Fusion Fun.

Thomas Friedman, in his ongoing attempt to push the boundaries of innovation in the U.S., argues for a push on “fusion” as a way to have a purchase on a massively game-changing energy source.

In his piece today, The Next Really Cool Thing, he writes:

Last Monday at 3 a.m., for the first time, all 192 lasers were fired at high energy precisely at once — no small feat — at the target chamber’s empty core. That was a major step toward “ignition” — turning that hydrogen pellet into a miniature sun on earth. The next step — which the N.I.F. expects to achieve some time in the next two to three years — is to prove that it can, under lab conditions, repeatedly fire its 192 lasers at multiple hydrogen pellets and produce more energy from the pellets than the laser energy that is injected. That’s called “energy gain.”

It’s also called “playing with fire” (pun intended). A few years ago, a physicist warned that that we simply don’t know what we’re doing by forcing elements together that previously didn’t exist together on Earth. Sure, it would be “cool” to have a “miniature sun” just fifty miles east of San Francisco. But do these scientists know how to capture, confine, and control that sun? What happens if this new sun created so much energy that it consumed the state of California, the North American continent, or the planet itself?

While I reserve some respect for Mr. Friedman and his desire to pursue “clean” energy, this is the kind of “reporting” that gave us a nice war in Iraq, a worldwide economic crisis, and a greenhouse warming. Are we all a bunch of suckers, hoping that we’re going to gain free energy—without risking the very structure of the planet?

If journalists like Friedman can’t ask the hard questions of these scientists, I worry not for the future of journalism but for the future of our little existence.

Wolfram|Alpha.

Wolfram Research is planning on launch its Wolfram|Alpha in May. If it’s real (and I have some small doubt that it can truly work as planned), it could change the way we interact with the Web, find information, and experience ideas online. Wolfram|Alpha is a computational tool that can answer natural language questions by digging deeply into the known informational universe and provide meaningful answers. Computation over lookup is its model.

Nova Spivack has a detailed description of it but, in a nutshell, here’s what he says Wolfram|Alpha is:

Where Google is a system for FINDING things that we as a civilization collectively publish, Wolfram Alpha is for COMPUTING answers to questions about what we as a civilization collectively know. It’s the next step in the distribution of knowledge and intelligence around the world — a new leap in the intelligence of our collective “Global Brain.” And like any big next-step, Wolfram Alpha works in a new way — it computes answers instead of just looking them up.

Spivack, who got a tour of the system recently, also says the following:

One of the most surprising aspects of this project is that Wolfram has been able to keep it secret for so long. I say this because it is a monumental effort (and achievement) and almost absurdly ambitious. The project involves more than a hundred people working in stealth to create a vast system of reusable, computable knowledge, from terabytes of raw data, statistics, algorithms, data feeds, and expertise. But he appears to have done it, and kept it quiet for a long time while it was being developed.

It appears that Wolfram|Alpha is a perfect compliment to Google’s search tool and a more trustworthy friend of the Semantic Web. Although it’s billed as a computational model, this new product/service may offer a more reasoned and humane approach to Google’s in that it allows a the praxis of questioning the logic of conclusions. It would be nice, for instance to be able to ask “When do most economists predict an end to the current credit crisis?” and get an answer based on a set of real, if biased, known data. I’m eager to find out more.

UPDATE: I tried out its competitor, [true knowledge] (what is it with the extra characters in these new systems?) by asking the following questions and receiving the following XML responses:

How many stars are in the milky way?

completeness unknown 100,000,000,000

How big is eifel tower? [purposely mis-written]

completeness unknown 324 Meters (1,062.99 feet)

Keychain -2147415734 error.

After a few weeks of banging my head against the keyboard - and only having small key impressions on my forehead to show for it - I think I’ve solved the problem of receiving the error:

“Keychain error There was a problem saving to your keychain. Please try again or use Keychain Access to verify your keychain. Error: -2147415734.”

Essentially, my various Macs and iPhone were not syncing. Every time that I added a new date in iCal or a new entry in Address Book, I couldn’t be guaranteed that those would appear on the other machines. Further, using .mac/.me was like watching paint dry; it would either be slow, unresponsive, or sticky.

I’m noting because others might find this useful and, well, because I may forget in two days time how the problem was solved.

The issues seems to be around the Mac’s Keychain, which either becomes corrupted or experiences a permissions error. There is some information about it here, on Apple’s discussion board. The last post on the board was the most helpful, though not extremely so.

Here are the steps I took to remedy the situation:

1. Shut down all applications on all computers.
2. Ran Cocktail on all machines.
3. Opened Keychain Access (an application in the /Applications folder)
4. Opened Keychain Access Preferences and then clicked on “Reset My Keychain”
5. You get the standard warning but I said Ok
6. I restarted the computers, just for good times’ sake and re-entered my .Mac/.Me information BUT this time, I used my username only (e.g. username and NOT username@mac.com or username@me.com), as I believe part of the original problem stemmed from a multiple addressing issue on Apple’s part

I hope it’s helpful to someone out there.

Thanks 2.

I have a lot to be thankful for on this holiday in the United States (though I reside in North North Dakota, as my friends in Brooklyn sometimes say). Instead of revealing my most treacly and open reasons for thankfulness, however (which include, importantly, my health, my family, my business, my quick wit, and the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States of America), I thought I would treat you to my latest thank yous to those technological innovations that drive my work, my mind and, perhaps most relevantly, my distractions. These technologies are constructs that I could easily live without, bits followed by bytes that are less necessary than they are needed, and more pervasive than they are pertinent. In any case, or in all cases, they are as follows:

• NetNewsWire, which I use every few months, but when I do, I thoroughly enjoy it. The strange reality of RSS feeds is that they hover in nothingness, without context or the pretty graphics that make blogs great and relevant to me. But I still love the unification of posts in NetNewsWire and the synchronicity of Newsgator, multiple desktop apps, and the iPhone app. No one has done this integration better than these guys.
• Backpack (note: affiliate link), which I love to hate and hate to love. I’ve tried other to-do lists, note-taking tools, and online repositories of every variety and I keep coming back to the scrapings of Basecamp, which allows me to semi-organized my semi-life with relative simplicity.
• Movable Type, in which I have written, composed and re-written and re-composed endlessly boring posts like this one. I still vastly prefer my current installation of the application, stuck in, approximately version 3.5.2 and I likely will not upgrade to 4.0 until it becomes 5.0 and less reliant on pretty-pretty. I know that my blogging friends and neighbors are all moving, en masse, to Expression Engine and WordPress, but I like what I know and I know what I like: MT 3.5.2.
• Safari, which is a browser par excellence, and continues to beat Firefox, a recently beautified application that is unquestionably faster, cooler, and more relevant to Web designers and developers like me.
• MobileMe, Apple’s terribly expensive sync tool, allowing me to write once (in iCal, Address Book, and Yojimbo) and find it anywhere and everywhere. While it’s had its hiccups, it continues to be the only way to ensure that I don’t have multiple dates, names and passwords strewn across the desktop landscape of my office and abode.
• Yojimbo, speaking of this, which humbly holds a ridiculously large number of passwords, bad ideas, good ideas, bad passwords, receipts, boilerplate, serial numbers, and digital detritus that has nowhere else to reside. Yojimbo, horribly named, has grown on me like a new arm.
Posted by Andrew at 10:42 PM

Gore on 2.

This is a powerful speech (at O’Reilly’s recent conference) by Al Gore on Web 2.0 and its’ relationship to global climate change. Now that Obama is about to be in office, Gore, rightly, makes a call to action and a call to arms: The U.S. should set “a national goal of getting 100 percent of America’s electricity from renewable and noncarbon sources within 10 years. We can do that.”

And more:

Seinfeld and Gates.

The new Microsoft campaign, fronted by funny man Jerry Seinfeld and rich man Bill Gates, has arrived.

