Archives

Snap Happy

Nikon D70Thanks to an unnecessarily complicated income tax situation, I was only able to receive — and spend — my 2003 refund recently. Feeling a little despondent after last week’s big Democratic loss in the election, I took a WTF the attitude and splurged on a Nikon D70 digital SLR camera. It arrived today, and I just spent the last two hours figuring it out; there are a million things to learn about it, but at this point I’m totally thrilled. Following, the first decent picture I took with it.

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InDesign We Trust

Adobe InDesignThe past two days, I’ve been spending more time than usual in Adobe InDesign. While I’m still no fan of designing for print (or the process of it, anyway), I’m really finding that I enjoy using InDesign as a tool. Maybe it’s because I kind of grew up using QuarkXPress, but I find the mode of thinking that a layout program like InDesign uses to be very intuitive. The program’s style sheets feature is a good example; defining and using these text-styling rules is exceedingly simple and logical. It makes we wish that there was a way of manipulating Cascading Style Sheets similarly. Of course, CSS is far more powerful a medium than InDesign’s style sheets, but there must be a way to balance its raw power with InDesign’s brand of plainspoken logic.

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The Hub of the Matter

USBThe USB 1.1 standard, which in theory allows ‘hot swapping’ of scanners, mousing devices, external hard drives etc. without necessitating the reboot of your Macintosh, has always been a frustrating experience for me. With three or four USB devices for each of my computers, I rely heavily on the hubs that I own — two cheap Belkins that I bought at Staples a few years ago — to get all those devices working properly so that I can get my own work done.

But every time I hot swap a device — like my digital camera — I get over-current error messages. And not all of my devices seem to dependably register each time I start up; I regularly have to unplug and re-plug my Griffin iMate-enabled ADB Kensington TurboMouse in order to get my Mac to recognize that it’s attached. The implicit promise of this standard is that working with these peripherals should be painless, but it’s far from the truth.

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File Under “Young, Stupid”

By and large, it’s not my opinion that weblogs should chronicle the minutiae of an author’s everyday life, but I’m going to ignore that rule for a moment and let it be known to the entire world that I cleaned out my file cabinet yesterday. For years, I’d been moving around a set of hanging file folders stuffed with the accrued paperwork of my personal business affairs; I’d relocate these bulky files from apartment to apartment the way you might move furniture that you never use. And each time I had to open the drawer to retrieve some crucial document or file a document that seemed vaguely significant, I’d make a mental note: “Gotta clean out these damn files soon.”

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The Escapist

Men of TomorrowIt’s fuckin’ gloomy around here. Everyone’s pissed off or depressed or angry or sulking. To get a little respite, I’m retreating to the fantasia of the comic book world with Gerard Jones’ “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.” I picked it up over the weekend while browsing the aisles at my local bookstore, stocking up on fodder for my culturally elitist reading list (my duty, as a citizen of a blue state). I’ve never really left behind the familiar comfort of comic books, in part because they almost bring me back to the less prickly reality of childhood, but these days I think I enjoy the idea of them more than anything; I’d rather read about comic books than actually read them.

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Do I Have to Draw You a Map

MapsSetting aside this awful feeling for a moment: here are a few of my favorite electoral maps — from an information design perspective, not from an electoral math perspective — from this Election Day just past. It’s mildly interesting how the various news outlets and independent sources each tackled the challenge of visually assessing how the country voted. I say “mildly” because as a design problem, the electoral college is almost banal in its limitations. There are only so many ways you can show this data.

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Game, Set, Match

Not many of my friends seems to want to talk about the Kerry/Edwards loss in any great detail, and it makes me wonder if I’m the only one taking it as hard as I am. To be honest, I’m devastated, and furious and overcome with melancholy, and I’m not sure what to do with myself. It fills me with dread to consider what George W. Bush will do with a second term; I get physically ill when I consider the long-term damage that might be done by forty-eight more months of his diplomatic myopia, his economic irresponsibility, his craven Attorney General, and his retrograde Supreme Court appointees. It’s going to take some true grit not to succumb to complete despair over the next few days.

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Got Out the Vote

Vote KerryIn spite of all the tension coursing through me today, and in spite of all my previous bad-mouthing of John Kerry’s campaign performance in late summer, I think that I’m cautiously optimistic about his chances for winning this election today. I know there are something like thirty-three ways that the various electoral lots can add up to another bitter tie between Bush and Kerry, but I just don’t see that happening somehow. In my gut, I think there will be a relatively decisive victory, whether it’s for one side or the other. This is fueled in part by the early reports of immense voter turnout and the leaked mid-afternoon exit polls I’ve seen — crack for those of us who can’t bear the suspense. I’ll heed the cautions that early exit polls are tremendously unreliable, and I have little doubt that Bush supporters can still manage a clear late-inning victory, but right now, I’m just going to throw aside my rational self. I’ve been waiting four years to cast a ballot for a Democratic challenger and against George W. Bush; so I’m just going to enjoy the lingering sensation of that act for at least a few more hours.

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Name That iTune

iTunesThe current generation of iPods can be had with a hard drive as big as 40 Gigabytes, and the iPod Photo can be had in a 60 Gigabyte model. If you don’t limit yourself to the storage available in a portable digital music player, you can have an exponentially more capacious warehouse for all of your MP3s on your computer’s hard disk — a desktop computer with a 250 Gigabyte internal drive is not uncommon these days. That’s a lot of music. So it occurred to me this morning, when the chorus of some half-remembered song popped into my head inexplicably and then haunted me all the way to the office, that iTunes and iPods — or whatever substitutes you care to name — still don’t allow you to find that one song that goes something like “Doo de dum de doo…” You know the one I’m talkin’ about?

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Picture Imperfect

iPod PhotoWhether or not I really have a use for an iPod Photo or not is unclear to me, but seeing how I’m in the market for a new one of these things, there’s a decent chance I’ll own one by the end of the year. However, I still have a quibble: I like the fact that Apple is continuing to expand the feature set of its increasingly important digital device, but I’m frustrated by the company’s apparent unwillingness to just go the whole way — how much longer must we wait before Apple just makes the iPod what it so obviously is: a true multimedia portable digital assistant? Most of the groundwork for this is there; all that’s missing is a touch screen screen. With these photo features, the iPod Photo amounts to one big tease. Anyway, all I know is the U2-edition iPod is really dumb.

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