His lovely wife, Anna, started a business selling attractive reusable bags. Mitch was helping Anna cover a booth at the fair. Anna’s idea for the product and company came two years ago when she saw a need to design a resuable bag that pretty and strong.  EnvBags was born. It’s a great bag and we use it all the time.

It’s always fun to see a family business in action. Good luck, Anna and Mitch.

I grew up in NYC and I always find myself drawn to movies where the City goes down.  I still have to watch Cloverfield but I think I got the other recent ones covered.

No link to Amazon here since Max would want you to run down to your local bookseller and buy it there.

But more importantly, nytimes.com takes advantage of being on the web by doing much more than just repurpose text and images. The site includes a ton of video, audio, slideshows and applications that are very informative and/or helpful. Here are a few of many standouts:

While I watch CNN for their analysis and their cool touchscreen maps, I come to the New York Times for their Delegate Maps. The county-by-county information is updated as quickly for the readers as it is for their own editors. It’s very cool.

Their audio and visual slideshows can be a lot of fun. Their writers are not always the most dynamic personalities but the audio certainly adds a good perspective.

This is a fun and simple application to see the Top Surnames in the US. The information design is terrific (larger fonts denote higher rank). My surname doesn’t make the Top 5,000 but my wife’s is in the Top 500.

This is another example of an information application that the New York Times has done well. This is an application to help you figure out if you are better off renting or buying. Depending on when you bought your house, you will be either like or hate its findings.

The New York Times spent several months with updates on Life After Katrina. The stories are nicely displayed here on this map.

And when the New York Times started publishing blogs of their own, I found them immediately useful.

Now, not all is perfect with the New York Times. In fact, they have probably my biggest pet peeve on the Web. If you click into a story off the front page and then double-click on any word or phrase, a pop-up window will appear that shows a “reference search” for that word or phrase. Now, I am a “clicker” by habit; I will just click on a web page for no reason whatsoever. On the nytimes web site, that means I am poppping up useless windows left and right. This is a bad attempt, or should I say dirty trick, on generating pageviews with ads.

But other than that (huge) nit, I find myself spending more time on the New York Times web site than ever before. Nicely done.

I’ve liked the changes they have made in the past. Surprisingly, I read the Journal as much for pleasure as for business. If you had asked me if that were possible ten years ago, I would have said no.

So when the Journal made a huge design change on Jan 2, I once again braced myself. There were a lot of initial thoughts that were negative. Some thought the smaller paper felt less substantial (I did too, at first). Others felt that profits were trumping experience (print newspaper are facing so many challenges that I expect papers to try to cut costs).

I did not want to come out with an immediate judgment. People generally are uncomfortable with change.

As the two weeks came to pass, my blog post was supposed to say something along the lines: I am fine with the redesign. I do like the smaller size for convenience reasons; I still feel that it gives ups an intangible heft-ness. It felt easier to read; the content remained good. Basically, no harm, but no great breakthroughs. Summary: boy, it must hard to redesign icons.

But earlier today, I read a front page article in the Journal (subscription needed, sorry) titled: “An Immigration Raid Aids Blacks — For a Time.” This article documents the changes in a company town when federal immigration agents chased out a mostly Hispanic workforce and made opportunities for local African-Americans.

It was a fascinating read. Uncomfortable at times, revealing, stark, worrisome, maybe even inflammatory. But it was brave and it was IMPORTANT. I encourage people to pick up today’s Journal and read that story.

After reading that story, any post on redesign seemed small. So tomorrow and next week and next month, I will pick up the Journal, not because of its width or font or layout, but because of its proven ability to publish important stories.

[Image from the terrific site newsdesigner.com]

Yes, I am a fan of minimizing the page-loading experience in a browser, so I generally like using AJAX.  But is the browser a robust enough operating system to support productivity applications? 

At Boxxet, we are asking a lot from the browser, with a fair bit of AJAX-y interactivity.  And we think it’s the best way to build web apps.  But when I look at a web-based spreadsheet, I wonder if we asking way too much from a browser.

So here’s what happened.  Google Spreadsheet would not accept my killer Excel file.  It accepted my simpler ones but not perfectly. 

But the application is pretty snappy and may change my mind about how far we can go with the browser as a platform for productivity apps.

For now, I will try Google spreadsheet for light spreadsheet duties that need sharing: timesheets, to-do lists, project plans.  But for financial modeling and interactive spreadsheets, I’ll stay with Excel.

But small steps in making unnatural acts more natural is how big changes start to happen.