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Speaking at WWWAC Design & Development SIG
June 17, 2002 (usability) +
I will be sitting on a panel on information architecture Tuesday night (June 18) at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. It's a special interest group meeting held by the World Wide Web Artists' Consortium. If you're in New York and curious about the role of IA at Economist.com—or you just want to say hi—do stop by.
The SIG is free but you have to RSVP to attend.
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The Moment, part two
June 17, 2002 (journal) +
My coworker Will is an affable Brit living in Manhattan with his wife. He has been here for about 10 months, and had his own Moment last month.
Will was traveling up Central Park West in the back seat of a taxicab when his cab driver inadvertently cut off a large Mercedes. The driver of the Benz, mad at the cabbie, sped up, raced past the cab on the right-hand side, then turned 45 degrees to the left and stopped short, blocking both northbound lanes of the street.
The driver of the Mercedes jumped out of his car and, with his children watching from the back seat, stormed over to the cab to discuss the cabbie's driving skills. The two were jawing as Will sat in the cab, watching the argument and his meter keep rising.
After a moment Will got fed up and rolled down his window. "Excuse me!" he called out to the Mercedes driver standing in the street.
"What do you want?" the man lashed out.
"Are you going to pay my fare?" Will asked angrily. "I have a meter running here!"
"Butt out," said the driver.
Will didn't. "Listen, you are either going to get back in your car and get out of my way, or you're going to pay my fare while I sit and wait for you to finish your argument. Now get out of my way."
The angry Benz driver stared at Will for a moment, and then, grumbling, went back to his car and took off.
Mild-mannered Will spent the rest of his cab ride marveling at his newfound New York attitude.
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The Moment
June 14-2, 2002 (journal) +
Upon moving to a new city, one goes through the natural acclimation periods, including a stretch where the city is comfortable, but not yet home.
Then comes an instance where suddenly one lashes out, and acts in a way not previously thought possible on a personal level. The Moment is when realization sets in: Yep, this is my town.
I grew up in New Jersey, always traveling to New York City for events and weekends with my family. I began working in Manhattan when I graduated, and two years later I moved into the city proper.
For a while, I was a Jerseyan in the City, right down to my abundance of khaki pants and brown shoes. I defended my home state (still do); I identified more with my past than my present. It was natural to do so. But I quickly succumbed to the rhythms of city life, since I knew them well before I moved.
A few months after relocating, I was heading north in Times Square at the corner of 46th and Broadway, and I wound up standing on the corner, behind a man who wasn't stepping off the curb. I pushed past him, bumping his shoulder as I went, muttering under my breath about stupid tourists clogging up the sidewalks.
Then I looked up and found myself crossing 46th Street against the light with a car barreling toward me.
I got to the far corner without incident, but I knew what had happened. "Well, David," I thought to myself, "you're a New Yorker now."
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Get in the hole!
June 14, 2002 (weblog) +
Surviving the 'Most Demanding Sport' in the New York Times.
For all the roars that thundered across the Black Course for Woods's birdies and par-saving putts, the loudest cheer occurred when he emerged from a portable restroom in the tree-canopied dirt path on the way to the 15th tee. Hearing the roar, Woods smiled.
"Are you guys clapping," he asked, looking around, "because I'm potty-trained?"
Welcome to New York, Tiger.
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The music industry, she's a-changin'
June 13, 2002 (weblog) +
Slowly but surely, the music business is wading into an era of thorough upheaval. Is it good? We'll find out in a few years; this is probably just the beginning. What's interesting is its effects across the board.
On the music side, news that Sony and Universal are making it cheaper to download music online shows the beginning of what should ultimately be a full embrace of technology. In the long run, smart, straightforward copy protection and reasonable prices will revolutionize music. Why not pay eight bucks for a downloaded album, or $16 in stores? Sounds like a fair deal each way, trading slick production and goodies for in-home convenience. Price it right, and people won't balk at the cost. Some will continue to steal, the same way people swap bootleg videotapes now, but the industry will soldier on.
What these Web-savvy, wired consumers mean for print media and attention spans is another issue entirely, and one that fueled Rolling Stone's appointing a veteran of FHM as its new editor. Realigning coverage toward booze and babes isn't such a stretch for RS, but it probably isn't going to feel good to its more literate readers. Then again, the argument could be made that Rolling Stone should get out of covering starving babies in Africa and stick to music and entertainment anyway. Even though RS did spawn "Fast Food Nation" and other notable contemporary literary works, readerships change over time, and Rolling Stone is acknowledging and embracing that change.
