My one man quest to rid the world of all this Sex And The City madness continues. (’In’ the city? ‘And’ the city? Who knows. I can’t be arsed to look it up.) This from the first review of the new movie which debuted in London, puzzlingly:

There may be a problem with a film when a narrator constantly tells you the meaning of what you have just seen, gift-wrapping each scene with a moral.  There may be a problem with characters who shop with such conviction while the audience looks up from the trough of a credit crunch.  There may be a problem with stretching Sex and the City into a two hour and twenty minute film - it can feel like a never ending dinner party: however pleasant the courses, after a while you can hardly eat another one.  None of these problems seemed apparent to the women who sat around me in the cinema in Leicester Square, laughing and weeping in quick succession. After a while I began to reason like one of the characters: maybe the problem was me.

To seeing a movie that gets reviewed like that, I’d say no. Honestly, I’m just happy to read a review of any movie that isn’t just a padded-out press release. We don’t really seem able to say anything nuanced about film in the U.S. anymore; it’s either “best movie evar!!!1″ or “sucked!”. There’s no in-between.

But this pile of dick jokes wrapped in a thin veil of sisterhood deserves whatever horrors befall it.

When we went to see Iron Man the other night, I was greeted at the ticket window by a “cash only” sign. I never carry the stuff, so my saintly wife—who does—stepped up and asked, “two for Ironman, please.” Ironman, like that’s his last name. It was just adorable.

So today in the office we’re listing out all the superheroes whose last names could also be (strange) surnames. Like Kip Spiderman (”Yeah, you know Kip Spiderman. He lives in our building? He made those frittatas you liked at Karen’s party?“). It’s absolute meme gold, I tell you.

About four months ago, as gas started to inch its way toward $4.00 a gallon, my wife and I decided to start looking into a new car. I drive 100+ miles a day to work and back (another story altogether) and I could sense that very soon $90 would be leaping out of my pocket every week just so that I could keep doing it. My current car is also an all-wheel drive, heavy Subaru. I love this car in every way except for its habit of drinking gas like your prom date drinks vodka and purple Kool-Aid.

Of course our first notion was the Toyota Prius. We took one home for a weekend and loved it, but thinking we could get a better deal if we haggled we returned it and said “not yet thanks” on Monday morning. Life got in the way, my job moved into a new office and my wife produced a play. Now that we’re looking again in earnest we can find nary a Prius under twenty-six grand. What used to be the sole domain of soy-sipping hipsters and tenured english Professors is now standard issue survival equipment, and surviving the summer can mean only one thing: real, no screwing around, car shopping.

This is one of many times since hitting my latter twenties that I’ve opened myself up to being marketed to in not so subtle ways. Perusing the web for cars that seem like good matches for us I’m bombarded with images that threaten to shake my beliefs about what I am: in nearly every shot of the Honda Fit in action a slender hipster is casually recumbent in the backseat, swilling a lookalike Starbuck’s latte and surfing on his MacBook. Similarly, the Kia Spectra5 seems to have been placed into production entirely to transport indie-rock bands to their well-attended gigs in Brooklyn. Even the Nissan Versa, sensible in almost every other aspect, assaults the viewer with Juno-style quips while images of its interior load. Room for big hair, indeed. After a while the cynicism sets in so deep that you even start to feel like your friends and Consumer Reports are lying to you about which car to buy. Later, the prospect of buying any car seems like madness and the concept of what constitutes “good” gas mileage becomes contorted and twisted, until all you want is some theoretical car that runs on moonbeams and good thoughts.

The first time I ever shopped for a car on my own, I test-drove a Plymouth so old it had lived through the first oil crisis. The marketing materials that accompanied that one were a newspaper ad and an address I thought I could find without too much trouble. I became aware three blocks in that the brakes were shot, and the shift linkage was gone. I drove a harrowing four miles down a rural interstate before turning around and making a deal right there on the spot. I was absolutely smitten to have found a car that was about as snotty and recalcitrant as I was at 20. Soon it had the requisite Apple sticker and a rebuilt transmission, and my future wife would even ride in it—but just once, enough times to convince her that it hated her and that the feeling was mutual.

But this time I’ve pledged to be more sagacious, resolute even, in our quest to get a car that fits all of our varied needs. We’ve created a composite of this car and it has three hundred airbags, 800 horsepower, a built-in Mac, talking nav that knows where to get really good Pho, and theoretical tie downs for the theoretical car seats our theoretical children may one day ride in. Oh, and alloy wheels. And an EPA estimated 85 miles to the gallon.

What I’m getting at is that I’m bad at this, and all the marketing doesn’t really help as much as I thought it might when I was younger. At 12, staring at the pictures in car magazines like most boys do at that age, I was convinced that car buying was not only easy but probably fun, too. The wise, current-day version of me knows what it’s like to have to tell a car salesman that I do not always, in fact, “wear the pants” in this marriage. The pants are shared, thank you very much, and I try to make it so that my turn happens when my wallet is missing so that we don’t end up with more Plymouths. 

