Archives

The Gift of Gab

President Bush’s News ConferenceAmongst all the obfuscation, double-talk, evasions, stuttering, awkward pauses, rote repetitions of talking points and tongue-tied sputtering in President Bush’s news conference this evening — only his third ever prime time conference, by the way — I think my absolute favorite line came during an answer to a reporter’s question about… I don’t even remember what it was about. But Bush went down some long, confusing tunnel of rhetoric and, in seeking to illustrate his assertion that America, apparently, has been charged by God with spreading freedom all over the world, he uttered this lovely gem: “I think the American people will find it interesting that we’re providing food for the North Korea people who starve.” I don’t even know what that means.

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You Can Lead a Dog to Water

Mister PresidentThe ridiculously gorgeous weather of spring — the reward for months of crappy winter weather — is starting to visit the New York area now. Though it was overcast and raining today, it was gorgeous on Saturday, when my girlfriend and I took Mister President up to Fahnestock State Park, where we hiked about 6 miles, part of it along the Appalachian Trail. We made the trip as much for us as for the dog, who we let off the leash (probably at the risk of a fine from a park ranger) for the entirety of the four hours.

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Behaviors to Come

Behaviordesign.comJust so you know, there is in fact a new version of Behaviordesign.com forthcoming. In what little spare time our current workload has allowed, we’ve been tooling away on a redesign that will, hopefully, ease our continued embarrassment over the way the current site looks on its face and the way it’s structured beneath the surface. This new version will be a hundred percent XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, and I’ve been having fun playing with alternative CSS files for various media.

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Morning Routines

Here’s how my Web surfing habits have changed: somewhere along the way, I got completely out of the habit of reading the various design Web sites like K10k and Surfstation every morning, possibly because I so often find that their purposely terse and cryptic language leaves me wanting. This is also because I’ve been spending more and more time every morning reading political news, most prominently at ABC News’ excellent The Note, which has just started a new spin-off column that intends to offer the same brand of Beltway insiderism on a ‘real time’ basis. And then there’s the Progress Report from the Center for American Progress, which is exhaustive in compiling cogent cases against the Bush adminstration’s errant policies every morning. And of course there’s all those political blogs, too: Talking Points Memo, Political Animal, Instapundit and Wonkette, and wherever they lead me.

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Hell on Reels

HellboyMost of the people with whom I’ve casually discussed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” have insisted that I should put aside my prejudices — specifically my unwillingness to get suckered into another attempt at reinventing Jim Carrey’s heretofore painfully unwatchable career, first, and my aversion to watching yet another ridiculously hip music video director’s transition to the silver screen, second — so as not to miss one of the brighter offerings in this year’s crop of movies. “I was skeptical too, believe me, but it was really good,” said one of my friends last week. I just can’t do it, or at least I haven’t been able to yet, and if I do, I’m pretty sure I won’t be writing about it here unless I find it sufficiently unworthy of all the praise it’s got. Something stubborn in me finds the whole enterprise just too plainly offensive.

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Manual Dexterity

I found a little bit of old New York in the Flatiron building this morning, when I took my girlfriend’s malfunctioning Olivetti Lettera 35i typewriter to the Gramercy Office Equipment Company for repair. This 70+ year old business is run in a little hovel of an office on the eighth floor by an impeccably groomed, kindly gentleman with a pleasing Brooklyn accent and a preternatural understanding of what makes a typewriter, er, type. Every available surface in the office is stacked up with aging typewriters, office equipment and unfiled paperwork, and when I walked down the very narrow yard of floorspace with the Olivetti, he pulled out a small writing extension from a hulking old steel desk, slapped it with his palm and instructed me to “Set it there. That’s all the space I got.”

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Bookkeeping for Dummies

QuickBooksMy award for the worst interface in a best-selling, market-leading software application goes to Intuit’s perversely inelegant QuickBooks. This bookkeeping program is more or less ubiquitous among small-businesses, in spite of its opaque and unfriendly design, which I find to be really amazing because it’s truly, profoundly awful. As the finances at Behavior have gotten more and more complicated, I’ve been finding myself spending increasing amounts of time trying to figure out QuickBooks’ hidden corners and idiosyncratic organizational structure. For someone who has only a cursory understanding of accounting, I find that almost nothing I click on behaves as I expect it to, and it provides no clear metaphors for understanding how to navigate through a company’s finances. Even fundamental behaviors like scrolling and searches are unpredictable, having been half-heartedly implemented or incompetently reinvented by Intuit’s software designers. I just can’t say it enough: this program sucks.

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School Spirits

My high school yearbooks are lost to me, fumbled somewhere over the past five years, during the course of one of my moves between apartments and cities. It gives me a very small pinprick of pain when I think about that — or about many lost things from my career at Gaithersburg High School — and then I push it out of my mind and try and think of more present matters.

Once in a while though, I’ll wake up in the morning having dreamt about some classmate or other that I might not have thought about since practically the day I took my diploma in hand. Try as I might, I can’t fathom why he or she made such a memorable guest appearance in my dreams; there’s almost no tangible connection that I can bring to mind, and yet I swear that, for a time between late night television and the morning alarm, they were as vivid to me as if I had passed them in the cafeteria the day before.

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The Head Case

Sony MDR-7506One of the small but enduring benefits from my time in the dot-com boom was the pair of Sony MDR-7506 studio headphones that, in the early days of abundant venture capital and scarce foresight, one of my former employers handed out to every employee free. When I moved on from that job, I conveniently forgot to hand the headphones back in, and since then I’ve been using them more or less every day.

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What He Said

Richard A. ClarkeThese are the articles that I read this morning about former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke’s claims in his new book that President Bush had a fixation on invading Iraq and that he pressured his aides to produce connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda: an overview of the scenario in the Times, as well as that paper’s analysis of the accusations’ political impact: “At the worst possible moment, it undercuts Mr. Bush on the issue that he has made the unapologetic centerpiece of his administration and a linchpin of his re-election campaign: his handling of the global war on terror.”

In his regular column, Paul Krugman places this incident in the context of the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy and obfuscation. Similarly, in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen examines the administration’s habit of casting aspersion on its critics: “ The White House has opened its guns on Clarke. He is being contradicted and soon, as with poor [former Treasury Secretary Paul] O’Neill, his sanity and probity will be questioned.”

That paper also gives some background on Clarke’s character, noting that he is a registered Republican. The L.A. Times takes a more detailed look at the White House’s coordinated and notably aggressive attack against Clarke, and includes notes from an interview that Clarke gave the paper on Monday.

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