I've been working on converting an all-Flash Web site to HTML, so its content could be properly spidered by Google, Overture etc.

My mandate was to preserve the design of the original Flash site in every possible respect, short of getting ridiculous with JavaScript- and DOM-based animation. The original site creators are big-time Flash addicts, and primarily visual. So the issue of typeface embedding came up rather quickly.

It seems some folks are building a cathedral smack-dab in the middle of the bazaar.

A developing news story describes a "hack" for the popular video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The so-called "Hot Coffee fix," in wide distribution on the Internet, patches the game code to... create? reveal? some way off-book sexual scenarios.

Begging your indulgence, you are hereby forewarned that this text is:

• The kind of nauseating sentimental fawning that would normally send me running for the hills;
• Squarely and unforgivably in the category of exhibitionist and confessional Web garbage that permeates the blogoverse;

In a word, catharsis.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'm sensing a trend in hard news reporting, wherein explanations of any event or process that exceed a second-grade reading level are becoming optional.

A "designer" wine rack, which I'd had for years and of which I was rather fond, broke with a thundering crash this weekend. I got a bit obsessed with figuring out how it suddenly broke.

I had a startlingly delicious conversation with a client of mine a few days ago.

It came up that, in a previous (& presumably interstitial) life, he had been an active & working musician, a percussionist.

No one really speaks of this: that our visual landscape, like air and water, is perforce public property. Yet we all live blithely enough in a brand-saturated sensorium — and while we may roll our eyes at the excess of intentional messages in our visual specturm, we remain far from regarding it as what it really is: pollution. A genuine health hazard. The heartbreaker is, to some extent we have allowed this to happen.