Flex.

I’m exceedingly boring these days. That’s why I haven’t posted very much on Deckchairs. And that’s why the stuff that I have posted (e.g. videos, fonts, etc.) is of little relevance to almost anybody but me and three other people. My boringnesss stems, at this time, from three factors: I am completely swamped with (great) design work for (great) clients, Passover was here, and the weather has been mildly better (except for today when we got, yes, about 1 inch of snow).

Just to keep this boring ball rolling a little longer, I saw this new car/SUV thing called the Flex today by Ford and it’s just lovely. It’s the car that I would want immediately if the following things weren’t simultaneously extant:

• The thing probably gets 14 mpg and gas is soon going to $5.00 and then probably $6.00 per gallon
• I have a family of three, not seven
• The car will probably cost $40,000 in Canada

What’s so cool about this vehicle? It looks like what we, as kids in the 70s, would have wanted all of our parents to have back then. Lots of space, wood paneling, long sidelines, round dials up front, a big sunroof, a long wheel base, and seating for seven. Check it out in black.

It almost makes me nostalgic for the days when gas was cheap, life was easier, wood was available, the sun wasn’t bad for you, and travel was fun. Oops, that’s what they wanted me to say.

Words.

Everyone around me seems to be dropping like flies from some kind of series of viruses. Flu, cold, aches and pains, sore throat, coughs, fever, chills, nausea, headaches vomiting, general malaise. There’s some fear about this being a kind of mini pandemic but I only heard about this in the States.

In social virus news, today I bought two words at a new website called The Big Word Project, a new online experiment by two young, smart dudes. It’s cool. Kind of. They’re selling the universe of known English words, one dollar per letter, via PayPal. What did I buy? Man and Sites. Psychologically, it’s also quite interesting. It’s almost like having a blank slate of top-level domain names and it reminds me of how it must have felt when, in 1993, as was rumored, a woman registered every vegetable dot-com domain at the supermarket one day on Network Solutions. With only 1,600 or so words reserved so far, the Wild West of registrations can be mildly relived.

P.S. As of this writing, the word domain is, amazingly, available. And 37signals already registered “backpack.” Others, large and small, have, too.

Ford.

There are still some analysts who wonder why the American auto industry is in such dire shape. Approximately half of the answers can be found within the visuals around Ford’s release of its Alton super-SUV truck.

One of the commenters on the related blog post asked, I think jokingly, “Does this come as a hybrid?”

//c.

This seems to be getting picked up a by a lot of people, but I love the way this photo essay drools over the opening of an old, old computer - a 1988 Apple //c.

Check out how nicely packaged the entirety is and how well the images reflect the care Apple put into the creation of this object.

I remember this machine. My dad brought it home from work in 1988 for me to see and experience. Addendum: I think he actually brought home for me the Apple //e - a mild update to that amazing machine that included a monitor with six colors and modicum of games.

Seed.

I really, really wanted to attend the Seed Conference in Chicago a few weeks ago but a few things such as insanely priced airplane fares from Winnipeg to Chicago and my daughter’s birthday kept me from going. This, despite the fact that I would have loved to have seen a few good friends in Chicago and I could use the business-starting shot-in-the-arm and kick-in-the-arse that the conferenced promised.

In the end (n.p.i.), I’m glad I didn’t go. It would have set my pocketbook, work, and family life back by a month, though it would have been good, clean fun. I read a few reviews of the conference, and Bud Caddell’s was the best. Here’s an excerpt that I found useful:

Small decisions are the way to go. Jason Fried of 37 Signals talked a lot about how his team focuses on breaking any task into tiny decisions to make their work more manageable and also to remain agile. That beats my method, turn your back until the decision is the size of Godzilla and work to create some kind of mecha-godzilla or Mothra solution to combat it — which usually leaves Tokyo destroyed.

And here’s an even better one:

Be blunt up-front. Carlos talked a good deal about always telling the absolute truth to your client, especially in the initial stages of the relationship. “Tell the truth when you’re still friends. An enemy is just a friend that you told the truth to too late.” If you know me personally, you know blunt honesty isn’t something I lack — this presentation just supported my stance.

F11.

It took a little while to figure this out. But thanks to iSlayer, I’ve learned that, with the new aluminum keyboards for Macs, using Command+F3 will clear away your application windows to show the desktop. It’s awesome and relatively intuitive, what with the icon of F3 showing Expose as it may be. I like this feature of OS X and I’m glad it wasn’t eliminated from the new keyboard structure; essentially, it allows me to see everything on my increasingly uncluttered desktop with a bush of two, magic buttons.

Putting things off.

Continuing my line of thought that other people have more time on their hands to write about productivity, here’s one of the best list of ways to beat procrastination I’ve seen. If these things don’t work, I guess you can pretty much decide there’s no hope for you in the procrastination department. Seriously, these are great and pithy “ways.” I better get back to work.

Network Solusucks.

A pretty big story hit the tech world yesterday that Network Solutions, which provides some of the worst network solutions in the industry, is squatting on domain names after you search for them. In this way, you have the purchase the domain name from them instead of going to another, cheaper, or better registrar.

I tested it out to see it first hand. First, I went to Network Solutions, and I looked up the domain name “cropdusternewsworld.com” - the site gave me a “Congratulations!” and then I opened up a new tab in my browser. I then went to Register.com (a large competitor to Network Solutions) and typed in the domain “cropdusternewsworld.com” and, guess what? It’s taken! Amazing, no?

Just to be sure, I looked up “tributenewsitems.com” on Register.com first. Available! Cool! Then, I typed in “tributenewsitems.com” at Network Solutions. More “Congratulations!” I went to Dotster, a smaller competitor and looked up “tributenewsitems.com” and, guess what? It’s taken. And I can “make an offer” on the domain.

Bye Bill.

Okay, I don’t have a lot of respect for Microsoft but I thought this was pretty, mildly funny. Amazingly, he got Obama, Hillary, Bono, Ballmer, Williams, Jay, and Clooney to advertise for him. I think it would have been cool had they shown Bill Gates talking on an iPhone in his office.

Thanks to K.F. for the lead, who noted, and I quote, “Sort of funny in an awkward microsoft sort of way.” (Am I the last blogger on earth to have seen this?)

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Vista Free.

As you probably know, I’m no big fan of Microsoft. They create crappy software, bloated operating systems, and half-hearted websites and all of them, pretty much, are based on the belief that people will continue to buy them. Things must have gotten pretty bad at Microsoft HQ, because the company apparently now has offered a free version of their new operating system. What’s the catch? Well, they get to spy on you and whatever you do and then you get to fill out a survey every so often to make sure that you’re happy with being spied on and that your computing habits match up with your impressions. It’s so insipid that I can only think Microsoft is starting to run a little scared. Who gives away one of their main product lines in order to watch you in the dressing room? Nike? J. Crew? Amazon.com? Sure, you get free cereal in the mail sometimes (or, at least, I used to) but I always assumed they didn’t put spy cameras in the sugar nuggets to make sure your body was processing the stuff correctly.

Shopping.

I had a kind of mini revelation tonight while looking at Facebook, watching American Idol, and petting my two cats, having finished an excellent home-cooked meal of lentils with tofu bacon and an arugala salad with blue cheese and beets at our friends’ house.

Oh, the revelation was that looking at people on Facebook (e.g. finding friends, learning about what friends are doing, and updating my own page) is essentially equivalent to shopping at Amazon. I take a look at the reviews, decide on who I want to virtually befriend, and then check in on the status of the order occasionally. With Facebook, the order is a human life. And, looking at hundreds of faces scroll by, I couldn’t help but think of our individual expiry dates, when we’re pulled from the shelves, taken back to somewhere, far away from the eyes of others. In ten or twenty or thirty or forty of fifty years, someone will pull down my page and there will be a thousand others to replace me on that sliver of server space.

