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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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’.]

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.

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.]

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.