Last night, I visited the lovely Bytowne Cinema in Ottawa, for the very first time, to see the animated film The Triplets of Belleville. It's a nice old theatre with a balcony and was perfectly suited to this incredible film.  •  Until a few days ago I hadn't even heard of The Triplets of …

Merry Christmas everyone! I'm off to Ottawa to visit my brothers and for our family's holiday get together. I'm also looking forward to my first experience on a Canadian train since I was about three. Should be fun and hopefully relaxing.

About a year and half ago, our CEO Dan James walked into our old office and started shooting us with balls of air. He had bought the incredible Airzooka, which fires a ball of compressed air out of a contraption that looks like a small plastic garbage pail with a handle and a plastic bag …

I spent a frustrating hour today trying to find a simple Tetris game for Windows XP for my girlfriend. Is there a single simple XP-styled Tetris game out there that's pretty cheap or free? Even with the wondrous Google, it's still surprisingly hard to find things like this.

Everyone knows that pop-up books rule. How do the authors make those crazy things pop right off the page? Anyhow, I received a pop-up book of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture for my birthday. It's amazing. It has the Guggenheim in New York, the Robie House in Chicago, Falling Water in Bear Run …

A couple of days ago I was eating lunch with my mother at Cedar's Eatery. One of her friends came over and sat with us and somehow professional wrestling came up. While telling his story, this man (who is in his fifties) naturally referred to the WWE or World Wrestling Entertainment.  •  The …

It's my birthday today and the good folks at Nullsoft must have taken notice as they released Winamp5 yesterday just in time for the celebrations. This release is a huge step forwards (and backwards in a good way) from the previous versions of the program. I've always thought these guys were …

Until last week I hadn't watched Weird Al's UHF since I was a little kid. I had borrowed the DVD from Stephen at least six months ago and somehow hadn't gotten around to watching it. It was certainly worth the wait.  •  Ah, the memories came flooding back of cruising along in my parents' station …

Wow, I thought I'd seen my share of ugly modern architecture. However, the new building for the Ontario College of Art and Design really takes the prize for the most abhorrent monstrosity to date. I saw parts of the construction when I was visiting Toronto recently, but had not viewed a conceptual …

I discovered two things this past weekend that are worth pointing out:  •  One. While playing Trivial Pursuit on Friday night¹, I discovered that CNN was once derided as the Chicken Noodle Network by other news organizations.  •  Two. While briefly watching CNN on Sunday, I discovered that it …

I've been a big fan of Sam Brown's beautiful drawings at Exploding Dog for a long time. If you haven't visited before, you must be the last person on the internet and you should head over there right now.  •  However, almost as impressive as his drawings is Sam's prolific and steady additions to …

The last top five list I tried was very entertaining, so I'll try another. These are my choices for top five flags from around the world. Flags are some of the finest and oldest examples of 'branding' to be found and there are some truly wonderful examples. Simplicity and originality are the most …

Just to be absolutely clear, I can't stand the band Nickelback and you won't be able to convince me otherwise. However, my twin brother recently pointed out the uncanny resemblance between Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger (see photo) and 15th-century German artist Albrecht Dürer (see photo …

A news headline yesterday raised a question that's been nagging me for quite some time. Several news services reported on Tuesday that Exxon has been fined ten million dollars by Nigeria for spilling between 40,000 and 100,000 barrels of crude into a river there. A company spokesman responded that …

Before Air Canada swallowed it several years ago, Canadian Airlines had one of the most beautiful logos in the skies. The company's goose was an absolutely elegant logo that looked striking at its tickting booths, on its print materials, and most especially on its planes. Kudos to its designer and …

A while ago I was happily chomping down on a spring roll while absentmindedly reading the back of a container of so-called plum sauce when I discovered that plum sauce is actually made up primarily of pumpkins! Now I’m not sure if this has always been the case but since this first discovery I’ve …

I reached an exciting pinnacle in my battle against spam today as I received my ten thousandth junk email since I began using email filtering at the end of May. That's an average of about 55 pieces of junk mail per day, which isn't as bad as many people, but is still incredible. I nominate all …

I was made aware today of a great site called Web Design Practices developed by Heidi Adkisson. As she explains:  •  “Surprisingly, I found very little research documenting the frequency of seemingly common (perhaps even standard) design practices such as the left-hand navigation bar, blue …

A few months ago a friend lent me a fantastic book called Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis. The author does a fantastic job of describing the intoxication of the game as he becomes more and more deeply involved in …

I discovered a great site via Coudal Partners that lists superheroes from around the world. Canadians can proudly lay claim to both Mr. Canoe Head (of Four on the Floor) and Benton Frasier (of Due South) as national superheroes along with more traditional selections like Captain Canuck.

My cohort Steven expressed his frustration with this a long time ago, but I thought it was worth reiterating. Why the heck does anyone turn off the automatic indenting on bullet lists? By default, a bullet list (also called an unordered list) on a website has nicely indented text like this …

Matt Rainnie's recent comment about Dr. Seuss reminded me of a site I visited a few months ago. I hadn't realized that Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) had illustrated commercial advertising during his career. This gallery contains some neat examples from NBC to General Electric to Standard …