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What I want
June 12, 2002 (journal) +
I'd like to win the lottery, really; today I'm buying a ticket for MegaMillions, which stands at $35 million for Friday's drawing.
$35 million lump-summed and taxed would leave me with roughly $9 million in cash, maybe not quite enough to retire and live life as a fat cat forever—the dotcom upstarts of the late 1990s always said that would take $10 million or more, because at that level, one could stick it in a trust and live off the $1 million in annual interest and investment gains—but plenty for me, undoubtedly, to take a long vacation and buy a bigger apartment for me and my lady, and exit the Web world for a while, and buy a lot of CDs, and write for a living, or at least pretend to write for a living, knowing full well that the chances of me making a six-figure annual income off words are slim, but that'd be okay, because I'd be sitting on the $9 million that made it into my pocket on even slimmer odds, and I could eat at the bar at Union Square Cafe once a week, if I felt like it, instead of once a year, when I decide I really deserve that $23 veal and pasta appetizer.
Barring that, I'll get a cheeseburger for lunch on Saturday.
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Perfect
June 12, 2002 (weblog) +
Poor Andre.
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RTFM
June 12, 2002 (weblog) +
As the page title reads, Mozilla help to the rescue.
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That's Kim Cattrall they're talking about
June 10, 2002 (weblog) +
Elderly woman: "Look at that man with the dummy!"
Her husband: "Who are you to criticize?"
—Mannequin
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Wanted
June 7, 2002 (weblog) +
Math class scratch paper. Reward.
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Oh, and talk about weblogs
June 7, 2002 (weblog) +
The Weblog FAQK from Brunching Shuttlecocks.
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I guess she'll die
June 7, 2002 (weblog) +
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly. ...
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Metaphor
June 4, 2002 (weblog) +
Fantastic Michael Wolff column in New York Magazine this week: The music industry is becoming the book business.
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Balancing act
June 4, 2002 (weblog) +
Building brand into structure at Boxes and Arrows.
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Interim
June 4, 2002 (journal) +
There's a netwert.com redesign that is thisdamnclose to launching but isn't ready yet. It's powered by a fine PHP and MySQL back-end that was lovingly prepared for me by my good friend David—six months ago—and I am finally, slowly, aggravatingly debugging it daily.
I need to relaunch this soon, because this design is ripe for replacement, because I know how few of my readership realizes there was a weblog over there [juts chin to the right] for the past six months, because I have taken a shine to not using FTP to post to the site. But I'm not a good enough programmer to repair all my mistakes, so the new site is not yet live.
Until such time occurs as I can get the new guy out the door, I've gone ahead and reformatted this page anyway. Weblog entries (without permalinks) are getting thrown in this main column, along with usability essays and journal ditties. That's the way they'll be in the redesign, to some extent, although it will make much more sense once the categorized database is in place. For now it's a bit of a mess, and for that I apologize. And once I'm relaunched, I can spare you and me both from this obnoxious weblogging-about-my-weblog shtick, for which I must also apologize.
In any case, I do update NetWert just about every business day, and this is the page you should continue to check for said updates, and with that, I'm going to get back to my regularly scheduled (and now gloriously disjointed) prattle.
P.S. Yes, I am aware of the alarmingly high amount of adverbs currently on this page (there's two more!) but that is an issue for another day.
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And it's real
June 3, 2002 (weblog)
Web geek gut course.
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On authorship
June 3, 2002 (journal) +
Sadly and unsurprisingly—and not a little bit exhilaratingly—I have found myself doing lots of the little (marginally annoying) things authors do when their books are published.
Like what? You ask.
Like, I tell everyone "My book is out!" even if they didn't know I was writing one.
I whip out a copy of the book, uninvited and unannounced, if I happen to be carrying it, to show just about anyone I can, from my high school friends to my girlfriend's doorman. This usually just precedes the "My book is out!" announcement.
I got a cheap and obvious thrill out of seeing Amy's copy of her book arrive in its Amazon.com box last night. (And no, silly, I didn't force her to buy one; she decided it would be fun to support me. Even though my free-book box is in her apartment. And it was fun.)
I had my brother ask at the desk at his local Barnes & Noble if they had my book in stock. (They didn't. Dammit.)
I check the Amazon page for my book several times a day to peek at my Page Rank. (It's gotten as high as 6,378, which is not too shabby for a tome that isn't available at retail yet.)
I don't feel any more important or special than I did six months ago, but if you're wondering about this whole newly-published-author thing: Hell yeah it's fun.
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