Delta Tango Bravo

My sister, who is a pastry chef, recently passed a link onto me of some fantastic artistic food photography. Pierre Javalle and Akiko Ida, two photography students at Arts Décoratif in Paris have made a gallery featuring their photos of tiny little figurines on pastries and other food items.

Little miners dissecting chocolate blocks, tiny skaters in tart pans, sledders in a bowl of whipped cream, and wee shepherds walking over cauliflower. Not only is the design extremely detailed, but the photography is top notch. Really nice.

Too bad the flash website has a near-indecipherable navigation (which has nothing to do with the text being in French). Here's a quick guide: wait for the page to load, click the minimiam text, then use the silly little circles to navigate. The right-hand circle pulls up a hidden menu and the other two let you go between the photos in each set under the heading "Galerie". Good luck, it's worth the crap navigation.

At the end of my quiet little street is a small, unassuming store called The Sacred Seed. Despite its claims to be an "exotic seed and houseplant shop specializing in medicinal, rare, and otherwise intriguing plants" it carries a wide range of cannabis seeds including varieties such as Island Sweet Skunk, Afghani Special Indica, and Swiss Bliss (take that Swiss Miss!).

I've walked past the store just about every day for the past year. About six months ago I noticed that they had started flying a really interesting flag in the window. Today I stopped and ask the owner and discovered that it was the official flag of Amsterdam. Apparently the three "St. Andreas crosses" represent the three dangers that have traditionally plagued the city: flood, fire, and pestilence and no one is quite sure where the black and red colors come from. More on the flag can be found on this site and at the Wikipedia. Big points to Amsterdam for a bad-ass flag.

A friend just turned me on to a weblog that is entirely about cover versions of songs. Copy, Right? is dedicated "to share my love/hate relationship with cover songs" according to Liza, the site's owner, and each post includes downloadable tracks and witty commentary.

The August 30 entry is especially good and the Asylum Street Spanker's rockabilly cover of the Beastie Boy's "Paul Revere" is well worth a listen. Thanks for the tip Joel. Here's a local download of the Paul Revere track — Asylum Street Spankers "Paul Revere".

Over the time I've lived off Church Street in Toronto, I've eaten at the 5 Alarm Diner at least once a week and often more often than that. The food was excellent, the staff were fabulous, and I was actually treated like a regular. Several of the waiters knew what I would eat before I had even looked at the menu. I used to meet my sister and her husband there for late night breakfasts and to celebrate good happenings.

You'll have noticed that I'm writing in a melancholy tone and in the past tense. This evening I strolled down for a late evening supper (perogies or bacon and eggs, I hadn't decided yet) and discovered that it had suddenly closed. I had just eaten there this time last week and there was no inkling then that the end was nigh. The explanation on the sign that they closed "due to circumstances out of our control" is ambiguous. I asked around at several restaurants in the neighborhood, including their neighbor Babylon, but no one seems to know anything. Does anyone out there have any information at all about this? Hopefully it will open again in another place but I'm not holding my breath.

And... in possibly related news, the Garage Sandwich Company, a couple of doors south of the diner has simultaneously closed up shop. Gladly, they'll somehow be affiliated with the Pusateri grocery in the neighborhood (not sure how that's going to work) but their old shop was pretty cool and they made the best darn sandwich in the city.

It's a sad day on Church Street...

In a couple of days, I'm driving my twin brother and his girlfriend (and their cat, turtle, and dog) down to Chicago where they'll both be starting graduate programs at UChicago and Northwestern respectively. Incredibly, I've never before been to Chicago and I'm really looking forward to finally amending that oversight.

I was just thinking to myself the other day that a good part of my impression of the city is influenced by Wilco's music. It'll be curious to see if the real thing has the same flavour. For full effect, I'll make sure Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is playing as we pass the city limits.

I'll be in the city for a good part of the weekend and will have a bit of time to explore. I'd greatly appreciate any good suggestions for gawking, drinking, and dining. Recommendations anyone?

