I don't get around to blogging as much as I'd like.

I’m going to keep my mouth shut and let (inter)national news media do the talking.

• House Works on a Bailout — for E-Mail
  New York Times (includes a small screen cap of my work)
• House of Representatives’ Web site overwhelmed
  CNN (#1 most viewed story earlier today)
• The Day After: House E-Mail Servers Flooded with Millions of Voter E-Mails
  Dallas Morning News
• House Website Crumbles Under Weight of $700 Billion Bailout
  Wired (includes screen cap)
• Bailout Bill Overwhelms House Internet Servers
  ABC News
• U.S. House limits incoming e-mail
  Detroit Free Press
• Ailing US House website limps back to life
  Agence France-Presse
• House Deals With Unprecedented Website Troubles
  CBS News (via Politico)
• House Web site overwhelmed as bailout bill fails
  AP
• Public reaction to bailout failure jams Internet in D.C.
  The Tennessean (featuring the tragically comic “Once on the Web site, locate contact forms and phone numbers. If it doesn’t work, keep trying.“)
• U.S. House Puts Limit On Constituent Emails
  DigitalJournal.com
• House limits constituent e-mails to prevent crash
  The Hill
• House websites slowed by e-mails on bailout bill
  The Hill

And then there’s the blogosphere’s take on it.

Also, I should note that I was on the outside of this decision and that the people who made it are a group that includes my direct supervisors and others vastly above my pay grade. My contribution was actually just making that page where the error message now resides.

And I don’t agree with it at all, not when reducing the number of requests was really what would bring the situation under control, and the simplest way to do that would be to just surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. Let me repeat and italicize that seemingly revolutionary idea: surface the most sought-after content on the home page, including a complete directory of all representatives. This is what I advocated for years. And anybody with an eye on the trends – search logs, web stats, etc. – and a long enough memory to recall the drop of the 9/11 Commission report PDF and the Mark Foley resignation (which brought down the Clerk’s site with hourly spikes two years ago, to the day) would’ve seen this coming as early as Thursday. Where the asinine triage command originated I can’t identify. It’s just unfortunate that constituents hoping to contact their representatives in earnest are the group most adversely affected (to say nothing of the group in the Infrastructure branch monitoring the servers, the legislative correspondents under the deluge, and anybody else freaking out about the arbitrary path the American government has chosen to remedy massive failures in private enterprises).

I sent over to Lou a copy of the top 20 search queries from Sunday, 28 September, and he’s posted it to the Search Analytics blog at Rosenfeld Media. I intend to follow through with this research (off the top of my head: “bailout” was the top query starting on 23 September, “Barney Frank,” “email,” and “contact” each cracked the top ten in days preceding), not that it’ll make a dint of change in my employers’ minds. It’s just nice to know, as time passes, as I’m now well into my fourth year of employment, that I haven’t lost my ability to think beyond what this job requires – rote production of kilobytes of rhetorical fluff – and about what this situation requires.

I wonder what legislative change, if any, this will prompt. Granted the House has pressing issues on the floor but this is just embarrassing. Can the paradigm with which lawmakers have approached the World Wide Web – mid-’90s stamp of technology adopted for its own sake – be shifted into something more appropriately modern by passing a law? That remains to be determined, although I’d like to help write that legislation, if only to actually guide and assist instead of just saying “I told you so” years after the fact. Not that it isn’t fun to say.

I told you so.

As my conversation with Kristy and Patrick at the bar last weekend turned to politics, two other patrons within earshot expressed their disdain with icy silence proportional to our increasing application of decibels. It became clear that their body language was expressly directed at us, and we considered the possibility that continuing our conversation would lead to the necessity of physically incapacitating two men larger than either of us. In short, we began preparing for a bar fight.

