Delta Tango Bravo

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!

I was just reading an ESPN article about the Final Four action in the NCAA tonight when I noticed a little accessibility pet peeve of mine worth mentioning. ESPN, like a number of other websites, has a handy little text-resizing widget on the side of articles (it's a little buried down there in the right column) that uses a little bit of javascript and css to increase the text size to make it more readable. This is great for people who have difficulty seeing small text and who don't know how to increase their text size using their browser's built-in functionality.

However, ESPN and even Wired News, which also has this feature, identify the widget's use in miniscule little text. The text is actually smaller than the standard 11 pixel Tahoma font on my Windows machine. If this feature is a bonus for accessibility, wouldn't it make more sense to make the text legible to those who have difficulty reading small text? Don't get me wrong, the two example sites I identifed are extremely well designed generally, but this minor issue seems to be an oversight (pun just discovered and it is completely unintended).

So, it turns out that my father studies something interesting enough to warrant publication on Salon.com's newswire. He's a professor at the Atlantic Veterinary College and specializes in the world of sealice and farmed salmon. It's always interesting to see the topic picked up in the national (or in this case international) media and you realize that something your parent does is relevant to the wider world. I found that was a curious milestone on the road to maturity when you find out that your parents actually do things that don't have much to do with you, but which other people greatly value.

So... I think now that sealice are finally getting the honour of some serious media attention it's time to start the great propaganda campaign my brother and I devised a few years ago: "Sealice! Do you know where your children are?" We kept encouraging my father to start such a media blitz to increase the amount of funding for people like him in the field. Now is the time to build upon the fearmongering with a snappy campaign. You'll be seeing posters in your city soon...

I finally got a chance to watch Pumping Iron last weekend, which I've been meaning to see for ages. It's basically the story — which I use very literally — of Arnold Schwarzenegger's pursuit of his sixth Mr. Olympia title in 1977. Someone kindly lent me the 25th anniversary special edition of the film.

The most fascinating part of the film for me was the revelations afterwards in the "Raw Iron" featurette about the making of the film. Everyone knows that documentary films exhibit some bias of their makers, but it's revealed afterwards that Pumping Iron has some broad fictional elements to add drama and marketability to the film. I'm not criticizing the film makers here (they consistently refer to the film as a docu-drama) but I was surprised how much of the original film I took at face value. I'm a reasonably critical audience member, but I passively accepted that the tension between Arnold and the film's antagonist was real and that other parts of the film were unscripted.

Aside from being a very entertaining film, coupled with the added features Pumping Iron provides a fascinating insight into the documentary process and also into the strange world Arnold was a part of at that time.

There is also an interesting scene in the Raw Iron segment where Arnold and a couple of other body builders are part of an art exhibit at the Whitney Museum, posing as real life statuary. It was part fundraising event, part art exhibit.