Archives

World Won’t Listen…

Not feeling so great today about the following things: The very poor customer service at Circuit City, where my girlfriend and I have been trying to redeem a store credit for weeks without success. The broken CSS support in Microsoft Internet Explorer, which always seems to mangle pixel-perfect layouts that Safari and Mozilla seem to nail without a problem. The unyielding nature of the airline industry, which won’t allow my girlfriend and me to reschedule tickets we booked to Las Vegas in November without onerous penalties. The nagging effects of repetitive strain injury, which comes and goes for me but lately has been more and more persistent. And the fact that the Oakland A’s should have swept the Boston Red Sox on Saturday night, but instead blew their lead in game after game, until this evening’s painful fifth game.

Continue Reading …

+

Lacking in Confidence

Web ConfidentialAll of my passwords and user data have been stored in a home-brewed FileMaker Pro database for years, but recently worries about poor security finally started getting to me. So I downloaded and registered Alco Bloom’s Web Confidential, which bills itself as “the most powerful password manager on the Macintosh.” Normally when I write a post like this, it’s with the intent of praising the entrepreneurial spirit of the lone shareware author, and I had assumed that I would become a Web Confidential fan more or less immediately. The software has been highly praised in Mac circles for years as an indispensable, highly secure tool for managing the bewildering array of security permissions with which Web surfers must contend.

Continue Reading …

+

Suite Smell of Success

Adobe Creative Suite

Just a tip of the hat to Adobe for the packaging of their soon-to-be-released Adobe Creative Suite, which bundles and not-so-cleverly rebrands the software giant’s flagship applications by appending a “CS” to each. This new creative strategy finally, finally does away with the cheesey-ass Photoshop eye logo and the Illustrator Venus logo, both long-standing icons that grew tired long ago. These new designs are sophisticated and attractive, and they kinda sorta help Adobe catch up with modern software packaging trends kicked off four or five years ago by Neville Brody for Macromedia. Better late than never.

Continue Reading …

+

In the Mood for Language

Lost in Translation.gifSofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” can be said to be a shallow exercise in style. First, it’s clearly a savvy assembly of key touchpoints for a specific niche of the New Thirtysomethings. Its characters, milieu and tone constitute an almost exquisitely calculated dream combination of many hallmarks of hipster elitism: a fascination with the idiosyncrasies of urban Japanese culture, the dissonance of semi-obscure British pop, the watercolor kinetics of Wong Kar Wai’s films, the mannered understatement of naturalistic acting, the ironic wisecracks of Bill Murray, and the irresistibility of adorable young actresses who spend a lot of time appearing in indie films.

All of these things possess an unimpeachable street cred, and yet, their confluence in this film has an overbearing quality. It’s as if Coppola is determined to illustrate her impeccable taste; any movie that gives a prominent role to a My Bloody Valentine song (and even employs Kevin Shields for original music) is making an unmistakable declaration of its own sophisticated, conspicuous eclecticism.

Continue Reading …

+

Veer Have All the Good Stock Photos Gone?

VeerOver the past few years, I’ve seen lots of stock agencies try to take a decidedly editorial approach to the creative strategy of their catalogs, mostly in an attempt to ingratiate their beautifully produced compendiums of pictures-looking-for-a-purpose into designers’s hearts. Nonstock and Photonica, notably, have produced some lavishly and slavishly designed tomes, but beyond the novelty of their approach, I always found them somewhat hollow; the design trickery that laid out their pages never seemed to be able to mask the emptiness of most of the photography they showcased, or if it did, any true creativity was spread too thin over too many pages. These books were generally as thick and heavy as a textbook, and the guilt of tree-killing, more than the books’ inherent usefulness, was probably what kept so many of them from getting pitched the minute they arrived.

Continue Reading …

+

Death by Stomach

Saturday night I was stricken with some of the worst digestive problems I think I’ve ever had, barring perhaps a horrific stomach bug that laid siege to me while traveling in Asia three years ago. I’ll spare the specifics for squeamish readers, and just say that I spent the twenty-four hours after dinner on Saturday and before “The Simpsons” on Sunday more or less in a doubled-over position. It was nasty and uncomfortable and it reaffirmed my suspicion that everything is slowly trying to kill me.

Continue Reading …

+

Anger Management

Third Democratic Presidential DebateAt last night’s third Democratic presidential debate, held at Pace University in lower Manhattan, Senator John Kerry and Rep. Dick Gephardt both took swipes at Governor Howard Dean with the obvious intention of provoking him to anger. Dean, who has been nagged by a reputation for irascibility, took the bait.

Responding to an allegation by Gephardt that he had sided with former House Speaker and notorious Republican Newt Gingrich on health care issues (including some negative comments on Medicare), Dean shot back that the claim was “a flat-out falsehood,” that he had, “frankly done more than [Rep. Gephardt]” to deliver health care, that “nobody here deserves to be compared to Newt Gingrich,“ that the allegations were “not helpful” and distracted from “the real enemy: George W. Bush.”

Continue Reading …

+

Fun with File Management

Path FinderCocoatech’s Path Finder is a replacement for the Mac OS X Finder that provides a multitude of geeky file management tools. It has a counterpart in the Windows world in the form PowerDesk, itself a geeky replacement for the Windows Explorer. Both of these programs subvert the ‘keep it simple stupid’ conventional wisdom of file management by adding lots of bells and whistles aimed at power users, but they’re also a lot of fun, at least for nerds.

I’ve been using the recently released version 3.0 of Path Finder for a few days, and it’s almost a home run. Its combination of management innovations, shortcuts and user-centric rearrangement of standard Finder interface elements is really excellent, a superb example of how third party developers can improve on basic operating system functionality. The only caveat is that it’s occasionally slow to refresh directory listings — not a huge shortcoming except for the fact that it completely disqualifies the program from truly replacing the Finder. Which is a shame, because I like it a lot.

Continue Reading …

+

Fake Realpolitik

The West WingAfter complaints and criticisms last season that it had lost touch with the times, the new creative team of NBC’s highly decorated series “The West Wing” seems prepared to play catch-up — and furiously — in its first outings without creator and former executive producer Aaron Sorkin at the helm. For those who don’t watch the show or who can’t be bothered by the dramatic meanderings of network television, it’s not worth recapping the details of tonight’s plot, but suffice it to say that a show that was once engineered specifically as a liberal fantasia has been rudely awoken to the new conservative reality; the president that sits in this fictitious Oval Office is now a member of the Grand Old Party.

Continue Reading …

+