I've got a big old picture frame I've been meaning to fill with something interesting for quite some time. I really liked the poster (look on the right) that Jay Ryan, from The Bird Machine, designed with Coudal Partners a few years ago. So, I was looking around The Bird Machine site and, coincidentally right on top of the Coudal project is a lovely poster Jay designed in 2003 for none other than the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, which just so happens to be where my father teaches.

The poster's called "the animals of prince edward island" and was apparently part of an advertising campaign for the college. Weird coincidence, and lovely poster. Congrats to Jay for a great poster, and especially congrats to the vet college for having such great taste in choosing an illustrator.

I've just finished reading Dan Cederholm's latest book Bulletproof Web Design. The book essentially teaches techniques for using clean HTML and CSS to build robust websites — designs that survive user manipulation, that elegantly degrade with missing technologies or features, and which are always accessible to people.

When I heard that Dan was writing a followup to Web Standards Solutions, I was really hoping that this is pretty much the topic he would tackle. In some ways, the old method of coding with tables and spacer images, while heavy and somewhat inaccessible, was comparitively robust. As designers, we could usually mitigate problems for small screen sizes, stretching layouts, missing images, and other issues. And, we lost some of that control initially when working with CSS layouts. Now, there are lots of techniques for handling those issues and Dan describes many of them in Bulletproof Web Design.

This is one of the first second generation CSS design books I've read. Thankfully, the "here's why you should use CSS" thesis is left behind and we're down to more of the nuts and bolts of how and why techniques are used. However, it's also not a book of fancy hacks for achieving extreme layouts. All of the examples Dan lays out are effective ways of using CSS for practical everyday design challenges.

I especially liked the emphasis in the book on allowing for unknowns when designing a layout. Header areas that are flexible for various amounts of content, boxes that stretch for two words or two hundred, and using backgrounds that stretch outside of their frames to allow the frame to grow, are just a few examples. Unfortunately, there a so many CSS-designed sites that rely heavily on absolute positioning and fixed-size elements that break apart with a single increase in text size. Dan shows that such layouts are possible and can be flexible.

If it sounds like I've got nothing but good things to say about this book, well, that's because I don't. This is an important book for people who design with CSS. Even if you don't learn a lot of new things by reading Bulletproof Web Design (nothing in here is very radical, which is kind of the point), the ideas in it will reinforce techniques and concepts you're already using.

The third annual silverorange frisbee golf tournament for charity is now scheduled for Sunday, September 11, at Strathgartney Provincial Park. The last two years we had over fifty entrants and raised lots of money for the charity Habitat for Humanity.

As in previous years, you don't need any experience whatsoever with playing disc golf to play. Most participants in the past two tournaments were complete beginners. You also don't need any special equipment — we'll be providing really nice disc golf discs for everyone, which you get to take home at the end of the day. Just bring your walking shoes and at least one arm and you'll be ready to play.

Register and get more information at the tournament website. Look forward to seeing lots of people out there and raising more money for a fantastic charity.

Update: For a few reasons. We've had to change the date from August to September. Hopefully everyone can still make it and more people will be able to come too. Thanks for your patience.

About a month ago, Amber Macarthur, a host on the television program Call for Help, contacted me and asked me to do a really short part on their show about favicons. Anyway, it was fun to tape a little segment with her co-host Leo Laporte about what favicons are, why you might want to have one on your site, and how to go about cooking one up. Sure, favicons aren't the most vital part of designing a site, but it was neat to boil them down to a five-minute discussion. Thanks to the whole crew for having me on the show.

So, here's yet another installment of favicons to the full collection. This is an unusually large addition (61 new ones I think) as I haven't made one in quite some time. Some stellar examples in there, including Amber's own weblog, The Toronto Star, and Dan Cederholm's slick favicon for Microformats. This raises the entire collection to something just over four hundred favicons and counting...