Here’s one of the longer videos, so far:

On the surface, we see Seinfeld and Gates, two of the most known characters in our culture, enjoy some time together with an average family. The marketing team at Microsoft wants us to laugh at that the company has been mildly out of touch with the technological needs of Americans—and that nothing less than the ex-CEO visiting your home will help rectify its customers’ distrust for the company. Companies like Apple are nipping at the coattails of Microsoft, and the Mad Men of Microsoft want to make sure to tell people: “Hey, we get it. We’re not the big and powerful monopoly we once were. We’re nimble and kind of quirky, just like Apple. We even know that we’re a bit out of it. See?”

The mom asks for financial advice. The pre-teen girl pulls a prank on them. The pizza guy is shunned by men who, together, have billions.

But what the marketing campaign is really telling us is much more powerful: The growing inequality between the very rich and the very average has grown beyond anyone’s expectations. And there’s no way to easily rectify it, except through hope and mockery. David Frum, conservative author, wrote a lengthy piece about this yesterday. In it, he writes:

As long as all Americans were becoming better off, few cared that some Americans were becoming better off than others. But since 2000, something has changed. Incomes at the middle have ceased to rise. The mood of the country has soured. Conservatives who disregard the mood of unease may forfeit their power to defend the more open and productive American economy they did so much to build.

At the end of the video, Seinfeld and Gates, walking off into the sunset, their bags in tow, do a little dance—and we laugh at our expense.

iPhoned.

I’m now officially counting down the “how-long-can-he-go-until-he-succombs- to-iphonia”. This is day one. I think I can wait about 21 days, which is probably long enough for Rogers to have enough black iPhones in stock again.

A nice illustration of my general feeling right now can be summed up by the photo illustration found on a post at Gizmodo’s yesterday, called 10 Ways to Escape From the iPhone Madness.

What do I like about the iPhone, or at least the idea of the iPhone? I currently don’t own a cell phone. This is an admission on the highest order of admissions, kind of like saying you don’t like to drink alcohol. I currently don’t drink alcohol.

No, what I like most about the iPhone is its design, its construction, its iconography, and the ability to watch a movie, any time, in your hand. But what I think I love about the iPhone are the new applications that are coming out fast and furious that are associated with the phone. These tiny programs, built by some of the most interesting design and development firms in the industry, are what is going to make the iPhone a powerful tool; further, my bet is that the iPhone’s acquisition rate is going to be driven, over the next few years and if we don’t go into a deep financial Depression, by these apps, which allow you to do everything from write on Facebook to calculate tips at restaurants and keep to do lists about the applications you’d like to buy for your iPhone.

These apps can currently be purchased on iTunes and they’re cheap, ranging in price from free to $30.00. I don’t see any reason not to be a Mac developer these days.

The countdown has begun. And, as exciting as it is, it’s also embarrassing.

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, unless Google and Microsoft have a way to create real-time syncrhonicity between desktops, networks and server clusters, I doubt the real prospects of massive migration to online apps. This means, by the way, that Bill Gates' vision of an Office on every PC is the long-term winner.

Why the Web is Won

I've been looking for a babysitter here in Winnipeg for a few days. I've asked neighbors, friends, colleagues, strangers, and even casual bystanders how thye would go about finding a regular babysitter in these here parts. I got the following answers: post a piece of paper in the community center, ask "XYZ" because they know about these things, see if you can find a nice grandmom in the neighborhood, and take a classified ad out in the community newspaper. Others thought I should use the Yellow Pages, which I actually did, and the babysitting service that I called said they probably wouldn't have anyone available for those days but that they would get back to me in a few days or weeks. The woman owner said she was about take out an advert in the city newspaper herself to start attracting more babysitters for her business.

I went online. Used Google. And then found Babysitter.ca.

I'm not sure it's going to work but the model is pretty excellent. Essentially, a parent signs up for the service, pays a fee for a few months and then can search the qualifications of various sitters who have also signed up on the site. Sitters do not have to pay a fee to join the site which is wholesome and fair. What I think is brilliant about the system is its ease of use as it allows you to post an ad within the secure confines of the site and you can read reviews of the babysitters posted by other parents. But it's not one way. Parents, too, can get reviewed by babysitters so that they, too, will know if they or their children are holy terrors.

This is not to say that the backyardigan nature of gossip and personal connections is over and done. But it does make me think that the Web has become, even in smaller cities (Winnipeg is 700,000 strong), a crucial component of social infrastructure that is more or less unexploited. No one in my initial conversations with residents here noted this website. One person mentioned Craigslist but the user base here is not large, yet. I know I don't need to be a booster for the Web's business-to-business foundation; but, this is a small-scale case for the power and efficicacy of the Web's ability to solve real problems in real time via human endeavor.

Do Squidoo

I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, though I don't always or can't always, follow his superbly written and presented e-book advice. He has a new venture called Squidoo. The goal is to create little pockets of expertly written information (like Wikipedia) but with a metaphor of lenses to allow better information to rise to the top. It's informationally slick - and there's a lot being written about it. You can sign up for a maybe limited beta account.

To Do

The other day, I purchased the Omni Group's OmniOutliner. I've been looking for a user-friendly, simple and powerful little toolbox that can sit on my computer and take the abuse of a hundred to-do notes. After looking at a lot of other Mac-based applications, this one easily fits the bill. You'd think that, because I have so many items to take care of, that I don't have time to do the research into what application will act as a container and database for my to-do items. You might even think that, by researching ad nauseum the many applications that exist out there, that I'm also procrastinating and not making the most of my time. You may even presume to think that I just want a new toy to play with and explore, finding new ways of organizing information and learning how others might associate different kinds of important information. You'd be somewhat correct.

I am now using OmniOutliner and, after 3 days of loving it, entering all of my list items (including "put up wire holders in kitchen," and "move files out of Entourage," and "organize office file system"), I hate the f*cking thing. It's really no fault of the application. It's me. I hate having all of these open check boxes sitting around, mocking me, telling me how inferior I am and that I'm an incompetent, time-wasting, and inefficient SOB. I hate the fact that, when I check one little item off its pretty little face, the others scream out laughing and tell me to get my sh*t together because I only have so many more days in this world and people are waiting for this stuff to get done. Then, I close the application and the crappy little icon sits on my computer and I know I need to open it again, because there, in all of its fricking glory, are the things I need to do, unreviewed, unchecked, undone.

F*ck.

Postscript: I must not be the only one thinking about the need for good To Do lists. I just received an email for beta testing a new online application that sounds good but looks only average from the goog folks at Good Experience. Sign up for a trial.

Goods

These are things are good:

Martha Stewart publicly renounces the use of and the wearing of fur. It's impressive. Martha says: "So much violence in the world seems beyond our control," says Martha, "but this is one cruelty we can stop by being informed consumers."

Opera, the browser manufactory, released its product completely free today - it used to be $39.00, believe it or not. It's a great browser - fast, slick, smooth, and pretty. It's a great alternative to Firefox and especially to Internet Explorer.

I finally installed the new Mac OS X on my desktop, which hasn't been used in a few months. It's nice. No big deal, but nice. BTW, I was greatly helped by Joe Kissel's well-written and well-documented e-book Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger.

T-Mobile finally released my Brooklyn cell phone number for my Vonage line. That's sweet. Vonage is great for the price, but like all inexpensive things, it's not perfected yet as voice clarity is less than transparent. T-Mobile will now get to bill me $200.00 for cancelling my service contract. Lucky them, too!

Google IG

I've been using My Yahoo! since the day it launched (or perhaps a few days later). I've found it an undeniably helpful homepage resource for so many years that, if it actually disappaered one day, I think I'd be in trouble. It contains all my lead stories, a lead photo that always has an emotional punch to it, and top-line weather in Brooklyn and Winnipeg (previous incarnations revealed weather in Krakow, Poland and Troy, New York). The map functionality on My Yahoo! is unparalleled and, yes, I can search through the top search bar. Yahoo! really knows me, pushing ads lately for stock photography, laptops and miscellaneous but uninteresting software.