Work Friendly.

In my previous lives, working at nonprofits and corporations for a few years, it was common that colleagues - but not me - wanted to visit websites, especially those like Metafilter. Someone behind a site called workFRIENDLY figured out a pretty good way to emulate Microsoft Word (old school flavors only) so that you can visit sites like Metafilter and not be accused of philandering, time-wasting, or even learning. The beauty of is that the WorkFRIENDLY filter itself strips out the styling of the site and converts it into Arial. There’s even a “Boss Key” that makes it look like you’re, well, thinking.

The whole thing reminds me of something I could have done myself in 1999. But I like the fact that it exists and I love the way sites look through WorkFRIENDLY, all stripped down and out. Of course, if you want to see what a website looks like without all the pretty stuff, you can always download and install Lynx, a free, text-only browser that can looks great on a Mac.

Email Standards.

For those of you who care about companies wasting people’s time because they can’t agree about standards, a bright new website has launched promoting email standards. It’s called, simply, the Email Standards Project. Why does it matter? Because a hundred years ago, industries agreed that planes generally need a wing on each side, that cars need four wheels, and that roads should be paved with a line down the middle. This allowed everyone to focus on the activity of transportation rather than the act of transporting. With many thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman, Web standards has us on a path toward Internet browsers supporting basic website functionality and display. Now, a few people want the same for Email browsers and applications so we can focus on the activtiy of communication rather than the act of communication. Let’s go, email yo!

Unsubscribed.

I recently unsubscribed from stupid newsletter sent by a company that I sometime don’t like hearing from. After having me go through two steps to unsubscribe (and I honestly don’t recall ever signing up in the first place), I got the following screen.

When I tried to “Click Here” nothing happened. What kind of crazy thing is this? A large company that loses an customer creates a screen like this? This is the best they could do? Here are some suggestions for what they could have done:

• Say “We’re sorry to see you go. Sign up again any time!” and then have a link to subscribe again.
• Show me something really cool that might make me interested in their future projects
• Simply take me to a page that says “You are now unsubscribed. If you would like to reach us about anything, give us a shout-out.” And have a contact link around that shout-out.
• How about a picture of a pretty man or woman waving goodbye to me?

I guess I’m thinking almost anything would be better than this. Then again, that’s not true. A picture of the inside of the Elephant Man’s intestines would not be so good.

Technologically Correct.

Boy, they got this one right in the year I was born. It puts Marshall McLuhan and Guy Debord to shame. Note: I’m not entirely sure if this video was filmed, edited, and crafted by some 2007 video art students.

Transmit Supports Amazon S3.

I’m planning on writing up a longer review of a number of online backup services, including Amazon’s powerful S3 service and the concomitant backup tools. But I’m glad that Panic’s new release of their FTP client Transmit supports file transfers to S3. Very cool stuff, though later than its competitors. In particular, I am going to try to get Transmit’s sync functionality to work with S3. This would provide the holy grail for Mac file storage: inexpensive, fast, and encrypted online backups.

Uninstalling AOL.

On my Macintosh, I use Parallels to run a Windows machine for testing websites. It works well, except when I tried to test a site in AOL VR 9.0 (whatever that means) and AOL more-or-less permanently installed itself on my machine.

It’s incredible that a company would make it so completely difficult to remove a piece of software, in 2007! Sure, I know that, back in 1999, it was kind of cool to force software on users because they didn’t know any better and, anyway, AOL was kind of cool, and the Internet was cool, and we were all cool with being cool with each other. Today? It’s unacceptable. And totally not cool.

I know enough about Windows to have found a very ugly alias icon for uninstalling AOL deep within the Program Files folder. Having double-clicked on that little horror-show, I was taken to Windows’ own Add or Remove Programs screen and I had to temporarily rewire my brain. The screen showed an Uninstall AOL program that said “You can uninstall this program or remove it from your computer.” Did I really want to uninstall the uninstaller? Why wouldn’t I want to eat a shoe? I went ahead with it, in the off-hope it would work and part of AOL was removed. I restarted, tried it again, clicked on more components that I wanted deleted, and now AOL is gone.

But, lo and behold, it’s still freaking there! In my Program Files folder, there is another folder called “AOL” and guess what’s inside? A folder called “Installers.”

A Better Backpack.

I've been using 37 signals' Backpack [disclosure: affiliate link] application for a good year and a half or so, stumbling upon it after many, many hours looking at personal information managers that would (help me) keep on top of my many projects, occasional ideas, and special friends. After a lot of searching, I settled on a few different solutions to keep track of things, but the one I'm starting to like again is Backpack. A few weeks ago, 37 updated both the functionality and interface of the application, fulfilling many user requests such as drag-and-drop between pages and more Ajax-y goodness. More importantly, they added these little things called "dividers," which are exactly what they sound like: lines that separate out different lists, notes, or writeboards, which are highly usable writing platforms that can be shared with other writers. Dividers, for me, are the killer application. They allow tremendous amounts of simplification, dividing and parsing different components of a page, and doing it without additional fanfare.

Moreover, I've learned to finally ditch the idea of contexts, which is the raison d'etre of many in the Getting Things Done community. I refuse to look at project lists more than once per day and if I have to do more work than that by contextualizing where a given job has to get done, I might as well be a secretary instead of a designer. (Does anyone really need to indicate that "Buy bread" is "@store" and not "@computer"?)

The most important breakthrough: individual tasks are useless to me. Whereas I used to list out all relevant and related tasks associated with a specific project, now I just list out the project. In other words, I went from a page of 15 projects and 6 to 12 tasks each to, well, 15 projects. My theory is that if I don't know what task to do next, I shouldn't be managing my own projects.

For instance, Client X (a nonprofit in New York) is redesigning a large and important website from the ground up. In traditional Getting Things Done tools, the project would look like this:

Nonprofit Site

• User interface document 1


• Feedback


• User interface document 2


• Feedback


• User interface document 3


• Asset capture


• Feedback


• Approval


• Design stage 1


• Feedback


• Design stage 2


• Feedback


• Design stage 3


• Feedback


• Design stage 4


• Finalize images


• Coding and development


• CSS tweaks


• Content integration


• QA 1


• Content modifications


• QA 2


• Launch

Now, the project looks like this:

Nonprofit Site

Needless to say (though I'll say it anyway), this system is new to me but seems to work. It's not unlike many other systems I've read about and liked but, to me, it's clear and simple and easy to update. In fact, it's the same system I use on paper on my desk but now it's available to me anywhere. As always, your mileage may vary.

P.S. When Backpack was initially launched, I tried it out for a few days. It sucked. I hated it. It's interface was confusing, limited, and lame. I can assure you that, if you have not seen it since its incipience, it's worth a shot.

Now I Want an iPhone.

Okay, this makes this phone something I want. The funny thing is that I don't even own a cell phone currently.

Photosynth.

Microsoft's Blaise Aguera y Arcas shows off Photosynth at the most recent TED conference. Wait for the demo of the incorporation of thousands of Flickr images of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. It's phenomenal and I have little doubt that this is how either the Web or operating systems will work in a few years. (Thanks, R.L.)

Applications in Need of Applications.

I've been really busy with a few smaller projects at work. It's been great, actually. But I've also been thinking about a bunch of technology tools that have been really fun playing with. I don't know why I'm fascinated with these things and I'm trying to find a good, productive use for them, but, for what it's worth, here are they are:

Mindjet came out last week with its latest version of MindManager for Mac. It's a sweet little application that allows one to draw out sophisticated maps of text and images with little stress and strain.

VoodooPad by Flying Meat is a fantastic little Mac desktop Wiki that gets more TLC from its developer than almost any other application out there. The latest version, out today, gives the user the ability to see preview a page just by hovering over a link and holding down two keys.