Iron Man is owed a much longer review than this, but suffice it to say that it’s easily the best Marvel superhero movie ever made, and high on the list of super hero movies period. The X-Men movies were garbage, and this more than makes up for all of their whininess. Give me this and the ‘89 and ‘05 Batman films and I’m happy.

Tonight as the credits rolled, my wife turned to me and asked two questions: 1) “Have you turned into an eight year old?” and 2) “Does this mean you’ll see Sex In The City with me?”

Wherein I attempt to get what little readership I have to fall into a deep sleep.

Nicks-iMac:~ nick$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
112 cd
53 svn
50 mate
40 sudo
35 ls
25 pwd
22 ./mysqladmin
17 port
14 ./mysql
13 curl 

Ah, now isn’t that better? Sleeeep. Sleeeeeeeep. I’m sure there’s at least one hard core Unix person out there saying “what the fuck does ‘mate’ do, and where’s all the entries for ‘vi’?” I will further separate the sleepy from the hardcore by announcing this is a Mac.

I change directories a lot, huh?

Accessibility is an important and worthy goal, but it is not at odds with good design. We should settle for nothing less than beautiful and accessible currency. This isn’t it. 

— John Gruber, April 3, 2008

Recently the U.S. Mint released new five dollar bills that have been redesigned in the same style as all the other denominations. Larger numerals have been added to the obverse sides of each bill, presumably to aid in identification by the sight impaired. The bills also contain further deterrents for would-be counterfeiters, like UV inks and special watermarks. But the money still looks the same. It looks like a multi-car pileup on the freeway of design by committee. And the worst part is most of the committee members never even lived in the same century. It seems as though American currency design has gone the way of most design here: an act of contrition to the flow of time, an act of desperation against petty (and not so petty) crime, and a half-hearted nod to those less fortunate than ourselves.

The goal of “beautiful currency” is probably meaningless to most people. Money is a means, a way to buy lunch and put gas in the tank. But more than any official document or printed decree, money is an ambassador. When the U.S. dollar was strong, millions of these little treaties on American ideals were in circulation in parts of the world where few knew anything about us, testifying for us—even if we could never measure up to all those hopelessly noble faces and mighty monuments of architectural achievement.

The five dollar bill I fidgeted with tonight in line at the grocery store looked like a ransom note from some amateurish kidnapper, stained with red Kool-Aid and ham-fisted attempts at foiling teenagers at Kinko’s late at night. The enormous Helvetica “5″ on its back seemed placed there if not totally by accident then at least without care. Held up to the light I saw the lovingly engraved portrait of Lincoln, the president who managed to give his life convincing half a nation that maybe owning humans like cattle was a terribly bad idea, bemusedly looking on at that purple numeral in reverse.

American money, in addition to being stinky, is ugly. And it’s getting worse. But look on the bright side: at least now its looks and its value are getting in synch. The worse our money gets in terms of its aesthetic value, the more it slips in international market value. Am I suggesting that somehow all the world is as shallow as we are? That somehow, entire Saudi families loved the look of the 1967 fifty-dollar bill so much that they stock-piled them in their palaces by the millions and swam around in them like Scrooge McDuck based solely on looks? In a word, no. But design, as Steve Jobs likes to say, is not how it looks; it’s how it works.

So ask yourself next time you’re at the pump putting eight of these new bills in your gas tank if design makes any difference to you. Would it make any difference if the money you used to do it were beautiful, with slogans that reminded you of a bygone part of our shared history that through perseverance and sound governance we could return to? Or would you rather have the key to a Holiday Inn, with a sticker on the back marked by hand in ball-point pen: do not copy?

I’ve been doing some work recently, trying to re-invent the index page of a really large project that I’ve been attached to for almost a year now. It’s a homepage for a community portal site that is produced by an “old media” company, a newspaper specifically. As I’ve submitted countless designs for every imaginable user interface element and page layout, I was reluctant to start again; our company in internally famous for epic and glacial “feedback loops”, and I was in no hurry to find myself defending every last inch of my work to people who may or may not have any idea why it’s important—given their somewhat ironic position of web people trapped inside a newspaper.

After a recent submission, I received a well worded and polite response. It essentially said that we were very close to having a finished candidate, but some tweaks to color would be necessary to move on. I’m fine with this, at least publicly. Internally, however, it makes me want to scream. Even though the writer is a seasoned veteran of the newspaper industry with an above average grasp of the internet as a communications medium, it still makes me cringe. As a company we’ve been tasked with growing virtually every metric we have to measure ourselves by an abstract percentage. That number is in turn based on something only a newspaper would have the sense of humor to map its success against: the penetration and market size of the average locally owned TV station—the other dying medium, besides making records to sell. Management hasn’t been given any terribly clear direction about how this might be accomplished, but many of them seem to think more display ads will do the trick. This is what I hear approximately half the time: grow business, design with ad space in mind, make it conservative. The other half of the time I hear make it ‘web 2.0’, we need ajax, we want comments and tags on everything.

Someone is lying, or wrong, or both.