While Yahoo! just pushed out it's new Mindset tool, Google gave birth in July to an elegant, if too simple, customizable personalized homepage that I'm actually considering switching to. Why is it so powerful. Because of all of the RSS readers and content feed delivery systems, Google's just works nicely. Using drag and drop trickery, I can load up my favorite blogs, websites and other thangs and then place them on the page where I want and leave out the decoration that My Yahoo! provides and, unfortunately, overuses. You can also customize the screen at any time without having to go into a special "customize" mode as you do with My Yahoo! Finally, your recent Gmail Inbox can appear, which is no small feature, especially when I'm waiting for something important to be sent to me. One feature it's missing - the ability to box out, through colors or borders, the various kinds of content on the page. That would make the totality of the interface strong.

I'm not convinced it will change my online behavior but it might. Right now it's a bookmark directly under my homepage button. More information about customizing Google's homepage can be found at WikiHow and

Mindset launched

in case you're looking for something to do in your spare time, take a look the new mindset tool by Yahoo!. It's slick, intuitive, Google-competitive and more or less useless. Which makes it art.

In other tech news, I noticed that my ol' friend over at manoverboard.org is doing weird application science for Mac OS X. Pretty interesting little applications, too. It's just too bad I never registered that darn domain name because Mindset put's his site ahead of mine sometimes in the rankings.

Still more: I deleted all my sports bookmarks today. That was a good feeling.

Further: This looks kind of fun, although apparently Steven Johnson raves about it.

Techno Links

We're going through some major growing/planning pains so bear with Deckchairs another few days while we sort out our lack of commentary.

In the meantime, here are some nice links on late technology fun:

• IBM and LAMP
• 456 Berea Street on Web Standards practices and recommendations
• An overview of "captology"
• Landing pages explained
• Fontographer owned by FontLab

Tiger, Tiger

Although I've purchased Apple's new OS, Tiger, I ain't upgrading until 10.4.1 comes out. For the braver souls who are upgrading, I did find a very useful listing of software vendors who have upgraded their applications for Tiger.

I've never had perfect success with upgrading an operating system as so many others (seem to) have had. The typical install for me takes 2 weeks of trepiditation and nervous stomach, 1 day of hemming and hawing, and 2 hours of teeth biting as the software loads. Then it's about 4 hours of complete and utter FREAK-OUT, followed by 2 nights of resentment, anger, self-hatred and fear of technology and 4 days of quiet re-organization. This, in turn, is followed by general fear of OS failure for 2 months.

Backflack

The good folks at 37 Signals have come up with another very interesting new web-based organizational application called Backpack. It would be great to have an online, sharable, nicely designed, and fast web-based tool to gather notes, ideas, photos, and to-dos together but, let me be one of the few to say: it's lame.

Here's why:

• Backpack, for the father-me, is best known as Dora the Explorer's expedition friend who helps her find navigate the territories of the world.
• Backpack is basically a rehashed, genetically re-engineered Basecamp mixed up with Tadalist, both properties of 37 signals.
• Backpack is too smart for the average Joe and too dumb for the average Geek.
• Backpacks typically rot, get all beat up, and smell. I wouldn't want my backpack, filled with old Kleenex, wet matches, and dirty socks to be shared with anyone.

Having said all that, I do love the 37 signals blog.

Blogs, blogs

I’ve been writing to Deckchairs for about 1,000 years and now everywhere I look, blogs appear. It’s remarkable that weblogs, bloggers, blogs, blogging, war-blogging, etc. have taken on a life of their own and are not a component of the “Internet” or “Web design” or “Content Management.”

But blogs like Deckchairs are pretty old school. My intuition about blogging is that, as business blogs grow and more CEOs, personalities, and corporations use blogging on their sites, personal blogs will increasingly look small, petty, and possibly N/A. Everything technological today moves from the personal to the socio-political: cellular phones to ringtones, downloadable files to digital piracy, recycling to full-on green cars, pirate radio to podcasting and mixability.

A few mild moments in time to prove my point:

Business Week’s cover story is all about how blogs will change big business. I think they’re right. And one way I know they’re right is that because the online article is more interesting, comprehensive, and carefully formatted than the newstand edition, which looks like a bad Rolling Stone layout. In the online version, you can actually read the article, click to related links, and get a sense of the transition from the personal to the corporate. The magazine is also launching its own Blogspotting site.

A newish company called, sadly, Othx aims to pull personal weblogs into its fold. You can pay for being featured higher up in their search rankings and they act as a kind of oddly commercial warehouse for personality-driven blogs. Nice idea but you know that personal blogging is over when sites like this crop up. I signed up!

Yahoo has a new News interface that they’re trying out. It’s pretty great and one of the reasons is because it doesn’t look like a blog. It’s Amazon-like tabbed interface makes reading news easier and it will be a great tool once it’s fully RSS-enabled (which will be very soon) and corporatized.

Adobemedia

Well, it's official, Adobe bought Macromedia. I had heard rumors about it but now that it's come to light - and it all makes some sense - I find it sad that competition is again being erased. There are many, many good, small design software shops out there but none of them will have the baby teeth to take on a behemoth like this new company.

So what? Adobe has done a good job of providing quality software over the past three years.

What does the design software community really need?

Here's my wishlist:

• A stronger commitment to Web standards and Web standardization which would include promotion of accesssibility, good coding, and good usability.
• The ability to better customize software. Mozilla is of course leading the way with themes, extensions, and plug-ins. Photoshop and Dreamweaver have had extensibility for years but the barrier of entry is pretty of high.
• Less bloat. Software should have fewer bells and whistles when installed and the possibility of turning them on and off as needed.

Small is Good

For the second time in two years, I had to have my 20-inch Apple Monitor in for repair. It doesn't actually bother me that much. The thing is basically on all of the time and the technology of LCDs is pretty new and, afterall, the thing's a workhorse. (I'm always surprised when obsolescently-designed machines actually perform better than my withering expectations.)

What I found interesting was that I actually like working on a "little" 17-inch LCD monitor, my backup. It's small, square, and stable and it's a bit brighter, somehow, than the larger beast (now sitting on its side in some DHL depot between here and Florida). Sure, the visual real estate isn't there and I can't have four applications open at the same time. But I'm enjoying the new, clean desktop, the solidity of one window per application, and the confinement of focus that this visual reprieve has brought to my table.

Email Newsletters

I've been creating email newsletters either for myself or for clients for probably about 8 years.

I started designing these things back when I was heavily into promoting The Site at MANOVERBOARD and gathered steam with about 400 subscribers. I created simple HTML emails that would highlight the artist being exhibited on The Site and then I would send them out from my 14K or 56K modem 20 or 30 at a time until they were delivered. My ISP at the time (Interport, long live Interport) couldn't handle more than 30 emails at a time.

The Site is now more or less kaput and has run out of steam on its own (my own?) accord. In any case, I've used a number of good to average online email marketing solutions to send emails for MANOVERBOARD and for many clients over the past 3 years. There has been mixed success. The statistics one can gain from tracking emails sent to your loyal followers is insanely detailed; what I mean is that an email sender typically knows a tremendous amount of information about the quality of the emails they are sending by looking at the "open" and "click-through" rates of those emails. Some server-side email software can also tell you what visitors clicked on what links, which is both scary and cool if you're a senstive marketer like me.

