Archives

Building Good Credit

Chase Credit CardsVery early this morning, at about 03:00a, a year and a half of Behavior labor finally bore fruit at Chase Credit Cards. We’ve been working on the redesign of this Web site since late 2001 — in fact, it was one of the marquee projects that got us going straight out of the gate when we opened up shop late that year — so we’re very, very happy to finally see it launched. If you’ve got a Chase credit card (and research shows that many of you do!), you can start using the site and all its cool tools immediately; if you don’t have a Chase credit card, the site makes it dead simple to choose and apply for the perfect one for you.

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A Flock of G5s

PowerMac G5It’s hard to know when I can trust myself when it comes to applauding new Apple announcements, but I had that same familiar excitability come over me when Steve Jobs unveiled new PowerMac G5 desktop computers at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference today. From the online images, these new machines look dead sexy — sleek, angular and forbiddingly cool. In a way, they remind me of the industrial design language that informed high-end stereo systems in the 1980s; I’ve also seen a few recent automobile dashboards modeled in this fashion. Maybe it’s time I broke out my stash of skinny ties.

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Lee vs. Lee

The HulkUnexpectedly, the battle that’s truly at the heart of “The Hulk” is not the one that the titular green antihero fights with society at large, the massive arsenal of the U.S. Army or even the tortured depths of his own soul. Rather, it’s the battle between the moviemaking prowess of Ang Lee, who has been responsible for some of the most intricate and touching personal epics committed to film, and the cantankerous spirit of Stan Lee, controversially-proclaimed father of the famed stable of Marvel Comics super-heroes. What results is a movie that pits a grotesquely literal interpretation of the graphical storyteling of comic books against a psychologically complex exploration of human horror. It’s not an altogether disastrous experiment in opposing sensibilities, but it is ultimately, hugely, disappointing.

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Rebuild the Desktop

Rice Bowl IconLast Thursday, I dropped off my PowerBook G4 ( Titanium) at Tekserve for a little upgrade. Its original 30GB hard drive had been bursting at the seams for a while, and so I finally bit the bullet, forked over a few hundred dollars and had it replaced with a new, 80GB model. The always-helpful Tekserve technicians encased the old one in a portable FireWire drive so I can still access the data on it, and they gave me a fresh installation of Mac OS X Jaguar on the new one. So today I’m spending the day installing everything from scratch, from applications and utilities to fonts and all of my old documents.

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Hulk Smash! Or Flop?

The HulkI’m feeling kind of time-pressured today, because I’m trying to leave the office early to go see “The Hulk,” which unfortunately got a pretty poor review in The New York Times today. This is a shame, because I had so many high hopes for Ang Lee’s foray into multimillion-dollar box office spectacles as a sign that the characters of popular mythology can actually be treated with truly artful hands. I don’t know why I do this to myself each time I head out to see a comic book made into a movie, because I tend to be let down. It’s just that I think these characters have so much potential for mature, literate dramaturgy that it’s a shame that Hollywood is not aiming to make true classics out of them, rather than just box office smashes.

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The Fantastic Fourth

The Invisible Girl“The Invisible Girl” is the title for my latest contribution to the Squat mix CD club. It’s not as late as its predecessor, but it wasn’t on time, either; I only shipped it today, two and a half weeks after the original deadline of 31 May. If I can offer any excuse, it’s that my packaging for this round was more complex — and expensive — than ever.

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That Ol’ Time UI

Parents: The Anti-DrugIn a weekly email question-and-answer column, NY Times advertising reporter Stuart Elliot addressed a reader’s question about this online ad for the “Parents: The Anti-Drug” campaign. The reader remarked on the fact that the ad was “designed to recall the display from the early Macintosh computers,” and wondered whether it was meant to be “lifeless enough to drive away teens, but familiar to the eyes of young parents like myself, who grew up with the Mac and its display quirks.”

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Five Oh Oh!

500Five hundred posts is a milestone of some kind, right? At least it feels that way to me. When I launched version Six.5 of this site, there were only around 420 posts or so. That was just two months ago, and now I’m halfway to a thousand! I worried back in April that the new format and the writer-friendly Movable Type software would make it difficult for me to be able to keep posting to this site daily; together, the two changes practically demanded lengthier entries.

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The Glass Is Half Full

Half-Life 2This 600 megabyte video clip documenting the “Half-Life 2” demonstration at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo 2003 is ridiculous. What I mean is that it’s an embarrassment of technological riches. This video is ostensibly a preview of this much anticipated video game’s unconscionably advanced depiction of science fiction terror and violence, replete with gorgeously overwrought scene locations, nearly frightening use of artificial intelligence, and an absurdly detailed sense of a world in complete panic.

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Categorically Speaking

SubcategoriesIn an email exchange with Naz of Absenter.org, I got to thinking about some of the limitations of the categories feature (Subtraction.com refers to them as ‘tags’) in Movable Type. While powerful, this feature doesn’t allow me to do one thing that would be very handy for me: I’d like to be able to string together a few arbitrarily chosen posts in a kind of ’series’ — almost like a regular category, but more limited in purpose.

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