Acts of Volition: Recent Episodes
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When I was growing up, when I or one of my four siblings was sick and there was a risk of vomit, someone would be sent to fetch the “Blue Bucket”.
Even if the bucket wasn’t blue, or wasn’t an actual bucket, it was still the Blue Bucket.
What color was your blue bucket?
The Apple.com home page has over 3,400 words of small-print footnotes.
Screen recording scrolling through the apple.com home page showing multiple screens full of legalese small print.
People who hate Justin Trudeau really like other people to know that they hate him. They put stickers on their trucks.
People who don’t feel too strongly either way about Justin Trudeau don’t shout about it, or reply in online conversations about it, or wear shirts about it.
There is no sticker for your car that says: “I don’t love or hate Justin Trudeau — I like some of what he’s done and dislike other parts. On the whole, he is not a disaster.”
Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws states that:
One should name laws after one’s self.
See:
- Garrity’s Law of Corporate Typefaces
- Garrity’s Law of Timer Responsibility
- Garrity’s Law of Photoshop Jokes
- Garrity’s Law of Inverse Congregational Intelligence
- Garrity’s Law of Icon Metaphors
Just as “every program attempts to expand until it can read mail”, I believe that:
Every organization expands until it commissions its own bespoke typeface.
Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc. have all done it. Mozilla did it. Now, Figma has done it too.
See Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws
I learned about the row/column grouping feature in Google Sheets. If you’re anything like me, can’t believe you didn’t already know about this.
Screen recording showing the row Group feature in Google Sheets.
The company I helped start, silverorange, is now 25 years old. I wrote a bit about how it feels 25 years in (it feels good!).
When we got started in 1999, we were 7 people in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
In 2024 we are 38 people spread across 8 provinces (and one Canadian working abroad in the US):
- 12 on Prince Edward Island
- 9 in British Columbia
- 7 in Ontario
- 3 in Alberta
- 2 in Quebec
- 2 in Nova Scotia
- 1 in New Brunswick
- 1 in Manitoba
- and one Canadian working in the US
(read the rest)
I wrote in 2021 that my dream car is a mythical 3-year-old electric minivan (that doesn’t exist). Later that year, I wrote up a summary of the prospects of an electric minivan (as of 2021). As of 2023 there wasn’t much of a change.
Here in 2024, I’ve given up on the dream of an electric minivan, at least for my purposes and for now. The dream is closer than ever.
- I was actually able to sit in a 2024 Kia EV9 at a local dealership. It’s a big 3-row SUV, but it’s the closest thing to an EV minivan that actually exists. It’s not cheap, but it’s not ridiculous either.
- Volkswagen says their EV minivan, the ID.Buzz is “coming to Canada in late 2024.” I suspect that means I wouldn’t be able to test drive or buy one for at least another year, and even then, I expect it will be quite expensive.
For my family, we still have (and love) our 2013 8-passenger Honda minivan. We’ve been finding we’re driving it around a lot more with one or two people in it lately though. With three kids often heading in three directions, we’re also reluctantly accepting that we have use for a second vehicle.
So, we’ve added a 2024 Hyundai Kona EV to our fleet.
- It’s the cheapest and least cool EV we could find.
- It was actually available on the lot to test drive and buy.
- Provincial and federal rebates add up to $10,750.
- It doesn’t have stupid door handles (though it does have a stupid key fob).
Farewell electric minivan dream. I hope we meet again.
Today some tourists ask me to take a photo of them. I happily obliged. They thanked me, and then they asked me to take another, this time with the phone vertical please.
I could almost feel my hair turning grey.
Skype was Zoom before Zoom was Zoom, but how far it has fallen. I opened up Skype for the first time in a while and was bombarded with a wall of “news”. Is anyone going to Skype for their news!?
I’ve been reviewing resumes and job applications as part of my job recently and was reflecting on what I do these days.
I put together a quick summary of my current skills (PDF) that I suspect many of you may relate to.
It’s so easy to complain about poorly-designed and poorly-built systems, and just as easy to forgot to note (or even notice) when they are well done.
I filled out the 2024 Census Test from Statistics Canada yesterday and it was pretty good. The interface was simple, understandable, fast, and allowed for a combination of mouse and keyboard input.
Well done.
Is (are?) Aurora Borealis the only phenomenon that actually looks better when photographed than in real life?
There was a minor internet brouhaha over an Apple iPad ad where they crush a bunch of musical instruments and creative tools. It was just a video in (very slightly) poor taste. No one got hurt.
I also didn’t really like the ad – it felt like if Amazon made an ad where they burned thousands of books, and dumped the ashes into a Kindle. Burning books is never good a good look (unless it’s The Day After Tomorrow and you need to keep warm), neither is crushing pianos.
That said, I’m not sure apologizing is a necessary or appropriate step. I’d save the apologies for when people get hurt.
A co-worker of my, James, released a new album with his band brainrust. Creating an album is a top-tier life achievement in my books.
The album sounds great and feels like a fitting, if unintended, tribute to Steve Albini, who died this week.
It is available on Spotify, Tidal, and other streaming services. There’s a video for the track ordinary on YouTube.
In the world of those who build out the web platform, and CSS in particular, there’s some drama.
- The Webkit team at Apple have put forth a compelling proposal for how to make the Pinterest-style layout (aka, ‘masonry’) by building on CSS grid.
- The Chrome team at Google have an alternative approach to the same problem, introducing a new ‘masonry’ display type as a peer to flex and grid.
The folks at the ShopTalk Show talked through the state of the debate with a Google rep in episode 614.
My take is lukewarm:
- “Masonry” layout is too specific a use case and not valuable enough to build in to the web platform.
- I needed grid and flex a million times before they came along. I don’t think I’ve ever found myself needing masonry layout.
If you need it, that’s great. It doesn’t have to be for everyone. There is a cost to adding to the platform though.
I posted last year about hiring designers at the lovely company I work with, silverorange. Well, we’re doing it again!
As I said last time, it’s a great place to work. We’re looking for a Senior Web & App Designer able to work remotely from within Canada who can help us design great systems for our clients.
Our company blog is a great way to get a sense of who we are.
What color are my teeth supposed to be? According to Crest’s YouTube ads, the same color as a kleenex.
We have a law in our house that I think should be a universal law:
A person who stops a kitchen timer bears the responsibility for resetting the timer (if additional time is required) or taking the item out of the oven.
Have you ever heard a story about a veteran software developer who decides a major change in their field of technology is enough, and it prompts them to retire?
This is how I feel about my regular grocery store rearranging the aisles, but instead of retiring from a tech career, I’d be retiring from buying food ever again.
You’ve seen tons of eclipse photos today, but I bet you haven’t seen any of the eclipse projected through a delicious Toppalbles cracker.
My experience with COVID isn’t special or particularly severe, but I did experience two mild side-effects I hadn’t considered: fear and loneliness.
A few days ago I tested positive for COVID for the first time. I’m fine. I feel lousy and it hurts to swallow, but I’m OK.
My entire immediate family had gotten COVID back in 2022, somehow I didn’t at the time (or at least I was asymptomatic and never tested positive).
My symptoms are typical (head cold, sore throat, body aches, foggy head, chills/fever) and not particularly severe — but bad enough, thanks.
I’m sure many (most?) of you have already experienced this, but it was new to me. After living under the cloud of COVID for years, like everyone else, when you actually see those two lines in a COVID test, it feel surreal. It’s a bit scary.
I’ve been vaccinated with every booster available to me, and I realize the risks are relatively low. I’ve also heard the horror stories of long-COVID, hearing loss, permanent head-fog, weeks of low-energy, etc.
I’ve also mostly been alone in a (very comfortable) room for about three days. I miss hanging out with my family.
The isolation and fear also feed each other. It’s scary to be alone and sitting alone in a room is a good time to spiral about unlikely worst-possible outcomes.
So, my brilliant insight on COVID: it is bad and it makes me feel bad.
With all the press the Canadian Conservative party are getting for rhyming Axe with Tax, it’s unfortunate that there’s no similarly quippy counter-rhyme for those that support a Canadian carbon tax.
Nobody likes being taxed, but taxes are a useful tool for our society. I can simultaneously not want to pay more tax, and also support everyone (including myself) having to pay more tax. I don’t see this as an inconsistency.
So, let me add my tiny voice to the din: I do want a Carbon Tax – especially if you give that money back to me in rebates.
Thanks to Chris & Dave for answering my nerdy question on their great web-dev podcast, the ShopTalk Show. The question is brought up around the 10min mark of episode 608 (but you should listen to the whole thing!).
My question was: What are your most and least favourite parts of building websites these days.
My answers:
- Least favourite: Setting up build process and tooling (it’s important, but I don’t enjoy or excel at it).
- Most favourite: Basic styling of core elements, like links, buttons, form inputs, etc.
This is a photo of me doing my taxes this year (getting that Canada Revenue Agency T777 form ready in particular).
Today I learned that if you right click on an image in Firefox on macOS (and only on macOS), you can “Copy Text From Image“. This does what it sounds like: macOS has a system to recognize text in flat/static images like JPEGs and PNGs. You can also select text in flat images in the macOS Preview.app and QuickLook image previewer to copy the text.
The version 14 release of macOS (aka “Sonoma”) added a “Reactions” feature that seems to have been enabled by default.
If you hold up a thumbs-up gesture with your actual hand, the system will recognize the gesture and show a virtual overlay of a thumbs-up graphic in a bubble overplayed on your video. I don’t know why you’d want a “virtual” thumbs up showing when everyone can already see your actual thumbs-up. Other animations include a thumbs-down, a heart, and rain.
I’ve seen these gestures triggered accidentally, and can easily imagine an accidental reaction animation being wildly inappropriate. The animations are often understandably attributed to Zoom, instead of macOS where they are actually coming from.
Apple has some documentation explaining how to turn off these reaction animations. The short explanation is:
- When your camera is on, click on the bright green/white camera icon in the top right system menu
- Click the “Reactions” item to toggle it off (or back on)
- Bonus: you can manually trigger these animations using the same green camera menu, clicking the arrow to the right of “Reactions” and clicking on a particular reaction.
