Archives

Work in Progress

AIGANon-disclosure agreements and a general respect for our clients’ privacy generally preclude any mentions of current Behavior projects here, but I’m going to make an exception of a sort for the work we’re currently doing for the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Since late last summer, the AIGA has been working on a major overhaul of their core Web sites, and we’ve been privileged enough to take part in redesigning one of the major hubs of aiga.org &#40I’m not going to say exactly which one). We’ve had the pleasure collaborating with my pal Naz over at Weightshift, and to design alongside the likes of Flat, which has made for one of the most interesting design processes I’ve been through. After some hiccups, I think we’re getting close to a really sharp solution, one that draws not only on the work of our aforementioned peers, but also on some of the ideas we started playing with on Gain and the work I’ve been doing here on Subtraction.com. There’s a long way to go, but I’m pretty excited about it.

Continue Reading …

+

A Night on the Tiles

ScrabbleLots of people I know decided against joining any kind of large-scale New Year’s Eve celebrations in public places this year. For me, at least, a quiet evening spent at home after a hectic December sounded more enticing than any drunken bash. So right up until about 10:00p, my girlfriend and I were still on the fence about attending a few parties to which we’d been invited. But ultimately, we couldn᾿t resist the coziness of our apartment, so we stayed in and watched Hal Ashby and Warren Beatty’s truly excellent “Shampoo” and played two rounds of Scrabble.

I used to be really good at that game about ten years ago, but something happened to me in the intervening years — I might be tempted to blame the Internet — and my girlfriend handily beat me two times in a row. All the same, I really enjoy Scrabble, and it seems odd to me that it hasn’t been properly translated into an online version. Its simplicity makes it seem pretty well-suited for net play, but after some cursory searching, I could only find a fairly kludgy Java-based approximation called “Word Biz” (Windows only) and a knock-off at Yahoo! Games called Literati.

Continue Reading …

+

End-of-Year Errata

Thanks to those who pointed out the mysterious, unsightly PHP errors that suddenly started appearing all over Subtraction.com this week. I went back through and fixed all the code (I think) so everything should be more or less back to normal. While doing so, I was reminded of all the fixes and tweaks that I’ve been meaning to find the time to implement… well, December has been a pretty poor month for posting frequency, to say nothing of under-the-hood changes, and January looks like it will be fairly hectic as well… but never say never. Happy new year!

Continue Reading …

+

Old Drawings of New York

This Is New YorkI found a copy of M. Sasek’s wonderful, recently reissued book “This Is New York” while browsing for holiday gifts in the children’s section at Barnes & Noble. Its pages exude an immediately gratifying warmth as soon as they’re opened; the illustrations, completed over forty years ago, are evocative of the urban, sophisticated-primitive style of drawing that dominated commercial art in the late 1950s, and which owed more than just a passing debt to the work of Ben Shahn. Though Sasek’s drawings depict a New York nearly a century out of date and are rounded out with more than a heaping teaspoon of naivete, they still communicate the precise pitch and tone of Manhattan᾿s noisy, cantankerous character. There’s no mistaking the sense of limitless possibility in these drawings for any other city, which makes this reprint seem remarkably current.

Continue Reading …

+

Burn Baby Burn

DVD BurningThe so-called “SuperDrive” in my new 12″ PowerBook G4, while not the first DVD-RW I’ve ever had access to, is the first one I’ve personally owned. So, with a little bit of free time this past weekend, I decided to sit down and see if it was possible to burn myself a copy of one of the movies that I own in DVD format — for fair use, back-up purposes only, of course.

Continue Reading …

+

Don’t Spam the Messenger

iChatI’ve had to remove my iChat/AOL Instant Messenger screen name from my already fairly outdated About page because in the past month or two, I’ve become the victim of some pretty frequent IM spamming. There’s nothing interesting or clever about this junk advertising, aside from the fact that it gets delivered over a previously spam-free communications channel; in fact, it’s probably among the more banal and least innovative ways of capitalizing on a new medium that I’ve seen.

Continue Reading …

+

Long Haul in Middle Earth

Return of the KingFor fans who don’t want the J.R.R. Tolkien “Lord of the Rings” trilogy to ever come to an end, director Peter Jackson has apparently done his very best to fulfill that wish with his interminable, ass-numbing, bladder-busting “Return of the King.” It clocks in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred hours and goes to great pains to bring satisfying resolutions to nearly every one of the bakers’s dozen of protagonists and almost all eight billion of the supporting characters in this epic tale of short people and cloak-lovers.

Continue Reading …

+

Tethered to My Wireless Carrier

Treo 600All year long, I’ve been waiting for the FCC’s mandate on wireless portability to become law, so that I could switch from Sprint PCS without having to give up my number, and without having to send out one of those unseemly emails imploring friends and family to “Please note my new cell phone number.” This situation finally became reality on 24 Nov, but as I began to casually shop around for a new carrier I found that the coverage quality provided by the competition is generally even poorer than Sprint PCS.

Continue Reading …

+