Who knew Swee’Pea was such a great dancer? Genius. I know Allison would say that violence is never the answer, but that Wilco brand spinach really sparks Popeye up.

Whitehorse played the Rio Theatre in Vancouver a few nights ago. My review of the show is on No Depression or you can read the text after the break.

Continue reading "Whitehorse at the Rio Theatre"

Wilco made an appearance in the most recent Popeye strip, immortalized as a brand of spinach. In the last panel at the back of the line that’s the boys in the band unloading the ship.

Despite the fact that I have a well deserved reputation as a Wilco fan, it really just takes one track with Daniel Lanois and Emmylou Harris to tear me away.

The New York times posted a great article celebrating Bill Cosby’s 50 years in show business. The man’s been receiving accolades for years, and they’re all deserved. In a day and age where being funnier seems to be a synonym with being louder (I’m looking at you Sam Kinison) and crasser (I’m looking at you Chris Rock) Bill Cosby has remained a very funny while staying clean. I’m not saying those other guys aren’t funny, it just seems like a cheap, easy way out sometimes.

I saw Cosby live once. It was the end of a very hard summer for me. I was fifteen, and things weren’t good at home for me largely due to circumstances of my own making. I’d asked to leave Toronto and wanted to move to Cranbrook to live with my father. There was screaming, there was shouting and in the end my mother let me do what I wanted. She packed my stuff and put it on a bus and I was gone.

As these things so often happen, what I thought I wanted wasn’t what I actually wanted and things didn’t work out in Cranbrook. After a few weeks and before the end of the summer I finally screwed up the courage to call my mother and tell her I wanted to come…home. We talked for a few minutes about the trouble I’d been causing and she said yes without evening thinking about it. That’s what parents do. Good ones anyway. That was a hard call to make. She could have made it harder. She didn’t.

When I got home she asked me if I wanted to go see Bill Cosby with my Aunt & Uncle. She’d bought three tickets for a show at Exhibition stadium and she was giving up her own so I could go. It was a warm, dry memorable night in Toronto. The Blue Jay’s were on the rise and shortstop Tony Fernandez and outfielder and home run legend George Bell were in the audience. Cosby took the stage in a Jays jersey. He joked with the players, ran through some material and closed his show with his justifiably famous The Dentist routine. I’d probably heard that routine dozens of times but seeing it live was an entirely different thing. That man is capital F Funny. If he has an equal, I can’t think of who it might be. Lily Tomlin? Steve Martin? Maybe.

I’m sure I didn’t realize how much that night made me feel like I was at home at the time. Typical of most teenagers, I suspect it just felt like another night.

I’m not sure if my mother ever got to see him live. I don’t remember her mentioning it. I might have to make up for that sometime.

Cosby’s performing days are winding down—and tickets cost an abolute fortune I’m sure—but if he comes to your town don’t miss seeing him. You won’t regret it. That’s my commitment to you.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to see Mavis Staples sing The Weight live on a pretty magical night of live music. I’m not sure I’d ever anticipated hearing that, and it’s a fond memory of the year.

Mavis singing The Band classic with Wilco live in Chicago? I think my mind would have been blown. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t there. This will have to do for now (though you can hear the live version in the Roadcase on the Wilco site for now.)

With a rapid rise in the user of mobile devices for browsing and a lot of sites publishing their own site specific apps there’s been a trend towards mobile site interstitial pages. Having your own app poses an interesting dilemma for some sites, but these interstitials are just part of a larger trend of problems with browser aware home pages that attempt to serve mobile content.

In the early days of mobile content, a lot of sites would redirect mobile browsers to a mobile specific home page. This may seem sound in theory, but in practice links that are sent out through Twitter and other social media posts were broken: clicking on a link for a specific article would, instead, take you to a home page and you’d have to find your article all over again—if you cared. The Georgia Straight did this for a long time, though I think they’ve since stopped.

Next was the interstitial pleading with you to download a site’s app. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked by IMDB to download their app. I refuse every time, but they keep asking. This is exactly what persistent cookies are for friends: stop pestering me into a form of behaviour I’m not interested in.

The other day I clicked a link and saw the interstitial pages above, with an app download button so large and a continue link so small I couldn’t actually select it. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this sneaky little trick is: downloading the app requires several more steps, so you’re not going to fool me into it. If I can’t click the link I can’t continue and you’ve just lost a page view, and a probably a bunch more from other people in similar situations.

Really though: are there that many people who need to check FailBlog every day that you should even be distributing an app?

Sometimes the land rush to the new mobile world demands a bit of careful consideration, and I don’t think it happened in this case.

What Child is This by Justin Rutledge and The Beauties

Oh Holy Night by Jenn Grant and The Beauties

Silent Night by The Beauties

…and the crazy kids at Google apparently didn’t think that they needed a selector list that displayed more than three lines when you add a video to your YouTube lists. Go figure.

In general, selector lists should have some relationship to the average length of the list that’s on them and I suspect that most YouTube users don’t even have playlists like this. Of course with a user list that runs in the tens of millions, it’s hard to imagine that most YouTube users share anything in common.

There’s a basic principal of lists like this that they should at the very least provide a reasonably sized view of the list so that it can be scrolled easily. The problem with a three item view is that a small scrolling movement shifts the list entirely and you lose the context of what you’re doing. It’s too easy to get lost.

Five items is a reasonable minimum—this is what Apple uses for the dials that show up when you choose a list like this on your iPhone. Shift the list by one on a five item list and you’ve still got some sense of context.
I’ve said before that I sort of think of Google’s interface design as non-design really. I think they spend so much time not thinking about things that they wind up just deploying a lot of user interface elements that are coded without much thought.

This is all kind of boring, so why don’t we watch the video in the screen shot above instead. It’s the latest from Kendel Carson’s Belle Star project, and it’s pretty awesome.

A couple of weeks ago, I popped down to the Wild Buffalo to catch Blind Pilot a couple of days ahead of their show in Vancouver. A good time was had by all, and I reviewed the show for No Depression.

Despite my best attempts, this space does occasionally seem to slip into being a music blog. When the music concerned is Kathleen Edwards’ new track Change the Sheets is that really a problem?

Voyageur comes out on January 17th. Get it.

Designing interfaces for large software projects isn’t easy. As an interface designer you can paint the broad strokes of button placement, list layouts and the like but when push comes to shove and thousands of pages of code have to be written it comes down to software engineers to implement them consistently and well. This inevitably leads to mistakes and problems that crop up in spots. Many of these are minor and acceptable, others are just weird.

This one falls into the just weird category.

This is a pick list in Salesforce’s admin pages that allows you to select the data type for a new field when you create it. At the very top of the pick list is a radio button that allows you to choose the None Selected option. I was sort of curious what would happen if I chose it, so chose it I did.

An it turns out that—you guessed it—it throws an error every time.

Just weird.

In a moment I can only describe as…exciting might not be quite the right word…my office has made the cover of the new Nickelback album and right there, in the fissure running vertically through the album cover you can see the desk I sit at right now (though that’s likely to change.)

I think if you look closely enough you can see me expressing my thoughts on Nickelback as a band in the window.

Ryan Adams is an incredibly talented and remarkable musician, not to mention a very contentious one. Moments of beauty like this one shine through his arrogance often enough to make it worth taking the good with bad.

I seriously can’t watch this without crying, even if the voice is off a bit (and I don’t meant that in a small way.) I’ve got high hopes for tomorrow’s release of a new Muppet movie.

When Dean Martin tells you how to make a really good burger, it’s best to follow the recipe closely.

Tag Cloud