Regardless, I've found a new email newsletter home at CampaignMonitor which seems to totally rock. I've had a few successes with it and I'm relaunching The Telegraph, a MANOVERBOARD newsletter that has sadly been in winter hibernation because of a project called Overload (see previous post). Long story long, Seth Godin wrote a short, cogent piece last week about email marketing and he's spot on: good marketing takes time, knowing your audience, catering to their needs and whims, and being consistent. What more is there? I'm planning on re-applying this idea to all my newfound email projects with my new email newsletter application.

[For a future post: Commentary and explication of the dearth of solid, useful information on the Web about email marketing, email technologies, HTML vs text emails, email clients, and email delivery systems.]

The $100 Laptop

Not enough commentators and news organizations have picked up on what I consider a big story: the near possibility of a $100 laptop that would allow billions of poor schoolchildren around the world to connect to the Internet. Journalist Kevin Maney, of USA Today, pushed this story a few weeks ago, driven by the Davos Forum and Nicholas Negroponte a few weeks ago. Large companies have rightly signed on to push the technology forward; they include Google, AMD and possibly Samsung and Motorola.

Slashdot, BoingBoing, and many others have noted the story weakly. To me, it's a fascinating construct and one that could be more than confabulatory if all of the positives really came out. The standard reasoning among many promoters is that the $100 laptop would allow potentially violent young insurgents to see how "cool" the West is and forgo their anger and hatred of all things Western (this myopia seems contingent upon the seductiveness of video games for some reason). Others see the pure economic benefits of, say, a Nigerian woman being able to sell her handmade items on eBay. Still others focus on the educational aspect of the $100 laptop, allowing students in developing countries to learn more deeply than they could have before.

It also seems that there are many micro-economic effects that the $100 laptop could have on our global culture and economy as well:

• Because the proposed systems would be open source based (to save costs and ongoing fees), programmers in any country could join the front in creating reliable, strong, and usable software.
• Small high-tech firms could reproduce the product within their countries, providing jobs and social structures in small communities.
• Innovation would be pushed open across the board. Rather than one set of hard-drive technologies being focused upon consistently, for instance, other kinds of memory devices and systems could be explored.
• The need for new phone systems (mobile or landline) could essentially be eliminated in small, hard-to-reach areas as VOIP could be used among the poorest to communicate.
• Medical facillities and other information-critical organizations would be greatly assisted with the advance of ready-to-use technical assistance provided online.
• Whole economies could tie into the Web, providing new communities and financial bases for products and goods where there were none before.

The logic of this is so clear, so pure, that it's hard to believe an NGO or major multinational hasn't already been started to push this project deeply. Western and Asian businesses would of course reap huge benefits with new subscribers and new audiences -- as would local news organizations and academic institutions. For a foundation or major corporation, $100 million dollars towards this project would go a long, long way.

Good Idea

The title of the email below, which came today from a spammer, is Good Idea. I've been tempted to call this person on their phone number (548-946-1628) or mobile number (961-650-1357) but perhaps I can leave that one for Monday.

Die land, divide. Big near when. About, describe begin want. I give little plan meet. Rock boy engine, receive. Build kind ocean. Young small among base. Car sun river, who self some. Travel drive surprise, perhaps group. Contain apple sent direct. Feel, come special effect. Equal listen team glass possible lay.

Ogling

There comes a time when every man must confess what he desires. This is not that time. However, there are a few newish applications out there that look worthwhile, including:

Process: A small but sophisticated outlining application for OS X that allows one to plan projects. It should open with the capability of planning to buy this program. It's 25 bucks.

Transmit: Panic.com today released its newest FTP application which makes it an even sexier, smarter, and faster way to get files to and from Websites. I love Transmit and will likely want to pay 18 bucks to get the upgrade.

Snapz Pro X: This has been on the list for a while. The application allows you to capture anything on your screen including full motion video. Imagine recording your mouse movements as you roll over the relationship of your name to historical circumstance on sites like The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager! [Note: the whole purpose of this post is to promote the ogling of this last site. The NameVoyager is truly amazing.] I can't seem to find the 69 bucks for this yet, though.

iPod Sucks

I know that I'm not the only one without an iPod but the whole thing just gets sillier and sillier.

Besides the reasons that I enumerated earlier, Apple has come out with iPod Socks (U.S.) that allows a device owner to, well, put your iPod in a sock. Dumb.

And the iPod U2 Special Edition? Dumb and not even nicely designed with its black and red palette and laser-etched signatures on the back making U2, once original musicians, look like a bunch of clowns.

CrackBerry 7100t

After much hemming and hawing and spitting and scratching, I broke down and bought the newest Blackberry telephone the 7100t from T-Mobile, which is part of the BlackBerry 7100 Series.

For over one year, I thought about purchasing the now famous Treo 600 and looked at all the Treo rumor sites for information about the upcoming Treo 650 that looks very sweet indeed. But I realized that I did not want to spent about $500.00 to continue on with the relatively crappy Sprint PCS network which offers both high cost plans and average customer service. And I didn't want a telephone that can do everything except wash the dishes because I believe that PDAs are best kept on a tight leash lest they dominate the remaining brain space we all have outside of our cubicles.

The new Blackberry, at $199, is just right. It isn't for the power-user, the ones who want to stay up all day and night glued to their handheld to see who emailed or imed every few minutes or moments. And the keyboard, which innovatively combines two letters on every key in the small QWERTY keyboard takes some getting used to. It's easy to hit a wrong key on the thing but I do that anyway on my 18" keyboard and the last thing I want to do is actually "type" on a phone.

With the brilliant advent of third-party Mac synchronization software for the BlackBerry (which took 14 months to produce, apparently without much thanks to Research in Motion, I can now see all my calendar events, contacts, to do lists, and emails on the same device. (No need for a phone, PDA, or a short-term human memory!) Email comes fast and furious thanks to RIM's superb email handling service and the phone is small, the way phones should be.

Best yet, surfing on the Web on the device, while slow, is actually possible and the screen resolution combined with a usable scrollwheel on the side is very, well, handy.

Win on Mac

With the purchase of the newest version of Microsoft Office Professional, I fearfully installed Virtual PC for Mac today.

It was absolutely a piece of cake. Microsoft in its infinite wisdom (and its massive advertising campaign in "creative" publications and websites) has made it very easy to install a full-blown Windows XP Professional operating system on a Mac. The company bought the software only recently but they've reconfigured it to run very smoothly and quietly for those unaccustomed to "Start" menus, green grass and white clouds, and strange iconography in the system tray.

A few notes:

• While I feel some ambivalence about supporting Microsoft and their generally crappy software, as a Web design guy, I really feel obligated to ensure that what I'm designing is being properly seen and read by the 90% of those out there. I do have a laptop that I use for checking sites out in Windows but having the system on my Mac creates a greater obligation for me to ensure compatibility, legibility, and design and standards compliance.
• The first thing I did when I saw the Start screen was expand the window to fill up the entire frame. I knew that this would give me the full-on feeling of being in a Windows environment and I must say, it felt like I was being strangled by a ghost in glasses. I quickly figured out how to minimize the Windows window and then quit the operating system completely.
• The second thing I did was to download Firefox, which is quickly becoming the safest and fastest way to view websites with Windows. It's installed and I'll probably use it as my second browser.
• I imagine I won't actually use Viritual PC for Mac very much. While it automatically creates a relatively safe connection to the Internet through the Mac and it prints documents perfectly through existing Mac driver software, it is nicety, not necessity, informing my decision to use Windows on my Mac.

Iraqi Web (Development)

Well, here it is, the first I've seen of an Iraqi Web design and development company, eKur Software Group.

All kinds of thoughts and questions arise:

• The country code for Iraq is 88. This I did not know.
• People are doing business, no matter what, in Iraq.
• Their portfolio, while not the best, ain't bad.
• The technologies behind globalization are insanely powerful. This company uses WebObjects, WebSphere, and ASP.net for its technologies, by Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, respectively. eKur also uses Flash terribly, just like every other Web design group.

