Scott Bush

The prob­lem with the con­sumeris­miza­tion of Christ­mas, if I can coin a very long word, can be summed up by the tragic death of 34-year-old Jdimy­tai Damour, who was tram­pled to death in a Black Fri­day stam­pede at a Wal-Mart in New York. I wish I was jok­ing. I’m not:

By 4:55, with no police offi­cers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rab­ble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoul­ders pressed on the sliding-glass dou­ble doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault.
Sud­denly, wit­nesses and the police said, the doors shat­tered, and the shriek­ing mob surged through in a blind rush for hol­i­day bar­gains. One worker, Jdimy­tai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and tram­pled in the stam­pede that streamed over and around him.

I’m sorry, but no amount of $29.99 DVD play­ers or what­ever else the crowd had been queu­ing up for since 3:30am is worth the death–or even injuries–of work­ers or other shop­pers. It’s asi­nine. I’ve never been to any Black Fri­day sales because I value my time (not to men­tion san­ity and appar­ently even my health or life) too much. The hol­i­days are about fam­ily and friends, not stuff. If more peo­ple real­ized that, events like this would never occur.

First, check out this new smart­phone. Makes the iPhone look like a Nokia 5160:

http://www.pomegranatephone.com/

Now, if you’re done explor­ing the phone’s built-in pro­jec­tor, shaver, and coffee-brewer, you may have noticed this spoof was put on not by Apple, Sam­sung, Microsoft, or Nokia. Nope, not even by an adver­tis­ing agency, the now-defunct Sharper Image, Brook­stone, or even Air­Mall. It’s a mar­ket­ing video for… Nova Scotia.

No, Nova Sco­tia is not some crazy name for a new frozen-yogurt shop. It’s the actual province in Canada (you know the Cana­dian provinces, don’t you? Nova Sco­tia is the one on the east coast of Canada, with all the fish­ing? Yeah… I thought you knew it). This well-designed mar­ket­ing con­cept really is a stretch, but I think it will work. Most peo­ple prob­a­bly haven’t heard of Nova Sco­tia, or if they have they think it’s “just some place in Canada.” Well, this site does a good job catch­ing people’s atten­tion and may actu­ally increase the tiny provinces’ poplarity–or, at least recognition–among the younger demo­graphic that the NS gov­ern­ment is appeal­ing to.

After teas­ing the techophiles with the mul­ti­ple fea­tures of this “smart­phone,” the site tells view­ers that “one day you’ll be able to get every­thing you need in a phone,” but that “today you can get every­thing you need in one place” and then whisks them off to this page. There are equally well-produced vignettes here of peo­ple liv­ing, work­ing, and enjoy­ing life in the province. It’s a smart way to get peo­ple look­ing at and talk­ing about a place that might oth­er­wise never get noticed. But is it effec­tive? There are cer­tainly a lot of peo­ple dis­cussing the cam­paign, that’s for sure. This com­men­ta­tor in Hal­i­fax doesn’t think so. Time will tell, but I salute the Nova Scot­ian (or is it Novan Sco­tia?) gov­ern­ment for their efforts.

Today, I logged into my Gmail account. “That’s strange,” I thought, see­ing the color scheme and slightly-altered edges of page ele­ments. I was busy and didn’t pay too close atten­tion; I merely wrote it off to an odd­ity of the aging Win­dows box I’m forced to use at work.

But when I logged on from home, I noticed one of those dis­creet mes­sages Gmail employs, this one inform­ing me that Gmail now has themes. What a great exten­sion to an already great prod­uct. Gmail is rapidly becom­ing a pop­u­lar e-mail client (every­one I know is switch­ing to it and loves it, though Google appar­ently is keep­ing total usage num­bers to them­selves), and these skins are just another step in the evo­lu­tion of the prod­uct (such as the new video chat fea­ture, which I’ve not yet used).

Google is smart to fur­ther solid­ify their pop­u­lar­ity with younger users who have become more accus­tomed to the abil­ity to cus­tomize, or “skin,” their desk­tops, phones, MySpace pages, Trap­per Keep­ers–every­thing. Choos­ing one of the sub­dued, whim­si­cal, or spar­tan theme for your pri­mary e-mail inter­face is another way to endear the tool–and more impor­tantly, the Google brand–to an impor­tant demo­graphic. Google’s cus­tomized home page, iGoogle, has offered themes for some time so adding this abil­ity to Gmail is a log­i­cal next step.

I won’t go into a descrip­tion of the themes avail­able. You can see exam­ples and read more about it over on Google’s blog. But I just had to call out two themes: Ter­mi­nal and Ninja. I’m run­ning Ter­mi­nal now, but I don’t know how long I can actu­ally take this ASCII-style mono­chrome throwback.

UPDATE: I agree with Sean’s com­ment (below). The fact that the mes­sage com­po­si­tion area is not skinned is a bit of a dis­trac­tion. It’s espe­cially prob­lem­atic with the high-contrast themes like Ter­mi­nal and Con­trast Black. Here’s a sam­ple with the Ter­mi­nal theme:

I know this area can be skinned, as the chat win­dow fol­lows the aes­thetic of the theme. Per­haps it was more com­pli­cated to skin it if Gmail is using a frame­work like TinyMCE for the com­po­si­tion area. But Sean’s right—Gmail is eter­nally in beta so per­haps when it offi­cially launches this area will respect the theme choice?