Then there's NetNewsWire, the RSS reader created and generously managed by the folks at NewsGator. I've tried other RSS readers and this is the best. One very sweet little feature in the new 3.0 version is a mini-screenshot of selected feeds; this is something I've long thought should be part of every browsing experience and which can be found in the most recent versions of Opera. [Note: of all of the applications listed, this one is the most readily applicable and I'm including it here because I can.]

Oh, and the really nifty new kid on the block is the unlikely titled Mental Case. I haven't the foggiest idea what it does. It's nice and dark gray, though, and the buttons and transitions are nice.

Apple Runs.

It's a bit easy and tired to say that Apple is leading the way in terms of digital content. But, in one hour's time, a visitor to the company's website can easily see the visionary power of this singular company shaping the universe of content online. Apple just seems to be doing everything now, and everything right.

There are hundreds of brand new (and free) courses at iTunes U, allowing anyone with a pretty good connection (and the free iTunes application) to learn from educators and researchers at schools like Penn State, MIT, Otis College of Art and Design, and Duke. You can also take a look at Apple TV, which is going to very soon have total access to YouTube. The trailers on the Apple site load more quickly (and have far better quality) than any other sites out there; their large, high definition trailers are incomparable to anything I've seen. The massive Worldwide Developers Conference is coming up in a few weeks in San Francisco and predictions are wild that Apple's new Leopard operating system is going to functionally and visually blow Microsoft's Vista and the current Apple operating system out of the water. Let's not forget that the iPhone is coming out soon, and though I'm still doubtful people will be willing to pay $500 for a phone, the product has the potential to forever change the way they interact with mobile devices. Oh, and yesterday, Apple announced the launch of iTunes Plus, which will allow consumers to buy completely DRM-free music, play it on any player, and own it forever. I'm convinced that other music online music stores will be forced to follow this model. And if you go to the iTunes Plus page within iTunes, the application will tell you, automatically, how to update your music library to DRM-free (but .30 more costly) songs.

I risk the mild ridicule of technologists and the knowing smirks of Apple afficianados, but all of this, to me, is very impressive for one evening's visit to one company's one website.

Intel Conan.

Mean but funny, Conan visits Intel HQ:

Tom Hank's Typewriter.

I read today that Tom Hanks does not like or does not use computers. He prefers the , that great-great-great grandfather of our lowly keyboards. I don't know why he prefers the typewriter, nor do I care. I vastly prefer being able to have a lightweight keyboard and screen on my lap or on my desk; the integrity of the writing process is better maintained, for me.

But I had a realization: I belong to the last generation that actively used a typewriter for writing. I think I'm it. Anyone a little bit younger than me would have learned to type on a TRS-80 or slightly newer computational device. I learned to type on keys, having to push hard on the letter "s" with my adolescently weak ring finger while getting that little thrill of throwing the carriage back, from the right to the left side.

Minisodes.

I read today in the Times that Sony, sometime next month, will introduce something called Minisodes. These little 3 to 6 minute television shows will consolidate older, out-of-play dramas such as Charlie's Angels and T.J. Hooker. I quite like the idea.

Afterall, though I'd like to wax nostalgic in front of The Bionic Woman or The Love Boat or Love, American Style, thinking back to my pre-pubescent thoughts, it's more likely that I would take a gander at a five-minute, heavily edited, perhaps slightly kitchified version of it on my computer screen. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

The Moon.

I wanted to write up a post about how I think Microsoft is completely wiped out because no one is interested in Vista, no one wants to use Microsoft Office anymore unless they have to, no one likes Internet Explorer too much, etc. But then Paul Graham beat me to it with his Microsoft is Dead.

Oh well. I've been even more powerfully interested in tides. Tides. According to my source, the moon controls the rising and falling of the water on the surface of the earth. Yes, the moon. The moon! I'm saying, "the moon." That huge-ass object in the sky that smiles cruelly down on us, its bone white teeth shining on some occasions, then disappearing behind our own bright shadow on others. The moon controls the water surrounding us. Inevitably, it must control us, subtly, sometimes mechanically, sometimes with fierce command. The moon. The Moon. How come we're not all worshipping the moon?

The moon.

Gmail Paper.

Man, this is cool. Google never ceases to amaze.

Goodbye Information World.

About ten years ago, there were a number of good to great magazines about technology that I would actually look forward to getting. These included Wired, of course, but also Info World, PC Week, Mondo 2000 (further back), and other sprightly ones like Upside, which a lot of people hated because of its sappy up-with-technology optimism.

It appears that Information World, the print magazine that has followed me for the past seven or so years, will no longer be printed. In the past year, the magazine has tried to become more gadget-focused, more Mac-happy, and more relevant to non-CIOs. It was a valiant effort and I enjoyed getting every (free) issue. The magazine didn't always have directly relevant information for me, as its focus was on the alphabet soup of ERP, CRM, KM, and IT applications and news about outsourcing, interoperability, enterprise solutions, and innovations (and competition) in business information. But, through the print magazine, I gained a solid understanding of the big picture of technical innovation and how the larger tech players were advancing and receding. It was also good toilet reading—bite-sized, informative, well-written and cogent.

Alas, no more, no more.

Counting to Ten.com.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Microsoft's Excellent Decision to Use Word as a Rendering Engine for Outlook 2007.

I've spent a little bit too much time over the past three days researching and re-researching what the repercussions are of Microsoft's decision to use its Word product, instead of Internet Explorer, to render HTML emails in the new Outlook. There are a few good blogs posts about the issue, which will increasingly affect many people who are starting to use Outlook 2007. Most of these come from the fine folks at Campaign Monitor, an email delivery company I've been with almost from the start (I dissected a Coudal email way back to see who they were using). And the ball really got rolling thanks to Kevin Yank's great article on Sitepoint.

In order to see what kind of damage Outlook 2007 does to Web standards-based HTML emails, I tried a new online application by SiteVista. You can see what the MANOVERBOARD Telegraph, the email newsletter I send out semi-regularly, looks like with Microsoft's Outlook 2002/XP and its newly released Outlook 2007.

Long story short: I've been trying to come up with a nice, pithy, easy-to-use statement about what this means for the few MANOVERBOARD clients for whom I designed and created HTML email newsletters using Web standards. (And, let me say this: Despite excellent support from and a valiant effort by Campaign Monitor, I consider myself fortunate that, as a designer, I only have a few HTML email clients.)

Thus, after a lot of thinking and work, here is my brief statement on the issue:

Using Web standards to create HTML emails is no longer possible because of Microsoft's decision to use Word rather than HTML as its rendering engine in Outlook 2007. You can still create HTML emails with poor/complex/table-based code and they may look fine. Or you can send Web standards-based emails and just give up on anyone with Outlook 2007, as those folks will see a terrible mess. Or you can just send plain text emails, which are great (and superbly legible), except you'll get poor reporting on your campaigns because good reports rely upon HTML and images being embedded in the emails you send.

All of these are bad solutions with the last one being the least bad, imho. This is what I will recommend to my clients who need or want an email newsletter, for now.

Postscript: My new understanding of all of this is that many of us designers and developers were trying to apply the beauty and elegance of Web standards to a medium (e.g. email) that has very competing needs (communication, marketing, file sending, and news) and stakeholders (email users, technology providers, ISPs, and software developers); a longer and more complex technological history than the Web browser; and, no governing organization or consortia (including the W3C) that have the teeth or cojones to police, enforce, or cajole companies to agree on standards for the rendering of emails.

Giving Up On Email.

I so want to do what journalist Tom Hodgkinson did. He just told everyone he's done with email. End of story (more or less). No spam, no checking email at night and in the early morning. No anticipation of emails. No file size attachment issues. No longing for past contact with people electronically. Just the phone, the mail, and the sweet sound of silence.