Design is inherently a practice of problem solving, and the problem was that in a brawl of brutes, Kristy, Patrick, and I would not be favored against these two. (How many pitchers of Coors would I have to imbibe over how many decades to be at once that intimidating and pathetic? There’s a Fermi problem for you.) But designers never solve problems in vacuums (unless you’re James Dyson, but I digress). Our solutions must always follow contextual parameters, and if you’re resourceful, in those parameters lie the keys to those solutions.

I immediately surveyed the room for a pool table — none. No pool cues or balls. Cues can make clumsy weapons, but they’re effective for creating a defensive radius while employing a projectile offense. In any case, no need bring out the amphibious invasion strategy guide for a landlocked country.

Liquor bottles can be dangerous either as projectiles — they’re heavy enough to have a predictable trajectory — or lacerating weapons — though there’s a high likelihood of injuring oneself as well as an opponent if employing a bottle as a breakaway club. I wanted to harness a beer tap — solid wood and built to grip. It would be the closest thing to a Major League Baseball bat readily available. Patrick mused that one could brand an opponent’s face with the etched-metal Magic Hat #9 tap.

Kristy and I were working on wine, but Patrick had beer served in an acrylic pitcher and glass mug. Hold the bowl of the mug inside the fist (loosely so it won’t shatter) with the thick glass handle facing outward — aim for the teeth. With a hand wrapped in cloth napkins and holding the acrylic pitcher, one of us could distract with a splash of beer and follow it with devastating plastic battery. Aim for the neck.

The tchotchkes on the walls, the contents of the speed rack, lonely drinkers in dubious football jerseys, failing pickup artists, girls-night-out girls, bartenders and bouncers — all contextual parameters, all potentially problematic and indispensable to the solution. There was no way to consider all the possible outcomes and iterations and the half-price cabernet wasn’t a boon to scenario planning. Besides, I tend to favor diplomacy: solve the problem by negating its existence.

But Patrick and I agreed: we’d both, inexplicably, wanted to be party to a bar fight. These two guys with their asinine burger orders (just say ‘medium well,’ no need to explain the physical properties of charcoal) and jingoistic politics who’ve probably been in bar fights before have won some and lost some and lived to tell. Maybe they go out looking for a fight; maybe bad beer does that to a man.

For me, for as much as being a designer requires a thorough understanding of context, often in the form of immersion, it is also characterized by a kind of academic remove. It’s just research, just business. And so often, I just negotiate, compromise, move on to the next job. But one day soon, I’ll skip that diplomacy stage and just solve a problem in the thick of it — wield a beer tap, maybe kick some ass, maybe take a beer mug to the teeth. Because bar fights, day jobs, love — it’s all in the context. And soon, I’ll knock ‘em all out.

When I came across the packaging for HP’s Pavilion dv6929 laptop, I was stunned. Not for what it is, but because it hadn’t occurred to anybody, myself included, before the year 2008 to actually do this: ship the laptop in a messenger bag.

Packaging, no matter how sleek, is ultimately disposable, and laptop users who pay the premium for a portable computer already consider the investment of an additional piece of luggage that’ll keep it safe from office to home, subway to sidewalk, journey to destination (and that piece of luggage will have its own packaging, to be sure). The packaging and the messenger bag serve the same purpose for manufacturers and end-users respectively — to protect the computer from damage in transit — so if one designs a unit that serves both audiences, it’s that much less raw material consumed in the process.

And marketers also score a victory, a substantial one at that. It gives them more leverage because the product packaging, if used as intended, continues to promote the brand even after the owner calls it a day at the coffee shop. I find the prominent logo displayed on the bag problematic since it easily identifies it as the container of a computer, increasing its likelihood of being stolen and bordering on conspicuous consumption. I understand the compromise from a marketing perspective, but I advocate taking a more stealthy approach — one that HP has actually done with some success with its “The computer is personal again” campaign that shrewdly excluded celebrities’ faces from their endorsements. Screw the logo, let’s see business-class models shipped out in carbon-fiber or aniline leathers, student editions wrapped in cotton duck and wool felt, and of course, limited-edition collaborations — imagine Halliburton Zero × Lenovo ThinkPad and Mulberry × MacBook Air (Coach × Dell seems sadly inevitable) — stamped by the starchitect du jour, touted on NotCot, destined for eBay.

