Illustrate Me for Halloween!

Tue 31 Oct 200606:40 PM

It’s no trick. I have a Halloween treat for all you Illustrate Me fans out there: for once, I’m publishing a new entry in this ongoing series early. That’s right, no weeks-long delay this time. Before the last day of October even closes out, the month’s archives have been beautifully illustrated by Ray Frenden, an illustrator from rural Illinois. You can see it right now in all its gruesome glory on the October archive page.

Plastic, Interrupted

Mon 30 Oct 200611:29 PM

Mr. France-y Pants

Wed 25 Oct 200611:29 PM

If you can believe it, I disappeared over the past few days to Paris, France. Yes, that Paris, France: land of unconscionably good baked goods, storybook architecture and head-shakingly beautiful women. Since my father now lives there, I’ll be visiting fairly often (even if my last trip there was nearly a year ago), which poses a semi-interesting question for blogging purposes: should I even bother posting about a trip to a romantic locale when those trips are common-place enough to be not particularly romantic? It wouldn’t seem to make for particularly good reading if I did, which is part of the reason I didn’t even bother to leave a ‘Gone to France’ post last Thursday afternoon, when I flew out.

Illustrate Me for September

Thu 19 Oct 200604:20 PM

September’s Illustrate Me comes from an unexpected source: Alissa Walker, design author extraordinaire and one-half of the tireless design reporting staff at Mediabistro’s Unbeige blog. It’s a gorgeously raw, hand-written illustration that really caught me off guard. You can see it for yourself now on September’s archive page.

The War on Error-ism

Wed 18 Oct 200609:12 PM

Something’s up with my installation of Movable Type and/or the MySQL database powering it. Often, during the publishing process — after hitting Save or Rebuild — the application will fail in its attempt to get a response back from the server. What results is a message that says, “Internal Server Error.” Fun, right?

This was something I started to see a few months ago, about the same time that I upgraded, after much delay, to Movable Type version 3.3. (To be fair, I’m not entirely sure that the upgrade was the cause of the problem.)

At first, I thought I was only seeing it on the administrative end, when I was editing posts, creating new ones, or managing comments. Then I started to realize that users were seeing it, too, because I suddenly started to get multiple copies of comments, often published in quick succession. Obviously, people were — and in fact, all evidence indicates that they still are — submitting their comments, encountering this error, and then, thinking their remarks weren’t successfully published, submitting them again until some sort of confirmation indication appears.

When All’s Said and Done

Wed 18 Oct 200601:52 AM

Despite an ugly night of non-stop rain, Jeffrey Zeldman’s Small Talk event for AIGA New York went off without a hitch this evening. In fact, it went great; Jeffrey’s always entertaining, and he gave a spirited, insightful and often hilarious talk on the nature of selling great work to clients. The subject was a perfect match for the mixed audience of Web designers and print designers, and I think everyone got a little something out of it, regardless of how they earn their design dollars.

Just how many of each kind of designer attended, it’s hard to say. During one question, Jeffrey asked for a show of hands, and it looked like most of the room was populated by designers who work primarily online. Still, this is a salient question for AIGA that I’m keen to get an answer on. As I mentioned last week when I was promoting this event, we’ll be surveying the attendees for their opinions starting tonight, so if you attended, check your email.

As promised, we’ll be giving away some prizes to randomly selected survey respondents: two copies of Jeffrey’s “Designing with Web Standards (Second Edition),” each of which have been signed and dated by Jeffrey to commemorate tonight’s talk, and a free season pass to all four of next spring’s Small Talks.

Speaking of future Small Talks, we have three more coming up before the end of the fall 2006 season: Marc Joseph in November, Peter Arkle and Amy Goldwasser in December, and Emmanuelle Linard in January. All of these events take place in the beautiful venue generously provided for us by Bumble and bumble, and all of them are not-to-be-missed if you enjoy listening to incredibly sharp people talk about design.

When All’s Said and Done

Wed 18 Oct 200601:52 AM

A Postal Fix

Mon 16 Oct 200610:18 PM

Simpler and Simplerer

Thu 12 Oct 200609:58 PM

After using the Kinkless Getting Things Done system to manage all of my to do items for months, I ultimately had to set it aside. I’m just not up to the task of maintaining the system anymore; not that it was particularly difficult, but it did, on occasion, ‘hiccup’ on me, and to do items and projects would fall out of sync with one another. I just don’t think I have the energy in life right now to troubleshoot things like that that just shouldn’t need troubleshooting.

(This is really the fault of the whole damn concept of synchronization, which, at this stage in the maturity of software, is unbelievably anemic. But that’s another discussion entirely.)

Instead, I’m turning to Mori, a simple note-keeper application from Jesse Grossjean’s Hog Bay Software. Mori is a descendant of Hog Bay Notebook that adds some nifty new features like robust Spotlight support and, er, some others that I don’t really use. Mostly, I turn to Mori because it does what Hog Bay Notebook did so very well: conveniently bundle together what are essentially RTF-based TextEdit files into a hierarchical file system. Put more simply, it takes a bunch of not particularly fancy text documents and allows you to edit and manage them in a single window. There’s no context lists, no project hierarchies, no synchronization or database — none of the things that kGTD does. It’s dead simple.