P.S. I'm not actually going to do this. Unfortunately, that sound of silence would also be the sign of starvation.

Face Time.

If you have some time on your hands, you might want to waste it creating different faces with Monoface, a seamless, slick Mr. Potato Head meets Get a Mac interface that allows you to create over 759,000 different human faces on the fly. None of them look like me, yet.

The DRM of Apple.

Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, has received almost more publicity from his public letter yesterday about digital rights management (DRM) than his iPhone escapade in January. My assumption, per my earlier post on Microsoft's hellish DRM on Vista, is that this is both a smart PR move against Microsoft and a legal and ethical push from a "consumer-centric" company for open music formats.

I'm a proponent of open systems and open sources and, although I don't believe in taking intellectual property that an artist, writer, or engineer does not want to be taken, DRM systems always struck me as plain dumb. The big music companies spend a lot of time huffing and puffing about stolen music but they produce music CDs which essentially allow the distribution of that same music. Jobs gets it right:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That's right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

I've never seen this argument publicly made; perhaps it took a genius like Jobs like to do it.

I'll let the Mac-heads and the laywers sort everything out while I relish in the visuals of Apple's visual history on Flickr.

Appending Text in LaunchBar.

There are a number of excellent launching tools on OS X that allow you to access information, applicaitons, and documents without having to use their mouse. Over the past three years, I've tested out the big three: Objective Development's LaunchBar, Peter Maurer's Butler, and Blacktree's Quicksilver.

All three are superbly helpful. Essentially, you "invoke" the application by typing a combination of keys like Command and Space (all applications allow you to customize your key combination) and then type in a few letters; the software then tries to quickly figure out what you're looking for, be it another application, an address, or an image. For example, if I type in "DAR," I immediately come up with "http://www.daringfireball.net" - a blog I like to read; hitting Return brings up the website immediately. If I type in "WNYC" and then hit Return, iTunes launches my fave talk station. That's it.

While I like Butler because it's "free" (actually donationware) and very powerful and I semi-like Quicksilver because it looks pretty, I really like LaunchBar (which costs $19.95). The application works very, very quickly and its matches are accurate. I recently switched to using my Address Book application to manage all of my contacts and LaunchBar beautifully brings up information from Address Book easily - phone numbers, email addresses, etc.

Lately, I've been using LaunchBar to take quick notes on something or other without having to leave the keyboard. For instance, if I want to make a note "clean out car" while I'm working on something else, I don't have to leave Photoshop. I just call up LaunchBar, type in "TODO" and a .txt file caled "todo.txt" is noted. I then hit the Tab key, type "APP" to call up the Append Text script (built into LaunchBar) and when I type "clean out car," that text gets entered in my todo.txt file. It sounds like a lot of work. Why don't I just open the file todo.txt and then add information to it? Because it would twice as long and I'd have to open the file, type in the information, close the window, save the file and then regroup.

Of course, I didn't invent the Append Text method. Merlin Mann noted how to append text using Quicksilver about a year ago. If you want to try it with LaunchBar, make sure that you can first find the .txt file that you want to open. You'll need to open the Configuration panel, select the group that you're indexing (for instance "Documents") and make sure that "Access items via sub-search only" is not checked. This will allow LaunchBar to find your text document. Much thanks to Objective Development for helping me figure it all out.

MS $uicide.

I know this is the second post about technology in two days. I know.

A friend of mine, RJ, noted to me a fascinating set of articles that could begin with this one Windows DRM is the 'longest suicide note in history' at The Register. In a nutshell, Microsoft, in its limited wisdom about young computer users, has decided to build into Vista, its new operating sytem, the most complex and doom-laden digital rights management (DRM) ever devised. The way it was described to me was such that every potential piece of hardware throughout the connectivity chain (USB connections, RAM, everything) has the possibility of being involved with ensuring that digital rights are adhered to by the big movie/music studios.

My quick prediction is that, if true, this spells the end of Microsoft as we know it. Within six months, the company will see a forfeiture of its market share by as much as 10% to one company, Apple Computer. Microsoft will then have to back its DRM out of Vista and produce a more visionary and gentler DRM for its customer base. It's incredible to me that companies with as many market researchers as Microsoft would choose to deploy a draconian DRM system that goes against the prevailing, lighter-touch sensibilitiy around digital rights that people have come to expect, and demand.

New Year to Write.

A very happy and healthy and peaceful 2007 to all my readers. I was away for the past few weeks on the East Coast (Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York) and it was a great and illuminating trip. I'm back and I promise to be posting more.

A few tidbits while I warm up for further posts:

For some time now, xPad has been one of my very favorite note-taking and note-keeping apps. Its attention to detail, its ability to keep and find text data easily, and its overall usability surpasses almost anything else out there. There are better writing tools but none for the price.

Over the past year, I've noticed that the site and the product itself have had numerous problems of various sorts and the details were revealed today. It's a sad but revealing story about application development, business ethics, Mac personalities and the power of independent developers and software sales sites, which have received a lot of attention recently on blogs and larger sites. The end result is that the developer of xPad is giving away this great product.

Frontline's Kiva.

I just saw a 15-minute special on Frontline that blew me away. An organization, based in San Francisco, called Kiva (site is currently overloaded), had the absolutely brilliant idea of allowing individual Americans to provide micro-credit loans to individuals in developing countries who have expanding businesses.

One man who was interviewed on the program said he could, in a small way, be much like the Gates or Rockefeller Founations. If his lendees paid the money back, which they typically do, he could then reinvest the money in another business. With grantees able to reach computers in their communities, "progress reports" are more like personal correspondence as account managers on the ground handle the day-to-day administration.

I saw the effects of Grameen Bank style lending when I was in South Africa ten years ago when i worked at the Rockefeller Foundation. (Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi that founded the Grameen Bank in 1983 just won the Nobel Peace Prize.) The country was just about 4/5 of the way through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and blacks had finally, finally won some freedoms after apartheid; mostly, those freedoms were political - rarely economic. We visited a slum in Johannesburg that was filled with people, all working away at whatever they could - selling sodas, fixing tires, building houses. One business was raising chickens to provide eggs to the town and there was a largish building housing thousands of chicks; the building was paid for, in part, by micro-credit. I saw, with my own eyes, the power of micro-lending: people gained financial leverage, social clout, self-confidence, better cash flow, and technical skills to manage their funds (all of which, interestingly, I could myself use).

I wish I had invented Kiva. Congratulations, Kiva.

Parallels and Virtual PC for Mac

There's a ton of information out there about installing Windows on an Intel-based Mac using Parallels Desktop for Mac. Essentially, one loads Parallels on one's computer, follows the instructions via PDF et voila, Windows on your Mac while you're running OS X.

There's very little information out there (actually, none) about what one should do if one has invested previously in Microsoft's now-unsupported Virtual PC for Mac. A few years ago, I bought Virtual PC so that I could be sure that the sites I was creating looked and worked well on 90% of computers (e.g. Windows). It was a necessary investment.

It turns out that Microsoft, in its semi-finite vision, bundled the Virtual PC application with Windows XP Professional. There's no way to unbundle them; they live together on a few, unusable, CDs in my office cabinet. I found an old Windows XP install disk to try to load with Parallels and it worked. Except, when I re-booted XP and was asked for my Product Key, the key from my old (legitimate) Virtual PC disk was useless or, at least, not recognized by the new XP just loaded. Microsoft gave me a way to purchase a new key, for USD 200.00, but I already own a valid copy of Windows XP and I don't want to pay an additional $200.00 for XP. I'm going to call my friends at Microsoft and I'll see what they can do for me.