I saw this on XKCD today:

(XKCD is a great web comic, but prob­a­bly won’t inter­est you if you’re not a 1) pro­gram­mer, 2) math­e­mati­cian, or 3) a gen­er­al­ized geek of some kind.)

This comic struck a chord with me because I’ve often won­dered this exact same thing. Call­ing Asian coun­tries “the East” and Europe and North Amer­ica are “the West” never made sense to me. First, it shoe­horns some coun­tries, like Ice­land and Australia—not to men­tion entire con­ti­nents like Africa and South America—into groups to which they might not belong. Sec­ond, car­di­nal direc­tions are com­pletely a mat­ter of per­spec­tive, as shown so clearly in the comic.

I know that “East” and “West,” in their cap­i­tal­ized senses, have more to do with ide­o­log­i­cal divi­sions than lon­gi­tu­di­nal ones. The con­cept of “East­ern” vs. “West­ern” philoso­phies is inter­est­ing, whether it be in med­i­cine, diet, reli­gion, art, or any of a dozen areas. But couldn’t there be a bet­ter way to draw a dis­tinc­tion than over­load­ing these geo­graph­i­cal terms? I don’t pre­tend to be smart enough to sug­gest any, but I will note that these sorts of labels can change. Remem­ber the term “third world coun­try” (which I always thought meant coun­tries founded after World War II, but maybe not)? It’s now bet­ter to call them “devel­op­ing nations.” So it’s pos­si­ble to change these labels. If we did, maybe XKCD can get back to really incred­i­ble comics, like this map of the uni­verse on a log­a­rith­mic scale).

I’m pretty excited to intro­duce to you a new punc­tu­a­tion mark: the Quest­la­ma­tion mark. It’s gonna be the biggest thing since the asterisk.

What is it, you ask? Much like “Speng­lish” (Span­ish + Eng­lish) and “Brangelina” (Brad + Angelina), the Quest­la­ma­tion mark is a com­bi­na­tion of the ques­tion mark (?) and the excla­ma­tion mark (!). I found myself need­ing to add empha­sis to a ques­tion and decided there was noth­ing wrong with sim­ply using both punc­tu­a­tion marks together, as in: “You did what for how many green jelly­beans?!” But in the never-ending quest for opti­miza­tion, I cre­ated a hybrid, and I present it to you now:

It util­ity is matched only by its poten­tial for vari­a­tion. While the ver­sion above is the ubiq­ui­tous standby, Times New Roman, I’ve also cre­ated a ver­sion using the sans-serif font Ver­dana:

Note the slight irreg­u­lar­ity of the shared dot. To cre­ate the proper align­ment of each mark’s stem in rela­tion to its dot, I had to warp the sides of once–reg­u­lar dot. I think it gives this exam­ple a hand-crafted authenticity.

And, to avoid any claims of bias toward the inter­rog­a­tive over the empha­sis, I cre­ated the quest­la­ma­tion mark a cousin, the excla­mes­tion mark:

Sadly, nei­ther of these extremely use­ful punc­tu­a­tion marks can be found in your favorite fonts. But don’t despair because the intro­duc­tion of the Euro sym­bol showed us that such an under­tak­ing is pos­si­ble. I sug­gest you write your con­gressper­son and ask–no, demand–legislation be intro­duced requir­ing the quest­la­ma­tion mark be required in all fonts and on key­boards no later than 2012. Oh, and also have them see about adding the word “quest­la­ma­tion” added to dic­tio­nar­ies so that all these red squig­gles under the word go away!

Only one thing can tem­per my joy on this, the day I intro­duce a new punc­tu­a­tion mark to the world: the knowl­edge that I’m not the first to do so. The folks over at FontFeed.com have a post about the “Inter­robang.” (For those non-Unix and non-programming geeks, this name is derived from “interrogative—to question—and “bang,” which is for some strange rea­son, short­hand for the excla­ma­tion mark to that group). But, just like New­ton and Leib­niz, I swear I came up with the idea inde­pen­dent of any­one else. What’s worse is they link to two sep­a­rate fonts that include not only an “inter­robang” char­ac­ter, but two other excla­ma­tion mark hybrids. Here’s an image of them in Ampli­tude Wide Bold:

Well, I shouldn’t be sad. The more expo­sure the world has to this punc­tu­a­tion mark, the greater its accep­tance and adop­tion will be. (But id bet­ter be called the quest­la­ma­tion mark instead of inter­robang!). So, will you please get out there and start ask­ing ques­tions with a lot of emphasis

My ado­ra­tion for Word­Press, the open-source blog­ging and web­site tool, is well-documented. As I worked in it this evening I noticed some­thing that sim­ply had to be shared:

(Briefly: WP has two con­tent con­structs: posts and pages. Posts are time-related, pages are not and instead let you assign a hier­ar­chy like a tra­di­tional web­site. This panel lets the user assign a page’s place in that hierarchy.)

If you can’t read it, the panel gives instruc­tions and then a caveat about the qual­ity of its purpose:

Pages are usu­ally ordered alpha­bet­i­cally, but you can put a num­ber above to change the order pages appear in. (We know this a lit­tle janky, it’ll be bet­ter in future releases.)

C’mon, how great is that? The devel­op­ers know it’s not as intu­itive as WP’s other fea­tures but rather than exclude it, they left it in with this tongue-in-cheek note. Good stuff.