We had an election here in Canada yesterday. The Elections Canada website has a page with the results. There’s a little in-line bar chart to help visualize the relative values.

What is generally considered a good practice in CSS (the code used the style and layout pages on the Web) is making 33.1% look bigger than 34.4%:

This issue is fairly simple. The width of the bar-charts are defined with the em unit. Both the Conservative 34.4% bar and the 33.1% Liberal bar are to be 3em wide (they’re rounding off for the small comparison).

The trouble comes in the way the winning party row is highlighted. The winning row is set to have a larger font size (120% the regular size). Since the em unit is relative to font size, the winning row chart gets distorted to look 20% larger.

The fix is easy – use rem units (which are relative to the base document font-size rather than the local font-size) rather than em units for the bar charts.

I’ve passed this on to Elections Canada, but wanted to post here because it’s in interesting little issue that could be easily misconstrued. I also wanted you to know how smart I am.

There’s a proportional representation joke in here somewhere…

I got to join Matt Rainnie this week on the CBC Radio Mainstreet program for the SpinTime DJ segment. I got to choose three songs, which is harder than it sounds. First, I had to get over myself and realize I didn’t have to take it as seriously as those who assembled the Voyager Golden Record. I then looked for three great songs that someone listening on the way home from work on Friday might not have otherwise heard, but might enjoy.

First, I selected Coax Me by Sloan from their 1994 album Twice Removed. I was 16 years old when this came out and this song and video are burned into my brain. It’s up there with Everything You’ve Done Wrong as my favourite Sloan songs.

Next, I selected A Lot to Be Loved by Mardeen from the 2008 album Read Less Minds. Some CBC listeners might know from Mo Kenney’s cover of their song Telephones from the same album. This is a great, simple, pop/rock song.

Finally, I chose Wordwide by Adam Again from the 1992 album Dig. This is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard. If you consider the ratio of how great a song is compared to how likely people are to have actually heard it, this becomes an even more extraordinary gem.

The segment airs this afternoon some time between 4-6PM on Mainstreet on CBC Radio One, Charlottetown. It aired on Friday, September 20th, and is now available online: Mainstreet PEI with Matt Rainnie – Sep. 20, 2019: Spin Time – Steven Garrity

Thanks to Matt for having me in – he’s truly gifted at the art of conversation for the radio.

Many of us in the technology world are beginning to grapple with the unintended consequences of the platforms and products we’ve been created. I’ve recently noticed a pattern with potential unintended consequences where software products leak information about your presence or actions to others. It may not be fair to use the term “leak”, as it’s intentional on the part of the products, but those using the software may be less aware.

In Google Docs (and Sheets, Slides, Draw, etc.), when you are viewing or editing a document, you can see the names and faces of those who are also viewing in real time.

The notes/wiki system Notion shows a similar name / face of others who are viewing pages.

The Slack group chat app shows others when you’re typing in a channel.

The Figma design tool shows the names (and cursors) of others viewing a shared document.

These indications of presence or activity are often helpful. Knowing where a person is focused when you’re working together can be a helpful proxy in lieu of body language. Knowing that someone is typing a response to your question helps make the asynchronous flow of a text-base conversation feel a bit more natural.

These features also have unintended side-effects. In the case of Google Docs, I may want to refer to a shared document, but not broadcast my reading. If you have a difficult situation with a co-worker and privately look up an internal company policy to see how best to address it, you probably don’t want to ‘run into’ that same co-worker in the “How to deal with jerks at work” Google Doc.

In the case of Slack’s indication that you’re typing, you may start a typing out a comment and decide the conversation is better off without your input. Only now, everyone knows you’re there – reading, and is wondering what you are about to say. By not saying anything explicit, you’ve still communicated something to the group (I was going to speak, but decided not to, I’m about to speak, My cat is walking across my keyboard).

It’s always easier to point out the problems with complex systems like these than it is to recognize what they do well. Slack made an improvement to allow you to preview a channel (a discussion room) without ‘joining’ (joining and leaving Slack channels is announced to those in the channel).

Before the change to allow a ‘silent’ preview of a channel, it was like you had to jump into a room full of people, announce your presence, see that you didn’t want to be there, and announce your departure.

