Archives

October Backlog

With this past weekend’s trip to D.C. and the unrelenting workload at Behavior, the past week or so, it’s been hard to catch up on email and to find time to post to Subtraction.com. I’m hopefully going to be able to make some real headway on my to do list this week, but to clear out the backlog a bit here are things with which I’ve been preoccupied.

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Doppelgänger in D.C.

MonaRemember that episode of “The Brady Bunch” when Peter Brady met another student at school who looked exactly like him? I was reminded of that when my girlfriend and I drove down to D.C. this weekend to stay with some friends for the first time in about two years, we realized that their dog looked exactly like our dog. They weren’t perfect twins, but their heights, builds, and faces were within 90% of one another, to the point where it was often difficult to tell them apart without looking carefully. The uncanny resemblance entertained us all weekend, and we couldn’t stop talking about it, finding it endlessly fascinating. We’re totally dog people now.

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Pain in Vain

YankeesYou can call me a fair weather fan, but when the home team is behind, I don’t think I’m constitutionally suited to watching baseball. This is the situation I find myself in this evening, watching the Yankees struggle against the Red Sox in the seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series.

The winner moves on to the World Series, and the loser spends the winter in ignominy — this kind of drama is the definition of good ball, but I find it’s a sort of drama both too excruciating and too superfluous for me to watch. That is, I am endlessly fascinated by the game but I find these moments of extreme competitive consequence to be too much, too engrossing and too demanding of my emotional energy. What’s more, I find something subliminally complicit in watching, as if I’m somehow partaking in my team’s progressive defeat. This is all completely irrational, I know… but with everything else going on in my life, I’d just as soon not watch these pivotal matches and thereby save myself the exhaustion. Anyway, go Yankees!

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Point Break

PowerPointA good chunk of my day today was spent designing an investor presentation for a client using the supremely inaccurate Microsoft PowerPoint — first on Mac OS X and then on Windows XP — a process which is best likened to assembling a model airplane with oven mitts on. There’s a lot left to be desired in all of the Microsoft Office applications, mostly owing to fact that counter-intuitiveness seems to be the suite’s guiding design principle, but I have a special complaint for PowerPoint. Not only does it do a poor job of crystallizing a thorough thought process, but it’s remarkably unfaithful to user intentions.

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The Wandering Dollar

A Brief LifeHere’s how impulse shopping helps crowd-pleasing consumer choices trump more high-minded pursuits like literature: my girlfriend was looking for a copy of Juan Carlos Onetti’s “A Brief Life,” which has been impossible for her to find in town. While checking my Hotmail account (which I almost never check), I came across some spam from Alibris, an online clearing house for used book retailers. I bought a book from them once about four years ago, and they’ve been faithfully sending me junk mail ever since.

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Good Day for Muléh

MuléhNew work from Behavior: this evening we launched a redesign for Muléh, (pronounced moo-lay) a D.C.-area retailer specializing in imported, high-end furniture. It’s certainly not the largest scale site we’ve ever done, but it’s a lot of fun launching smaller sites as well — the path from concept to completion is much less circuitous. Muleh.com is almost 100% XHTML Transitional 1.0-compliant, relying entirely on a simple CSS file for layout; we’ll be tweaking things here and there over the next several days to get it up to code. The site is also driven by the endlessly handy Movable Type, which was the perfect light-weight content publisher for a do-it-yourself kind of client who didn’t want to learn a complex CMS. Now I go to sleep.

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Share and Share Alike

At the office, we were debating the issue of file sharing and its impact on artists, specifically whether or not a digital distribution system for music sales would allow artists to see a larger share of the proceeds from every sale. The argument was made that the low overhead of digital distribution doesn’t necessarily ensure that artists will see more money and in fact it may mean that they get a reduced share of the profits.

That’s when I realized that, after all the fuss over Napster (whose impending relaunch actually kicked off this conversation), Gnutella and lawsuits filed against individual users by the RIAA, I’ve developed a pretty callous attitude towards artists’ rights. This may anger some of my friends who are musicians and who aspire to become very well-paid musicians for a living, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter to me much whether artists get their fair share of money from recordings or not.

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Big Black Cat

PantherApple promised to deliver Panther — the next major upgrade to Mac OS X — by the end of the year, which to my mind meant that we’d be lucky to see it by early December. Imagine my surprise when they announced that it would ship as soon as 24 Oct — just a little over two weeks from today — and that it’s available for pre-order immediately. When I heard this, I started getting excited in the way that one might get excited for a long-awaited movie release, or a new album from a favorite band; the anticipation suddenly took on a tangible quality, and I started imagining myself actually sitting in front of a computer — maybe even a new computer — and actually using, rather than reading about, this software.

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Hast la Vista, Democracy

SchwarzeneggerWatching the recall process in California has been like watching an insane neighbor dig up his backyard in some crazy treasure hunt. Every day, as first the grass and then the soil and then the pipes running beneath the neighborhood get torn up and piled in a destructive heap, the yard becomes a worse and worse disaster, and yet it still seems hopeless that the neighbor would ever listen to a reasonable argument against calling the whole thing off.

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