There are a few other gestures and associated animations. I will admit to using the rave-lasers-background to generate mirth among my peers.
BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: This accidental triggering of macOS Reactions happens on the inaugural episode of WikiHole with D’Arcy Carden (around the 17m40s point).
Mike Knott is among the songwriters who had the greatest influence on my life. I discovered Knott’s music as a strange underworld below the depths of the strange world of “Christian music” when I was a kid. As a typically disgruntled teenager, his music was everything that the Christian music industry was not: raw, honest, and sometimes ugly.
I learned today that Mike Knott has died. See this obituary from NPR.
I’m grateful to my friend and personal music consultant, Dennis, for introducing me to the music of Mike Knott.
Among the loads of music he made, the albums that resonated most with me were:
- The Rocket & A Bomb, Fluid, and Strip Cycle solo albums
- His LSU album Grace Shaker
- The first album he made with the band Cush (go listen to Heaven Sent now)
- The Aunt Bettys album (now go listen to Rock & Roll)
In 2000, when a flight to Ontario would have cost me several months of income, I flew to see Mike Knott perform in London, Ontario. I knew at the time it might be my only opportunity to see him live, and it was. I’m so glad I look the time.
Knott never quite broke through with mainstream popularity, but was deeply influential on those who knew his music. It’s only an accident of history that he isn’t in the pop culture pantheon of rock stars.
At this 2000 show, Mike was mourning the loss of his friends Gene Eugene (another of my favourite songwriters) and Dennis Dannell. He put two paintings up on stage with him, one reading “MISS YOU DENNIS” and the other “MISS YOU GENE”.
Miss You Mike.
I asked my 8-year-old son to set a timer for 15 minutes. He opened YouTube and searched for (and found) a 15-minute timer. I’ve never felt so old.
After an important conversation with some colleagues, we concluded that a doily is lingerie for end-tables.
I don’t know much about either artist, but the harmony that starts about one minute into this song, “Right Back To It” by Waxahatchee featuring MJ Lenderman, is perfect.
Mitchell Baker announced today that she’s stepping down as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet Mitchell on a few occasions in the past 25 years through various types of work with Firefox and Mozilla. My various involvements in Mozilla and Firefox were only ever tiny contributions when compared to the huge scope of the Mozilla project. Even so, Mitchell was always kind, attentive, and appreciative.
It can’t be easy leading a large organization that operations so in-the-open, as Mozilla does. You are even more open to criticism than leaders of any other organization due to the transparency. I’ve never had any doubt that Mitchell was leading with the mission of an open and inclusive internet close to her heart. I’ve always felt Mitchell Baker has wise person, on top of being smart and kind. I don’t call many people ‘wise’.
I’m glad Mitchell will still be involved in Mozilla back in her role as Executive Chairwoman, but wish her well wherever her life takes her.
Anil Dash wrote about how the decentralized nature of podcasting is a triumph of technology “that can’t be controlled by any one company”, in his essay titled: “Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement.
My 8-year-old child was asking me about a podcast1 I was listening to. He asked: “What is it on?”
I didn’t understand his question and he clarified: “Is it on Tidal or Spotify or something?”
I think it’s time to have The RSS Talk.
- In the discussion about podcasting with an 8-year-old, I realized how podcasts I listen to are full of casual profanity. ︎
Through some accident of weather and culture, I ended up watching the 1993 movie Cool Runnings with my family this evening. For those of you too young to know (like my kids), it tells the (dramatized) story of how a Jamaica bobsled team competed in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta.
It was not bad. It didn’t age as badly as I might have expected. A few observations:
- I forgot how prominent Calgary was as the setting. I’m heading there next month it will now be “the place from Cool Runnings” for my kids.
- The USSR and East Germany participated in the 1988 Winter Olympics.
- The Swiss bobsled team in the movie were smoking (literally and figuratively).
- The score was composed by Hans Zimmer.
- John Candy, god rest your soul (my kids recognized him as the “guy from Home Alone”).
I did appreciate that my kids assumed the stars of the movie would win the big race, and they didn’t, but it was still triumphant.
After the movie, we looked up the how ‘true’ the based-on-a-true-story was. I enjoyed this quote from Wikipedia:
“The film depicts the team carrying the sled to the finish line to a slow-building standing ovation: in reality, the team walked next to it and received some sporadic applause.”
Wikipedia
A few other gems from the Wikipedia article:
- Disney wanted Kurt Russel to play the coach, but John Candy insisted and took a pay cut to play the role (it was his last)
- Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeffrey Wright, and Eriq La Salle were considered for roles of the bobsled team.
After having a series of energy efficiency improvements done to our home in Charlottetown, we received the following rating from an EnerGuide efficiency evaluation:
Our “before” audit showed us using 85GJ/year and our “after” audit has us down to 51 GJ/year. We had cold climate air source heat pumps added (like, a lot of them) and spray-foam insulation added to accessible portions of our basement foundation walls (including sealing some glaring air gaps out into an unconditioned garage).
The house already had a ~16kw solar panel system when we moved in last year, so the solar is incorporated into the before and after evaluations.
These evaluations are approximate. There’s no measure how how much energy I’m actually using. They do a blower-door test to measure for air-tightness (our “air leakage rate at 50 pascals” is 3.89 air changes/hour – down from 5.7 before our recent improvements). Beyond that, the values are calculated based on number and type of windows, house size, and a bunch of other static measurements.
So, these values could be better if I keep the house freezing all winter, or much worse when the kids leave the door half open in the middle of winter.
I do like that the rating from EnerGuide Canada includes this note:
One gigajoule (GJ) equals the energy from two BBQ propane tanks
Maybe a BBQ propane tank is the “football field” or “Olympic-sized pool” (!?) measure for energy. Note that this is just for comparison. We’re not actually powering our home with primarily with propane.
Knowing our house could be using around 100 BBQ propane tanks of energy per year sounds pretty low, and way too high at the same time.
Come along with me on a small thought experiment:
Imagine for a minute, you’ve been given a task by the United Nations Commission on Computers & Stuff.
- Your job is to optimize all of the un-optimized digital images in the world (to take less storage space).
- Your mandate dictates that you can only do lossless optimization. For context: there are tools that reorganize the contents of image files such that they take take up less storage space, but no data or image quality is lost. This is in contrast to compressing an image more, where you discard data and lose image quality.
- In my thought experiment, you somehow have the funding, computing power, and the access to all computer systems in the world.
My question is this: Is it better (from a climate standpoint) to:
- Spend the energy once to save all of the storage space in the longer term, or;
- Don’t spend the energy to optimize, and keep spending the energy required for the un-optimized storage?
Obviously the real answer is It Depends on factors like: how much optimization is possible on most images, how long (and on what type of storage) are most images stored. Let’s not ruin a fun (?) thought experiment with nuance, though.
What say you? Does it cost more to squish a big image, or keep it around un-squished?
Any time I’ve rented a car in my life there’s been a question I didn’t know how to answer: Do you need insurance?
I’ve had a vague notion that my credit card may provide insurance for cars I rent, or maybe my own personal car insurance may cover cars I rent. I didn’t really know though.
Sometimes I waived the rental company insurance, sometimes I paid for it.
With an upcoming rental with the Turo car rental app (think Airbnb for cars but hopefully without fuelling a housing crisis), I was asked again if I needed my own insurance, or if I should pay for Turo’s insurance.
I finally decided to figure out the real answer: do I already have insurance on cars that aren’t my own? I called The Personal Insurance Company, who insures our beloved minivan, and got a real answer.
After some confusion about coverage for when I’m driving a rental car, and coverage to pay for a rental car when my own car is damaged, I got my answer: No, I don’t have coverage for cars I rent.
How much would it cost to get insurance for cars I’m renting? They called it “endorsement PE-SEF 27” and it is $8. A year. Done.
It took me decades, but I can finally waive rental car insurance with confidence.
I like to think I’m pretty smart, until I try to read a novel featuring two characters whose names start with the same letter.
The Learning Synths site from Ableton, the music creation software company, is an extraordinary example of the power of interactive documentation.
The way new concepts are introduced gradually and then layered and combined reminds me of the brilliant design of the first level of the Super Mario Bros. game.
As part of their story about the downfall of Twitter, The Verge has compiled an archive of Great Tweets. I might just be tired, but I’ve been laughing for 15 minutes at these.
Not on the list, but a couple of favourites of mine:
“There’s still so much we don’t know about HTML. Even now, scientists are discovering new tags almost every day”
@Orteil42
“Stepping down from my job to devote myself full time to reading the emails from my kids schools”
Joseph Birbiglia @joebirbigs (deleted)
This video (that I found via Waxy, who found it via the Tom Scott newsletter) does a great job of illustrating how you can visualize subtle or hidden change over time in video:
In a much less sophisticated example of a similar principle, I sometimes use the ‘Difference’ filter mode in Photoshop (or other image tools) to catch small changes between two images.
As a simple example, these first two images (screenshots of the WordPress settings screen) are almost identical. The third image uses a ‘difference’ blend mode to make this small change obvious.
The differences between the first two images are: a checkbox was moved down a few pixels, and the word “register” was replaced with “join”. If you open the first two images (A & B) in two browser tabs, you can also switch quickly between them and your brain will do the work to highlight the change (just like the T-Rex did in Jurassic Park before it ate that lawyer off the toilet).
As a bonus, the Web has native support for this ‘difference’ blend mode via the CSS mix-blend-mode property. I was able to put together a quick example with some simple HTML/CSS that shows the difference mode without a tool like Photoshop.
See the Pen Blend Mode by Steven Garrity (@sgarrity) on CodePen.
If you’re taking a photo and for some reason there’s a door open into a bathroom in the background (which you can probably avoid), follow my #1 photography pro tip:
Close the toilet seat.
I asked my coworkers today: We have terms for the children of your siblings, or the children of your children. What do you call the children of your work -friends?
I was satisfied with one colleague’s suggestion of “Coworker once removed.”
Then, many hours later, it dawned on me: Businiece (or the slightly less perfect, Businephew).
All in a day’s work.
If you start a timer on the macOS Clock application and close it, it keeps counting. Like, forever.
