Delta Tango Bravo

Kofi Annan lays it down on John Bolton. From a New York Times article today:

Mr. Annan paid his last visit to Washington as secretary general last Tuesday when President Bush gave a dinner in his honor at the White House. One of the guests was John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations who had frequently disdained the secretary general and who had announced the day before that he was resigning.

Asked the next morning at the United Nations whether he and Mr. Annan had made peace at the farewell event, Mr. Bolton said, “Nobody sang ‘Kumbaya,’ ” referring to a confessional song celebrating companionship.

Told of Mr. Bolton’s comment, Mr. Annan said, “But does he know how to sing it?”

Thanks to my bro for the tip. Also, the New York Times just added support for submitting stories directly to Digg.com today. Pretty cool.

This might be old news for Torontonians (or even Canadian residents in general) but I just discovered the plans for new subway trains in the city. The trains, which are to be built by Bombardier are pretty cool looking. What's more interesting is the well-written explanation of the trains' design on the TTC website.

The TTC site comes up with some frequency in Toronto design circles as a quintessential example of poor site design. However, this individual article is concise, well formatted, effective in its use of imagery, and is generally an interesting read. When considering issues of accessibility on the web, it's always interesting to see how those concerns translate in the real world. Carefully colour-coded floor mapping, accessible evacuation systems, and colour-contrasted anti-microbial (!) stanchions are just a few examples from the article.

When we mess up accessibility on the web, people miss out on important information, are locked out of systems, and can't buy things. When it's messed up in the real world, people can get sick, get injured, or die. That's quite a responsibility, and it's one which unfortunately gets little credit when people invariably look at new subway trains' design and pass quick judgement on the aesthetics.

Accessibility expert Joe Clark has started a micropatronage drive to support his ability to support media accessibility projects. I'm particularly interested in the efforts he seeks to support regarding the development of more accessible fonts for captioning. He's up front about what he's looking for — a modest sum of money to allow him to pursue funding for a broader accessibility effort. It's a good idea and Joe is well worth supporting.

If you're not familiar with Joe's work, start by reading his articles published on A List Apart or check out his book. The man knows a thing or two and is willing to stick his neck out to say it.

You can support Joe by giving him a donation via PayPal and/or posting one of his hilarious banners on your website (sorry Joe, I'm not sullying this layout with a banner no matter how funny it is).

Joe's also speaking at the Web Directions North conference in Vancouver in February if you're lucky enough to be there (I barely got in on the early-bird registrations). I'm sure he wouldn't be averse to in-person donations if you happen to run into him there or anywhere else. Good luck Joe.

While some people were underwhelmed with the recently released Firefox 2.0 browser, there are some important improvements that will fly under a lot of people's radar. Improved tab navigation, better anti-phishing technology, improved user interface, and other improvements are great. However, the most notable enhancement, in my opinion, is the new inline spell checking feature in text input areas. This might seem like a pedestrian feature, but I honestly do not think its importance can be overestimated.

The poor spelling habits of the online horde is one of the clichés of the internet. Weblogs and forums are notorious for childish spelling as people rush to get their words out into the public eye. This single improvement to the browser will have a tremendous effect on the online experience. On a site like digg.com where the usage of Firefox is well above average, the effects are already being felt. The quality of spelling in submissions and comments (while still not perfect) has significantly improved since the release of the new Firefox last week. And, with better spelling, one thankfully sees far fewer snide responses correcting other peoples' mistakes.

As on the Mac, this type of feature would ideally be implemented at the operating system level — one dictionary to rule them all. Also, grammar and misspelling still require good old-fashioned editorial abilities. Browsers still can't help me with my poor hyphen use and misplaced commas, for instance. Nonetheless, this is a massive improvement for webloggers, commenters, forum participants, and most especially for everyone else who reads the content those people produce. If you haven't upgraded yet or if you were waiting for one special thing to entice you to try Firefox, this is your cue to get Firefox 2.0.

PS: In case you were unaware, you can also enable spell checking in text inputs (the smaller, thinner inputs where you enter text like the search input on google.com) but it's a little tricky: in your location bar enter about:config, scroll down to layout.spellcheck:Default, double click that line, change the 1 to a 2, and you're done!

Earlier this month a Scrabble player named Michael Cresta, in Lexington, Mass., scored 830 points in a single game! He and his opponent scored 1,320 points, making it the highest individual score and the highest game total ever in regulation play.

Stefan Fatsis, the author of the greatest (and only) book I've ever read on Scrabble, has the complete rundown on Slate today. It's actually a great description of how a large number of improbabilities can snowball into something incredible — two mediocre players make enough unlikely choices in succession to create a highly improbable outcome. Sort of a... if an army of monkeys at a million Scrabble boards... kind of scenario... without the frightening hordes of monkeys... um, where was I?

Yes, "baladodiffusion" is the French word for "podcasting". Say it three times fast in a throaty accent... I dare you. Proof. Props to my friend SZ.

This might be old news, but if you haven't seen it already check out the trailer for the Trailer Park Boys movie. I just watched it three times on loop. So good. Damn, this is going to be the one movie where living in California might actually mean it gets to theaters later than Atlantic Canada — if it makes it here at all! I haven't anticipated a movie this much since Bubba Ho-Tep.

If you haven't seen it already, silverorange housemate Peter Rukavina has started an intriguing side project all about three letter acronyms. His new site 3LA.ca is a podcast/blog/dictionary where Peter endeavors to explain all kinds of three letter acronyms in a concise way for a wide audience. So far, he's picked PMT, RSS, ZIP, YYG, and TLA itself. I think he's been quite successful at providing explanations that don't bore the expert and which are informative for the uninitiated. All of the posts are available both in audio and text format which is great if you don't especially want to wait for Peter's clear but slow school teacher's voice to finish reading you the explanation.

One curious attribute of the mixing of a podcast/blog/dictionary is that Peter is presenting information that is not time-sensitive in a chronological format. The only way time really figures into the equation is the time when Peter decides to explain an acronym. Right now, with only a handful of explanations under his belt, the chronological view works fine, but it will be interesting to see a dual chronological and alphabetical view (perhaps with a topical breakdown too if the list gets long enough). Well worth following. Keep it up Peter.

Update: Peter has now added an alphabetical listing to the sidebar of 3la.ca. Cool.

My sister-in-law is currently in the process of starting her own business, a fabulous home decor store, in Ottawa. Among the kazillion things she's trying to piece together for the opening is her store's brand identity. She got a great name and she's designed a really unique and striking wordmark from the name, which my twin brother has been helping her refine.

As part of the process she decided to post the logo to a forum related to home decor to solicit feedback from a variety of people. The feedback is absolutely classic. People nitpick about minor points, make recommendations that would render the logo looking like a vanilla home decor shop at the local mini mall, and generally offer suggestions with surprising authority even though their comments are usually comically preceded by 'imho' or 'my 2 c'. Thankfully, my sister-in-law is confident in her first vision and has taken the suggestions for what they're worth—making some minor revisions but sticking with her original vision for the identity.

This whole process reminded me of a brilliant blog post at The Online Photographer a few months ago that pokes fun at the feedback one finds at sites like Flickr by showing how the great photographers of the past century would have been received by the online hordes. Hilarious stuff if you haven't seen it already. The story of the Aeron chair's failure in focus group testing, only to become a hugely successful product, also seems apt. I remember reading a great history of the testing of the Aeron, but can't locate it. Please post in the comments if you know it. Well worth another read.