Postscript (10/31/06): It turns out that you cannot upgrade from Virtual PC for Mac to a plain old, vanilla version of Windows XP Pro. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with three different Microsoft tech/sales folks, and, alas, that's the story. For those of you with Virtual PC for Mac and who are now going to use Parallels with Windows XP, you'll have to buy a new version of XP, straight out. While I understand Microsoft wanting to make money on a newer operating system, the company really should have an upgrade path for semi-dedicated Mac users who are committed to ensuring that Windows, well, works.

Better Results.

For some reason, I really like the new Apple ad called Better Results. (Don't analyze it or me too much.)

Speaking of which—that is confessions and results—I sometimes will have days where I'll be in front of the computer somewhere between 8 and 20 hours a day. It's not so much a problem with 8 because that's what one is supposed to do as a worker guy (or schlong, as my friend MR used to say). But when I've worked something like 12, 14, or 16 hours (the latter is rare), using the Command + Copy, Command + Paste, Command + Undo and Command + Redo keyboard shortcuts, my body starts to adhere to the protocols of the desktop mind-finger dance.

For instance, I'll walk away from the computer, move a pumpkin and a gourd around in front of the house and then realize I don't like the results of the new arrangement. So I'll try to mentally hit Command + Undo and nothing happens. The pumpkin and gourd stay in the same spot that they were previously.

Photography, It's Nice.

For the past five years or so, there seems to have been (in my mind) a real dearth of good photography out there. Most of it was either very derivative of documentary photographers or it simply mocked photography in the 1990s. Boring.

Lately, it seems that there are quite a few artist photographers out there doing some beautiful and complicated work. Here's a little list:

Trey Ratcliff's Stuck in Customs, a photo blog filled with his heavily color manipulated images. I love his more "realistic" images, like the one of conservative writer Andrew Sullivan and this one of a gorgeous Eva.

Weird (but not too much) portraits by Noah Sheldon. They feel heavily de-masculinized as well, castrated to their core and gorgeous.

I may have noted her before, but I love the work of Rachel Papo and her website Serial No. 3817131. These are some of the most haunting, mezmerizing photos of Jewish women I've ever seen.

Old pal Jake Dobkin has been working away on some amazing photos of street art on his Streetsy. Jake's got 50 fine pages of photography, each one richer than the next. His photography has been a real collaboration between himself and those who decorate the street. It's asychronous aesthetic collectivism built on top of new technologies. Thanks, Jake.

Airport Slow Connection Speed.

The past few weeks have been slow. I have this laptop and when I'm sitting around with it, sending emails, looking at websites, figuring things out, it was slow. Pictures would crawl in. Banner ads would creep in. Text would flow in. Background images would slip in. And emails, large and small, would traipse out. I'm using an Apple Airport Extreme connection with a G4 laptop. After a little bit of searching, I finally found a series of fixes that seem to have helped tremendously, much thanks to MacFixIt. I hope this helps the wayward airport slow connection speed traveler.

Undel.icio.us

I've seen and used del.icio.us, the online social bookmarking tool, for a while now and have never wanted to set up an account. But then, tonight, in the midst of being tired but not sleepy, I thought I'd open an account and lo and behold, I did!

Wow, it was really interesting importing all of my bookmarks/favorites (I have almost 2000 of them) into del.icio.us. Wow, it was so nice to see all of my folders stored so neatly as tags around each of the bookmarks. Wow, it was so cool to see me editing the bookmarks, adding tags, notes and other things to my bookmarks so that I (and my children and my children's children) could recall websites in perpetuity using del.icio.us. And Wow, it was so great that it all was pretty easy to use and I could even create a little bookmarklet in my browser and I had my own little mini domain name and everything. Wow!

Then I noticed that, Wow, all of my bookmarks are completely exposed to the viewing public. And that, Wow, special sites that I reserved for my use or my client's use were totally available (or at least visible) to any Tom, Dick and Harry who want to visit them. And that, Wow, everyone can see all of my favorite "Inspiration" sites that I go to for regular design or content aspiration. Wow! I was totally exposed within a few minutes!

After looking up "how do I delete all of my bookmarks from del.icio.us immediately," I found that it isn't easy. In fact, it's quite complicated - one needs to have a script compiled to do it. Then I found out something really cool: Wow, I can shut down my whole del.icio.us account immediately. And I did. Goodbye Yahoo! Inc.. (I mean del.icio.us).

Postscript: I know there is a way to make sure that bookmarks are kept private (or some bookmarks are kept private) but it's certainly not clear in any of the instructions I saw. Additionally, I know that social bookmarking is supposed to be, well, social. Still, the situation I described above shouldn't have happened. Rather, what should have happened was this: I import my bookmarks into del.icio.us. The system then immediately asks, "Hi, Andrew. How are you doing? Would you like all of your bookmarks available to the prying eyes of the World Wide Web? We assume you do because you're into social bookmarking, right? If not, check, well, this box, dummy." That's it. How freaking hard would that be to do, I ask.

The Club.

I want to join a club. An electronic club. A club filled with positive and negative electrons, where people share thoughts, ideas, resources, knowledge, and passions and provide personal assistance to those in need, support to the downfallen, and advice to the world weary. I want the club to be full of like-minded individuals who are committed to realistic yet simple rules and who share in the same concerns that I do. I want the club's language to be one of tolerance, respect, thoughtfulness, and assurance. And I want the individual club members to generally always be available so that, when something is noted, someone picks up the thought and continues to run with it.

Further, the individuals need to very committed to not leaving the club. If I'm going to be part of a club, the last thing I want is for me to get used to people being part of the club and then having them leave. Because it's all electronic, there's no real way of knowing where they might have gone to, and I don't want that. In addition, I want the club members to be nice.

I want the the club to be long-lasting. The very last thing I want is for me to join the club and then, about a week later, the club is gone. That would be the worst thing. After years and years of thinking and deliberating and researching clubs, I don't want to join a club and then find out it's shut down, perhaps because I joined it.

I want the club to be tolerant, as noted above, but also diverse. I don't want everyone to agree with everyone and I don't want people to "agree to disagree." I hate when people agree to not agree. Moreover, I want the club to like me.

I also want the club to have good-looking people in it, even if I can't really tell what they look like. It's important that everyone looks good. And they should be good writers as well. Preferably, they should have gone to college and earned a degree in English but also be specialists in their various disciplines. They should be able to bring this education to the club in many manifest ways. There should be no misspellings and no bad grammar. And no cuss words at all.

This brings me to the last thing that I want. I want a club that will take the time to get to know me, who will ask generous questions of me and be generally supportive of me while I learn the ropes. I don't have a lot of time to spend in this club because I'm very busy right now so members in the club will have to understand that.

Okay, if you have any suggestions, let me know. I'm looking forward to joining my new club!

Application Simplification, or Entourage vs. Mail.app.

Having become slightly (or perhaps more than slightly) obsessed with tiny new applications offered up on websites like MacUpdate and described on blogs like Hawkwings, over the past week, I've installed and uninstalled applications with names like Rapidowrite, Quicksilver, y-type, Grammarian Pro and AutoCorrect. My objective is to try to improve upon Microsoft Entourage, my email client of choice over the past few years.

Why do I want to switch from Entourage to another application for email, namely Mail.app (described with the three letter extension most generally by its fanbase because otherwise, it's just "Mail")? Because I've had a few database errors and some odd behavior from Entourage over the past few weeks that, while it's been resolved, made me think that there may be better applications out there to read, manage, and send emails. I'm in the process of trying Apple's Mail.app instead of Entourage. So far, I'm slightly impressed but I won't make a final decision about whether convert my life over from Entourage to Mail and its sister programs, Address Book and iCal. I've read just about every single (often very helpful) post about the similarities and differences between Entourage and Mail, I've tested both out thoroughly (mostly late at night), and I've trouble-shooted both via online forums and blog lookups. There should be a ton of user feedback about both applications and, surprisingly, there's not. One would think that, because email is so critical to the functions of most people's computing lives, a more thorough discovery could be found. Instead, what I found were strong opinions about Apple and about Microsoft and many well-informed thoughts on their respective email applications.