I’m up to 284 days. Apparently I started a new “lap” after a few months. Onward.
This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.
When I was a child, our family bought a coconut from the grocery store. It was a rare and exotic novelty.
We all gathered to try and access the strange and nourishing coconut milk trapped inside the huge hairy stone.
In a time before YouTube, we had to resort to our own ingenuity to open the coconut. We moved the operation out into our garage where we tried a hammer and nails. We tried a drill and screwdriver.
Eventually, we smashed the coconut open and watched as a tiny splash of coconut milk trickled out onto the dirty garage floor.
AI features keep popping up in all of the digital products I use. Figma, Photoshop, Notion, Zoom. These products tend to prompt acceptance of vague privacy terms that may or may not feed your private/company data into the AI slurry.
Figma added some AI generation tools into their FigJam product under a “Beta” caveat. I’m both impressed at how candid they are and troubled at how they are comfortable shipping a feature that requires such a warning:
“AI outputs can be misleading or wrong”
— FigJam product, which uses AI…
Also, if you ask the Photoshop’s AI-powered “Generative Fill” feature to draw something “with a transparent background”, it renders a messy checker-board background that is sometimes used to illustrate transparency.
Lots of power, lots of potential, lots of problems.
Nice cover of Nothing Compares 2 U by Choir! Choir! Choir! with Feist. Found via Kottke.
My distaste for band names with punctuation notwithstanding.
If you enjoy Canadian rock music from the past three decades, you may enjoy the Trans-Canada Highwaymen.
If you saw me laughing while walking home from one of my kids’ schools this week, it was because a podcast host said that the two subjects of his story:
“They go together like Jack & Meg White, or Ant-Man & The Wasp”.
Jonathan Goldstein in episode #54 of Heavyweight
I listened to the first episode of the season of the Dissection podcast dedicated to Radiohead’s In Rainbows album.
This first episode is a great recap of their career — appropriately over-simplified, but nicely presented as a coherent story (which it really isn’t). I’m optimistic about the rest of the season, but this opening episode is worth listening to regardless.
Thanks to Brad for the recommendation on Mastodon.
Naming things is hard, so I like to recognize clever and effective names for things. I’ve previously noted Ingrid the crossword app and WordTsar the WordStar clone.
Today, I acknowledge the punny genius of a vintage metronome/rhythm device for recording studios I learned of via a YouTube video. It was called the Russian Dragon. When you’re off-tempo in music, you’re either “rushing”, or you’re “dragging”. Get it?
While listening to this interview with comedian Maria Bamford, I laughed out loud when she shared her approach to charitable giving.
Maria Bamford gives 11% to charity, which is “one percent better than all Christians.”
Generous, sharp, and hilarious in one gesture.
1981-1992: The Good Old DaysFor my formative years growing up on Prince Edward Island, our vehicle license plates looked like this:
Prince Edward Island license plate from the golden age of PEI plate design: 1981 – 1992 (image from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)As we tend to do with things from our formative years, I consider this the golden age of license plate design for Prince Edward Island. With a family that would travel to the United States by car, we would often have people ask about the plate. They could clearly read the large lettering, and as many weren’t familiar with PEI, the inclusion of “CANADA” was helpful. The design was informative and an effective, uh, vehicle, for promoting our province.
I suspect cost and complexity kept the design as simple as it was, but whoever designed this did a great job within the boundaries (Let me know if you know who it was).
1993-1997: The Clip-Art YearsIn 1993, things took a dark turn on the back of PEI cars.
The PEI plate from 1993-1997. (image from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)The 1993 redesign did keep the large “PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND” lettering, but lost the helpful “CANADA” qualifier. It also included the addition of a low-quality illustration of Anne of Green Gables and Green Gables House.
I have no objection to the reference to Anne of Green Gables. When I tell people I’m from PEI, the Anne character is often their first or only reference point. It’s also a pretty good book. I object to the illustration, which is somehow too detailed for the scale, and not detailed enough, and gives of a 1,001 Clip Art CD-ROM vibe.
I heard first hand many years ago from one of the graphic designers who worked on the project. They were asked to provide a quick mock-up and were surprised to see their incomplete draft (it’s missing windows/bushes) ended up on the final product.
1997-2022: The Photoshop YearsIn 1997, the PEI license plate was redesigned again. This time, it included the wild addition of gradients. There were variations featuring the historic Province House in Charlottetown and the remarkable Confederation Bridge.
The PEI plate from 1997. (image from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)The PEI plate from 2007. (image from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)The PEI plate from 2013. (image from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)The 1997-2022 era included several redesigns and variations on PEI plates. Again here, I have no issue with the topics. The Confederation Bridge is an incredible engineering feat and I still marvel at it 25 years after it was built. Highlighting the early adoption of wind power on PEI is also great (despite setbacks, PEI has done well with wind power generation).
All three major design variations are just too complicated for an object that is usually seen covered in dirt, moving at high speeds, and at a distance. Simplify, man!
2022-: The Glorious RedemptionFinally, after over a quarter-century of Photoshop feathering, gradients, and clip-art collages, things got better! The Province of PEI introduced a new redesign of the PEI license plates.
The current license plate on PEI as of 2022.The redesign revealed in 2022 is finally a worthy successor to the 1981 classic. This design is simple, readable at a distance, and includes the key information in the largest font size possible. The “Canada” qualifier has returned with an improvement: the simple and recognizable Canadian flag.
The coat-of-arms of PEI, with its imperialistic lion, and three small and one large oak trees is featured as it was in the 1981 design, but this time with much more detail. This is a case where the added detail helps. While you won’t discern the details of the crest at a distance, it simplifies into a recognizable shape. This is a textbook case of Edward Tufte‘s principle: To simplify, add detail.
There are a few variations of this plate design tied into current PEI government campaigns, but I’m just happy the simplest version exists.
The announcement doesn’t credit the designers. To whoever designed this and whoever had the authority to commission and approve it: Thanks, it looks great.
Thanks to those who maintained the Wikipedia page about Prince Edward Island license plates for the history and photos.
To oversimplify in order to make a point, there are two types of people: crumblers and rocks.
Imagine a coffee shop with a lineup growing faster than orders can be served. Some of the customers are getting frustrated as it’s take a long time to get their coffee fix.
Behind the counter serving coffee are these two types of people:
Crumblers are the people (like me), who crumble under the cumulative pressure of the needs of others. We feel the weight of the impatience (perceived or real) of every person waiting. Rather than working more quickly, the pressure gets us flustered. We make mistakes and end up helping even fewer people.
Rocks are the people who let the needs flow over them. They make coffee as quickly as they can, but they don’t take it personally that there are too many people in line. They keep working calmly, knowing that this is the best way to help as many people as possible.
Let’s be rocks!
One of the many charms of the ShopTalk Show (a podcast all about Web design and development) is the cast of zany characters who drop in.
Off the top of my head (and in addition to the regular hosts Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert) there’s:
Colonel Standards – the hapless Southern gentleman of Web Standards
Bernie Standards – the shaggy Vermont socialist for the people’s Web Standards
and recently:
Barack Shadowdomobama – the President of Web Components
Davatron5000 the AI bot
Who am I missing?
Thanks to Paul Robert Lloyd for noting these glaring omissions:
- Hip Hop Dad
- Tswiftinator
- Macho Man Randy Standards
And to Greg Robson for the Web Standards Sommelier
I’ve decided that only things I don’t care about can be automated by AI. Everything else needs to be careful crafted by artisans.
The manual for some dishwasher? Sure, have a robot whip it up. The manual for my dishwasher? That had better be hand-written by the engineers who built it.
The Web platform includes a CSS feature called **prefers-reduced-motion** to detect if a person’s device is set to reduce motion on screen. Seeing a window smoothly zoom out of an icon can help us understand where it came from. For some people, though, this motion is can trigger discomfort.
Whenever I sign into the RBC Web banking system, I wish there was a **prefers-tasteful-motion**.
On clear days at our family’s cottage on the eastern end of PEI’s North Shore, we have a view of the Hermanville / Clearspring wind farm. I take a small bit of comfort against climate nihilism when I see any of the large wind turbine installations and the spread of residential solar panels on PEI.
We’d been noticing that most of the windmills at the Hermanville installation haven’t been spinning this year. I was dismayed to read that, according to the CBC, “6 of 10 turbines out of commission” at the site.
I give the civil servants that are responsible for the operation of the site the benefit of the doubt that they’re doing what they can to get the turbines working again. In the meantime, though, it’s frustrating and sad to see such an important piece of public infrastructure sitting idle.
This photo was taken back in 2017. Honda Odyssey minivan for scale.
Maritime Electric (“a Fortis company”, as they like to remind us) needed to replace an aging power pole near our family cottage (the one with all of the woods). We weren’t around when they came to replace it, and we didn’t realize our clothesline was affixed to the old utility pole.
Instead of leaving our clothesline down on the lawn, which would have been understandable, the thoughtful crew left just enough of the old pole to hold up our clothesline.
I’ll be even more grateful tomorrow when we return from the beach with sandy wet towels and bathing suits in need of hanging.
Back in 2021 I wrote up a summary of the prospects for an electric minivan in Canada (and the US, as the market is similar). I added an update back in 2022 about how not much has changed.
Here’s your July 2023 update: no change.
There is still Toyota’s hybrid with their Sienna, but not a plug-in hybrid or full EV, and Chrysler’s plug-in hybrid version of the Pacifica, though availability is extremely limited.
For me today in Canada, there is still no feasible all-electric minivan.
Instead of waiting for a mythical EV minivan, we’re starting to relax our requirements and consider other (smaller) EV types.
This year at silverorange, the Web design and development company where I work, we welcomed Clare Raspopow as CEO of silverorange. Clare is the third person to take on the CEO role in our 24-year history, and the first who was not among the original founding partners in 1999.
Clare has been in the role since January. The nice benefit of making our public announcement after six months is that I already know (though I was always confident) that we found the right person.
Welcome Clare, and thanks to Isa, who did the job so well for the past 8 years.
While running a company for over two decades and successfully transitioning the leadership is a significant accomplishment, I’m also proud of the term we coined for this transition: The Clareification. Naming things is hard.
