Archives

The Sheltered Tennessean

I’m spending the week in Nashville, TN, kicking off a project with a brand new client. This happens to mean we’re back at the Opryland Hotel, which is still pretty crazy and great. A colleague likened it to “Bio-Dome” because the hotel is an environment of its own, a self-contained ecosystem of artificial waterfalls and fauna, miniature roadways, restaurants, cafés and even an adjunct convention and business center. And it’s true, since arriving here by airport shuttle on Friday night, we haven’t breathed more than 60 seconds of truly exposed Tennessee air. We’ve eaten, bathed and worked within the confines of this little universe almost exclusively. It’s weird, but oddly reassuring. Except for the fact that I have limited Internet access — there’s a nice high-speed line in my hotel room but it restricts access to unapproved SMTP servers, so sending email is pretty difficult. It’s certainly a case of more work than play, too, which means postings here will be limited this week. Y’all c’mon back now, ya hear?

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Get on My Good Side

It always seems like we could use another designer at Behavior and so we’re continually interviewing candidates, whether for immediate hire or down-the-road gigs. My partners do it more than I do, but it’s not unusual for me to sit in on a few from time to time. I’ve never been a big fan of interviews, though I admit the formal, almost adversarial constraints are a necessary evil of finding qualified designers to join our team.

Anyway, I’ve compiled a short, non-definitive list of things that have made interviews go well — for me. These are things that can improve the emotional temperature of an interview, i.e. they help a candidate ensure I’ll walk away with a positive impression of his or her wherwithal, presence of mind, and ability to interview, at least. These tips won’t necessarily improve someone’s chances for hire if the work is no good — and we’ve met candidates who have flouted one or more of these tips and still interviewed successfully — but every little bit helps.

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Fictitious Weblog Name

DickensIn a roundabout, flirty kind of way, what I was asking in yesterday’s post was, “What is a weblog?” The question itself is so open-ended and suggests no definitive answers that even those who pose it seem to do so a bit wearily, which explains why I didn’t come out and state it that way. It deserves to be asked though, and I think a reasonable if still evasive way of answering it might be, “What is a book?” The most literal answer might be: it’s a technological vehicle for the delivery of ideas. But the form itself suggests few inherent purposes, uses or opportunities beyond the very basic one of communication, so why should a blog? Both a book and a blog can take just about any form that can be contained within their own rudimentary technical limits.

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Wheres and Whys of Blogging

Last Friday my girlfriend and I drove to Northern Virginia to see family, leaving just before the “Blizzard of 2005” hit and returning just after the snow finished falling. Before I left, I didn’t get a chance to update my weblog with one of those “Gone fishin’” posts to let readers know I was going to be away from my keyboard for a few days. I’ve never liked those kinds of posts, especially the times I’ve gone back over them while performing housekeeping tasks on my archives — they seem irrelevant and superfluous beyond the immediate present. I’m a bit precious, I suppose, about the idea of making my archives readable, free of that kind of cruft.

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The Reading (and Waiting) List

Bel CantoIt’s not often that I read fiction anymore, unfortunately. I blame this on a schedule that imposes unhealthy restrictions on leisure reading in general and also the ‘always on’ nature of my home internet connection, which beckons me to read more and more blogs when I should be spending the evening on the couch with a good book. From time to time I’ll make a concerted effort to read something in ink and paper format, but more often than not, I’m drawn to non-fiction.

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Do the Shuffle

iPod ShuffleHaving been, for nearly a week now, on the cusp of buying myself an iPod shuffle, I was reminded by my girlfriend that the principal mode of listening to music through this new device is antithetical to my own listening nature. That is, by habit, I still listen to songs in the mode of albums, and that I rarely will put iTunes in shuffle mode across my entire music library. When she said this, my reaction was first, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” But then I thought about it for a moment, and I realized that she’s right. When I’m sitting here at my desk in our apartment, I’ll launch iTunes and play whatever albums I’ve recently acquired over and over — and over and over.

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Feeding the Hand That Aggregates Me

For news aggregator jockeys out there: I’ve just spent the afternoon overhauling the main Subtraction.com feeds (and brushing up on my meagre XML skills). You’ll notice, on the home page, a new little table in the right-hand column which lists links to the XML feeds, available in the standard RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom flavors. They even describe what you can expect in terms of feed content, so there are no surprises. (If you’re looking for a different kind of feed, perhaps one with comments appended, just let me know, and I’ll pass the request on up to the Feed Development and Publishing Department.)

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Individual Style

Individual StyleSomeone, somewhere may have come up with this before me — if they did, I never saw it, I swear — but I’m nevertheless proud of this little trick that I developed for version 7.0 of this site. It applies unique styles to individual articles from within Movable Type in a more or less automated way. This post is an example of the trick in action: a little bit of PHP, a little bit of Movable Type hackery and a little bit of CSS all conspire to apply a completely arbitrary variant on the standard, black and white Subtraction.com article. Translation: this page looks different from the others.

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Second Helpings at Macworld

Mac miniEverything that Steve Jobs announced in today’s Macworld Expo keynote address can be thought of as a kind of second helping. There’s a sequel, like the iLife ’05 suite of digital lifestyle products. There’s a second taste of Apple’s teasing foray into a full-productivity suite, in which the new version of Keynote is bundled with a brand new word processing program under the name iWork. There’s a new, lower-priced version of Apple’s winning digital music player called the iPod shuffle, which almost seems as if it’s being sold as an accessory to its larger siblings. And there’s the Mac mini, which is being pitched as either a replacement for a Windows PC or a companion to an existing Macintosh. In an unexpected way, you could even say that it’s a kind of sequel, too.

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