Often my pictures don’t have a lot of people in them, perhaps because I tend to shoot random street scenes and I usually shy away from asking permission from people… but this time, the streets I’m shooting here really were deserted. I arrived around 3:30pm, in the middle of siesta time, and wandered around the silent city almost completely alone. By the time 7:00pm rolled around the locals were just thinking about opening up their restaurants and taverns. I was starving so I scored some pizza from some expat Germans.

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Scott Pilgrim is an incredibly entertaining movie – you should all see it – but the premise of the movie is a little bit baffling. While set in something resembling modern-day Toronto, the conflict is entirely surreal. To finally be with the girl of his dreams, Scott Pilgrim has to defeat her seven evil exes with elaborate fight sequences.

Caution: Spoilers!

(Also see the original size on Flickr.)

For a fairly long time I thought my career was going to be in graphic design. On the left hand side is a typeface design I never quite completed, back in the mid-to-late nineties.

It was an attempt to render a scalable font out of Espy Sans (right hand side), a bitmap font that Apple has used in various products over the years.

Epoch Bold has a lot of flaws, but there are some characters in the font that I still rather like. It was a good try at capturing a very “open” looking font, with a tremendous x-height, in a humanist sans.

I found the sampler printout of Epoch Bold while going through some old things and scanned it in, since I am not sure I have it in machine readable form any more. I think I have backups somewhere on Iomega Zip drives. :( The screenshots of Espy Sans were taken from an Apple Newton emulator; I couldn’t find any version of Espy that would work on any machine I own.

This all started when I saw a rainbow on the ground. It appeared after some workers had finished sandblasting there.

I researched this phenomenon and found out it was a “glass bead bow”, a special kind of rainbow formed by glass microspheres. It’s just like the rainbow you see in the sky, except it’s more intense and at a tighter radius than a water rainbow. But because it seems to be embedded in a nearby surface, it’s more obvious that the rainbow “follows” you around, and is centered exactly on your shadow’s head. It looks just like a rainbow halo.

I thought this could definitely be a Thing we could bring to Burning Man. The Black Rock desert has intense sun, and I like the idea of art that uses the environment. But mainly because I just love colors and light and science and I don’t care if it isn’t art exactly. But, despite that, it ended up illuminating (ha ha) some surprising aspects of reality anyway… in many ways some disturbing ones.

If you think the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart is doing journalism, you don’t know what journalism is.

It may not be your fault, especially if you are young. In your lifetime, journalists are untrained monkeys asking uninformed questions of celebrities. Stewart also does that, so maybe it seems similar.

Stewart is a comedian. That’s a very specific job and it’s not all about laughs. Seinfeld called comedy “the truth, only faster”. It’s about seeing absurdity and pointing it out in a specific way that makes you realize your own doubts, uncertainty, fears even. It makes you laugh sometimes and cry other times.

Stewart can see absurdity, and point it out, but he’s not doing journalism and he would have no talent for it.

Journalism would be something like becoming an expert in derivatives and risk and, based on that knowledge, asking CEOs of banks questions, rooting out hidden problems in published balance sheets, maybe even investigative reporting. Here you aren’t hobnobbing with celebrities, you are developing contacts in the records department of various firms, interviewing recently fired or retired employees who have an axe to grind, analyzing disclosed activities of lobbyists, developing your own sources within Congress, and just generally pursuing a story with dogged and grim determination until you finally piece together the truth. And then, having the credibility to fearlessly communicate that to an audience, advertisers be damned.

Stewart cannot do any of that. But he can point to the lack of it.

A version of this was posted to Reddit’s r/politics..

I’m a public transit user. I was moving back to San Francisco to work for Flickr. I’ve read research that says that a short commute has a surprisingly large impact on happiness. So, I wondered, what are my options?

Programmers might assume there is a simple list of all the countries in the world. There isn’t.

For example, China and Taiwan don’t recognize each other as legitimate governments. If, for instance, your organization were to publish a list of “countries” which doesn’t include Taiwan, you may one day see Taiwanese activists with megaphones at your gates. If they publish a list of countries which does include Taiwan, then China might do something crazy like ban you otherwise hamper you from doing business in the PRC. This really does happen to tech companies.

And it’s why you should never label an ISO-3166-derived dropdown as “Country:”. First of all, it’s wrong, because Puerto Rico is not a country, and secondly you have all these sensitive political issues. Instead use “Location:”, or don’t even label the damn menu at all.

ISO 3166 is a very useful standard because it just says it’s a list of “countries and their subdivisions”. Quite deliberately, it doesn’t say what is really a country and what is just a subdivision.

A version of this was posted to Reddit’s r/programming.

This is an unsolveable deal from the Game of Set. I found it with SCIENCE!

Joel Spolsky has compiled a book of essays on software, which he calls The Best Software Writing I. The essays all came from online sources, but when Spolsky released the chapter listing, I didn’t see anywhere online where he posted links to the originals. So here they are.

Flickr is a popular photo hosting service that uses embedded Flash files as part of their interface. On every page, there will be a little delay while a new Flash file loads.

Lickr removes the need for Flash. It runs within the web browser Firefox, stripping the Flash before the user can even see it, and replacing it with an equivalent interface in pure HTML and Javascript.

Click the buttons to see the difference (or rather, the similarities).

Lickr combines Flickr, Greasemonkey, and Ajax, and is worth triple points in buzzword bingo.