I wrote about it over at the silverorange blog.

When we started reading it together, I felt like someone had plugged directly into my son’s brain and formulated the perfect book for him. The dialog among the characters sounds like my son talking soccer with his friends.

When you find a great book, it’s even better to find out that it’s the start of a whole series. We devoured book one, and quickly turned a few bookstore gift cards from Christmas into the next few entries in the series. We’ve now enjoyed books 1 through 4, with book 5 coming this week and book 6 later in May.

The book is such a hit in our house that is has changed our approach to reading and writing.

If I could bet on the further success of this book series – or any adaptations for TV or film, I would. The writing level and subject matter are perfect for a kid around 8 to 12 years old. I don’t mind it either.

Cook the bacon until the fat turns to meat.

That leaves me saying nothing. If I read a diary of someone who lived through the 1940s in Europe and it didn’t mention World War II, I would be bewildered. If I (or someone else) looks back on this website decades from now, they might wonder: What did he do about it*.

* The ‘it’ will be more obvious in historical hindsight depending on where we end up, but in general, I’m talking about a political climate of intolerance, corruption, and dangerous stupidity.

I’m a Canadian who lives in Canada, but today I ended up on the United States Department of Health and Human Services website. What I saw that scared me more than any of the dangerous garbage that Trump and his enables spout off.

The site will change, but when I looked at it back in February of 2025 (screenshot) if featured a photo of Donald Trump with Robert Kennedy Jr. – A guy who has an entire section on his Wikipedia page called “Anti-vaccine advocacy and conspiracy theories on public health”. In the parlance of the show Succession, the “are not serious people.”

The next most prominent thing is a photo of a smiling white woman with the darkly Orwellian headline “Protecting Women and Children.” This leads to a page from the Office on Women’s Health” where you learn that what seems to be their most important health issue for women is blatant fear-mongering about trans people in sports.

Fuck that.

It’s somehow much more disturbing when the garbage I expect from Trump shows up on an official government department website. A real government department that matters to people’s lives.

Trump also keeps talking about taking over Canada (and now Greenland). It’s absurd on the surface. I would have assumed fifteen years ago that no country could take over a part of another modern democracy. Then Russia took Crimea from Ukraine. It’s not acceptable to even suggest taking over another country.

What am I doing about it? Not much. I don’t know what to do.

I’m relieved that we in Canada didn’t hand over control of parliament to the Conservative party, which is parroting Trump-style nonsense more and more.

Trump is dangerous and needs to be stopped. But this type of passive-voice statement isn’t changing anything.

How do they know the snow is going to be yellow before it comes?

Two examples come to mind:

1. Sports video games that simulate the TV viewer experience rather than the player experience, and;
2. Software musical instrument recreations (like guitar amp simulations) that simulate the listening rather than playing experience.

I’d love to hear of other examples.

Sports TV simulators

First, sports video games. When you see someone playing FIFA, Madden NFL, or NBA 2K on a PlayStation from across a room, it can be difficult to distinguish from a televised live game. The games are designed to look and feel like watching sports on TV, not to look and feel like playing an actual sport. The perspective is that of a viewer, not a player. The viewpoints mimic TV cameras. The on-screen graphics and stats look just like broadcast TV graphics.

To further illustrate what I mean by simulating consumption, imagine the alternative: a PlayStation game designed to simulate the first-person experience of an NFL quarterback, not the experience of controlling parts of a televised game. There would be no birds-eye view of the whole field and no coloured lines on the field showing where your receivers will run. Instead, you’d have an often-obscured eye-level view of the chaos of a defensive line coming at you.

Software musical instruments

My second example of simulating consumption rather than creation comes from the world of music. We’re at a point where a tube-powered guitar amp can be simulated in software at a level that can fool professional musicians.

Many of these software guitar amps are designed to sound not like a guitar amp sitting in front of you, but like guitar amp mic’d up in a recording studio. The characteristics and position of the microphone are simulated. The physical acoustics of a studio room are simulated. The whole process feels geared toward making playing your guitar feel like listening to a polished recording, rather than standing in front of a guitar amp like you would in a live band.

