Delta Tango Bravo

There's a hilarious CNN story today about a kid who figured out that he could trick his school-issued Texas Instruments calculator into converting decimals to fractions despite the fact that the function was meant to be disabled. Apparently the discovery has led to a massive recall to keep kids from cheating on standardized tests. The response from a school official sounds like it was ripped from an Onion story:

"His fellow students were so proud of him and congratulatory. They thought it was really, really cool. They didn't call him a nerd or anything," said Michael Bolling, a school official in Chesterfield County. The county had more than 11,000 of the calculators recalled.

This all reminds me of a certain twin brother of mine who used to waste away the boredom of highschool math by figuring out ways to trick his very own Texas Instruments calculator into giving slightly incorrect responses by using extreme exponential multiplication or something. I'm sure he remembers every keystroke required. But... oh no, he's not a nerd...

Please excuse the upcoming rant but it feels like it's forty degrees centigrade and I've had one in a long succession of bad experiences with Purolator deliveries.

Yesterday I received a call that the recall battery replacement from Apple for my iBook had been out for delivery but they were unable to get it to me, could I please go and pick it up? Ok, no problem. I check their website, type in my tracking code, and voila, it tells me to go pick up my package — but not where to pick it up. So, I check their website for the nearest location to me. Super, there's one about four blocks north of where I live. I call them and am informed that the package is actually conveniently being held down near the lake out in an industrial park almost thirty minutes away by bike (probably longer by car or public transit).

It's sweltering outside, but I figure I'll bike down there anyway and grab the darn thing. When I show up, I discover I forgot to bring the shipping number, but I've got an unusual enough last name and I know the street address so they can probably look it up. Nope, after twenty minutes in their unwelcoming cramped office they have no clue where the package is.

So... I sweat my way home on the old bike, grab a massive glass of water, and then check the website again to make sure I'm not going crazy. I check a little closer and the package went out for delivery on May 24 and I only got notified yesterday! So, I call their 800 number and speak to a very nice woman who managed to have the package moved to the location nearer me tomorrow, saving me the long bike again. She's the only good thing that happened in this whole ordeal.

If this was the only time I had a poor experience with Purolator I wouldn't mind so much, but this is just the latest in a string of craptastic service from them. A few lost packages, a few late deliveries, a terrible website, and this — it all adds up to a bad experience overall. Why can't they just be Fedex? Hold on, why don't I just use Fedex for all my shipping when I've got the choice?

This past weekend I finally got to visit Algonquin Park for the first time. What an absolutely gorgeous part of Canada. I had anticipated an extraordinary wilderness park based on stories told by people I know who've visited, Group of Seven paintings, and by its reputation but it still outdid my expectations. Gorgeous lakes, great walking trails, and lots of wildlife. In less than twenty-four hours, I saw a sun-bathing turtle, a loon diving for food, and a female moose meandering in the trees. A few quick thoughts:

Rent a Canoe Next Time

This was just a quick trip — just a chance to get out of Toronto and to visit the park for the first time. Watching canoes crossing the stunning lakes (there are heaps of them) was wonderful. Next time I book ahead and get one of the camping sites that is only accessible by canoe.

It's Not That Far From Toronto

I had mixed reports from people about how long the drive to Algonquin is from Toronto. Granted I was driving on the weekend and didn't experience any bad traffic except for on the 401 on the way back, but it only took about 2.5 hours to get into the park. Not too bad.

Early June is Perfect for Camping

I couldn't believe how few people were at Algonquin. It must have been 25^oC all weekend and the campground couldn't have been a quarter full. Likewise, the roads and the walking trails in the park were practically empty. Also, the bugs weren't too bad at this time of year. Sure I got a bunch of bites, but I imagine it's worse later in the season. Note to self: take stronger bug spray next time.

It's a Provincial Park, Who Knew?

I had assumed that Algonquin Park was part of the national park system. Well, that's incorrect. It's actually an Ontario Provincial Park.

Echo Hatchbacks are Highway Worthy Cars

I know this doesn't have a lot to do with the park, but I was driving a rented Echo Hatchback from Hertz and it handled great on the highway. This is the furthest I've driven one of these little things and I was driving consistently around 130km/h in heavy traffic and occassional rain and it performed admirably. I was a little skeptical to begin with and I'd probably prefer a slightly larger car like a Corolla for long trips, but all told it was a great car.

My brother-in-law and I were discussing great basketball players' nicknames the other day and then I remembered that I used to do dorky top five lists on this site from time to time. What a perfect top five subject. There are some truly stellar basketball nicknames from both current NBA players and from classic stars as well.

1. "Dr. J" aka Julius Erving
2. "AI" or "The Answer" aka Allen Iverson
3. Hakeem "The Dream" Olajuwon
4. "Chocolate Thunder" aka Darryl Dawkins
5. "The Human Highlight Reel" aka Dominique Wilkins

The list of runner-ups for this topic is extensive. I can't think of any other sport aside from boxing with so many great nicknames — Air Jordan, Spud Webb, The Mailman, The Admiral, Sir Charles, Clyde The Glide Drexler, The Croatian Sensation, Magic Johnson, Wilt The Stilt Chamberlain... And, even with this list, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of great nicknames, especially from the older eras.