This explanation of the Monty Hall Problem by Lukas Mathis is the first that I’ve ever been able to understand intuitively.
People say it’s healthy to seek out change and new experiences in life. I’ve found that if you just stay in place long enough, you might just find that your favourite podcast changes their theme music. Voila, growth!
If the 1987 song Moonlight Desires by Gowan (YouTube) had been a track on Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So, it would be held in as high regard as anything else on that album.
When you move a meeting “forward” (or “ahead”), or “back”, you realize that some of us see time as something that washes over us, and others see time as something one moves through.
So, the reason I missed your Zoom call is because we have a fundamentally different understanding of how we relate to the universe.
I’ve got an idea for a new (completely made-up) bit of Canadian rumour/conspiracy:
Margaret Trudeau is Enid.
The question I ask any professional or contractor I’ve hired is: “Any surprises?“
Asking “How’s it going?” can get an understandably hollow “Good” response. What I really want to know is: What have you learned since you started the work that you didn’t know before you began?
I’ve found this question helpful in my own work as a Web designer and all-around person-in-a-small-business.
Music nerds don’t need me to tell them about Rick Beato – he’s a YouTube-guy-talking-about-music. I would like to call your attention to two interviews he did with legendary music producers, though.
The first was the interview with Butch Vig, who produced albums for the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. It’s delightful to hear someone at the top of their craft talking about the work with such enthusiasm. Vig is a drummer himself. Watching him air-drum along with Nirvana shows how he has these songs burned deeply into his mind.
The second was the interview with Daniel Lanois, who produced classic albums with Brian Eno, U2, and Peter Gabriel. Lanois was in the room, sometimes contributing directly, when songs like One by U2, or In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel were formed. I also enjoyed hearing Lanois explain how “Cajun” came from “Acadian.”
My favourite Lanois album is Shine. You can really hear the sound of U2’s Achtung Baby on a song like I Love You.
Keeping up the traditions set by his mother, King Charles III will serve as king for 70 years, until he is 145 years old in the year 2093.
With all of the coronation proceedings on the news today, my kids asked me:
“What would you do if you were king?”
Without putting any real thought into it, I made the following declarations:
- Give the property of the crown back to indigenous peoples.
- Set a side one nice cottage and a few priceless jewels for myself I can sell to buy a fancy guitar This is what I would do, not what I should do.
- Dissolve the monarchy.
Two free bad ideas for you:
- A kitchen design company named Counter Intuitive
- An interior design company, but for your digital desktop/workspace
This episode of the Conan O’Brien’s podcast with Julia Louis-Dreyfus confirms that she is one of the funniest people I’ve ever heard.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft has been operating for over 45 years. We should get those NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab folks to build a dishwasher.
One of my friends at work discovered that the Canadian government password recommendations reference the classic XKCD Password Strength comic. They even include a French twist with the example passphrase: correct cheval battery staple. Delightful.
The Canadian flag has been appropriated by people with a slurry of anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and freedom-at-the-cost-of-others sentiments. This sucks.
One approach I’ve noticed to help take back the Canadian flag for an inclusive and mainstream use is to combine it with the pride/rainbow flag (and I realize there are many variations therein).
If I see , I think: “Are they going to shout at me for wearing a mask?”
If I see side-by-side, I think “They like Canada, and they don’t like alienating people who are different than them.”
I’ve always found the song The Boys of Summer by Don Henley to be a great song, but it also felt like a guilty pleasure. It shouldn’t – there should be no such thing as a guilty pleasure, but that’s how it felt.
I learned today from a YouTube clip that the music for The Boys of Summer was written written by Mike Campbell from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Now I can feel like I knew it was cool all along.
If the original is pure 80s, this cover of The Boys of Summer by The Ataris is pure 2000s.
I’m not even going to bother reading the article. This headline alone sounds like good advice: If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It.
I hope that one day, maybe within my own lifetime, scientists will be able to create a vacuum hose that children don’t want to stand on.
Today’s news that President Trump (still can’t believe those words) was indicted was big. How big? On CNN.com, it was 102.05714 pixels big.
Screenshot of CSS code from CNN.com that sets the “TRUMP INDICTED” headline to 102.05714 pixels in size.
If you are trying to think in REM units in the Figma design tool, you can use the simple built-in math capabilities on most numeric inputs. You can enter a width like 16*24 and it will automatically resolved to 384.
Until Figma learns about units other than pixels, this helps a bit. Math!
Quick demo of using math in numeric inputs in Figma.
Cultural relevance curiosity: What do these stripes mean to you (if anything)?
Answer in a reply (and avoid the replies if you want to considering without seeing the answer).
It occurred to me today that building “AI” tools that can detect content generate by “AI” tools is a bit like saying that the best defence against a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.
My brother Tim, who is the Chief Electoral Office for our province, is going to pick some songs as the Friday SpinTime DJ on CBC Radio this week. As I was the SpinTime DJ back in 2019, we’ve reached 2/5 of the Garrity siblings in this pinnacle of cultural relevance on Prince Edward Island.
As far as I noticed, there were two guitars featured during Super Bowl El Vee Eye Eye.
During the half-time show, Nuno Bettencourt was supporting Rihanna with a theme-appropriate bright red edition of his signature Washburn, presumably the N4 model.
Before the game, Chris Stapleton performed the US National Anthem with what looks like a Fender Telecaster Custom.
Update: I missed Babyface playing America the Beautiful on an American-Flag Taylor acoustic. Interesting arrangement here, as it’s strung for right handed players, but he’s playing “upside-down” left-handed. Thanks to pmac for letting me know.
Tune in again next year for episode 2 of Guitars of the Super Bowl.
That was Nuno Bettencourt playing guitar behind Rihanna during the Super Bowl. Yeah, the More Than Words guy.
Can you make nominations for Governor General of Canada? I nominate Jonathan Torrens. He taught me in the 90s on Street Cents that combination-shampoo-and-conditioner does neither well (I use it anyhow). Also, he’s buddies with the old drummer from Our Lady Peace. These seem like qualifications a’plenty.
Reading about the extreme conditions recorded at Mount Washington in New Hampshire today (wind-chill of -77 Celsius) reminded me of my experience with Mount Washington.
I was on a hiking trip with a youth-group. We hiked to the summit, which felt pretty impressive until we saw that there were people who had driven their cars up the other side.
In the observatory at the peak, they played this great video of an outdoor breakfast on Mount Washington that I still remember almost 30 years later.
While it wasn’t -77, we did hit an extraordinary low of a -43 wind chill in Charlottetown last night. We were safe and warm in our home, but the weather felt dangerous in a way that reminded me of Hurricane Fiona.
We’re hiring designers over at silverorange, the company I helped found over 23 years ago.
It’s a great place to work. We’re looking for people able to work remotely from within Canada. There are two positions:
Senior Web & App Designer – We’re looking for an experienced designer who can help us design great systems for our clients.
Junior Web & App Designer – We’re looking for someone earlier in their career who wants to join our team, design and build great stuff, and get even better at it.
Our company blog is a great way to get a sense of who we are.
Kottke.org shared an interesting numeral system: Cistercian numerals. It only takes a minute to understand how it works in a way where you could decode any numeral. I wonder how long it would take to internalize the system, see a shape, and just know it’s 1979.
Saturday Night Live has a good skit about how to talk to kids. I’ve got my own tip for talking to kids.
Take whatever the kid has written in their shirt and read it to them on the form of a question. Here are some helpful examples:
Kid: [has a shirt with a surfer that reads, “Surf’s Up!”]
You: “Surf’s up, eh?”
Kid: […] “Huh?”
Kid: [has a Batman shirt on]
You: “You like Batman?”
Kid: [doesn’t recall which shirt they’re wearing]
The attribute I value most in those in a position of leadership is the ability to bring calm to a difficult situation, rather than ramp up the tension.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t react at all, or pretend a disaster is just fine. It means you don’t make it worse, and you do what you can to help.
Last year I was dealing with a bit of a catastrophe at work. No one was going to get hurt, but clients were affected and urgency was high. A colleague who was better able to address the situation arrived on the scene. When he showed up, there was no panic. Instead, there was a calm assessment of the situation, and then a methodical approach to diagnosing and fixing the issue.
The level of calm this person brought to the situation made us all work more effectively to get things fixed. It was clear that they understood the severity of the situation and of the urgency to get things fixed — they didn’t need to dwell on it.
When you arrive on the scene of a metaphorical fire, some of us ramp up the urgency, and start yelling “FIRE! Somebody do something!”. It doesn’t help anyone. Then there are those who arrive on the scene, take a moment to figure out what matters most, and use this context to guide their actions.
Is there anyone in the burning building? If not, you probably shouldn’t run in to it (I’m not sure you should ever run into a burning building — don’t take your firefighting advice from me). If the building is lost, don’t waste your energy throwing handfuls of water on an inferno. Get to safety. Get others to safety. Maybe there are other structures nearby that can be saved.
Next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, take a moment to consider if you are making it better.
I’ve written a short post over on the silverorange blog about how ‘efficiency’ is a better concept in Web development than ‘performance’
A good rule of thumb: The less time you spend on a Photoshop joke, the better.
I’m still working on a law that governs how to name laws after oneself, but I don’t have a good name for it yet.
I’m only just starting to catch on to what is an obvious pattern: if a person’s thing is being a jerk, they are a jerk.
When someone’s public persona is primarily defined by being the one who will ‘say what no one else will say’, or ‘isn’t afraid to step on toes’, they’re probably just a jerk.
Jerks can get a lot done quickly. They don’t have to consider others, or explore other perspectives, or learn and grow from their own mistakes.
I’m not passively-aggressively writing about a particular person. I’m fortunate to not cross paths with many jerks in my life.
This is my extension to Maya Angelou’s “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” My humble addition is that when people pretend to be something all the time – they may well be what they pretend.
If we someday find out that Larry David was an awful person (I don’t actually know), then my theory will be validated. Hopefully I’m wrong.