Future of Content Management on the Web

Just when I thought I had seen it all, I found the TiddlyWiki, thanks (again and again) to J. Kottke.

Play with this site. It allows you to easily modify any content on the site, add and delete posts and comments, and shows a potentially powerful, non-Flash, user-interface that is unlike any HTML site I've seen.

P.S. A peaceful, thoughtful and quiet Yom Kippur to all.

New Treo / Nutrio

I never bought (into) the Treo 600, which is an all-in-one Palm OS organizer/mobile phone/camera with browser and email applications released about 9 months ago or so. Yet, I desired it so.

But, typing "treo" into Google today, I found that some soul has found photos of the unreleased, redesigned Treo, possibly named the 650 and probably to be released with in a month or two. I know, I know, it's gross. But, if you're still grotesquely interested, here is a side-by-side comparison.

Hey, the blog is called "Deckchairs on the Titanic."

Yoogle!

This has been a week of very intense work, in terms of both quantity and scope -- identity development for two companies, a backend administration design, business cards, two proposals, three wireframes, and four websites under different stages of development.

Thus the less than stellar posts. In this vein, I found that the new (beta) Yahoo! Search to be pretty fascinating for a number of reasons:

• It uses side tabs, which are typically implemented very poorly. I predict that this will be a new feature of websites that feature forms and form data. It's nicely designed here and pretty unusual as interface device.
• The tabs themselves (and other features) are customizable, even though one doesn't have to be logged in, registered, or otherwise beholden. (It's a Javascript thing.) This is a nice feature for a search portal; there are times when I feel like My Yahoo!, which I use religiously, is capturing a bit too much about how I use it's portal interface. On the same hand, it sometimes feels like Google is too selective, too aloof to allow personalization.
• While this site mimics the soon-to-be $3.34 billion monstrosity called Google [page "not yet ready"], the interface is actually slightly nicer, warmer, more thoughtful and less technologically in your face. Oh, and Yahoo has a better logo.
• Job openings are listed right from the get-go, on the home page. Are there actually job openings in today's economy? It's good to know.

Tables

Douglas Bowman, pretty much the design and development leader in creating beautiful Web standards-based sites, wrote an interesting little piece called Throwing Tables Out the Window, with an obvious reference to the application made famous by Microsoft.

Bowman writes that if Microsoft would take out the fat, overloaded, non-semantic and inaccessible tables burdening its site, the company could reduce its file loads by 62%. What this means in "real" terms is that the company, getting 38.7 million page views per day, would save at least 329 terabytes per year.

How much data tranfer is this? Well, a terabyte is 2 to the 40th power which is about a thousand gigabytes, which is technically 2 to the 30th power or about 1 billion bytes. I recently purchased a harddrive with 80 GB on it. This means that a terabyte is about 12.5 of these hard drives, full. 329 terabytes is about 4112 of 80 GB harddrives -- a large amount of data indeed. But what is the true cost of this data bloat?

For Microsoft, it's very little. Their huge servers chug along quickly and quiety, regardless. The cost is to Web users more generally, who need to put up with downloading junky, wasteful code that reminds me a little of the operating system software the same company happily sells. (Truth: I'm actually not a Microsoft-hater. I use Word, Entourage, and other Microsoft apps as needed. But every time I visit a client who has Windows installed, the viruses, trojan horses, spy-ware garbage and crashes are the first things I undoubetedly see.)

Against the iPod

It's so completely uncool to not like the iPod. But I'm putting myself out there as someone who feels very ambivalent about it. It's so very easy to call our the typical adulations for the product -- it's sleek, it's fast, it works, it's Apple.

But here are my summer-cold-fueled negatives on the product -- negatives which I have never seen previously:

• The iPod separates us from the very physical reality that we inhabit. It's similar of course to the now 25-year-old Walkman but the iPod makes it far too easy for a person to ignore, or worse, sneer at, the concrete.
• The iPod holds too much music. I know that more is more when it comes to technology. But no one should have access to that many songs in one's pocket; there's something grotesque about the millions of hours of musical arrangement and production being reduced to a tiny replay apparatus.
• The iPod, despite Apple's best attempt at creating an integrated and legal music store, by its nature encourages the illegal downloading of music. 'Nuff said.
• The white ear buds on the iPod are ugly, inhuman, and unworkable. For some reason, the white color of the buds on any skin color looks horrendous, fetid, silly.
• The iPod's streamlined design and button functionality has nothing to do with music, musical instruments, or the history of musical recording, playback, or re-authoring.

Boy, I'm glad to get that off my chest. Now if I could just do the same thing with this cold.

Moogle

Some of you by now may have noticed the new MSN Search, which looks so much like Google.com's homepage that it's hard to believe there's no copyright infringement. As the New York Times' David Pogue puts it today Microsoft is always most serious when it comes to beating its competition. Visually, the no-nonsense efficiency of the new MSN search represents a full-on business rampage of one behemoth against another.

Seeing Purple

There's a whole new game in town called PurpleSlurple. Well, it's not really whole, new or a game but it is very hard to describe exactly what Purple technology is.

Essentially what it *does* is create anchor tags around all key areas of a given website so that individual paragraphs and areas of that website are locatable (or addressable in the language of the PS authors). It's a fascinating take on building a truly semantic Web and there are very few practitioners in the field that I know of.

Perhaps the visuals will be more interesting than the descriptors. Take a look at this site through the Purple lens: Deckchairs on the Titanic

My CPAP

Last night, I went through Stage 2 of the sleep apnea examination, which featured the use of the ultra-uncomfortable Continuous Positive Airway Pressure or CPAP apparatus (disclosure: photo is not of me but of another poor soul).

Around 9:30 p.m., a technician at Long Island Hospital strapped me up with a hundred electrodes so that he could monitor my breathing, leg movements, eye movements, heart and lung activity, and oxygen levels. It took about an hour for him to put all the gear on me and we had a nice chat about websites and web design. (After telling him that I designed websites, he informed me that his fifth grade son just built his first site, which made me feel about as powerful as a wet leaf.)

The sleep technician, a black man of small build who seemed to possible be from Ghana (he only hinted at his home country), then had me watch a video about CPAP in which heavyset people from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, talked about the instantaneous benefits received after a few nights of CPAP treatment. For the unitiated, or those who haven't clicked the link above, under the influence of CPAP, a person's nose is fully covered by a mask which, in turn, is fully strapped around one's head, top to bottom. There's a big flexible tube that pops out of the mask that goes to a whirring machine and one is essentially forced to breath out of one's nose; in this way, air is forced one's airway passage so that breathing (and not gasping, choking, wheezing, coughing, or asphyxiation) can happen.

Anyway, I slept like a baby, waking up about 4 times during the night, which is what most babies do. Lying in the hard hospital bed, I felt like a cross between Darth Vader and a person on life support, strapped up, strapped in, strapped. When the technician turned on the lights, I greeted him and asked how he was able to stay up all night. Was it coffee? He told me that he was an M.D. in Europe and that he used to deliver babies, so he used to have to stay up all night waiting for "deliveries." He worked as a sleep technician four nights per week while during the day he studied for his medical license in the U.S.

On my way out to the elevator, I said goodbye to the technician and my CPAP and wondered what the hell I was doing designing websites for a freakin' living.

Passed Sites

I use a little app (more about an unsuccessful attempt at writing about small apps here) that keeps track of my dozens of passwords, identifications, and serial numbers as well as a host of other important information. The database storing this info is virtually uncrackable -- using 448 bit encryption.

But in updating the software the other day and deleting old accounts from it today, I found the following websites had been acquired, changed hands, or just plain disappeared. It was odd to see sites that had been killed. Here are some of them:

• Zine-X, formerly a site for e-zine folks and now
• Let Em Know, formerly a contact management company, if I remember correctly
• WebProsNow, formerly a clearinghouse for companies looking for Web designers

More updated info about passed sites can be found at Ghost Sites, which, too, will be blank one day.

