New York Magazine's article about Wes Anderson features a photo of him at Deyrolle, a taxidermy store in Paris that I visited and photographed in 2005. I like how they call it his 'favorite taxidermy' shop, as if there are so many. Deyrolle certainly does have a Wes Anderson vibe to it though, now that I think about it. It is a great store, a destination I would recommend to anyone visiting Paris. You can see in my photos that the management has a good sense of humor in placing their animals all the time, not only when Wes is there.

I've been noticing during my new commute that train operators often announce my stop as "47th-50th, Rockefeller Center, Top of the Rock". This is the observation deck on the 70-story GE building, open to the public since November of 2005. A visit requires a reservation and costs about $17. The web site, once you skip the intro, asks you to choose your favorite color, time of day, and style of music, and then presents you with a choice to "Enter", "Skip", or "Buy" (it also, just for a moment when you first load it, has a title of "WEBSITE TITLE HERE"). The attraction has been heavily promoted since it opened. Given these facts, I think it's pretty obvious that Top of the Rock is paying the MTA to announce the stop like this. It's evidently been going on for a while: Gothamist commented on it in October 2006, and the Subway Blogger in March 2007. A man named Will Hines wrote about it just a few days ago. Apparently the MTA denies payment for it, but it's hard to believe the volume of people getting off at that stop to visit the deck justifies the announcement, especially when Rockefeller Center is already being announced.

No one who remarks on this can help thinking: what's next? How crazy could subway announcements get? "42nd Street, Times Square, M&M World." It may sound heinous and far-fetched, but you can always look at it this way: M&M World, or fare hike?

John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes about why people get angry in situations like Apple disabling the SIM unlocking and third-party application hacks for the iPhone with a software update. It is a 'misguided mindset', he says, to 'to expect support after taking unsupported actions.' But he has come to understand that this mindset is due to the subtleties and motivations of software limitations as opposed to hardware. The article is quite well written, as usual, and I recommend that you read it rather than only my attempt at a summary. But I think he misses a key aspect of this phenomenon. He says:

"But when you do these things [take unsupported actions], you are assuming responsibility for any adverse effects caused by them, now or in the future."

"Now or in the future." It's not just about hardware vs. software. It's that with the advent of software and networked devices, the product you buy is not necessarily the product you will always have. Particularly with devices like the iPhone that are designed to be more software- than hardware-driven, the product's nature can change to a great extent after you buy it, through software updates. Of course the updates are usually for the better, and you can almost always opt out of them, but in my experience, you can only hold out for so long, and it's quite often a mixed bag of improvements and degradations.

You can't blame Apple for disabling the hacks with the software update, and you can't even necessarily blame them for completely breaking some people's phones in the process. There might be a legitimate reason that wasn't their fault. But you have to understand that people are going to be suspicious, and have emotional reactions, when they take an unsupported action like this and it works fine, and then a software update comes along and breaks their product. It seems to violate an unspoken tenet of traditional ownership. And it's that much worse when the company has a business incentive not only to disable such unsupported actions, but to discourage people from even trying to find new ways to enable them. (In the case of third-party applications, you could argue that it would be quite short-sighted of Apple to discourage it, because all the rumors point to them enabling it in the not-too-distant future. But this enabling will still be controlled and on their terms in some way that might otherwise encourage hacking.)

Gruber writes about the risk one takes when "replacing the current version of a kernel extension or other system component with an older version from a previous release of Mac OS X because you read on MacFixIt that it works." Of course there is risk involved there. But quite often it does work, and in some cases it's necessary for the user. And when you have to consider not only the current risk but the risk that at some point in the future, the company that made your product will decide it doesn't like what you're doing and break your product with a software update, I think it will have a chilling effect on a type of experimentation that can be very beneficial to users.

Speaking of Gruber, he also posted, via John August, a link to a very funny "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. I've always found these funny--they used to be all over the place at the schlocky electronics stores in Midtown.

A few years ago when I was friends with a Japanese couple and we did some language exchange, I once tried to explain scare quotes to them. I said, "it's like sarcasm--if I say someone is my "friend" [using air quotes], it's like saying he isn't really my friend--he might really be my enemy, sort of secretly." They looked at me like I was utterly insane. I tried a few more examples, but each time I could tell it was only taking them further from understanding. Finally I gave up, saying I would try to think of a better explanation.

They then took a turn trying to explain a Japanese concept to me. I don't remember exactly what they said, but the impression was like this: "Say a crow flies over a village, and then a man starts his car, and goes ten feet, but instead of going ten feet in reverse, he says to his son, 'you have disappointed me.' That's kyoukatsu." I looked at them like they were utterly insane. Then I realized that examples like this have to be very carefully thought out, because what may seem to the explainer like a perfectly clear-cut illustration with no extraneous information, will often seem to the explainee like a hopeless fog of twists and turns, in which it's impossible to extract the salient points. These were, however, relatively difficult concepts (at least mine was--I still have no idea what they were talking about), and we should resist the temptation to put it down to a difference between Western and Eastern thinking.

P.S. Don't get mad at me if kyoukatsu is an obscene and incredibly offensive word in Japanese. I just made it up.

P.P.S. I just realized that every time I tried to use the Japanese word omoshiroi in conversation with these friends to describe something as interesting, they chuckled as if I had meant it sarcastically, as if it had scare quotes. Maybe I should have explained it that way! But I never could figure out how to say 'interesting' without it sounding sarcastic, unless I was misinterpreting their reaction.