Much as I documented my life in cars, I’m writing here mostly for my own benefit. I have this guitar that I love, but there is limited information about it available online. I want a canonical place to link to when I write about this guitar. This post will be that canonical link, for myself at least.
Look at all that wood!My guitar is a 1990s-era Yamaha Pacifica 102S. It isn’t some rare gem. You could buy one like it, or similar, at most music stores in the 1990s. You can still buy a modern Pacifica from Yahama today, but only in Stratocaster-shape (double-cutaway) or a signature model variation, still in the single-cutaway shape.
The basicsThe Axebition reference page has the basic specs of the 102S. Wikipedia has some general info about the entire Pacifica lineup. The basic specs of the guitar, as far as I can tell, are as follows:
- Body is a single-cutaway Telecaster-style body shape in alder (I can’t confirm this) with a natural finish (I can confirm this with my eyes).
- The two pickups are both single-coil (probably cheap-ish in-house pickups from Yamaha) with a three-way pickup selector (bridge, both, neck).
- The bridge is fixed with a string-through-body arrangement and six individually adjustable saddles.
- Th controls are a volume & tone knob that both always sit at 10 for me.
- The neck is maple with a rosewood fingerboard.
- According to the specs on Axebition.com, the fretboard has a 13.75 inch radius, and the guitar a 25.5 inch scale-length. I can’t confirm these measurements, but they do match the specs on the modern models.
- According to a difficult-to-read label on the back, this guitar was “Made by Kaohsiung Yamaha Co., Ltd. in Taiwan in accordance with specifications of Yamaha Corporation” and mine is stamped with model number
MI02314.
Intimate close-upOf all of these, the specs that matter the most to me and that I would look for in other guitars include:
- The neck feel and shape – I’m used it it, and I like it. I presume this has to do with the scale-length, fretboard radius, neck shape, and string spacing. I also love the rosewood fingerboard. I’m not sure I could pass a blindfolded taste-test challenge, but don’t care, I like the feel of rosewood.
- The fixed bridge – it’s solid, stays in tune, and is easy to adjust (which I do once every 20 years, apparently). I don’t need your fancy whammy bar (especially on a cheap guitar, where there’s no way it’ll stay in tune). If I even need to duel the devil, I’ve got a wah-wah pedal.
- The body shape – I love a basic single-cut Telecaster-style body. I also like the look of an off-set or offset-tele, like those from Reverend, but haven’t played one.
My customizationsI’m not one for too much customization. In my digital work setup, I like to swim with the stream with as many of the default settings as possible and only change what really matters to me. There’s a cost to customization. You ‘own’ the change – maintaining the change, ending up with a unique set-up that makes it harder to work in other environments.
It’s the same for me with my guitar. Over the 20+ years I’ve had this guitar, I have made a few small changes. I’m not confident doing anything that involves cutting, filing, sanding, or anything else that isn’t easy to un-do.
I didn’t buy it for the typography I have made these small changes:
- I added strap locks early on. Having a guitar fall from your strap is a mistake you only make once. These pair nicely with my home-made seat-belt guitar strap.
- In recent years, having been radicalized into buying upgrades by YouTube, I added locking tuners (Graph Tech Ratio staggered locking tuners), and a TUSQ nut and string tree.
- Not having done any setup adjustments to the guitar for over 20 years, I recently took it into a local luthier for a general set-up.
- Over 20+ years of playing, the first 10 or so mostly standing with a strap, I dug some nasty divots into the back of the body with my belt buckles. Oops.
I don’t regret any of these changes, but none were dramatic changes to the playability of the guitar. They did reduce my wanderlust for buying another guitar though.
What is it to me?The basic specs and my trivial modifications aren’t what make this guitar special to me. Rather, it was the story of how I bought it and the music I made with it that have made this guitar special to me.
I bought it from the long-defunct Matthew’s Music in Charlottetown. I remember seeing it, playing it, loving it, and then proceeding with a characteristically-bad price negotiation on my part. It was listed for $370. I asked the clerk if he would take $400 including taxes. He instantly replied: “Sold! Now that’s how to do business!”
I obviously left money on the table.
I paired this guitar up with a Fender Hot Rod Deville 4×10″ tube amp (it was so loud), and a few pedals (most importantly, a Big Muff Pi pedal) for most of the playing I did with my high-school band, Horton’s Choice. This same setup was used for the recording of our ill-fated (but special to me) album, The Borden-Carleton Sessions.
I later traded that amp down to a Traynor YCV40 40-watt tube amp that I hoped would be more manageable for playing around the house. This was still way too big and loud, as most of my playing happens when kids are sleeping these days. I later tried out a Fender Mustang Micro headphone amp (good), and settled on a Positive Grid Spark 40 modelling practice amp. This works well as a plenty-loud-for-the-living room amp, a digital interface for recording and modelling on the computer, and as a headphone practice amp.
I’m still happy with this old Yamaha Pacifica 102S guitar and haven’t played a guitar I’ve liked better. It’s got another good 20+ years in it yet.
Just as the best camera is the one that’s with you, the best guitar is the one you play. My primary guitar is a inexpensive Yamaha Pacifica 102S that I bought sometime in the late 90s. I have upgraded few parts (tuners and the nut), but those upgrades didn’t make a huge difference, and were mostly driven by YouTube-fueled spend-lust.
Whenever I stop in the local music store, I take a bit of time to play some of the great guitars they have on display. Many of them cost five times what my guitar was originally. I hate them all.
The poor experience is a mix of factors. They have grimy strings corroding in the grease of a thousand guitar nerds. Many are set-up poorly (strings are too high off the fretboard, intonation is off, etc.). They’re always out of tune (fixable in the moment) and they usually have much lighter strings than I prefer (granted, a personal preference).
I can look at what appear (and sound like) amazing guitars online, but when I try to play something in person, I end up preferring my old Yamaha at home. This is a blessing, like being able to enjoy cheap coffee, cheese, or wine. I’m happy to have a comfortable guitar that works well for me. I know it’s not the one thing keeping me from writing the next great album.
On the other hand, I’m sure some of these guitars would be great for me if the music store would take the time to set them up well and create better conditions for playing. Come on, folks – this pocket isn’t going to grow a hole by itself.
In the past few years, I’ve noticed an increase in text-driven ways to control the software I use. The most prominent example is Spotlight on macOS (or the many 3rd party alternatives, and the similar tools on Windows and Linux systems).
Most of these tools work something like this: you use a keyboard shortcut (cmd+space, cmd+K, etc.) to summon a typing prompt. You can then type a variety of commands to trigger an action, like launch an application, search for a file, or perform a calculation.
I presume the origin of these types of text prompt interfaces are linked to two prominent text-input interfaces types:
- Web search – Google in particular has taught us to see a simple text input, and expect to be able find just about anything with it.
- Command line interfaces – the text-based terminal interfaces that come along with Linux/Unix systems are less forgiving than the Google search box, but they allow experts powerful capabilities by chaining together simple text-based tools.
These days, most of the systems I use have some incarnation of these command prompts:
- Terminals (bash, zsh, etc.) – local and remote. In my work as Web designer and developer, I spend lots of time in a terminal either locally on macOS, or remotely on Linux-based Web servers.
- System-wide search/launcher prompts (Spotlight or equivalent) – a system-wide prompt for quickly launching or searching.
- Web-application command prompts – applications like Slack and Notion had keyboard shortcuts that trigger and application-level prompts to search or navigate within that app.
- Text editor command prompts (VS Code, Sublime Text, etc.) – most development-focused text editing tools feature command prompts for performing actions or navigating text files. These are like other application-level command prompts, but seem to be particularly common in the domain of text editing, presumably because it’s already a keyboard-focused activity.
Text-based interfaces tend to be powerful and flexible, but not easily discovered. The issue of discovering capabilities is often addressed with auto-complete suggestions.
Text-based input also happens to be a relatively low-bandwidth model that works well on remote systems across a potentially slow network.
One, or many?I find myself wanting for more consistency among these different types of commands prompts. Though some conventions are emerging, many applications have different keyboard shortcuts to trigger the prompts, and different syntax and behaviors within the prompts.
I’d like to see all of these systems become interoperable in the way of Unix-style command line tools. On a command line, I can “pipe” the output on one command into the input of another (indefinitely). The command prompts in macOS Spotlight, Slack, Notion, and my text editor live in silos, inaccessible to each other.
Slack and Notion both have concepts of “people” (usually prefixed with an @ symbol) and spaces (“channels” or “pages”). However, I can’t reference a Slack channel from Notion. Slack and Notion don’t know that when I refer to @Kelly in either system, I’m talking about the same person. This type of interoperability requires that: Everything should have a URL (sidenote: I think much of Slack’s effectiveness stems from how they do have a URL for every message, even though it’s a closed system).
There are some advantages to keeping each command prompt isolated in its own domain. This isolation allows each application to tailor the syntax and behavior of its command prompt to best match the type of content in that application. The more broad-reaching a system becomes, the more abstraction you must introduce. This abstraction can be powerful but abstractions can also leak and obfuscate.
Despite the drawbacks of a more universal system of interoperable command prompts, I still find myself wanting for a single universal command prompt that works across my entire system and can reach within each of the applications.
Also happens that voice command systems like Siri, Alexa, and whatever Google calls theirs, are becoming more popular. Infrastructure that makes application-level command prompts more interoperable could also open up more capabilities for voice-based control.
Editing note: This was a draft post I wrote and didn’t complete about two years ago, thinking I would build it into a great article full of images and references. Then, this week I saw much better posts on the topic from Chris Coyier and Maggie Appleton. The lesson: Press Publish.
I’ve noted before that naming things is hard and I like to celebrate naming done well. Last time it was a WordStar clone called WordTsar (hold for applause).
Today, via Ruk.ca, I came across a crossword building app called Ingrid. Bravo.
When starting a productive or creative project, I find myself exaggerating the need for new tools, gear, or equipment before making any actual creative output.
- I’d probably write some great songs if I just had that new guitar or amp.
- It would be fun to do a podcast. Now, what are the best microphones.
- I would get more exercise if I had a nice new pair of running shoes, or maybe an Apple Watch.
- I could really get some great writing done if I had a new workspace, or a new desk and chair.