So what?

I don’t mean to imply that either of these examples – simulating televised sports or produced guitar recordings – is necessarily negative. My imagined first-person quarterback game (let’s call it GarrityBowl 2026) might be a lousy game experience. I love using guitar amp sims.

Maybe we just want to simulate what we know. Many more of us know what it’s like to watch sports on TV than know what it’s like to be on a football field. Many more of us know what it’s like to listen to Spotify than know what it’s like to play through a guitar amp in a band.

I do think there can be a danger if we don’t realize that what we’re simulating is a mediated consumptive experience, rather than an unmediated original creative experience. Just like it’s dangerous to expect your real relationships to work like TV/movie relationships, it can be dangerous for us to expect any real experience to be like what we see in the media.

When this happens, we celebrate this bounty by singing “Bonus fish! Bonus fish!” to the tune of Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit Gloria.

So, things aren’t all bad.

As the rocket accelerates, the pressure from pushing through the atmosphere increases. Eventually, though, the atmosphere thins, and the pressure reduces. There’s a crossover point where the pressure is highest: max q.

Similarly, when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle at home over the holidays, the puzzle process has a max q.

The difficultly of a puzzle decreases with each piece you place, as fewer options are left for the remaining pieces.

However, the difficulty of placing a piece increases as you run out of easy and obvious placements.

There’s a crossover point somewhere in the middle where a puzzle is at its most difficult. There are still lots of pieces and positions left, and the easy placements have run out. This is puzzle max q.

Maybe it’s heart-warming surprise virtuoso performances at TV-show singing contests (the apparent shock here is often than people who aren’t traditionally attractive can be talented). For me, it’s live concerts where the crowd sings along with the audience. Maybe it’s the crowd helping out Lewis Capaldi when he’s struggling to get through a song, or the singer of Snow Patrol marvelling at the festival audience taking over for him. I love these. Especially when the artist themselves are obviously delighted. It’s like emotional candy.

Of course, enjoying this experience in real life is even better. I’ve gotten to sing Better Man along with a baseball stadium full of other Pearl Jam fans in Boston – or sing Sonny’s Dream along with The Once at the St. Mary’s Church in Indian River, PEI.

Once of these YouTube rabbit-holes brought me to the video for the song Monsters by James Blunt. If you have or have ever had either a soul or a father, it will probably make you cry. If you’ve lost a parent, It might need a full-on emotional content warning.

The video is such an obvious tear-jerker that there seems to be an entire sub-genre of reaction videos on YouTube where you can watch people experience it for the first time:

Some things are obviously trade-offs. Should you take that new job? On one hand, you’ll get better pay. On the other hand, you may not get on as well the the team as your current job.

Beyond the obvious cases, I’ve come to believe that everything is a trade-off. On top of that, we usually don’t have a great sense of what we’re trading off.

Obviously-bad choices are just trade offs that are weighted against our preferred outcome. Obviously-good choices are trade offs that are weighted to our preferred outcome.

I find thinking of things as a trade-off helps with post-decision regret. If you made a big decision and it’s not perfect, just remember that this decision had trade-offs, and any other choice would have just had a different set of trade-offs (maybe much worse).

This year, Maureen has written about something close to my heart: The Wonderful World of Web Feeds.

That said, no electric guitar should have gold hardware.

What surprised me most about this computer freeze was that I was surprised at all.

Years ago, a computer would easily freeze a couple of times per week, or per day. It was frustrating – but not surprising. It was frustrating how unsurprising it was.

Sometimes it seems like everything is getting worse (and in many ways, things are obviously getting worse). In one small corner, stability on a typical computer, things have gotten better.

When I say Resumability, I’m talking about the ability to quickly interrupt and later resume a task.

The task doesn’t have to be productive. The greatest resumable device I’ve ever owned is the Nintendo DS.

