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Winging It

Because I’ve invested so many hours into watching the preceding seasons of “The West Wing,” I’ve more or less felt compelled to watch its wandering, sometimes agonizingly listless course since the departure of creator Aaron Sorkin in 2003. Under the now exclusive guidance of Sorkin’s producing partner John Wells, the show has lost a lot of its crisp nature and has appeared, many times, to be wheezing along, looking for some new purpose, and in doing so, almost wantonly inflicting severe physical distress on its characters — torturous kidnappings, deadly explosions, heart attacks and advanced stages of multiple sclerosis, for example, have all been visited on familiar characters in the past two seasons — in the hopes of revealing some re-invigorating, ratings-friendly momentum.

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ABCs for iPods

iPod ScreenOkay, I’m kind of fixated on iPods right now, so bear with me. Since getting my new iPod photo, I’ve been in turns pleased with the way the user interface has been rounded out with new features — rating songs right in the iPod, for example, is terrific and something I didn’t have in my old iPod — and also I’ve been a little frustrated that a few fundamental changes haven’t been put in place.

A friend of mine wishes that, when in shuffle mode, the U.I. would allow him to take the currently playing song and shift out of shuffle mode and into that song’s native album. That sounds handy and I’d be happy to see it, but not before I’d want to see the addition of something much more fundamental: the alphabet.

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Walk This Way

If you live in a town where most traveling to and from places is done by auto, you might not experience this phenomenon, but I see it every day: when I walk down the street I pass person after person plugged into a pair of white iPod headphones. In New York, this is almost a given feature of pedestrian life, a subtle way in which Apple has left a mark on the character of the city. The other day I started wondering how many iPods I actually see during, say, my walk from home to work in the morning, was it just a few that seemed like many, or was there really an iPod consumer on just about every block?

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Primate in Pink

Pink ValentineEverybody seems to know what a singing telegram is, but few people have ever received one; heck, the one that I sent to my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day today was the first one I’ve even been involved in. It’s dead simple to book if you have a credit card and a sense of mischief, and the performer showed up promptly at her office around 10:30a this morning and serenaded her in full public view of her entire office — and to her great personal embarrassment — with chocolates and a rendition of “Hello Dolly.” Why they chose that song, I have no idea; it completely escaped me that I could specify a song when I was giving the details to the booker so I guess he just chose a favorite. One thing I did specify, though, was the pink gorilla suit. I spotted it on the Web site and I thought to myself, “What says ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ better than a singing telegram delivered in a pink gorilla suit?” I’ll tell you what: nothing.

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Headin’ Down South by Southwest

SXSWRather than my customary modus operandi of burying myself in work and letting opportunities to meet living and breathing people out in the real world pass me by, I’ve decided to head on over to Austin, TX for this year’s South by Southwest Festival. I just booked my tickets yesterday, and I’ll be there basically from late on Fri 11 Mar through that Sun 13 Mar. As I mentioned last week, Behavior was fortunate enough to have two of our entries tapped as finalists in this competition, so there is at least some incentive for me to show up, though in all honesty that’s just an excuse to go see all the hot shot speakers slated to appear. Also, I’m hoping to meet at least a few people with whom I’ve been corresponding over email or through blog comments — this means you! If you’re going to SXSW yourself, please drop me a line so that I may humbly put a name to a face. I can’t wait!

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Apple Is My Man

iPod photoHere’s some quick, back-of-the-envelope math to tally my recent Apple-related purchases: US$99 to renew my .Mac subscription for another year, US$79 for the iWork suite to get my hands on Keynote 2, US$79 for iLife ’05, US$19 for an extra iPod cable and US$29 for a Contour brand iPod case — both to complement the king of my recent Apple acquisitions, a brand new 40GB iPod photo. That last one goes for US$499 retail, which brings the total value of my spending to US$804, before tax.

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The Mini-Binder Sketchbook System

SketchbookThere’s a bit of throwback enthusiasm going on right now among the otherwise digitally inclined for the mystique of Moleskine. These decidedly analog, leather-bound notebooks and sketchbooks are a counterpoint to the foundering PDA market: they are idea keepers and organizers that can capture fluid, organic meanderings of the brain in a way that neither the Palm OS nor the Pocket PC can hope to approximate. What’s more, rather than losing their value and technological currency with age, they are built to grow more precious with repeated use, as their owners invest ever more care and time into filling their pages.

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Keynote Schizophrenia

Keynote 2My copy of Apple’s iWork productivity suite arrived the week before last, just in time for me to get it installed and running before leaving for Nashville. I’ve done little more than install, open, and briefly monkey around with one of the templates in the suite’s Pages word processing and layout application, so the jury’s still out on it. But for the past ten days or so, I’ve been putting its other component, Keynote 2, through its paces.

In anticipation of a big meeting last Thursday, I used that program to prepare a major presentation, replete with about 20MB of screen shots and perhaps two dozen informational graphics constructed in Adobe Illustrator. Understanding that no software upgrade will ever embody that elusive ideal of perfectly balanced features, elegance, performance and ease of use, I have to say that I’m pleased with the upgrade, but also impatient to see the next revision.

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Bragging Rights

Vote: The Machinery of DemocracyFinalists in the South by Southwest Festival’s 2005 Web Awards were announced earlier this week. I’m really proud to report that two of the projects that Behavior launched in 2004 made the cut as finalists. Happily, both finalists happen to relate to our intense interest in last year’s presidential campaign: the site we launched for P. Diddy’s Citizen Change was nominated to the Green/Non-Proft Business category. And in the Educational Resource category, I’m really pleased and humbled to say that Vote: the Machinery of Democracy was also tapped. I’ve lost a little bit of my taste for Flash as a delivery method for substantive information, but I still like this project because we had access to some truly illuminating content taken right from the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s rich archives. Read more about it in my announcement post.

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New York to Nashville and Back Again

Time is a weird phenomenon when you’re holed up in a week-long series of business meetings, as I was this past week in Nashville. On Tuesday evening, it felt as I’d been there for a whole two weeks rather than just two days. Nearly every minute of every day was scheduled; if we weren’t meeting, we were preparing for the next meeting, and by Friday morning it felt like it had been a whole month we’d been there. But now I’m back in New York, and I can’t believe it was almost an entire week ago that I was leaving for the airport; I remember the sandwich I was eating just before walking out the door last Sunday like it was just two hours ago. Very odd.

Though I’m freakin’ exhausted, I have to say though that it was probably one of the most productive kick-offs in which I’ve ever taken part. We met with some forty-odd stakeholders and cranked through a huge requirements and information gathering agenda, led principally by our information architect. We do projects of all kinds of sizes at Behavior, but even the big ones aren’t always as intensive and well-structured as this, so it has me in a pretty positive state of mind about getting started on the design. It makes such a big difference to have properly conducted the necessary research at the beginning of a project. Now comes the hard part. Actually, now I take it easy for a day and a half first.

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