic that charts predictions that the White House has made for “nonfarm payroll employment” in 2002, 2003 and 2004 against the actual data provided in a joint report from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.