I expect the trend will continue, and though the HP Pavilion dv6929 in its aquarium-printed sling may ultimately be a middling computer in an obvious container, its precedent will hopefully (and I think likely) be followed in more sophisticated execution. Well, it better be, or else I’m going to end up with a bunch of crappy looking bags sitting around my apartment from computers through the years, given that’s the form computers continue to assume.

Like an obscure band that high school kids you once mocked now call their god, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about purple entering the pedestrian American fashion lexicon. In an attempt to spur myself to introduce myself to strange women and simultaneously spare myself inevitable humiliation, I’ve made it a point to approach women wearing aubergine overcoats, those black swans of fashion inhabiting the improbable intersection of a practical garment and a color apparently not as practical. As a sign, it tells me that the wearer, first, loves the color enough to be clad in it neck-to-knee, second, has the confidence to own that color, damn the common advice of a neutral palette, and third, understands that the point of a cornerstone is to be built upon. If purple is the chromatic love of your life and it flatters your complexion, then I see no reason not to rock the purple overcoat and outfit the rest of the wardrobe around it, rather than the reverse (which a neutral color too easily accommodates).

There were my brown years, the days I resembled UPS livery. And overlapping that time in my work were the purple days (months, rather, just after the oranges), which yielded lilacs and aubergines and ubes and all shades between. Not that any of this work was published as intended, because unfortunately, the stigmas associated with the hue outweighed in the eyes of clients what I felt was its singular grandeur. Because I never considered colors property, I never thought that gays or monarchs exclusively claimed purple, and damn those (lots of people) who thought otherwise. My own interpretation of it — assertive as cardinal without the abrasiveness, cool as cobalt without the inertness — is what I ascribe to its users, and more specifically, wearers.

And soon, they’ll be everywhere. There is a fourth thing about the sign, that the wearer has considered all of this and then embarked on finding it in their size and clearly didn’t give up as seasons passed and it still didn’t materialize. And this could be that season when it does, trendy as it may be. But as seasons pass, there’ll be other colors and so many aubergine overcoats will remain closeted and the status quo will re-emerge, and those just-so strange souls will make themselves known, on bicycles, cigarette in hand, as dry ochre foliage rains around us.

And in the meantime, I suppose it’s as good a time as any to introduce myself to strange women.

My four-year hiatus from academia is over. Half of my first class at Georgetown was an introduction to WordPress, the same software in which this is being composed. I’m still optimistic.

Between Once and Man on Wire, there’s an undercurrent in my choice of cinema this past weekend of little things — pop songs and filament-tied-to-an-arrow — urged by good-humored gamines and can-do cads toward the seemingly impossible. I’m not in touch with most of my mentors from five or six years ago (and in some cases not on speaking terms), but I sense they’d smile knowingly at the return on their investments of encouragement and time (if not straight cash), the dividends paid to progeny. I didn’t know then clearly who I was or what was next, but their guidance in entrepreneurship, design practice, and, let’s face it, psychological warfare — and away from hourly retail in indistinct suburbs, indefinitely — capitalized the belief that I was meant to transcend the path my history implied, make great art, write a killer thesis, see the world. And lately, though it’s been a difficult belief to sustain, I’m here. The band’s in the studio; the cable’s between the towers.

It’s daybreak, and it’s time to dance.

While composing a shot of pigeons chilling on an I-beam during lunch at the marina, someone behind me chucked a french fry on the barge. Madness ensued.

Forgetting where you’re from is like a cigarette. Maybe you give into it when you’re stressed, or when you’re drinking. And sparingly and very occasionally, it won’t be the cause of your downfall. But make a habit of it and it’ll lead to an internal growth of a foreign culture, one that you might not notice until it’s too late to stop it. And it’ll kill you.