Results revealed soon. And right now, I honestly don't know which application I'm going to pick. It's 50/50. Right down the line. That's not you holding your breath, is it?

Google Does Sales, Fugly.

Although the commercial Web is over ten years young, it's amazing to me and nearly every programmer with whom I speak that setting up e-commerce on a website is a pain in the ass. Designers and developers spend inordinate amounts of time working with some clients who want to set up an online shopping cart. It can be extremely complicated, demoralizing, death-defying and even overwhelming, depending on the quality of the shopping cart and the programmer or group of programmers who are doing the e-commerce integration.

PayPal has attempted to do good but it never has. It's either way too easy to set up, which makes it both ugly and dumb-looking because it's not easily customizable, or it's way too hard to set up, which makes it a hassle and a half. Needless to say PayPal is not now the solution that I would recommend to many people.

Yesterday, in comes Google, with a hearty huff and puff. Their new online shopping cart called Google Checkout looks a bit too much like a PayPal immitation at first glance (and not enough, upon a second glance). It does seem to connect with their online advertising base and it seems to have many different flavors that should make it a shopping cart contender, in my eyes. Here's where it fails: the logo. Why, why does Google's logo need to sit near every transaction button? The buttons are uglier than sin and look as if they were designed by eighth-graders in shop class. I know that much has been written about Google's weird-bad logos and branding but this new e-commerce application can only suffer from Google's bad, old design decisions.

Poscript: I was in esteemed company this week regarding Google and the world of fugly.

My Pretty Desktop.

For the past two years, my daughter has bought into, quite literally, the crazy My Little Pony world of cute, pink and purple rainbow-studded and fresh orange-smelling happy go-lucky ponies. It's a strange micro-culture that probably builds big profits for Hasbro but, to me, it's kind of harmless. The ponies, with names like Rainbow Dash, dance around castles and can be customized with tiaras and tutus and kitchens and balloons.

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about customizing my desktop, which, to me, always felt like the computer geek's version of My Little Pony. Customizing my desktop: even the words sound so completely naive, cheesy, and brain-killing that I cringe as I write. For years, I've known about a Mac program called CandyBar, which essentially allows you to trick out your icons on your computer - they can take on a whole different look - sassy, techy, funky, queer, whatever. For people with time on their hands, I thought, CandyBar would be a big ol' fun thing.

Well, I downloaded the program and a bunch of artist-built icons made for Mac from Iconfactory, a site dedicated to showcasing beautiful, original icons for folders, applications, and actions created by different designers. I tried a number of different "themes" and the one that caught my eye most is David Lanham's Aqua set. These icons are gorgeous, easy-to-read both and large small, coherent, crafty and superbly rendered. I tried to figure out how these are done but, for the life of me, I don't know.

I've now got My Pretty Desktop, full of customized icons. It's fantastic - for whatever reason, I now actually look forward to looking at my desktop again. It's a pleasure to look at all of that customization, probably not unlike the good customers of Toyota's Scion line of personalized vehicles. I'm not going so far as customizing the look and feel of my windows and applications; the one time I did this, using Unsanity's Application Enhancer, the system slowed down and I felt bad. Sure, it looked nice. But it was like all of the work Apple's software engineers had invested in producing a breathlessly good, stable, and usable user interface had gone to pot because of my 3-minute installation of a complex system-changing application.

At the end of the day, my computer interface looks different and it's so nice to be happy and pretty and warm and everything is rainbows and sunshine.

Delete 10,000 [a.k.a. Entourage Error 4362].

I use Microsoft Entourage for most of my emailing, calendar, to do list and address book purposes.

Lately, my whole computer has been slow, in small/large part to having too many files on the hard drive.

And Entourage has had, for about 1 month, some kind of odd database error that I've been diagnosing and perhaps fixed by rebuilding. We'll see. I just went through all of my spam emails, all of my mailing list emails, all of my subscribed unreads, and all of my Deckchairs spam. It amounted to over 10,000 emails and I just deleted all of them. I'll either go straight to technology hell or efficiency heaven. G-d help me.

Postscript: After many hours of researching the error I had, which was generally around the full deletion of emails in my Deleted folder, there are two key sources of information:

Plan A: The fine folks at this MVPS page indicate that this error could be a result of a bad email and I've been convinced that this was the case for many weeks. The solution I used was to turn off the Preview pane in Entourage and then go to Tools > Run Schedule > Empty Deleted Items. This essentially forced the database to kill the bad email and everything seems, seems to be okay.

Plan B:: This link will take you to Microsoft's solution which is not lovely. They basically tell you to back everything up, export all of your data, and then open a whole new account in Entourage and import your old data. I was not looking forward to this and the question in my mind was whether, if I had to export all data (emails, contact, calendar items, and todos) would I just go straight to Apple's Mail.app, Address Book, iCal, and OmniOutliner or try to reinvent my existence in Entourage. I'm glad I didn't have to make the decision. If you ever do, take a look at this healthy discussion of Mac email clients at TUAW.

Sorry to bore.

Memorial Pack.

In honor of the many people who have been killed since almost five years ago, I wish you a thoughtful Memorial Day. This movie, strangely animated and horrendously compelling, may be a sign of things to come, a record of future tomorrows and wars and retributions to be had.

[The device, illustrated in the movie, was designed and invented by a friend of my parents'.]

Switch 2.

After the last totally disastrous post and another recent prediction that failed miserably, I'm going to stick to less political fare.

I'm somewhat interested in Apple's new under-the-radar switch (from PC) campaign. They use the trademark white background, simple dialogue and seemingly unscripted, ironic body language and quipping conversation that the company has become known for in its previous "switch" campaign.

I'm particulary in like with the Networking ad. It shows off the best of a large geek and a twiggy nerd in situ while a pretty Asian woman enters the scene; the first represents a PC, the second a Mac, and the third a digital camera. The acceptable racism and stab at heavyweight folks obviously doesn't bother too many people. And while both male characters are charming, unusual-looking, and well represent body types and technology tropes, they appear a bit knowing, stiff, and too ordinary.

Apple knows that switching computation platforms is not an easy task and, in its marketing efforts, the company knowingly winks at the hell that could arise from moving over. On the other side of the same coin, the white background, clear language and jovial smiles reference heaven, the prospect of redemption and the peace of mind brought about by good decisions and informed consent. The totality is both discomforting and comforting at the same time. I watch these with a sense that I know of what they (Apple, the characters, the writers, the producers, the editors) speak and that they speak it all too well. Perhaps if I was still in graduate school, I could say this was a case of watching a reified series of subjects committing themselves to the lies we tell, the hopes we hold, and the death we wish to preclude.

One note: if you have fast connection, I urge you to view the "HD" version of each of the ads. These huge Quicktime movies show how incredibly detailed high definition imagery can be.

Password Managers.

Like a lot of other Web designers and developers, I have a need for storing, managing and maintaining a lot of passwords. These belong to websites, accounts, applications, file transfer protocol (FTP), and email accounts. Keeping all of these passwords in a secure, organized, encrypted and sound place is a chore. It takes up a constant and consistent bit of work, a careful eye for record-keeping and accuracy, and a whole lot of worry that the information will not get into some schmuck's hands.

Here's an analogy: You're a lawyer responsible for keeping hundreds of individual wills for hundreds of families. They are relying upon you to make sure that their information is kept secure, just in case they need it. And someday, they will. You have to keep these wills organized and up-to-date but you also have to ensure that the wills will not burn up if your office goes down. Sure, it's possible that the familiies have copies of those wills in their homes but it's more than likely that their wills are sitting in an envelope beneath another envelope and they just expect their lawyer to have their stuff, always. Always.