Even now, there’s no way to silently leave a Slack channel. It is helpful to know when others leave a channel, but it also makes it socially difficult to leave channels. “Steven has left the #people-who-do-not-hate-dolphins channel” is a not a good look.

I’d like to be able to provide some concentrated rules-of-thumb for these situations, but they’re complex. These are the best conclusions I’ve been able to drawn so far:

• Let people know if, how, and when your software exposes a person’s activity or presence to others.
• Allow people to opt-out of features that broadcast their presence or activity.

This clever little widget called Good Fast Cheap by Kunuk Nykjær is a delightful illustration of how the classic project adage:

Good, fast, cheap–choose two

can be recast as:

Expensive, slow, shitty–choose one

Discovered via the often delightful CodePen Spark newsletter.

If you’ve watched the remarkable Chernobyl series on HBO and played the Half-Life series of video games, then please enjoy this: Chernobyl dubbed with Half-Life SFX. If one or the other of these is not familiar to you, then you get the next 2 minutes of your life back.

One of the many interesting and rewarding parts of my job this year was to curate and participate in the 20th anniversary silverorange art project. It’s an art project that celebrates the 20th anniversary of silverorange (naming things is hard).

Thanks so much to everyone who participated.

I really do love all of the entries, but I’m particularly delighted that our friends Tom Hughes, Sean Martell, and Geoff Gibson were able to participate.

Tom did an oil painting:

Sean created a hybrid Firefox / silverorange:

Geoff created an illustrated collage of references his time with silverorange:

My closest office-neighbour, Stephen DesRoches, even painted an actual orange slice!

My life was enriched in my ways when I got married 14 years ago. One of these ways is the deep connection my parents-in-law have to the “North side” on the Eastern end of Prince Edward Island. This includes a humble cottage in an extraordinary location near the Shipwreck Point Lightstation in Naufrage, PEI (Naufrage is French for ‘shipwreck’).

Like many cottages, this one is a patchwork of additions and repairs that have accumulated over decades. It is furnished with items that outlived their usefulness or fell out of fashion at their primary home and retired to the cottage life.

On our most recent stay, I was struck by how many different types of wood grain, panelling, and shingles there are in the cottage. I counted at least fifteen:

While at work today, I set about a relatively simple task: Write a summary of a new job opening we have to share on Twitter.

What followed was a yak-shaving rabbit hole mixed metaphor of multitasking. Here’s how it went:

• Ok, I want to write a tweet about the new job posting
• I need something to count characters while I write the draft
• Open VS Code, but notice line-wrapping is off – don’t want to change that setting
• Go to open Sublime Text – notice I don’t have it installed on my new laptop
• Download Sublime Text
• Notice it’s not registered, but I think I have a paid registration
• Look in 1Password for Sublime Text registration
• Get a Slack reminder about a whole other thing – do that other thing
• Look in Mail for Sublime Text registration
• Forget why I opened mail and start reading unrelated email
• Realize how far down the rabbit hole I am and start writing this list
• Find the Sublime Text registration email and re-register Sublime Text
• Actually write that tweet

Some of the disjointed nature of this process a reasonable by-product of working in and with digital tools. Some of it is just my own weakness in maintaining focus.

Oh, I did eventually get that job post shared – it’s a great job for a front-end web developer:

In the technology industry and others, I’m sure, it is often cited that those in under-represented groups should not be given additional consideration because hiring should be based solely on merit. This sounds reasonable and fair, though I’ve grown to feel it is neither.

The following quote from actor and activist Geena Davis on the WTF podcast articulates the danger of a narrow consideration of “merit” in a more effective way than I’ve heard before:

“…I don’t think anyone can say ‘I hire based on merit’ if they haven’t taken conscious proactive steps to overcome their unconscious bias.”

Gina Davis on WTF with Marc Maron

The whole interview is worthwhile, as is Davis’ work with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

I was talking to a friend recently about the perils of helping young kids manage uncertainty when they see disconcerting changes. My instinct is to say “Your mom & dad will always be together”, or even just “I’ll always be here for you.”

While I fully intent to fulfill both of those promises, they are dangerous promises to make as they can depend on forces outside of your control.

My wise friend shared the promise he makes to his son among uncertainly—a reminder of a reassurance that he really can promise: “I will always be your father.”