Category Archives: Miscellaneous

A Little Bit of Nice

Since I’ve disparaged a New York bodega in the past, it’s only fair that I should mention a little bit of understated kindness that I saw this morning at New Andy’s Deli at 873 Broadway, where I stopped to buy an egg sandwich.

Ahead of me in line was a little kid, must’ve been about ten years old, wearing an oversized backpack that one could say was adorably out of proportion to his pre-adolescent height. This was a city kid, to be sure, on his way to school and unintimidated by the adult world. He asked the woman behind the counter how much it would cost to get an egg and sausage sandwich on a roll, and when she answered “Two-fifty,” he looked away and took a step towards the door with a quiet kind of resignation — it wasn’t dejection or even a ploy for pity, just a wordless acquiescence.

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The Design of Everyday Briefings

Presidential Daily BriefingsGreg Storey posted an interesting and thoughtful exercise on information design last month over at Airbag.ca, in which he suggests that a better sense of design might have benefitted the Bush administration in August of 2001, when they apparently underestimated — or wantonly disregarded — a series of warnings that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had intentions to attack the United States.

His post is altogether earnest and well-intentioned, and I applaud him for it. The point he’s making is a good one that designers have been trying to get the world at large to understand — and with increasing seriousness — over the past few years: good design can have monumental impact on the effectiveness of information. Still, I can’t help but be a smartass about it.

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What I Did on My Vacation from Blogging

Wow, what a bust the last week turned out to be, at least for blogging. I took the Amtrak train to Washington, D.C. very early on Monday morning for a meeting with a new client. Even the unreserved coach cars now feature electrical outlets, so I was able to plug in and get some work done on the way down and the way back — compared to flying, the simplicity and convenience of traveling by Amtrak is almost a luxury. Our client visit went well, and I managed to find some time to meet up with some old friends, so in spite of actually dreading the long day, I had a pretty good time.

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Manual Dexterity

I found a little bit of old New York in the Flatiron building this morning, when I took my girlfriend’s malfunctioning Olivetti Lettera 35i typewriter to the Gramercy Office Equipment Company for repair. This 70+ year old business is run in a little hovel of an office on the eighth floor by an impeccably groomed, kindly gentleman with a pleasing Brooklyn accent and a preternatural understanding of what makes a typewriter, er, type. Every available surface in the office is stacked up with aging typewriters, office equipment and unfiled paperwork, and when I walked down the very narrow yard of floorspace with the Olivetti, he pulled out a small writing extension from a hulking old steel desk, slapped it with his palm and instructed me to “Set it there. That’s all the space I got.”

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Mel Gibson, Christie Brinkley and an Anti-Trust Suit

but that’s the way it is. I understand their map usefulness. Often, a formalised exercise helps map quest me to crack a block of some kind, and often affords map quest a new way to see something. It’s a way of playing us map with the process of creation – if one lets it mapquest serve that purpose. Another example: a lot of driving directions modern composers who use Finale or similar programs maps to score their music, either on the fly or by hotels

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How the West Is Flown

How the West Is FlownIt’s not very often that I fly these days — at least not nearly as often as I used to — but each time I do, I’m reminded of the declining quality of consumer aviation. Halfway through last week I flew to California to see family, and the service on America West was roundly disappointing: to begin with, my ticket was no bargain, but they charged me US$100 to alter it in order to accommodate some changes in my schedule. It was a cross-country flight, but they served only soft drinks and peanuts — not even a single meal. I’m no fan of airline food, but when one spends an extra hour cooped in a plane cabin, waiting for takeoff, a five-hour trip becomes pretty hunger-inducing at somewhere around five hours and thirty minutes. One might be tempted to turn to the in-flight movie to preoccupy one’s time, but there’s something humiliating about being asked to spend an additional US$5 for the indignity of whiling away the airline’s delays. And when we were delayed in landing, the cabin crew couldn’t even apprise us of gate information for our flight connections. I can hardly think of another consumer product that, dollar for dollar, represents less in the way customer care.

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A Night on the Tiles

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

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

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December Days

Right after Thanksgiving, I took a good hard look at December and even then I knew it would be a terrible month for regular posts to my blog. There’s just too much stuff to do during the last month of the year, from year-end purchasing and finances at Behavior to finishing up RFPs in the hope of lining up at least some new business for January, to say nothing of all the holiday commitments with empty checkboxes next to them. I wanted to do all of my shopping online this year because I will have virtually zero opportunity to go out into the real world for it, but even so, I’m finding that, today, I’m running right up against the absolute deadline for shipping in time for Christmas delivery. December is made of more impatient, entirely unaccommodating days.

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