So when I get feedback on a design whose brief was “bleeding edge, ajax, show-and-hide” that says “these colors are too bright” I feel as though I’ve landed on the ape planet, and there’s a giant Photoshop toolbar jutting out of the surf at right angles. But I’ve realized now that it’s just because we’re trying to do two things at once. We somehow need to keep the average 54 year old female reader—who revolts and calls us on the phone when we move the sudoku puzzle—and convince the 18 year old that we are just as cool as Digg. I’m growing increasingly dubious as to whether this can be done.

I think these dual goals are fairly common in businesses like newspapers, where it’s increasingly obvious that current technology has rendered the stuff we were once good at pointless; there’s a feeling of wanting to hold on firmly to the vine in hand while you look for the next one, even though everyone is telling you it won’t hold you and your baggage. Another example is the frenzy to extend support for IE 6. The fear of making customers unhappy by not supporting their nine year old software—or losing them altogether without more to replace them—is palpable. This fear pushes companies into announcing, with all seriousness, an intention to post positive growth simultaneously along every measurement it has for itself. It makes them spend time and effort figuring out custom newspapers that only cover your specific eighteen block neighborhood. It makes them hate Craig Newmark. It makes them announce they are competing with Google.

When we set out to redesign this site almost a year ago our team did everything it possibly could to distance ourselves from newspapers. We chose a software back-end that, up until that time, had been largely untested for that specific purpose; we designed with wild, complimentary colors and urbane type faces; we envisioned a site where almost everything was user-centric, where you never saw anything that you didn’t ask for. In the process that ensued, whittling away became incising. What is left bears enough resemblance to be recognizable to us, but I’m not sure it’s what we promised our users. We’re a different group now, and even though current events keep some of us trapped in meetings for hours at a time there are still good ideas circulating here. Newspapers want you to believe that being successful in 2008 would require them to see into the future. This is a lie. It would merely require them to see into last week. The pieces are all here, and there are thousands of people who want to do the work. It’s just that for every one of them there’s a counterpart, working hard to make sure we keep serving two masters.

I don’t know, maybe he just hates green. (And he really is a nice guy. Shame about the green, though.)

Peggy Noonan:

I think we’ve reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don’t. There’s no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don’t. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don’t, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will. (via)

My feelings about the Clinton presidency are well known: I loved Bill, and would follow him into a hail of gunfire and stinging shrapnel if it meant America could be like it was in 1997 again. But alas, it can’t; his wife is a lousy candidate and she’s mean spirited and lies with a frequency unmatched by anyone other than the Bush administration itself, the enemy whose deeds we’re trying to undo in the first place.

And I’m not even that much of a stickler for hard and fast truth in politics. I understand that it is a form of theatre in many ways, and that bettering oneself through a few harmless revisions of history is just part of the show. But then I look at Obama and I think, ‘why doesn’t he do that, if it’s so much a part of the show?’ The answer may be that he’s younger and less well-versed in party politics (”look, he doesn’t even know he has to lie yet! How cute!”), or it could be that he’s just better at lying, and less thuggish when he does it. But deep down I believe the reason he feels better to watch on TV and to get an update on Twitter from is just because he knows what it’s like to be decent and good, two adjectives that haven’t applied to the Clinton campaign since day one.

After acquiring a DSLR (this one) I decided to move from trusty old iPhoto to Aperture. I have about 6,000 photos in my library, many going way back. They’re all in Time Machine, so the move is less fraught with anxiety than it could be. But still, this sort of stuff is never painless. Also, I’m becoming less and less apt to tinker with software as I get older, so if something goes off the rails I’m more likely to call it off and retreat into the pocket of least resistance—or in this case, iPhoto and its overzealous virtual file system.

See, iPhoto stores separate copies of every action you perform on a photo. Rotate a shot? New version. Color correction? Ditto. What this means is that a drive will not only become littered with your original photos but their alternate versions as well. This would merely be a slight aggravation if it could be changed by ticking a check box somewhere. As you might have guessed, Apple chose not to provide such a preference. With that in mind, as well as the multitude of tools and options Aperture has over iPhoto, I made the jump this weekend. On the face of it, the process should have been easy; Aperture can natively import iPhoto libraries, after all. meaning there’s nothing too mysterious about getting the photos from one place to another. I was able to do that without any trouble. The snag came after the import, when I realized my new Aperture library was littered with all those alternate copies of many of my photos. Without a very good grasp on just what a “stack” is in Aperture, I was left without a way to quickly weed out the extra versions.

After a few hours of struggle, fiddling around with Smart Albums and importing and exporting things in various groups, I was rid of the duplicates. And the truth is I’m still not quite sure what I did. Whatever it was, between exporting a lot of junk and selectively re-importing it, I saved myself a gig or so of space. And I have to say Aperture is really nice. Somehow Aperture’s re-touchings seem more subtle than Photoshop’s; maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve been using Photoshop for so long that I can spot its use from a hundred yards away. I’m especially fond of Aperture’s gamma vignette tool, which is practically undetectable as a post processing trick.

All in all, I’d give my migration a 6 on the pain scale, with 1 being the Migration Assistant on recent Macs (yay!) and 10 being moving from XP to Vista (not yay!). Any Aperture tips or gripes out there?

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

Here’s the weird thing: I first heard that line about the 100-yard dash from Ballmer himself, maybe a decade ago.

(Via)