Ch-Ch-Changes

In no particular order, here are a few things that are different recently:

• Because Poland, along with many other Slavic countries, are now part of the EU (which now comprises 458 million people), fonts and font usage is going to have to chance. Polish, in particular uses many different diatrics which I've always found very beautiful and initially confounding. MyFonts.com has an updated page on this topic.
• My big fat monitor, an Apple 20" Cinema Display went wack-0 (sic) today but Apple was good about my returning it for repair.
• My daughter has a number of new expressions, including: "This isn't regular milk."
• I went through my change pile and sorted out the pennies from the non-copper items. Now I have two change piles.
• I'm expecting to see Guy Maddin's The Saddest Mustic in the World. This is considered a change because I do not see movies anymore.

App 3. No More

After reading today's horror stories about Iraq (both here and abroad), I've decided to discontinue this little series of banal tales about little apps. While I applaud those who are working to make computing better and easier, I can't wholeheartedly provide positive reflection about it right now.

I sometimes admire folks like Aaron Swartz, who wrote a post today called All News is Bad News. Despite its slightly cynical tone, he's right about the placebo effect news and news-saviness has on one's reading one's own life.

App 2. Macaroni Cocktail

For Mac's OS X, Atomic Bird's little application called Macaroni takes care of cleaning up often murky Unix databases and provides regular maintenance procedures for the operating system. But an even better small system utility application s Cocktail, which allows one to do all the above plus cutomize and optimize the system, remove crapped-out files, and change network settings.

What's interesting about these utilities is that a very smart couple of technologists put intuitive, useful interfaces on what are critical, command-line tasks to keep an open system running smoothly; there's something to be said about button-pushing.

I'm sorry if this is boring.

App 1. NetNewsWire

By far the most interesting little app that I've had the pleasure of working with is Ranchero Software's NetNewsWire, a handy-dandy and surprisingly powerful RSS reader for OS X. I've written about the "lite" version before; the full-on, paid-for ($39.95) version allows you to organize, using three window panes, all the blogs, news feeds, and miscellaneous literary garbage that you want to read.

It even allows one to post to one's own weblog. Kottke writes about RSS brilliantly but the way I think about RSS is that it's a way of consolidating what people, companies, communities, and organizations write online without the intermediary. It's the ultimate act of disintermediation, that poorly scripted term of the late 1990s as captured by folks like Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster in Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transform Strategy. But RSS (or what I also call "browserless surfing") is to everyone's (within the information economy) benefit.

Indie Software

There are so many finely developed applications out there right now for OS X, I thought I would dedicate the next 7 posts to writing about 7 of them. These "little" applications, which do everything from finding appropriate news to determing web page colors, are self-developed and published and indicate the breadth and depth of software, interface design, and intellectual expertise out there.

Full disclosure: I download software. I use the downloaded software. If I use the software, I pay for it. As a design-freak, pseudo-artist and a collector, I like to own things and small amounts of money is what it takes to own good, independent software. Most people I know download music, fonts, apps, and other things with impunity and I don't disparage their belief or habits. I also believe in open source software and the possibility of a free Web, uncontrolled by commercial or Government interests.

RSS Checker

This is probably boring. But Mark Pilgrim and friend came out with the latest and greatest little tool: Feed Validator for Atom and RSS.

What does it do? It allows owners of sites like Deckchairs to make sure website content is readable by RSS readers/browsers. Who cares? Well, it sure seems that everyone will once RSS truly catches on and it looks like it is. Here's an important post by JK about little old it. Does Deckchairs validate? Yes, it does which means something.

Vanity Plates

I did a lot of driving today. 2.25 hours to Philadelphia and then 2.75 hours back, much thanks to a seemingly tiny accident on the Staten Island Expressway Parking Lot. In any case, I think I realized today that vanity license plates are the true predecessors of the Internet's domain names.

Both are registered through demi-oligarchic means (the State and the state); both involve using specified letters, numbers and dashes (but no semicolons, colons, or asterisks) to lay claim to a piece of common cultural infrastructure; both are necessarily publicly displayed; both are treasured, admired, and critiqued for their logic, humor, and simplicity; and finally, both belong to a visual history of insignias, coats of arms, and other personalized or customized means of signifying one's presence in the world.

Accessibility in the U.K.

It's been a while since I've posted anything about website accessibility, but it's never far from my interests and aspirations. The Disability Rights Commission, a U.K.-based Government-affilated organization just released its Formal Investigation Report on web accessibility. This is from their introduction:

Disabled people must frequently overcome additional obstacles before they can enjoy the full range of information, services, entertainment and social interaction offered by the Web: blind people need sites to provide, for example, text as an alternative to images for translation into audible or legible words by specially designed screenreading devices; partially sighted people may be especially reliant upon large-format text and effective colour contrast; people who are dyslexic or have cognitive impairments may benefit in particular from the use of simpler English or alternative text formats, such as Easy Read, and from the clear and logical layout of an uncluttered website; people whose first language is British Sign Language may also find Plain English indispensable; and people with manual dexterity impairments may need to navigate with a keyboard rather than with a mouse.

Nevertheless, the Web has enormous potential for disabled people. In contrast to other information media, it is, with the benefit of assistive technology1, potentially tolerant of impairment. Inclusive website design makes it easier to use these alternative means of access, without making a site less attractive to unimpaired users. Irresponsible and inconsiderate design, on the other hand, not only puts disabled users at a significant disadvantage but can make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone, whether disabled or not.

And a few of the reports findings are interesting:

1.1 Few (19%) websites comply even with the lowest priority Checkpoints for accessibility.
1.2 All categories of disabled user consider that site designs take insufficient account of their specific needs.
1.3 Blind users, who employ screen readers to access the web, although not alone in being disadvantaged, are particularly disadvantaged by websites whose design does not take full account of their needs.
1.4 Although many of those commissioning websites state that they are alert to the needs of disabled people, there is very little evidence of such awareness being translated into effective usability for disabled people.

And perhaps most interestingly, the organization tested 1000 home pages from across numerous sectors. Only 16 were Level A compliant (this is the 19% noted above), meaning minimally accessible to those with disabilities. 6 home pages were Level AA compliant, which means that sites deliberately worked to assure accessibility. And NO home pages achieved Level AAA (or total) compliance.

Chicken Dance Elmo

I can't say I'm proud of it but I also can't, at the same time, say I'm not elated that my daughter was able to co-ordinate her hand and eyes to click on the various eggs in the Chicken Dance Elmo online game. I watched her subtly and artfully move her hand from egg to egg and clicking squarely on each one (pardon the bad metaphor).

What's the meaning? Well: a. she's spending too much time on the computer with me (like me); b. she's got highly advanced hand-eye coordination and a deep understanding of the relationship between three-dimensional movement, human agency and two-dimensional interfaces; c. she somehow connects with the logic of this sweet and goofy game; d. all of the above plus a mixture of plain old growing and learning.

Lessig for Less.

Because (or despite the fact) it's Passover tonight, I thought I'd post something liberation-relevant: Stanford Professor of Law and all things open technology Lawrence Lessig has made his new book "Free Culture" available for free [link goes directly to PDF] for a limited time on Amazon.com.

Granted this is a 352 page book but, from the excerpt below (from the preface), a potential reader might get the sense that this is an important book, a relevant and current take on the ownership of software, content, and the freedom to create and transmit ideas:

That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of 'free culture'—not 'free' as in 'free beer' (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but 'free' as in 'free speech,' ; 'free markets,' 'free trade,' 'free enterprise,' 'free will,' and 'free elections.' A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a 'permission culture'—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

Happy Passover.

Kinja In Deed

Like so many others, I'm very curious about the future fate of Kinja, the weblog guide, which was just released this week in beta.