It’s obvious procrastination. Goods tools are important, but I often have what I need already. I at least have what I need to get started.
I’ve been enjoying playing guitar more again in the past year or two. I even started a bit of recording.
Next thing I knew, I had to have a bass guitar. Precious evenings were lost to scouring the internet for just what bass I should buy. Recognizing my premature leap to tool acquisition, I’ve tried to reverse the process by making a deal with myself.
Rather than thinking, if only I had a new bass guitar, I would write all these songs, I’m trying this instead: If I write and record five actual songs, then I will buy a bass.
They don’t have to be good songs, but they have to exist. As Chris & Dave repeat in the opening of each episode of their ShopTalk Show podcast: Just! Build! Websites! (replace building websites with whatever it is you want to do).
I can write and record songs without a new bass. If I never end up writing or recording anything, then I know it would have been a wasted purchase anyhow.
It’s been about six months so far, and I’m about 10% of the way to my goal. For those doing the math, that means I’ve got about half of one song. It remains to be seen if I’m someone who writes and records songs, or just a person who thinks of themselves as someone who writes and records songs.
If I recently bought a product or service from you or interacted with your sales or support staff online, and you did not send a follow-up email asking me to rate the experience: Thank you.
You get five-stars:
Artemis I Flight Day 13: Orion, Earth, and Moon by NASAI love this photo from NASA’s Artemis I mission. It has all of the elements of a great selfie: the subject in the foreground (showcasing both the worm and meatball logos), and some friends off in the background (in this case, all of humanity).
My last two web searches were:
- “when was the last time someone was convicted of seditious conspiracy?”
- “chicken bouillon vs. chicken broth”
Our brains were not made to live in so many worlds at once.
For the record, the last successful seditious conspiracy charge in the US was in 1995 and bouillon and broth are interchangeable.
For many web developers, A Complete Guide to Flexbox from CSS-Tricks.com is a pillar of our web developer reference material. It’s my externalized memory on how the flex feature of CSS works. I don’t have to remember how it works because I know I can look it up there. You can even download a poster version to hang on the wall.
Now there’s another great reference An Interactive Guide to Flexbox by Joshua Comeau. An instant classic.
Canada’s central bank is warning us to “brace for a rough winter”, so I’ve lined up snow-removal service for my driveway with Steve’s Snow Removal (no relation).
Today I stumbled across (via the YouTube algorithm, I think) a song I immediately loved. The song is called Expert In A Dying Field by a band called The Beths.
Expert In A Dying Field by The Beths.My preferred musical formula: heavy + melodic. While I wouldn’t call their music ‘heavy’, they combine fuzzy guitars with sweet melodies, which does the trick.
The jumping in-and-out of falsetto reminds me of Regina Spektor, the lyrical style reminds of me Kathleen Edwards (bonus recommendation: Change The Sheets), and the fuzzy buzzing guitars remind me of, me!
The TV-series Only Murders in the Building is fun for a few reasons. It makes fun of true-crime podcasts and the combination of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez is perfect.
What I was most surprised to find myself enjoying about the show: the literal wallpaper.
For all its sordid history, the gossip-news site Gawker left us with a lasting gem: The “How Many Pizzas Should You Order” formula. It’s elegant in its simplicity: (# of people) × 3/8.
Image from Gawker.comWhat if some of the people are adults and some are kids? Large pizzas or Medium? No more questions! Just use the formula, and round up to the nearest pizza. It works. Your quality of life will improve.
The company I helped to found over 23 years ago, silverorange, is thriving in a way I couldn’t have imagined back in 1999. Getting to work with and learn from new team members of all different backgrounds is the best part. We’re hiring for a few different positions, the most recent of which is a … →
Having just weathered Hurricane Fiona, the strongest to hit Canada on record, I have a few notes: Everyone in my circle and as far as I can see around me is safe. I’ve never felt my house shake in a storm – but I did this time. We had a lot of close calls, but … →
I’m moving to a new house (same town) and so I’m being forced to contend with All of My Stuff. I’m selling off a few bits of guitar gear that I’m not using as much these days. You can buy my stuff through this Reverb shop. It will be much easier for me to carry … →
I enjoy how the Hyundai Canada website asks you to choose between a gigantic container ship and a hatchback EV.
I was surprised to learn today that the distinctive guitar sound from Sheryl Crow’s song My Favorite Mistake, is from Wendy Melvoin, who played guitar with Prince for much of her career. I learned this on the Dead Wax YouTube channel (which has some great guests, but I’m having a hard time with the over-the-top … →
My family got me the perfect Father’s Day gift this year. First, some background. Living, as we do, on Prince Edward Island, we have access to some beautiful beaches. I spent my summers as a child at a cottage near a beach, and we visit the beach lots now that I have kids of my … →
I noticed a new sensation today as I was looking at the news article on the web. I was about to start scrolling down and felt a pang that if I scroll, the whole page might be suddenly obscured by a pop-up prompting me to pay for access or sign up to a newsletter. I … →
It’s easy to identify and criticize bad design. When an object is well designed though, you often don’t notice it (by design). There are two monoliths that stand outside by house. One green and one black. These waste and compost bins, distributed by the provincial government, are well designed. They are durable. It’s rare to … →
I previously shared the result of an exercise in home recording: my lament for Niel Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife. I have a second such exercise to share. In this recording exercise, I wanted to try something I feel is more difficult: recording loud over-driven guitars. Getting a recorded clean guitar … →
YouTube Guitar-Guy Paul Davids does a great dive into how rich the seemingly simple tones of Blur’s Song 2 really are. Davids doesn’t address the distorted bass, which is a big part of the sound, but his video will still make you enjoy Song 2 even more. I saw the amazing Nova Scotia band Sandbox … →
I made a Lego build I felt proud enough to share, including some great help from the kids (the Dad figure was all them).
I’ve been playing around with some simple home recording recently and am impressed with the state of the tools. GarageBand comes is “free” (with an expensive computer) and is remarkably capable. I’ve been playing guitar quietly into my headphones via the Fender Mustang Micro. I realized I could plug the Mustang Micro into my laptop … →
The premier of our little province has proposed renaming our very big bridge from the Confederation Bridge to Epekwitk Crossing. Epekwitk is the original name the Miꞌkmaq People gave to this island. I appreciate the gesture and would like to see it happen. If we’re going to rename things, though, let’s rename the province itself.
I started watching guitar videos on YouTube this year. This led me to discover more guitar-focused YouTube channels. Like for any topic, there’s a whole parallel universe on YouTube populated by guitar players, gear reviewers, and customizers. I’ve had the same electric guitar for 20 years, and the closest I’ve ever come to modifying it … →
About a year ago, back in March of 2021, I wrote a summary of the prospects for an all-electric minivan. At the time the options were sparse. It’s not a year later and little has changed. The Volkswagen ID.Buzz has gone from a hypothetical future vehicle to one that will be actually introduced in Europe, … →
About twenty years ago, I fashioned an old car seat belt into a guitar strap. It’s still holding up. This may be my greatest triumph.
I like to be clear. Who doesn’t? Clarity is a form of kindness – or if you really want to fit it onto a coffee mug, “clear is kind“. I find my lack of clarity in communication tends to correspond with a lack of empathy. If I really understood the perspective of the person I … →
Thanks to an interview on Vish Khanna’s fine podcast, I discovered a podcast this week that falls right into my areas of interest: music and design. The podcast is Art Design Music by Jud Haynes. It is a series of “Conversations with iconic visual artists about their work for the music biz.” He speaks with … →
Though I suppose it would be hard to tell otherwise, I think I’m a reasonably intelligent person. Still, there are two areas where I have a kind of learned helplessness and completely fail to grasp basic math: Time-zones and daylight saving time changes“Ok, the clock says 9 am, but what time is it really?”“Is Europe … →
Whoever decided the clock on the lock screen of Android 12 should be stacked on two lines is bad and they should feel bad.
I’m not sure I can be objective about the company, silverorange, where I have worked for the past 22 years, but it’s a great place to work. We’re doing rewarding work with some world-class doctors that produce medical education tools. In the past few years we’ve built web systems for an art project, a funding … →
I was talking with some friends-who-are-also-colleagues at work about a subject that, if addressed, would “open up a can of worms.” As the expression indicates, addressing this subject would force us to face a slew of other issues. In the case, though, being forced to face these other issues felt healthy, necessary, and valuable. I … →
The heroes for me this week are all of the preschool and elementary school teachers. They are using every muscle in their face to smile with their eyes to welcome nervous kids to school behind masks. (don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re wearing masks too)
Of all the new music I’ve heard this year, the song that has stuck with me most is a joke. Like all great joke songs, it’s a great song first. Bo Burnham’s Netflix musical comedy special, INSIDE, culminates in a song call All Eyes On Me (YouTube, Spotify). There’s a concluding song that comes after … →
I had a few conversations with friends and family recently where we ended up compiling a list of requirements for a place to be called a “cottage”. If your so-called “cottage” has any of the following, then I’m sorry, you don’t have a cottage. You have a Summer Home. A foundation A dishwasher Air conditioning … →
My friend and colleague at silverorange, Stephen DesRoches, has been an accomplished photographer for years. Recently, though, I feel his work has crossed into the could-be-a-default-Apple-wallpaper level of quality. I can imagine this photo as a default wallpaper for macOS Cavendish in 2023 (I’ve since learned this shot is from Bermuda). If you live on … →
Every time you throw an apple core out the window of a moving car on a country road, you hit the ghost of Leslie Nielsen in the face and knock him off a horse.
Here in my home province of PEI (née Epekwitk), we have two primary dairy brands: Perfection/ADL and Purity. They both use similar white plastic bottles in four common milk-fat amounts: 3.25%, 2%, 1%, and Skim (fat-free). Both dairies use color to differentiate the milk-fat variations. For 3.25% milk, they both use red. For 1% they … →
Today at work we were talking about the concept active listening. Hearing the practices of “reflecting back what is said”, “asking for clarification”, and “summarizing” made me think of Bob McDonald. Bob McDonald is the host of the CBC Radio science program, Quirks & Quarks. I also loved watching his science TV show Wonderstruck when … →
I wrote back in April about Brad Sucks’ pending new album. It’s out today (June 10, 2021) and it’s great: A New Low in Hi-Fi.