For security reasons, I won't go into which password manager (or managers) I use but I thought I'd just compile a quick list of the better ones offered for OS X. Waterfall Software's Wallet is an improved and serious entry in this busy but tiny market. Koingo Software's Password Retriever and Web Confidential are the old granddads of the field with versions in the 5 and 3 order, respectively. Yojimbo is a multi-purpose information manager that has a dedicated password keeper. There are also a number of contenders, like RadicalSafe and Information Graphic's Secret Book.

None of these are very expensive.

[Disclaimer: I'm not a lawywer. I don't advocate for any of these applications and I don't vouche for their quality, security, encryption, or their customer support. The above is my opinion only and I take no responsibility for anyone trying any of these applications at any time.]

10.4.6 Update Problems, Solution.

What with global warming and all, I shouldn't be posting stuff about my computer. But I am in the hope that I can possibly help a few others out there with Apple's latest (ultimately poor) OS update.

I have two computers - a G4 laptop and and G4 desktop (mirrored doors version). I updated my G4 laptop from 10.4.5 via Software Update to 10.4.6 and it's working great. I always test out my laptop before I do anything on my way-more-important workhorse-of-a-computer G4.

Whelp, I upgraded 10.4.6 and, as I've found on many forums, my computer, when restarting would not restart. Upon initial restart, I got the beautiful gray Apple logo with the unbeautiful spinning gray wheel turning and turning and turning while my stomach did the same. Let be clear: I need that desktop to work in order to work. When my desktop computer is not working, I'm not working and I'm not happy if I'm not working because my clients are not happy if I'm not working and so on.

I'm right now doing a last-resort measure of Archive and Install, based on the instructions at MacFixit. In case someone wants to see how I got to this sorry state of affairs (and, as of writing, I don't know if this will work), here is the order of things (this list is a compilation of all suggestions and recommendations I could find on the subject):

1. After using Software Update (apparently, one should not actually do this but download the requisite update, I got a message saying that the update was being "moved to the Trash" and that it could not load the new software and that I should "try again."
2. I restarted. Nada.
3. restarted while holding down Shift in order to disable many items. Nada.
4. Because I could not get my CD-DVD-ROM drive open, I tried to restart from an external CD-ROM drive with DiskWarrior. The drive was not recognized. Nada.
5. I restarted while holding down the Option key. This allowed me to boot into my backup harddrive (which thankfully contains a nightly backup of my desktop harddrive). The Mac started but I could do nothing except open the internal CD-DVD-ROM drive to load my DiskWarrior 3.0.3 disk.
6. I then restarted holding down the Option, Command, "P" and "R" keys (not an easy job, admittedly) so that the built in PRAM would get zapped. Nada.
7. I then restarted while holding down the "C" key so that DiskWarrior would boot. I rebuilt the directory and replaced it and then restarted while holding down the Shift key. Nada.
8. I then came up with (what I thought) was a fantastic idea: start my desktop while holding down "T" to put it in Target mode. This essentially makes the whole computer one big, fat harddrive. I could then connect the desktop harddrive to my laptop while also connecting my backup harddrive to my laptop. A three-way! I would copy my (good) System folder from my SuperDuper!-enabled backup harddrive to my (bad) desktop harddrive and replace the good with the bad. I got an error not allowing me to do this. Perhaps that was a good thing? Note: during each step of the way, I went out of my way to protect my backup harddirve because without that, I'm shtupped. Anyway, nada.
9. Next is Archive and Install, the last resort (save for erasing the damn disk and trying again or calling Apple India). I restarted the computer while holding down the Option key so that I could exchange the DiskWarrior CD for my Tiger Installation DVD by booting from my external backup harddrive (in all cases, the backup is connected via FireWire).
10. I put the original Tiger disk in and then restarted again, having first removed all connected harddrives and checking that once more, again and then again.. The Tiger install disk came to attention and I told it to do exactly what I had read (about ten times) on MacFixIt.
11. The DVD installed Tiger's initial version (10.4.0) and it looks like everything (applications, files, directories, etc.) is there.
12. I'm now going to download the complete combo update software up to 10.4.5 (the last, very happy, state my desktop computer resided within) and run it on my machine. It's a massive 125 MB.
13. Once the combo update is downloaded via Safari, I want to wait for Spotlight to index my whole computer. It might be okay to interrupt Spotlight from doing its thing but the 35 minutes it takes to index my harddrive is a small price to pay, I guess.
14. Next, according to this article at The X Lab, I'm going to restart the machine using Tiger's DVD and run disk utility and Repair Disk Permissions.
15. I'll then install the OS X Combo update and cross a coupla fingers so that I don't gnaw them off.
16. Finally, I'll Repair Disk Permission from the harddrive after restarting the machine for the hundredth time
17. Then I'll restart just to make sure. And then I'll test all the applications out. I'm assuming, unfortunately, that a few will not work.

More in a few hours.

Two hours later. Everything seems to be running fine. A few weird things like Word icons not showing up correctly on my desktop. Oh and this: everything seems to running more perkily. I'm exhausted.

Truck.

After waking my computer up from a long night of sleep, the monitors starting looking kind of fuzzy and then, a few moments later, lots of lines and dots and dashes in patterns of many colors and sizes started appearing, out of nowhere, all over the screens. I have two monitors, side by side. And they typically work wonderfully, providing lots of visual real estate for my Photoshop and email habits. But today, well, it looked like techno-Santa came to roost in my machine. It's kind of pretty. Lines moving across the horizon, vertical greens and pretty reds on one monitor dancing along with black dashes in bunches of ten flickering on the other monitor. Through the haze of the digital miasma I could still see my desktop and look at my files so I knew that the underlying hard drive was okay. I called Apple (I have three months remaining on my AppleCare insurance, which gives me about, oh, twelve weeks to start looking for a new computer) and, after having to speak the words "PowerMac G4" a number of times into the phone and saying twice that I'm not an educational customer, was put through to Raj in India. At least, I assume it was in India. It could have been Pakistan or the Phillipines. My assumption of geographical identity is based on the last telephone call I had with AppleCare about one year ago. I recall asking John where he was located and he laughed politely and said, "India, sir." I didn't feel like knowing more. Today I didn't feeling like knowing anything except how to get the linear test patterns off my flat screens. I had a feeling it was a dead video card and, indeed, it was (or is). (FYI, yes, I ran Disk Utility from the startup disks and then used DiskWarrior to rebuild and nothing would take care of it so I was pretty sure it was non-disk hardware.) Now, and until tomorrow, I can't use the computer unless I want to squint through the linear maelstrom.

Luckily, I've got my little backup laptop and that's where I'm at.

Actually, I was at the parking lot of a supermarket just an hour ago and learned something. I'd like to buy a truck. In particular, I'd like to get a Ford F-150 pickup. I know what you're thinking: Andy with a fricking truck. Yeah. It would be great. I watched a man step out of his F-150 in the parking lot. By the look of him, he was probably going to go purchase some steak and a few loaves of bread and some apples. But that truck, man, it was nice. Lots of height in the cab. A nice sized, black cargo box situated at the rear of the cab, perfect for holding tools and whatever else I needed to keep protected from the elements. A large but not pretentious wheel base that wouldn't throw other vehicles off the road. Couple that with a 4.2L V6 and 17" machined aluminimum wheels and you're talking lots of possibility. It would suit my new personality, which is all about expedience, certainty and manufactured optimism. And it would allow me to haul things, whatever those might be and whenever they might need hauling. The best part of owning a small pickup is that you're riding high and no one can fault you. No one knows whether you're a cowboy, a farmhand, a machinist or a Rotarian. With a car, people know you're a wuss. In an SUV, people assume you're a waste of natural resources. With a minivan, they know someone calls you dad. With a large truck, they know you're in heavy industry. They just know from your pickup that you have a need for hauling some shit. Sure, if you got one of those Cadillac pickups, it's easy to tell who you are. But with a regular pickup, no one knows. Pure anonymity and the likely perception from afar that you're tougher than most. I realize I might have to change my appearance some, bulk up, and lose the glasses, but I'm into it.