It's got a great number of things going for it. With sweet kid gloves, it makes keeping up on weblogs easy. Adding and subtracting weblogs is as simple as clicking a button on your browser or popping the site URL into Kinja's add form. It's got a nice albeit slightly cluttered interface. And it's got the power of the good folks that invented Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Gawker and Gizmodo behind it.

Here's the problem: I don't know why I would actually use it on a very regular basis. Yahoo has a great new (also beta version) RSS aggregator built into My Yahoo! that allows new posts to be seen right from your home page without scrolling down and hurting the forefinger. The design of Kinja is nice but it doesn't allow one to organize the weblogs by category as Jason Kottke pointed out to me; it would be nice if I could organize the blogs I read by "politics," "technology," and "bug spray," for instance. Preferably, there should be a tabbed interface to control these things.

Finally, what is the business model for this site? It's not clear. But, it's a great and highly flexible tool for keeping up on a few blogs and it makes checking on new posts actually pleasurable, something My Yahoo! can probably never do.

mahanuala

Almost every day, it appears that more and more people are "doing" yoga. I admire them and I also wonder if it's just a trend like the other things that are, consciously at least, presumably not fads, like the Atkins and South Beach diets, the taste for war overseas, and the public's interest in the rise and fall of celebrities.

But here's Christy Turlington and her friends at Puma launching mahanuala, a newly branded line of loose, yoga-friendly clothing. I don't want to be sceptical about this, as anyone who risks time away from work to focus on their minds and bodies is doing themselves and those around them good. And there are clothing lines for skateboarders so why not yoga practitioners?

But I always ask myself regarding new things: "Under what sign was this born?" Websites, for instance, were born under the signs of 90s opulence and a revolution in information technology. The Lewinsky scandal was born under the signs of misplaced values and concern about large government (and large government officials). The rebirth of yoga is sadly born under the signs of poor economic outlook, war, and misappropriation of public and private capital.

The questions then are: Is yoga's rejuvenation a response to externalities beyond our control and a de-rationalization of our modern life? Or is yoga a retreat from the real, a denial of our own violence to ourselves and others, and admission of the poverty of our daily ways and means?

Googling, which I hate

Because so many folks are riding on the high of the next big IPO (that would be Google's), the language around and about Google is verging on the order of the grotesque. I so dislike the gerund "Googling" or the verb form "to Google."

But, Google released today a well-timed little toy called Google Web Alerts, which gives Google the right to regularly send you updated online information (links, new sites) about an industry, idea, person, or pumpkin. I'm going to set one up right now; the alert will be named "bubble 2.0." I'm sorry, but Google just seems to be reaching. They're other new search tool is personalized searching -- but if it doesn't work on Safari, and it does not, it's not very personalized for me.

Hotmail.NET.Passport.MSN.Explorer

Very often you'll read an article about how problematic Microsoft is with regard to customer service or usability and very often you'll say, yes, but.

Yes, but this evening, I wanted to log on to my old Hotmail account and attempt to review an email I'm developing for a client. Granted, this email address has not been used in probably a year and a half. Granted, Microsoft has radically changed its "member services."

But every time I tried to log in to either Hotmail, MSN, .Net, or Passport (all with different user names and passwords), I'd be sent to this beauty: Microsoft® .NET Passport: Not Supported. The HTML isn't even supported in the page Title!

It's a true embarrassment that a company as important as Microsoft has four different services for overlapping (albeit free) products and none of them will allow redundant user access. But more distressingly, none of the services will allow you to intelligently rectify the problem.

Spokes

The wheels at Apple just keep turning, as Apple today released news of its upcoming Spoken Interface, a pretty spectacular piece of software that allows those with disabilities to interact with an OS X-based computer. It's impressive, brilliant, prescient, and genuinely humane.

Brilliant Maps

It is indeed the little things in life that count. In looking for the location of a doctor's office online this evening, I punched in the address into Yahoo! Maps. In the rest of the country, driving directions are all one might need to get from A to B. But, finally, someone figured out that if one lives in New York City, one might want to know which subway line to take to a specific address.

Yahoo! Maps has done it. Surrounding the starred doctor's office on the map are very clearly labeled subway stops -- and relevant distances to the office were only a click away. Not interesting? Using a technology called SmartView, one can also locate specific restaurants, community services, stores, and even ATMs near any specified address. (SmartView is so new that I could find no online documentation for it.)

SmartView does not yet allow one to see multiple locations at the same time, so if I wanted to find a buy a book, find a cafe, and then rob a bank, I'd have to try different radio buttons sequentially. In the coming search engine battles, it's these seemingly small advances that are going to win the annual wars.

Is SmartView perfected? Not quite. In typing in my own address, I learned that the nearest "tourist spots" include "Two Little Red Hens Cafe," the "Brooklyn Museum of Art," and "FG Guido Funeral Home."

Real Pain

As I've written before, RealOne is a crappy application by a ridiculously mercenary company. Jogin writes a few days ago about his experience with Real and I found through Kottke's message boards that the BBC offers a free, ad-free, painless, and simple version of RealOne so one can listen to the Beeb's programming happily and without real problems.

Cannon

After much research (e.g. talking with friends and scouring websites), I purchased a little Canon PowerShot Elph, and the thing is a wonder to behold -- others. Its small size, its ability to take very vivid, beautiful photos of even unextraordinary events is fine. It's a wonder because it so easily captures life, the passing glimpses of active faces and bodies, in digital video. With a push of one top-mounted button, the default memory card records about 1.5 vainglorious minutes of moving sights and synchronized sounds. To me, it's as if the Lumiere brothers had come to visit, with their great-great grandchildren in tow.

Here's a gratuitous link to the Canon Camera Museum.

Dizzy

For so many years, folks complained that it was the Walt Disney Company that unselectively was homogenizing the cultural space of the world. It turns out that Disney is a shrinking violet and that the new corporate love is going to be Comcast. If they purchase Disney, that means that the one company would have a market capitalization of about $125 billion. Wouldn't that be cool?

Back in 1980 or so, Comcast started rolling out cable television in our neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia. I loved watching Triumph and Billy Squier stroke their instruments every hour on the half hour on MTV. Little did anyone know that Comcast, the pipsqueak delivery boy of Buggles videos, would come to outlive and outlove big, heartless Disney.

A Watch

After many months trying to keep track of my projects via my watch, the little time window in the corner of my monitor, and an egg timer, I broke down and spent a few too many dollars on DesignSoft's StopWatch Plus.

I have to say, it's quite a nice tool -- it neatly keeps track of the seconds, minutes, and hours spent on a given project and records those times in a sharp little spreadsheet. The data can then be imported to Excel or Calc and fondled -- I mean massaged. It's geeky and ridiculous but because I can no better keep good track of hours than I can remember what I ate for breakfast, this thing might Cheerios. I mean help.

Intentionality

I'm used Alsoft's DiskWarrior today to fix a problem with an external harddrive. Not interesting.

But when I looked at the product's software license, under Paragraph 2, Permited Uses and Restrictions, the text reads:

"...THE ALSOFT SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION, COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, OR AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL MACHINES IN WHICH CASE THE FAILURE OF THE ALSOFT SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE."

This raised two scary-ass questions for me: a. What kind of software do they actually use at nuclear plants? And, b. If it's not good enough for air traffic control machines, why am I using it?

Three Electronic Messages

The spam I've been getting recently has been getting really interesting for some reason. I'm fascinated with the poetics of three emails in particular and I refuse to delete these three in particular from my Junk inbox.

The first one has a subject line which I adore. "Brandy Mcneill" writes:
"purl candlestick disastrous." This is gorgeous.

