November 2001

Kynn is looking for work. And dig that patriotic stylesheet!

webdesign-l is a wonderful list, and has a great diversity of web literati on it. Sadly, the value proposition has changed, and I’m getting out for awhile. Mailing lists are such fragile clouds of activity. Leaving them always feels like that feeling of having a bar or restaurant you like go out of business. The good thing about lists is that they can turn on a dime.

Quote of the day:

Proponents of Bush’s kangaroo court say: Don’t you soft-on-terror, due-process types know there’s a war on? Have you forgotten our 5,000 civilian dead? In an emergency like this, aren’t extraordinary security measures needed to save citizens’ lives? If we step on a few toes, we can apologize to the civil libertarians later.

Those are the arguments of the phony-tough. At a time when even liberals are debating the ethics of torture of suspects—weighing the distaste for barbarism against the need to save innocent lives—it’s time for conservative iconoclasts and card-carrying hard-liners to stand up for American values.

– Bill Safire

Having OS X on a box here means I can add some new dialogues to my collection of why email submission of forms stinks.

New header for the home page and the blog. Noodling in Photoshop is fun!

This cartoon on Salon sums up image problem of the USA.
[ via robotwisdom ]

I have 96 megabytes of memory in my Apple PowerMac 8500—I think I’m gonna upgrade the memory. Here are the obtuse instructions for the obtuse process of installing memory on that beast.

Item in the New York Times: As U.N. Meets, bin Laden Tape Sets Off Alarms. This is a good note. Lots of news out there, but this one should raise some alarm bells. The take-home message for me is:

Osama Bin Laden has read his Sun Tzu
He is cultivating his friends and his enemies with great care. He seeks to eliminate any means to rally global sentiment against him. He seeks to end the UN because it has the capability to act against him. The UN was to be the successor – the successful successor to the original League of Nations, which failed to prevent the Second World War.

Osama Bin Laden and his group effectively read and use the media
From the way he manages to get his message out, to his awareness of the news on CNN, Al Jazeera, and how he uses that to craft his message he is a madman who uses the media with as much savvy as any Hollywood PR man. We must understand what he’s doing, and as I have said before, we must play that game as well.

It is not enough to have justice and right on your side, you must also be able to communicate that fact. Can we do it?

Related posts on this theme: msnbc in arabic, us leaflets need better design

The Creative Priority is my current side reading. It’s about the essential paradox of doing great work – you must reconcile disparate forces and harness the tension of craftspeople from different disciplines – and also get people to think beyond their narrow job scope. Hirshberg applied this principle at Nissan, but the same rules apply to web development – to the business end, to the programming end, to the artistic design end (and everything in-between). George Olsen once characterized (or maybe caricatured) these forces as suit, geek, and ponytail. Creative friction is also what makes for great community. I’m only 1/3rd of the way through – so maybe I’ll have different opinions later.

Still fooling with OSX. Keeping me busy. Hopefully I’ll have some new lab entries as a result of all this playing.