The DS was a clamshell-shaped portable gaming system. If you needed to stop playing, you could just slam the case shut (with a satisfying clunk sound).

Two hours (or two days) later, you could flip open the DS and you were immediately exactly where you left off. You could just un-pause and keep playing as though no time had passed.

There was no boot up, no menus to navigate, no agreements to confirm. You just keep playing.

When you’re a tired parent without much time for video games, resumability is key. If it’s going to take me two or three minutes to get into the game, I may have just used up half of the time I had available in the first place.

Other devices that are good at resumability:

• Most dedicated e-reader devices like the Kindle or Kobo resume exactly where you left off.
• Modern smart phones: Press an Off button, slide it in your pocket, take it out later and unlock it with your fingerprint or face, and you are exactly where you left off (feeding your dopamine addiction at the cost of your relationships and connection to society)
• Slack, the work chat app, is resumable even across devices. If I’m in the middle of typing a long message and my laptop flies out of my hands into the ocean, I can pick up where I left off from my phone.

Sometimes resumability needs to be designed into a device, like the examples above. For some types of devices, they are resumable by their very nature. A book with a bookmark is always ready to go. When you pressed STOP on an old audio cassette player, it just sat there in a physical arrangement ready to resume exactly where you left off a year later.

We don’t always want such a friction-less experience though. Friction is safe. It keeps you from falling down. Friction in an entertainment device, can also help keep you from excessive unwanted distraction.

If my TV takes 20 seconds to boot up, that might be just enough friction to keep me walking past it rather than getting sucked into watching something I don’t even really want to see.

Just don’t make me wait 3 seconds to resume my New Super Mario Bros. game.

• For any energy my solar panels generate, but that I don’t use gets shared back out to the grid.
• For any unit of energy I share back to the grid, I get a credit for that same amount of electricity.
• The credits are 1-to-1 value, with the caveat that we pay tax on the electric bill before credits are applied
• Credits can’t be carried year-over-year, and credits can’t be exchanged for cash value

A 1-to-1 credit system like this is pretty good. It means I benefit of every bit of energy I can generate even if I can’t use it at the time. Economically, at least it’s like the entire grid is my infinite battery, that I can charge up when it’s sunny, and draw from whenever I need.

The unintended consequence for this type of pricing is that I now have no financial incentive to do any electricity storage myself. I could pay $15,000 or more for a home battery system that would allow me to keep much of the surplus energy I generate and use it during hours when I’m using more, but generating less.

If there wasn’t a net-metering system, I’d have an incentive to get my own storage, but net metering is great. I don’t want to lose it.

Two incentives I can imagine would help people like me get home battery storage:

1. Vary electricity costs (charge more during higher demand). A smart battery system could draw down my battery during peak rate times. This would save me money and reduce my draw on the grid at key times. As a human on a warming planet, I want this. As a consumer – I don’t want to have to think about the price of energy at different times of the day.
2. Just pay me. If we want to reduce the draw on the grid at peak times, we could have the government incentive residential storage costs.

One other relevant thing to note (thanks to Steve for the tip in the comments): One of the first things you learn when you get solar panels (without some kind of battery storage) is: when the power goes out, your solar panels don’t work. A common residential solar installation without a battery storage component requires grid power to function.

I wonder what it was I was originally timing. Looks like the first ‘lap’ was 100 days long.

You’ll often here the weather-person express a kind of value judgment on the weather: it’s going to be a ‘nice day’, or the weekend ‘looks good’, or they have ‘good news in the weather forecast’.

The thing is, there isn’t good or bad weather.

Ok, there can be bad weather. No one wants a tornado or a flood.

Other than those extremes, though, weather isn’t good or bad. It depends on your preferences and needs.

Throwing an outdoor wedding reception? You probably don’t want rain. Trying to keep failing crops alive after weeks of drought? You probably do want rain.

I know people who love a hot and humid day. They call it a “beach day”. I hate hot humid days. I can only take off so many clothes.

