A human being finishing Super Mario Bros. in 4m 55s is the four-minute mile of our generation. What a time to be alive.

I’m excited to have my second article in 17 years published on the website “For People Who Make Websites”, A List Apart: Design with Difficult Data.

Thanks to Ste Grainer for the great editing.

This joke from Michelle Wolf’s routine at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has stuck with me. I can’t explain why I love it so much, but it is great:

“Mike Pence is the kind of guy that brushes his teeth and then drinks orange juice and thinks, ‘Mmm.'”

~ Michelle Wolf, April 2018

1. Getting your glasses smushed against your face.
   
2. Having your earbuds ripped out of your ear when the cord catches on a doorknob.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards podcasts.”

– Preet Bharara, while interviewing Bassem Youssef for his Stay Tuned podcast.

It’s easy to pile on criticism when a major company redesigns their logo, but I couldn’t help myself in this case. The logo looks fine to me, but am I the only one that sees a toe-tag on a corpse when I see the new Best Buy logo?

My friend and colleague of over 20 years, Nick Burka, has written a great article about the Usability for Promotion Codes and Access Codes over on the silverorange blog.

You might not care about promotion codes, but you’ve probably had to type in some kind of code for 2-factor authentication or the rare non-scammy coupon code. Nick’s article covers what can make these codes easy (or difficult) to remember, type, and say over the phone.

It’s too bad the creators of our Canadian postal code system couldn’t have read this before they put all of those Gs and Js in the Quebec postal codes (an English G and French J sound almost identical).

I’m particularly proud of this article as it draws on external expertise – something we’ve been trying to do more of at silverorange. This article in particular draws on things we learned for a literacy and essential skills consultant, and from the non-profit Computers for Success Canada.

I thought I supported science, but now I’m not so sure anymore. See the Washington Post on research that using two spaces after a sentence “makes reading slightly easier”. Thankfully, Lifehacker follows-up to reassure us that, No, You Still Shouldn’t Put Two Spaces After a Period.

See my previous writing on the topic.

The ideas are free, not the games.

How about a sports (football, hockey, basketball, etc.) simulator that simulates what it’s like to play a game rather than simulating what it’s like to watch one on TV.

Or, if we’re going to simulate what feels like to watch sports on TV, let’s get hyper-real. Greasy potato-chip fingers, bathroom breaks during ads, find the remote!

Heard on CBC this morning that one of many names floated for a possible Halifax CFL expansion team is the Halifax Explosion.

Brilliant? Inappropriate? I think both?