I spend a lot of my time on the internet. Much of that time is spend checking the local weather via the Canadian Weather Radar service. Some time this year, one or two of the weather radar stations seems to have stopped reporting data on this page. As a result, a swath of PEI (née … →
I was a pretty good student in high school. I wasn’t great at applying myself, but I was capable of getting marks in the 80s and 90s. At the time I thought I was smart. I found out a couple of years later that my ease with math and physics was actually an ease with … →
Naming things is hard. I applaud those who named this project, a clone of the vintage WordStar word processor. They named their WordStar clone WordTsar. Well played.
Prince Edward Island is a special place. Most people elsewhere in the world know of it as a place with nice beaches (true), a place that grows good potatoes (true), or the place from the Anne of Green Gables books (true). It has been called Prince Edward Island (or P.E.I. as we call it) since … →
When a typical five-day work week is cut short by a holiday, as this week is in Canada by Victoria Day, peculiar physical properties of a scheduled week are revealed. When the week is compressed, not all parts of that week compress equally. Events that are scheduled, especially regular and recurring events, tend to remain … →
Lena is a science-fiction short story written in the form of a hypothetical future Wikipedia page. The format is clever and used to good effect in telling the story. The title of the story is a reference to a commonly used test image. I’ve lost track of who pointed me to this link, but thanks, … →
I was eight years old in 1986. We spent our summers at a cottage on the North shore of Prince Edward Island. It was a twenty-minute drive from our house in Charlottetown, but it felt like another universe. Our family had a small portable radio/cassette player that we called our ‘ghettoblaster’ (?!). My older brother … →
Like many humans on planet Earth, I enjoyed the He-Man series and the related toys as a child. When one of my well-meaning aunts asked my parents what I would like for Christmas, they must have suggested a He-Man doll (or “action figure”, as we nervously called them). This well meaning and generous aunt headed … →
As a toddler, I had access to loads of great books. We had Golden Books, Dr. Seuss, Berenstein [sic] Bears. While I enjoyed most of these, there was one that I remembered dreading. Hands Hands Fingers Thumb by Al Perkins was a simple rhyming book about monkeys and their drums. Eric Gurney’s illustrations of those … →
I don’t recall how old I was at the time, but let’s be generous and assume I was only about 8 years old. Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky was on Prince Edward Island as part of a celebrity charity golf tournament. I wasn’t a big sports fan, but I understood that Wayne Gretzky was a big … →
Our first family computer was a Packard Bell 20Mhz 486sx, with 2MB of RAM and a 100MB hard drive. It was amazing. It came with Windows 3.1, which I soon discovered was quite limited. Family friends had Macs, which were remarkably advanced from a user-interface standpoint compared to our simple Windows 3.1 Program Manager UI. … →
The first such tale is about desire, hope, and value. I was in the fourth-grade and had spied an object of desire in the Consumer’s Distributing catalogue (source of several such tragic desires). It was a telescope that cost $39. As I recall, I saved up my money for months, but given the limited income … →
When you’re blessed, as I was, with a healthy, pleasant, and generally good childhood, you really have to look hard to find heartbreak. When all you’ve known is stability and pleasantness, though, little problems can seem like big disasters. Such is the delight and tragedy of childhood that you can be in a divine delight … →
I’ve been reading and appreciating the two Parable books from Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents. They are powerful books. I can’t quite say I’m enjoying them, because the characters endure such horrible events (including sexual violence against children — it’s dark). It reminds me of The Road … →
I was able to get the first dose of a COVID19 vaccine today. Thanks to all those involved.
In the introduction to episode 425 of the Accidental Tech Podcast, Marco Arment made the following statement encouraging people who are eligible to get vaccinated (note that my transcription here isn’t word-for-word, as I’ve trimmed it a bit for clarify): “We don’t get a lot of chances as a society to really step up and … →
My 5-year-old son got out a tennis ball and racket in the back yard and said: “Let’s pretend we’re playing Wii Sports!”
There’s a page on Wikipedia about the absurdly long, but grammatically correct, English sentence: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo As if that weren’t enough, there’s a delightful diagram to help explain sentence: While I love the absurdity of the diagram above, there’s another image on the Wikipedia page that I found more … →
I’ve never been good at swallowing pills. When I do, I need lots of water and I throw my head back and forward in a graceless hideous spasm of multiple failed attempts. If someone is looking at me, it gets even more difficult. I’ve gotten a bit better at it through years of practice, but … →
Hey you there looking at your phone while driving by outside my kitchen window. I see you while I wash the dishes. I see you.
Back in February, I wrote about A Mario Kart theory of media and economics. I learned today that a researcher from Boston University, Andrew Bell, had already an academic paper about using the Mario-Kart balance principles to help with environmental governance (behind a paywall). Bell’s paper is also covered by Boston University’s research magazine. Let’s … →
Like many people this year and last, I’ve been working from home. During much of the day, I’m the only person in the house. While doing some types of work, I like to listen to music and sometimes find myself singing along. I stumbled across a way to make singing along with your headphones more … →
Today, while confirming the spelling of the French term sacre bleu (for an important work presentation), I came across the term “minced oath”. According to Wikipedia: A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original … →
In his interview with author George Saunders (at 48 minutes in), Ezra Klein shared this anecdote: Someone once told me that whenever you think “huh, that doesn’t make sense”, what it means is that your model of the world doesn’t make sense. The world always makes sense on its own terms. It’s you is missing … →
Back in 2008, Brad Turcotte, aka Brad Sucks, came to our Zap Your PRAM conference in Dalvay-by-the-Sea, Prince Edward Island. He generously shared a look into his songwriting process and let us leach off of his Internet fame. Brad’s 2003 album included the Internet-hit Making Me Nervous, which still holds up. My favourite song from … →
As I’ve written before, my dream car is a mythical 3-year-old electric minivan. It’s mythical because it doesn’t exist yet. Even if an electric minivan was released tomorrow, it wouldn’t be three years old for at least [pause for calculation…] three years. I’m keeping an eye on it though. Here’s a snapshot of what a … →
There’s a scene in the show Ted Lasso where Ted confronts a character we’ve been led to hate and serves this bully a delightfully satisfying comeuppance. In the process, Ted quotes Walt Whitman: “Be curious, not judgmental.” I wouldn’t normally suggest life lessons from a TV show quoting a poet I’m not sure I’ve ever … →
There are twelve new electric school buses on the road in Charlottetown this week. The buses are from Lion Electric. As a safety precaution, they play a musical tone in place of the grumble of a diesel engine. I’ve heard it going passed my house just this morning. It’s nice to see a small step … →
Yesterday, CBC’s evening radio news program As It Happens covered the embarrassing refusal of the Canadian Conservative Party to acknowledge that climate change is even real. Host Carol Off had no patience with the nonsense she was hearing from members of the Conservative party as they struggled to explain away the absurd decision. After a … →
The editors of the Volkswagen Canada site were trying to helpfully inform me that a Canadian version of their car may differ from the European variations. The composition of this photo and text conveyed a different message.
Is Tom Cochrane the Canadian: Bruce Springsteen? Tom Petty? John Cougar Mellencamp? Who is Tom Cochrane? Must we define Canadian artists by comparing them to Americans? Somewhat agree
I was delighted to hear such a beautifully optimistic take on space exploration from Stacey Abrams’ in her interview with Kara Swisher on the Sway podcast. After forty minutes of talking about voting rights and how to repair American democracy, Swisher took a hard left turn and asked, “Do you want to go in space?” … →
I heard a song near the end of episode 3 of season 2 of the show Search Party that stuck with me enough to look it up. It’s Circles by Prairie Empire. It reminds me a bit of the restrained guitar and vocals from The National. Recommended. As for the show Search Party, I started … →
I stumbled across this cover of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android by Ball Park Music. I have never heard of Ball Park Music before, but I was captivated by their surprisingly faithful cover. Radiohead managed to make a few guitars, bass, and drums sound like nothing I’d ever heard before in Paranoid Android. Seeing it recreated in … →
Vaccination against COVID-19 is getting becoming more real and less of a vague hope as eligible family members and acquaintances are starting to get vaccinated. This reminds me of a post I made in 2017: Selling the Flu Shot. My point at the time still holds up: If you want people to get a vaccine, … →
The many variations of Mario Kart games have been among the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games. One of the many mechanics that helps make the Mario Kart games great is how the game is designed to narrow the gap between stronger and weaker players. If you’re in first place, you get weaker … →
I love this simple web tool that Joshua Tauberer built to show how an iceberg would float based on its shape: Iceberger. All of the complexity is delightfully hidden under the surface. There’s no visual user-interface—you just draw. There’s no reset button, you just draw again. Lovely.
I was pleased to learn that Chris Murphy & Jay Ferguson from the band Sloan have a podcast for their record label, murderecords. The first episode features Chris & Jay speaking with Joel Plaskett about posthumously remixing and releasing songs from their mutual friend and musical collaborator, Matthew Grimson. I hadn’t heard of Matthew Grimson, … →
I was explaining to one of my kids what the Canadian Heritage Minutes were and it occurred to me: there could now be a Canadian Heritage Minute about how Canadian Heritage Minutes are part of our Canadian Heritage.