This is a song about a bad girl,
Something that happened to me a long time ago.
Everybody was telling me how the little girl was running around,
But I had a head of my own,
And I just wouldn’t listen to nobody…
—Lee Moses, “Bad Girl, Pt. 1″

I’d never torn out a page of a Green Apple notebook before this trip, but if you come across two volumes in my archives missing pages, know that they are neither notes on an assassination nor the map to the holy grail, but leaves burned in service of a fire at Kalaloch, WA, the evening of 8 June 2008, cabin #15 overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I wondered briefly what ideas and sketches were supposed to fill those pages, now given to burn. In a way, I’d burned a lot of good ideas and better judgment to arrive at that cabin that night. Before I left for Portland, she told me that if I lived in LA, things might have been different. Of course.

As of Saturday, I’ve been living in Washington, DC for three years. For the last week in my duty as innkeeper and tour guide to Eric and Adrian, I’ve been compelled to articulate some things I truly love about this place. People here who know me as the ‘LA guy’ rely on my Google Map of Southern California, bars and bookstores and museums and the odds-and-sods of the 10-million-strong five counties marked up in nostalgia. There will come a time when I do likewise for the District.

But not yet.

As far as the rest of my recent vacation was concerned, this was a trip I could hardly imagine most of my friends enjoying in its entirety—equal parts downtown stroll, road trip, and nature hikes, with long pauses for photography and meat gorging. After the Hoh Rain Forest, I wondered aloud how trees on a sidewalk or an erstwhile park could compare to that experience of natural beauty, how the fields of conifers on either side of the highway which in the novelty of the approach were staggering to behold and mere logger fodder in the other direction. How does one go through something like this and mitigate their raised expectations?

For the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great, okay. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste—the thing that got you into the game—your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? Like you can tell that it’s still sorta crappy. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit.
—Ira Glass

At An Event Apart, Armin Vit’s article on the lack of landmark web design and the circumstances that prevent it from emerging was alluded to wearily by a few speakers, like the practice’s frayed horizon: when it comes to web design it’s rare that all elements — functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty — come together to create a result that is widely admired. And I forget if it was Andy Clarke or Brian Oberkirch who casually suggested, what about Google Maps?

The success of Google Maps was not in its transformation of how we understood cartography but how we layered the interactive and collaborative properties of the web over it and in turn understood the web itself. Indeed, Mapquest and other sites served largely the same primary purpose as Google Maps with moderate aplomb, enough that their brand names are still relevant. However, Google approached mapping with lightness—an address need no longer be divided into its Postal Service-dictated taxonomies, a partial query could be deduced and the result could be instantaneously (and elegantly) navigated, panned and zoomed—and wit—the inherent flaws of its satellite view became a topic of humor, to say nothing of driving directions from New York to Paris. It invited these flights and accommodated them, to say nothing of self-location by satellites, as no paper map could ever do, as none of its predecessors on the web had the foresight to. Its collaborative tools have proven indispensable—for those who know me as the ‘LA guy,’ for people who will know me as the ‘DC guy,’ for two people in different cities to plan a visit to a third.

After my trip to Haiti, after the opening rounds of the House search analytics project, it’s been difficult to stay motivated through seemingly interminable production work. It’s even been difficult to be a code monkey for my own projects, where the rewards are solely mine.

Because that beautiful thing is the new standard. And it’s been easy to mistake the absence of that beauty in parts of my life and my failure to attain it in my work for my unworthiness of it, and it’s a hard habit to quit. How does one go through something like this and mitigate their raised expectations? For how many years?

Julie admired that no matter how improbably discouraging my failures with women, I never settled. Never took advantage of an orbiter, never desperately called a satellite a star.

With graduate school ahead, it’ll be at least three more years before I make that map of Washington, DC, three years for honing and reducing. Because if I can’t be desirable, I can be unfuckwithable. There’ve been ideas burning too long, stories and artworks and labors of craft and affection, all paper and no firewood. And though it’s summer now, it’ll soon be time again that I’ll need something to keep me warm.