Yojimbo Reviews.

I can't stop researching the subject of Yojimbo as a new means of collecting and organizing information. For those 3 other geeks who have been Googlin' Yojimbo-related arcania, here is a list of relevant links about Yojimbo, its feature set, interface, and functionality and whether it's a Mover app, a Replicant, or a Dud:

John Gruber: Mover.
Nat Irons: Mover.
Macworld News: Unknown, but forum visitors say: Mixed.
Various Hog Bay forum folks (many, if not most, of whom unsurprisngly prefer Hog Bay's Mori, which has real "Smart" folders that assign categories intelligently based on your keywording and which I like a whole lot as do others, in part because the developer runs an active user community site): Mixed.
O'Reilly Mac DevCenter's Blog: Replicant. But, interestingly, Yojimbo uses a SQLite database to store its information, which I understand is actually better than StickyBrain's Openbase database.
MacUser's Derik DeLong: Mover.
VersionTracker's forum: Mixed.

For those who don't like to click on links for some reason, here is a brief summary of information about the application that I've found are relevant to my workflow and the question of shelling out for Yojimbo:

• .Mac sync is a huge value add; Yojimbo is the only application of its kind that truly integrates with .Mac syncing
• Drop Dock tab is very useful for getting information in quickly
• Pop-up data entry is very useful for getting information in quickly
• Creates embedded webpage archives
• Does fast encryption (but I question its simplicity)
• Overall ease of use (DevonThink and StickyBrain are too complicated to learn and maintain)
• It's smart folders aren't that smart; they can't "read" data on the fly
• Search functionality is good but it only works upon hitting the "Return" key, a very un-Mac feature; additionally, is Spotlight searchable
• Does not do hierarchical lists
• Is stable
• Is overpriced at a $39.95 introductory price

Yojimbo.

i just spent a few too many minutes trying playing with some very fine new software by old OS X friends at Bare Bones Software. It's called Yojimbo and it pretty much rocks. It can do a lot of fancy things like saving web pages, bookmarks, text, emails, pictures, menus, ideas, foot odors, and even passwords. It's new and novel and pretty and has a good interface that appears pretty intuitive, to me. (Critical to this last sentence are the words "intuitive, to me." Intuition should never be a universalized assumption, despite what some usability experts want to think.) Mostly, I really like the floating tab drawer that you can position on your desktop that allows you drag and drop content you want to save directly into/onto the application.

Jojimbo has some good competition out there, including the old but recently very renewed Sticky Brain, which looks a lot like Yojimbo, or should I say, the other way around. And then there's the sweet, but odd and oddly named Circus PoniesNotebook, which is fey and pretty much allows you to do all of the above as well and a bit more. Lifehacker featured the latter application today, ironically, as Jojimbo came out, like two days ago and Notebook has been around a long time.

As I mentioned before, there's ol' DevonThink which I know my old college chum Steven Johnson uses and swears by. He's in Davos today.

Jojimbo. It has a nice name to it. It's kind of funny. Say it with me: "Jojimbo." A search on "Yojimbo" comes up with a entry that has led me to review and re-view the well-named application VoodooPad by Flying Meat. (I really like the drawing of the voodoo'd boy on this page. You can even do some similarly ept drawings in VoodooPad, which is unlike all of the rest.)

These note-taking applications are not to be confused with outlining applications like OmniOutliner, which I quite like, though it's pricey for a thing that makes lists. Nor are these apps to be confused with Website tracking software like Webstractor nor its little sister (more like "cousin"), Yoink.

I don't know what the hell is going on. Maybe I need Jojimbo. Or Sticky Brain or Notebook. Then there's good old Stickies, which come with OS X in both Dashboard and desktop flavors. Or you could just use Notepad, and copy and paste all your shite in there in one huge list and click command-F whenever you wanted to find something. The other possibility is to save all of your stuff on your blog, kind of like I'm doing now.

Security and Security.

I've been catching up on my technology readings lately, having been given the excellent Joel on Software book for Chanukkah this year as well as getting a few late tech subscriptions all at once. It's fun. But the enterprise technology ads, I've noticed, have taken a more luxriously minimal design take and a more frightening content look. The designs are all very refined, lots of minimal space and clear, scary text that are geared to make heavy-duty information technology folks frightened about their data, their email, their systems, their networks, their hardware, software, or connectivity.

I looked for a few online examples of these fear-mongering ads but, interesting, corporate websites don't look anywhere near as compelling or frightening as the print ads. It's as if the print marketers figured out that magazines catering to tech freaks best serve their clients by taking a page from Homeland Security. it makes me wonder whether the actual threats to the U.S. national infrastructure and the private technology companies are similarly overvalued. There's no doubt that viruses, adware, malware, spam, breaching, etc. are huge headaches and major financial drains on companies which then need to pass their security costs on to consumers. Similarly, the federal government needs to assess real potential threats from national and non-state groups and individuals which then passes on its costs to taxpayers (or, more accurately, these taxpayers' children). But in both cases, the costs are pretty severe and one can see the logic of fear and fear-mongering in those print ads more clearly than one can via the newspaper.

Monosoft

It's interesting that today, as many have predicted, Microsoft announced that the online software model will be pushed by the company. It's a massive response and acceptance of the immense power of Google's online-based email tools and its most recent embrace of Sun's OpenOffice. In plainer language, Google wants to make PC-based Microsoft Word server-based Net Office. As long as I can remember, Sun has promoted the idea that the "network is the computer" and there are many, many unparalled features (like online collaboration and real-time version tracking) that only network-based applications can handle. Sun, in partnership with Google, could ultimately win the office productivity and workflow market if there is a serious desire for users to go ahead with online apps.

Despite many open source arguments for online application development and marketing, I have serious reservations about both the model and the privacy aspects of this purportedly new approach. There are a few very good and very serious online applications (like 37 signals' excellent Basecamp, which I use daily) that provide a very solid and responsive application environment for simple tasks such as ordering and maintaining lists and messages and documents. The speed of these apps are fast, almost approaching the speed of a PC-based text editor or Word processor. The brief delay in responsiveness because of the network is a small price to pay for the collective nature of these applications.

But if, suddently, Google allowed me to transfer all of my Word documents to an online Word-like repository that could archive, search, and recognize my documents, would I step up and sign up? No. There are two key issues of trust that I could not readily accept:

1. What will Google do with the content of my documents sitting on their servers? What are the real legal responsibilities that Google has toward me and my business documents? What legal repercussions are in place if, for example, they decide to share even aggregate data about my archive? And what would happen if someone at Google or a smart hacker could suddenly access my business, personal or other agreements, proposals, and personal information?
2. As worrisome, what happens if Google shuts down? If Larry Page and Sergey Brin get the avian flu one day and the company shuts its doors, do I lose all of my documents and my business flies away the day after? And what happens if, for whatever reason, Google's (albeit superbly redundant and stress-tested) servers go down? Will they assure me that I can get my documents back in an hour, a day or a week? And, most apocalyptically, what happens if the whole Net goes down? Granted, as a Web designer, I'm out of business anyway. But what about my mom's documents?

[Google's Gmail (email) is an exception rather than the rule here. Gmail, which is a powerful and highly usable online application, can also be used on the desktop by programs like Microsoft Outlook. And Gmail, despite its cool factor, has raised numerous legal questions about the privacy of content stored.]

I think it's wise for all of us, if, in the long run, Google and Microsoft battle it out in the online application arena. It will mean better overall application development, stronger user interfaces, and more thoughtful engagements with customers. But, unle