I enjoyed hearing my home province of Prince Edward Island make the list of other places one might like to live (even if only for two months of the year year) in episode 417 of the Accidental Tech Podcast (at around the 13m 30s point). Any other year, John Siracusa, we’d be glad to have … →
We’ve been fortunate on Prince Edward Island to have had limited exposure to COVID-19 and to have effective leadership from our health authorities. Today, someone in the family needed a COVID-19 test (unlikely to be a real case, but had cold symptoms). We had a drive-in test just after 8am (maybe a 10 minute wait/process). … →
Using consumer products to mark milestones in your life has the feel of creepy consumerism, but our lives are often framed by the things we buy. Like it or not, our cars, homes, phones, and computers all mediate many of our more meaningful life experiences. As a selfish retrospective, I am documenting my life in … →
My dream car is: A minivan. I want room for my three kids, a few of their friends, and their sleds. All-electric. A plug-in hybrid is a help, but I’d rather jump in with both feet. Affordable. While affordability is obviously relative, I don’t want a $60k (or $120k) luxury vehicle. Two or three years … →
If you had shown me some of the basic features of today’s design tools like Figma and Sketch back when I was using Photoshop ten (and twenty) years ago, my head would have exploded:
This Netflix stand-up comedy special by Tom Papa, You’re Doing Great, is worth a watch. I suspect your enjoyment of it may wane the further you get from the tired-dad demographic, but that’s me. This highlight on the “Good Old Days” is a good teaser (mildly not safe for playing out loud at work):
Though I don’t know the details, the Canadian government seems to require internet service providers to allow other vendors to resell access on their networks. For example, here on Prince Edward Island, Bell and Eastlink have the infrastructure to get internet access to homes in the form of actual cable and fiber-optic lines. There are … →
I’ve been working at the Web design and development agency, silverorange, since we founded it in 1999. It really is a great place to work. Though we are distributed across Canada, we work together on PEI for a week each summer, and get away from our regular work to retreat together for a week each … →
When writing in the cleverly-named Markdown markup language, I could never remember which comes first in the syntax for a link, square or round brackets. After discussing this with a colleague (who I’m assuming doesn’t wish to be acknowledged here), we settled on an alliterative mnemonic that has helped me for years. Round brackets look … →
This is a screenshot from a High Interest savings account. Ask me about my personal investing strategy!
I’m always interested to learn how others use their computers. In that spirit, here’s a list of the services that I find valuable enough to pay for online. I think of it as a few dollars here and there, but with exchange rates it adds up to around $70/month Canadian. The basics Netflix Standard Plan … →
We’re watching from Canada as our US neighbors struggle with running a fair election. I’m struck that gerrymandering and other attempts to suppress the vote, dissuade people from voting, or even to undermine confidence in the electoral system, seem to be employed openly and without shame. In a democracy, any attempt to undermine the fairness … →
Have you ever: …changed the radio station to one you want the next driver of your car to think you were listening to before getting out of the car? …picked out what you think are your coolest clothes before a hair cut so the hair dresser will know how cool you are, and give you … →
When looking at the podcasts I enjoy, the topics vary from Web and technology (not surprising, given my career) to politics to music. Though I spend a lot of my time thinking about design, I haven’t found many podcasts about design that I enjoy. I think we designers tend to be insufferable when we talk … →
I love playing video games but haven’t played many since I had kids about a decade ago. In the past year, I did squeeze in a bit of time and replayed a few old favourites (like an older person who never gets past the music they discovered as a teenager, which is also true for … →
Today I learned about the “birthday rule” in the insurance industry. As described in the Web interface to my health insurance provider: All insurance companies use the “birthday rule.” The parent with the date of birth that’s earlier in the year submits the claim to their plan first. Then the other parent submits the leftover … →
I’ve run into an issue working on a side-project with the CSS Grid. I’m not sure if it’s something I don’t know how to do, or if it’s not possible given the constraints I’ve got. I’ve created an example and explanation on CodePen. I’ve also posted the question on DEV.TO, based on the suspicion that … →
This delightfully simple no name® branded cocoa powder made clear something I had never realized: The English and French spellings of cocoa / cacao just swap each “o” for an “a”. Now you know.
Free marketing tip for Daimler Chrysler: Take your minivan, stick the iconic styling from the front of a Jeep (O||||O) on the grille, and call it Jeep Family™. Profit.
If you try to sign in to the Canadian government tax service website this month, you’ll be greeted with with a polite request to wait your turn: I’m fascinated by this on several levels. First, I like that it’s a simple request. If you have an urgent need, you could ignore it and sign-in anyhow. … →
I’ve noticed that most financial market charts in the news zoom in on the area of change, rather than start with a base of zero. In some respects, this makes sense. When you’re discussing a sudden change, focusing on that part of the chart can highlight the change and illuminate details within it. However, with … →
I listen to a lot of podcasts. I love them. Many of them are dedicated or adjacent to American politics, even though I live in Canada. Among these are The NPR Politics Podcast, Pod Save America & Lovett or Leave It, and The Ezra Klein Show. While all Canadians live in the long shadow of … →
If you had asked me how much it cost to drive a round-trip from Charlottetown, PEI to Halifax, Nova Scotia, I would have guessed about $80. Google Maps estimates the drive is about 3hr 30m. If I thought about it a bit more, I probably could have come up with a more accurate estimate. A … →
Idea for the nerdiest TV show ever: A high-budget HBO-style series about an alternate history where the only difference is that Apple bought BeOS instead of NeXT.
I loved the CBC radio show Wiretap. Sadly, the CBC website has gone through enough redesigns in the years since its broadcast that there doesn’t seem to be a canonical website for Wiretap anymore, hence the Wikipedia link. Jonathan Goldstein, host of Wiretap, is a Canadian national treasure, even if he now works for a … →
When I was a kid I wanted to be an aerospace engineer (and later, a rock star). At the time, there was no Web for which to be a Web Designer. I sometimes wonder what jobs will come in to being by the time my own kids have careers. Job that didn’t exist 30 years … →
Speaking of CSS, I’ve run into a CSS rendering issue and I’d like to know if I’m missing something, or if it’s a genuine bug. In Safari version 13.0.2 (14608.2.40.1.2) as of October 31, 2019 (👻), if the line-height in a
We had an election here in Canada yesterday. The Elections Canada website has a page with the results. There’s a little in-line bar chart to help visualize the relative values. What is generally considered a good practice in CSS (the code used the style and layout pages on the Web) is making 33.1% look bigger … →
I got to join Matt Rainnie this week on the CBC Radio Mainstreet program for the SpinTime DJ segment. I got to choose three songs, which is harder than it sounds. First, I had to get over myself and realize I didn’t have to take it as seriously as those who assembled the Voyager Golden … →
Many of us in the technology world are beginning to grapple with the unintended consequences of the platforms and products we’ve been created. I’ve recently noticed a pattern with potential unintended consequences where software products leak information about your presence or actions to others. It may not be fair to use the term “leak”, as … →
This clever little widget called Good Fast Cheap by Kunuk Nykjær is a delightful illustration of how the classic project adage: Good, fast, cheap–choose two can be recast as: Expensive, slow, shitty–choose one Discovered via the often delightful CodePen Spark newsletter.
If you’ve watched the remarkable Chernobyl series on HBO and played the Half-Life series of video games, then please enjoy this: Chernobyl dubbed with Half-Life SFX. If one or the other of these is not familiar to you, then you get the next 2 minutes of your life back.
One of the many interesting and rewarding parts of my job this year was to curate and participate in the 20th anniversary silverorange art project. It’s an art project that celebrates the 20th anniversary of silverorange (naming things is hard). Thanks so much to everyone who participated. I really do love all of the entries, … →
My life was enriched in my ways when I got married 14 years ago. One of these ways is the deep connection my parents-in-law have to the “North side” on the Eastern end of Prince Edward Island. This includes a humble cottage in an extraordinary location near the Shipwreck Point Lightstation in Naufrage, PEI (Naufrage … →
While at work today, I set about a relatively simple task: Write a summary of a new job opening we have to share on Twitter. What followed was a yak-shaving rabbit hole mixed metaphor of multitasking. Here’s how it went: Ok, I want to write a tweet about the new job posting I need something … →
In the technology industry and others, I’m sure, it is often cited that those in under-represented groups should not be given additional consideration because hiring should be based solely on merit. This sounds reasonable and fair, though I’ve grown to feel it is neither.
The following quote from actor and activist Geena Davis on the WTF podcast articulates the danger of a narrow consideration of “merit” in a more effective way than I’ve heard before:
“…I don’t think anyone can say ‘I hire based on merit’ if they haven’t taken conscious proactive steps to overcome their unconscious bias.”
Gina Davis on WTF with Marc Maron
The whole interview is worthwhile, as is Davis’ work with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.
I was talking to a friend recently about the perils of helping young kids manage uncertainty when they see disconcerting changes. My instinct is to say “Your mom & dad will always be together”, or even just “I’ll always be here for you.”
While I fully intent to fulfill both of those promises, they are dangerous promises to make as they can depend on forces outside of your control.
My wise friend shared the promise he makes to his son among uncertainly—a reminder of a reassurance that he really can promise: “I will always be your father.”
My friend at silverorange has written a beautiful tribute to his mother and her contribution to his life and our company.
Martha was kind and generous to all of us in the early years of silverorange.
About 18 or 19 years ago, she had an 1978 Volvo station-wagon sitting around that she let me borrow one winter. The only catch was, I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission.
Martha didn’t seem to think this was much of an issue. She’d just teach me how to drive it when she dropped it off for me. There in the UPEI parking lot, my friend’s mother showed me how to drive a manual transmission so I could borrow their extra old car for six months.
She was a special person. See Nick’s full tribute: A Mother’s Mentorship.
Update: I submitted this to the Sketch team as a bug report. They’ve responded that it should be fixed in the next version and is already fixed in the current Beta.
Update #2 (May 31, 2019): This issue is now fixed in Sketch (v55.1). Thanks!
I’ve noticed a bug in Sketch and I’ve documented it here in a quick screen-cast in hopes that it will get fixed and that others can understand and work around it.
To trigger the bug:
- Create two objects in a Sketch document
- Group those two objects
- Select one of those objects and move it with the keyboard in such a way that the group is now larger (for example, move the rightmost object further to the right)
- Click anywhere on the canvas to clear the selection and apply the keyboard move
- Select the group and notice that the width of the group is that from before the move – double-clicking on the portion of the moved object that is outside of the group has no effect
Now, to get Sketch to properly reflect the new larger size of the group, select one of the objects in the group and hit Escape. This seems to trigger Sketch to update the size of the group.
It sounds complicated when written out like that, but I’ve narrated a quick screen-cast to illustrate the issue:
Screen-cast of Sketch group sizing bug
I write a short post about how we chose the name “silverorange” for our company. We skirted catastrophe.