This is mostly trivial peeve of language, but I do think there’s a deeper issue. If we prescribe values to something as arbitrary as the weather, then we allow something which we have no control to impact how we feel.

Don’t value judge the weather! It’s is a path to sadness!

1. Margin is the space outside of an element
2. Padding is the spacing inside of an element

I’ve come to believe that scheduled meetings have MARGIN and PADDING too. Meeting Margin is the space between two meetings. This needs to be explicit. The screenshot below shows two meetings with no margins. They’re bumping up against each other.

Meeting Padding is the space inside a meeting required to make space between other meetings/activities before and after. For example, if I show up immediately after a previous meeting, I’ll still need a minute to find my notes, or run to the bathroom.

I try to give meetings Margin so they don’t end up with too much Padding. I try not to put two meetings immediately adjacent on the calendar. I don’t always success.

I wish calendar tools like Google Calendar would make this basic human requirement a bit more obviously part of the flow of booking meetings. Let me know that this meeting runs right into the next one, or that the person I’ve invited has zero minutes between their previous meeting and the one I’m scheduling.

Now, if you have a working printer, you have a social responsibility to help your friends and family print stuff. I humbly accept this responsibility.

The Heavyweight podcast from Jonathan Goldstein is back on a new network after being lost in the shuffle of Spotify acquiring Gimlet Media.

I loved the show back when it was Wiretap on CBC Radio. In the latest episode, Gregor is back. I love Gregor.

The second day, you no longer have the novelty or excitement, and you’re exhausted from getting through the first day.

The second day of school is harder than the first.

I’ve reported this ad as a scam at least three or four times, yet YouTube continues to serve it to me.

I can see how it would be infeasible for YouTube to screen every video they host – but as soon as they accept a penny from an advertiser, they take on the complete burden of filtering out (at least obvious) scams.

I would also expect that some facial-recognition might be in order for a G7 world leader.

Shame on YouTube.

• Taylor from Hanson (the MMMbop dudes!) on vocals
• James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins on guitar
• Adam Schlesinger (RIP) of Fountains of Wayne on bass
• Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick

Weird but true. Enjoy Kind of a Girl by Tinted Windows.

Update: I learned from Wikipedia that the guitar play from the Lemonheads also performed with Tinted Windows. And the Lemonheads have a great new song out.

This is a major hindrance and disincentive to use the feature. While I understand that Figma will want to drive subscriptions, and I’m happy to pay for the tool, this is one more stone on the “Figma alternatives” side of the scale.

It was even more frustrating to learn this after our team had been using annotations for a while. I’m sure the documentation and announcements of the feature may have explained the paid-account requirements, we missed this and you may have too.

Well friends, all that changes today (or earlier this week – I don’t know). As of today, Google Slides how has the de facto standard move keyboard behaviour (small increments by default, SHIFT for larger increments).

Thanks!

The greatest risk to our company is falls.

It’s not market instability, or hackers, or inadequate planning. It’s falls.

Your company is made up of people. People are made up of sticks and meat. When we fall down, we break. Be careful out there.

I wouldn’t be an effective executive if I didn’t follow-up my risk warning with some solid strategy, so here you go: Take two trips.

You’ve got one too many grocery bags? Don’t carry it all in at once. Take two trips.

You’ve got a coffee, a laptop, and a door to open on your way out to the deck this morning (hypothetically speaking) – take two trips!

Oh, and watch out for mulch.

Caveat: I have neither had ChatGPT write a book for me, nor have I written a book.

The Compliments: Maximum Raisin Bran cereal has so many god-damn raisins in it there should be a warning on the bag. It’s awesome.

Speaking of that bag through, it sucks. The bag has a “resealable half-zip” that has come pre-broken on every bag I’ve ever bought. If you designed this bag – have you ever used it? So many raisins though.

I assume anyone writing something for me to consume has a perspective they want to share. The writing isn’t inherently valuable in of itself. It’s the thought behind it that matters.