I'm glad to see the discussion on the Times's City Room blog about the new official TLC Taxi logo and paint job. The change took me by surprise and no one seemed to be saying much about it for the first couple of weeks. I had much the same reaction as some of the commenters--it didn't seem like it could be real, that something so fundamental to the everyday experience of New York City could change without a word.

The Times asked several graphic designers to comment on the redesign and they are mostly restrained, probably out of professional courtesy and karmic concern. In the comments it's pretty much a merciless trashing, over and over. They also have a narrative explaining how the process was a clear case of design by committee. The blocky, blobby, nearly illegible "NYC" in the logo is apparently a general logo for the city from New York & Company; if we're going to be seeing a lot more of that, I can only say god help us (though it's actually hard to imagine a more ubiquitous usage of it than on taxis). Many have commented on the circled T as reminiscent of Boston's public transit symbol, and possibly headed for future confusion with the 2nd Avenue subway line, also of the name name.

The feature of the redesign getting the most praise, if you can call it that, is the reorganized description of the fare structure. But some have also said that it is too small. Personally, I have been trying to see what it says for the past week, and only today did I finally get close enough to a cab that was still enough to be able to read it for a couple of seconds!

It's hard to know whether such a reaction, uniformly negative yet limited to a few websites, can be hoped to have any effect. It's not like there are going to be rallies and riots about a redesign, though I wouldn't mind living in a place where there were. This is probably just one of those things, like the redesigned dollar bills, that seems terrible and shocking at first, and then we get used to it surprisingly quickly.

Last friday I followed a link from Daring Fireball about one of its weekly sponsors, Bruji, makers of software called DVDPedia, BookPedia, GamePedia, and CDPedia, for keeping track of your collections of those things. I was immediately drawn to DVDPedia. I have a somewhat large collection of DVDs and so far I've only kept track of them with an Excel spreadsheet. For some reason I never bothered checking out the other software available for this purpose, such as DVD Profiler or Delicious Library. DVDPedia has some features that are familiar to Delicious Library users, such as scanning a barcode using your iSight camera to import a product without having to type in anything, and a tiled cover view that emulates browsing the shelves at a rental store. The look and feel is pretty consistent with apps like iTunes--you've got collections, smart collections, and so forth, stacked up on the left side of the screen. You can label a DVD as being borrowed by a particular friend, and send them an email from the program when it's time to return it. You can semi-automatically download all sorts of lovely metadata for your movies from several sources, though the ones I use most are IMDb and Amazon.

I'm not always the greatest person when it comes to paying for software. I think software developers large and small all do great work and deserve to be rewarded for it. I just so often find, after considering a purchase, that there is a free alternative, or a better one, or both, and I'm willing to tolerate an almost limitless amount of nagging for registration from a program as long as I can still use it. I'm not proud of this tendency.

That said, with DVDPedia I was sold almost immediately, and having been using it at nearly every spare moment since my purchase. For me, the 'killer app' within the app is when I'm choosing a movie to watch. Sometimes Maya and I spend so much time trying to choose that we end up not having enough time to watch a movie at all! And the search tools that are standard with something like this can be incredibly helpful: we want something less than 120 minutes, say, in a particular genre or from a particular country, that we haven't already seen.

I did have a few hiccups in getting my library into shape, but I was able to resolve all of them with a trip to Bruji's forums. The couple behind the company is doing a truly amazing job there of responding to everyone's questions, bug reports, and feature requests. This is especially impressive because this is the type of software that immediately suggests a hundred features to anyone with an imagination. It's also the type that everyone will use in a slightly different way depending on what they want out of it, so each user has different priorities for improvement.

I've been noticing that a lot of the best and most popular software that has come out lately is for organizing collections of one thing or another, whether it's files (Google Desktop), photos (Picasa, Lightroom, iPhoto), music (iTunes), books, CDs, DVDs, Games...I'm sure there are many more niche products that I'm unaware of. With some of these products, there's no upper bound to the amount of time you can spend organizing. I really want to add keyword tags to my Lightroom library, and the "Develop" tools are fantastic, but with 4,400 photos, growing all the time, one of my prime concerns is that all that work not be tied to a particular piece of software or operating system. Good export options, like XML, can alleviate some of the concern, but with Lightroom or photo apps in particular, I've been wishing for a system in which I could have my library be accessible on both my (Mac) laptop and my PC. I tend to spend more time on my laptop lately, but my PC has a much bigger and better screen for serious editing work. One requirement is of course that the software run on both platforms, and Lightroom provides this, while Picasa as yet does not. The second part is the data. Either I must synchronize the directory structure and the metadata between the machines, or keep both on a central server that can be accessed with good speed and reliability by both machines. The latter would be a large and slightly ridiculous upgrade to my current home network setup, and might never work as well as I'd like, so I'm leaning toward the former. Keeping everything on an external Firewire drive is one idea, but it would be a bit annoying to lug it back and forth, and I don't know if one drive can be used by both a mac and PC. The third requirement is that the metadata database format be transferable between the Mac and PC, not caring about the different operating systems and everything, as long as the directory structure and file names are the same. This, if it's at all possible, might require serious hacking, effort that could always be undone with a new release.