Here's yet another installment of favicons to add to the ever-growing original collection. Again, there are some really fine examples of design in an incredibly constrained space. I especially like the US Airways icon which is an elegantly simple scaled-down version of their already fine emblem. I've always thought their logo was beautiful and the fact that it scales from the tail of a commercial aircraft to a 16x16 icon is a reflection of its quality. Lots of other great examples in here too...

Like every other installment, your contributions are welcome. Just leave a comment if you've seen a favicon you think is worthy. Thanks to everyone who has contributed suggestions already. A number are queued up to be included in the next addition, whenever that might happen.

Yesterday I reviewed my newish Logitech Z-2300 PC Speakers over at the silverorange stuff site. A great set of speakers and a great bargain to boot. Read the full review...

Before I get this review of Dave Shea's book The Zen of CSS Design started, let me get an important disclosure and a shameless name drop out of the way as they kind of go together anyway. I had the good fortune of attending the FITC conference here in Toronto back at the end of April where Dave did a great presentation about web standards at the crack of dawn. So, to cut the story short, he kindly gave me a copy of his book to peruse. Thanks Dave. So, you could say I'm both shameless and somewhat biased — although had I not liked the book I would probably have just not written a review at all and found some other way to drop Dave's name publicly.

To tell the truth, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from The Zen of CSS Design. I had followed the launch of the The CSS Zen Garden website and some of the entries there are impressive examples of what a bit of good CSS knowledge and a lot of imagination can accomplish. However, I wasn't sure exactly how one would translate those examples into a book that would provide more than one would get just going to the site and examining the code yourself.

Well, Dave and Molly Holzshlag have done an outstanding job. Instead of choosing examples from The Garden and then discussing them (as I assumed would be done), they've written a CSS guidebook punctuated by examples gleaned from the site. The book is one of the best tutorials on CSS I've read. The basic idea is that they've chosen key topics in CSS and then elaborated on them by closely examining a pertinent example from the collection for each topic. And, it works extremely well.

One great example of the depth of their writing that I especially like is the chapter on typography. Drawing on some stellar examples from The Garden, the authors address key issues of web typography from contrast and legibility to limited type choices and image replacement techniques. The structure of the book makes these correlations between example and content surpisingly unforced. The authors also add depth to their examples by not simply dictating one method of accomplishing something but instead describing the pros and cons of each choice and where certain choices might be favoured. Scalability of text, for instance, is adressed in connection with Shaun Inman's entry. The authors describe technically how Shaun achieved his interesting design and then they debate the reasons why one should be cautious of using such fixed-sized text in many instances and how type varies on the web. The discussion is both simple and in-depth enough that even experienced designers will find a few valuable nuggets or arguments posed in a new and enlightening way.

This method of teaching the pros and cons is something I really liked in Dan Cederholm's book Web Standards Solutions and I think both of these books have a ton to offer. For the aspiring CSS designer or the seasoned CSS wrangler, both of these books will find a spot on your desk (not on your bookshelf). And, according to Dave the sales of The Zen of CSS Design are going phenomonally well, so a lot of designers probably already know what I've been raving about. The book is well worth the modest $55 CAD list price (which I admittedly didn't have to pay). Great job Dave and Molly!

Morning Update: This morning a coworker of mine pointed out that there were a number of negative reviews of The Zen of CSS Design on Amazon.com so I went to check them out. It's curious, most of the negative opinions came from people who were specifically looking for technical tips, tricks, and hacks for CSS and were disapointed. Too bad. The whole idea of The Zen Garden project was not to show technical ability but to show the mesh of technical ability with creativity and aesthetic sensibility — something that had been lacking in the CSS community and still does to some extent. Kudos to Molly and Dave for writing a book that brings technique and design together in a meaningful way. Yeah, if you just want to learn syntax go buy Eric Meyer's fine books, but I think The Zen of CSS is a better book for actual web design.

I finally got the new OSX Tiger installed on my mac last week, which went amazingly smoothly and quickly. It's fairly impressive that you can just push in a dvd and upgrade the entire operating system without a glitch and all of your settings are remembered (although it's still highly recommended to back up everything anyhow). Congrats to the Apple OS team, you have one happy customer.

However, one hilarious weird anomoly in the whole process was that the clever weather widget that's part of the whole new Dashboard thought that I lived in a different Toronto than the large Canadian city in which I do reside. I was looking out the window of my apartment and it was sunny and about 19^oC outside but the weather thingy was telling me that it was rainy and only about 12^oC. It took me a bit to figure out that it was giving me the weather for Toronto, Ohio (I think) and that I had to choose the Canadian city from the search. All fixed and now very handy, but it seems a little strange that the system isn't clever enough to determine your country first and then choose the appropriate city.

In general, the widgets are a bit American-centric, which is unfortunate considering the wide base of Apple users outside of the States. The Phone Book, for instance, only searches the American Yellow Pages but there's no indication that it's a country-specific look-up. I don't really mind that they don't ship with a Canadian phone book, but it would be at least useful to know right away that the installed phone book isn't Canadian.

But... that's just some nitpicking on an otherwise very worthwhile upgrade.

What better on a rainy day than a little online disc golf action? A friend (he's on the left) just pointed me to a great little Flash disc golf game from Addicting Games that's actually pretty incredible. It even lets you throw curves to avoid the obstacles like ponds, rocks, trees, and garbage cans. Go toss an anhyzer!