The second begins with the following message and is written by "Jeremy Conrad":
"clubhouse fredholm spellbound handclasp viceroy hedonist edward acquaint haw death fanfold batchelder amber hutchins wrought
adoptive juncture chenille demurrer jubilate burial chariot prothonotary pollux heel plebeian boric paramagnetic par polarography immobile promulgate autistic allegiant teat bloodstream baldy boutique dihedral tungstate arise price cytolysis canna array thrust prohibition allison cocklebur suffolk trapezoid
questionnaireJust a way to CANCEL your DEBT.defrock
abolition congregate versailles presentational bosom bstj bayesian lin worm antoinette cheesecloth declaratory cowan dreary cayley explosive cycle icy contravene brent wiggly windbag oneida abed downstate stardom contention acclimate alpheratz fruition consist cox affinity basket battalion freemen hillbilly cortical rebelled consort" I have never seen these worrds in this order except for the finest poetry.

The third message is from "Mohammedan E. Coastlines":
Good morning.

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Pant

I've solved a lot of my problems with Panther, and I'm now quite thrilled with the results. Althought I went from A to D by going by W and X first, the system is pretty stunning. I realize that one unforeseen benefit of creating an entirely new login for myself is that I started afresh - all old caches, files, and preferences that I no longer treasured are gone. For the record (and this will be the last time I talk about it for a while):

- All my apps launch and work more quickly under Panther.

- The updated printer and scanner drivers (from Epson) are much more professional and clearly designed for lots of use. Same goes with the print dialog boxes one finds throughout every app now.

- The overall visual framework of the system is much smoother, more elegant, and importantly, clearer. Text renders better everywhere though I question the much higher contrast that was seemingly ordained by Apple in order to achieve this effect.

- I'm impressed that every app, except for Suitcase (Extensis are you listening?), had zero problems with the new system. Apple did its homework in this regard. Even Microsoft Office runs better on Panther.

- Logging a user in and out (and watching the respective desktop spin in and out of place) is not as cool as people think. Nor is the highlighted aura that goes around desktop files when you select them. Nor is the new Finder window, though I appreciate the fact that you can actually Find files in this window now.

- Safari is still awesome. But I am definitely going to play with Camino, thanks to many readers' recommendations. That is, once I feel confident again behind the ol' keyboard again.

More Safari Fun

This from an email to my technically smarter friend. Warning: not interesting at all unless you're using Apple's new Panther and Extensis Suitcase X1.

I updated to 10.3.2 first. No problems with Safari. (I checked Safari all along the way as it's kind of the canary in the coalmine.) Because I've been cautious about Suitcase and Panther for the past three months, I've also taken care to make sure my files and fonts are in order.

Then, I opened and reregistered Suitcase X1. NO problems. Then, I moved the com.extensis.Suitcase.plist Preference from the old archived user to the new one. Again no problems with Safari.

I somehow intuited that the next thing might be problematic. I moved the folder Suitcase Preferences from the old to the new user Preferences folder and voila, Safari hung, hung, hung. It was fascinating and horrifying at the same time - as I saw my two day old problems come back.

This is what I did next, for what it's worth. I noticed that all the fonts in Suitcase were pointing to my old user -- there's a great "Reveal in Finder" function in X1. So, I deleted all of the fonts from X1 completely. Quit and relaunched X1 -- and then added all fonts to X1 from a new copied folder in the new directory. These are the same exact fonts, same order, but importantly, this time the index of fonts in X1 point directly to the actual fonts in the new directory, not the old.

I quit and relaunched Suitcase and it was fine. I opened Safari -- fine. System -- fine. Me -- fine.

Now, I just have to move all those old files and preferences one by one to the new login, which sucks a lot.

Still

Thanks for all the help I've received over the past 1.5 days re: Safari and Panther and other Apple apps. You can see my tepid reply to posters today.

Got to get some work done and pretend my system isn't wacked.

Safari's Panther

I bit the proverbial bullet, installed the new Panther on my G4 machine, and everything works well except:

1. Safari. I get nada. That sucks because I love Safari and I can't find, for the life of me, a fix. The application opens but it's as if there is no Web to connect with it's little, beating heart.

2. Help Viewer. This sucks because when I need help from the desktop, there is none.

3. Internet Preferences. Can't find it. Doesn't exist. Where'd it go?

I guess I should be happy that things print, scan, and fonts work, thanks to Extensis. And the whole system works more speedily, apps loading quicker, and programs like Dreamweaver stalling very little now. But cheese and crackers, why is it so hard to solve these little app issues?

Rovered

Take a look at the incredible images coming from the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. These images are not so incredible for their inherent beauty but because of the technology that makes them so.

Scientists and engineers had to target this small craft to reach the surface of Mars after traveling 300 million miles -- not a misprint. One scientist noted that not only was the launch of the initial vehicle important but so were issues like the molten lava at the center of Earth, plate tectonics, and how "plasma in the atmosophere delayed radio signals to and from" something called the Deep Space Network, a series of antennas that connect interplanetary ships to the folks in "Houston." The craft itself, entering the Martian atmosphere, will be as hot as the surface of the sun, yet it does not melt. It's all incredibly sophisticated science and it makes the wonder of the Web, my usual concern, seem almost feeble.

The truly beautiful imagery available on the same site is that of the graphic artist who illustrated how the craft made it from here to there. Look at this one and this one, for instance. Is it odd that the digital work of the NASA illustrator is more fascinating than the near realtime photography of the Rover robot? I think not. The engineering behind the wondrousness of the project is what is astounding. In the end, the beauty of Mars is only as deep as its human counterparts.

Furthermore

The other side of what I posted below is revealed in Eric's Archived Thoughts, which speculates that Microsoft truly is seeking to undermine open standards for Web development. XML, the generally accepted new lingua franca of the Web, may be soon (2006 or 2007?) challenged by the company's XAML, a proprietary system designed to work best with Windows systems.

Put inexpensive, unaccountable programming together with top-down standardization and you've got a new Web that's built to fracture.

Pant

On Sunday, I ordered the new operating system offered by Apple (v. 10.3), called Panther. All the message boards and all the breathless technologists nearby (well, near enough) have agreed that this is the coolest thing since sliced Swiss cheese. The operating system has some flaws but it's fun. I'm all for fun. But I'll give the same reason that I voted "no" yesterday, against the idea of non-partisan elections, as I would for putting Panther on my box. Change is not always good, though I'm an advocate of change. The black and silver box came to me on Tuesday from California via UPS and I left the whole damn thing in its box.

Digital

I'm so tired right now, having had a crazy-odd day and now possibly coming down with a crazy-odd cold. But I saw this little camera that I'd like to get and I wonder if this desire has something to do with being tired, as taking pictures is the laziest way to remember -- and also the most earnest. I do love photography but it always seems just to simple to record a place in time and let it sit in time again. There's no work involved and perhaps that's why we love photography.

Working Type

It's here. Movable Type is installed. I know it's not a big deal, but I'm happy with the install and more than thrilled that three years of posts are now happily residing on the server. I still have a tremendous amount of customizing to do, so bear with me as I learn how to rebuild the Titanic.

Thanks goes out to Mark Paschal, who via the beauty of screenshots, shows how to import Blogger content to MT. More thanks soon.

Just Testing

Truly not a real post. I doubt it could even possibly work.

Moving Type

Speaking of movable type (see below), I'm slowly moving to Movable Type instead of Blogger (which has been great -- no real complaints) and a new host so that I can more powerfully and less expensively post my arcania to the Web. Please bear with me over the coming weeks until I work out the numerous kinks.

My apologies for advance for not being a good enough designer, technologist, linguist, or Internet protocolist, and all other things.

My apologies to my nervous system as well as, until an hour ago, I thought I had lost 3 years of Deckchairs posts to the Internet wilderness, as I hadn't backed it all up in over one year. This means, that I would have lost 1 year of posts -- but, well, it would feel like 3 years to me.