It’s not that that quality of writing doesn’t matter — it’s critical, but the writing a means to an end. I don’t need “an email”. I need someone to understand that the ideas I have about their project. I don’t need “a proposal”, I need to help someone understand why they might want to hire my company for their project.

Writing is a shadow of thought. The better the writing, the more clearly the shadow represents the shape of the original thought. Even the best writing can never perfectly capture the original thought. Writing is one of the best tools we have to share thoughts across space and time.

LLMs are good at creating the artifact. They’ll give you “an email” or “a proposal”. If I’m generous, they may even help you work through your idea. I’m not convinced they are helpful in helping me understand your idea.

I’m curious to check back in on my own thinking here are as the tools and our expectations evolve over the next few years.

I’ve noticed three conferences lately that I think are particularly well-named:

• Breakpoint: a conference from BrowserStack, company that makes tools for web developers. Breakpoint is a programming debugging term and a point where responsive web designs change size/layout.
• SquiggleConf: A web tooling conference for the kind of tools that put red squiggles under your code in your editor.
• Config: Figma’s design conference. Perfect.

See more examples of how naming things is hard.

• Naming things is hard: Conferences
• Naming things is hard: Ingrid
• Naming things is hard: WordTsar
• Naming things is hard: The Russian Dragon

The whole show is always worth a listen (especially this week, where you’ll be taken on a word-tour of the Alaska Folk Festival), but the segment I’m referring to starts at 38m 11s.

Thanks guys.

I thought (and wished and hoped) that people should vote for the candidate they think is best. Otherwise we’ll always end up in the middle-of-the-road, at best.

Then Donald Trump became president of the United States. Twice.

The middle-of-the-road sounds great.

I’d vote for a toad if it meant keeping a demagogue (or whatever Trump is) out of power.

Here in Canada, we’re voting later this month. While I don’t think Pierre Poilievre is exactly like Trump, I do think he would move Canada closer to a system that devalues journalism, environmentalism, social support systems like health care, and organized labour.

Given the frightening instability we’re seeing from the United States, voting in a stable, predictable leader who believes in climate change is the least we can do.

There is a trade off in voting strategically. We need more than just stability and sanity in political leaders. We need to push back hard on racism, nationalism, and general selfishness.

For now though, let’s vote in a Liberal party in Canada that won’t set things on fire.

On a related tangent, if Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre actually believes in all of the “Political positions” listed out on his Wikipedia page – addressing climate change, access to abortion, same-sex marriage, pro-immigration, etc – then why doesn’t he vote for the Liberal Party?

The phrase “gild the lily” implies unnecessary ornamentation, the idea being that adorning a lily with superficial decoration only serves to obscure its natural beauty. Well, I’m here to tell you that a little touch of what might seem like unnecessary ornamentation in design is exactly what you need.

When your design is solid, and you’ve nailed the fundamentals, adding one layer of decoration can help communicate a level of care and attention. [read the entire article]

With this article, I’ve reduced the time between publishing articles for myself down from 17 years to only 7 years.

Prime Minister Carney explains that the carbon tax had become “too divisive.” At least he’s honest about why he’s removing it – not because he thinks it’s a bad policy or because it’s ineffective.

Let’s take a moment to lament how even when receiving hundreds of dollars in direct rebate cheques from the carbon tax, we’re collectively too stupid to endure the most mild perceived imposition.

The ThinkPad laptops supported a docking Station you could physically ‘click’ your laptop into, and then everything on your desk was plugged into that docking station.

I remember thinking, back then, that someday we’d have a single cable you could plug in to your laptop and it would do everything. Display, power, audio, mouse/keyboard, would all run through one super cable.

Imagine the seconds I would save each morning when I plugged in my laptop! What a world it would be!

The future is now – and has been for a couple of years. I can plug a single USB-C cable into my laptop, and it gets power and connects to a display and an array of other peripherals.

Now that I live in this dream world, I look back on my past self and think: Dream bigger, nerd.

Matt was made for that radio hosting job. He was somehow genuinely curious about every person he spoke with. It didn’t seem to matter if they were talking about their music project, history, technology, or farming.

That curiosity kept his many thousands of conversations on the radio from ever feeling routine. It also made him easy to talk to for those of us being interviewed, who were often nervous and not gifted at speaking naturally in an unusual circumstance.

I can’t imagine a career where you were live on the radio every day for years. You can’t be late for that job. You can’t ‘phone it in’. That takes a special kind of person.

Thanks Matt!

It was a near-miss, with her husband happening to catch a talk at a meet-up by one of our co-founders. I’m so glad Nikki found us.

Brad Sucks has a new album out! Congrats Brad. It’s great.

I’d start with Learning to Lie, which is a great song and has a robot-pickleball-themed video.

I feel this is an achievement of “having it together” at a level that warrants a congratulatory note from the Prime Minister, like when you turn 120 years old.

It’s a clever setup he’s got going: ask people who like to write (often about themselves) to write about themselves. I was happy to oblige.

You can read my full interview here: P&B: Steven Garrity

[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

I propose a new law, in accordance with Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws:

Garrity’s Law of Spreadsheets:

We are bound to create spreadsheets that reflect the structure of our own brain.

The only way to truly grok a spreadsheet is to make your own.

See Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws

As I just wrote about over on the silverorange blog, my friend and colleague at silverorange, Maureen Holland just had an article published as part of the 2024 HTMHell Advent Calendar: You don’t need the isOpen class.

It’s nice to hear her voice again, and interesting to hear how she and her nine siblings would write letters to Santa Clause, and burn them in the wood stove (so they’d go up the chimney – makes perfect sense).

I didn’t have Jigsaw-puzzle-tax-holiday on my bingo card for this year.

This feels more like a stunt than a policy, and I expect it will be generally perceived as a stunt. That said, I don’t discount the impact of the savings on those who need it most.

Also, my thoughts go out to everyone working on a point-of-sale system trying to get these updates addressed in time, and to those making the difficult edge-case decisions (do they use jigsaws to make 3-d puzzles?).

“Donald Trump is a dangerous maniac who can barely complete a sentence, and it is lunacy to believe he can even recognize the existentially threatening collective action problems facing our nation, let alone actually solve them.”

He also uses USB-C to help explain collective action requiring government intervention.

You probably aren’t going to do more business with that person from Facebook Marketplace who sold you a pair of kids snow-pants and claimed they lived “in town”, but took 25 minutes to get to their house.

I’ve got an issue that started recently (possibly when updating my M1 MacBook Pro to macOS 15 (Sequoia).

The issue only happens with this particular combination of hardware/software: SM57 into my UB802 Behringer mixer, into my CalDigit TS3, dock into Zoom videoconferencing software.

With this combination, I get an odd stereo effect that sounds like (and I think is) the same mono signal slightly out of time in the left vs. right stereo channels.

• If I use the same mic/dock into any other audio app, it sounds fine.
• If I use any other mic, or even the same mic/mixer into the headphone jack on the MacBook, it sounds fine.

Today, I discovered a “fix”: The issue only appears if I pan the left/right mix on my mixer to the center. If I pan hard left or hard right, it sounds fine (even though it all gets mixed down to mono). Since it’s a mono signal from the mic (I guess getting split into stereo in the mixer), it sounds identical in Zoom regardless of the panning.

I don’t know if the ‘fault’ lies with Zoom, CalDigit, or macOS.

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?

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.”

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
• Garrity’s Law of Spreadsheet Structure

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

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)

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.

I could almost feel my hair turning grey.

I put together a quick summary of my current skills (PDF) that I suspect many of you may relate to.

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.

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.

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.

See Garrity’s Law of Eponymous Laws

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.

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.

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.

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).

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’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.

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.

1. In the discussion about podcasting with an 8-year-old, I realized how podcasts I listen to are full of casual profanity. ︎

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.

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.

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:

1. Spend the energy once to save all of the storage space in the longer term, or;
2. 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?

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.

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.