Michael Gravel

I love it. Love the idea and love the energy behind it. It’s an “indirect” form of brand building: just build something cool, give others permission to do the same. Eventually those cool things reach critical mass and begin to define you. It’s an inspiring and positive idea for a city that has long struggled with its identity. Also: sweet site design from Lift Interactive.

This piece resonates with me because I have worked at the intersection of seniors and technology. There is a lot of work to be done in making technologies more accessible and easier to use for seniors. There is some great startup potential here; it’s an opportunity to do some truly great work.

Nice think piece by Porter Anderson on DIY publishing and how it does / doesn’t handle R & D and the development of new authors.

As the industry morphs and struggles, it’s the kind of question the best heads need to be ready to answer: In self-publishing, with every writer working for him- or herself, where does the R & D come from?

The publishing / book industry may head down the same road as the music industry: a fractured enterprise with no centre; many small groups with small audiences that support each other.

I’m not sure on the details yet, but it looks like Bruce’s big show in Hyde Park for Hard Rock Calling got cut short because of a curfew. Not the end of the world, but it happened shortly after Paul McCartney joined him on stage for part of the encore. I’d be pretty pissed if I was at the show.

The headline is a bit hyperbolic. Given Facebook’s penchant for changing their interface, depending on them to keep a set of features that you depend on for revenue isn’t wise. This change killed an “industry” to make way for better “customer engagement” by businesses and brands.

I didn’t realize that “bodygrooming” was a thing for men. The photo of the guy sporting a Batman symbol carved from his chest hair is especially disturbing.

Argentinean artist Agustina Woodgate has been surreptitiously sewing excerpts of poems into garments at second hand stores in Miami.

Sewing poems in clothes is a way of bringing poetry to everyday life just by displacing it, by removing it from a paper to integrate it and fuse it with our lives. Sometimes little details are stronger when they are separated from where they are expected to be[…]

A pleasing idea for the poets among us.

Excellent roundup of various backup techniques and services for Mac. Are you backing up your shit?

A skeletal framework for shipping HTML email. Nice chunk of code that includes a reset and some client-specific fixes. Worth checking out if you’re in the email construction game.

Super nice typeface. A nice range of weights and some sweet little touches like ligatures and text figures. Pretty pricey, but hey, awesome costs.

A framework (actually, an extension of an existing framework) for creating media-query based responsive websites that are optimized for mobile first, as expounded by Luke Wroblewski.

Nice little tip for targeting Windows Mobile browsers. Also good advice on using media queries in general – start with a linearized layout and use media queries to optimize the layout for wider windows.

A great, great thing for downtown Edmonton. What really bugs me about this story is the litany of nay sayers in the comments. Nothing new for a news site, but the constancy of shrill, reactionary comments is wearing thin.

Very cool, but how will games designed for a joystick and one button work on a touch interface? Guess I’ll have to download and see for myself.

The ever colorful Mike Monteiro (@mike_FTW). Should be required viewing for all freelancers and creative types.

Lucid post on creativity and art. 9 aphorisms that ring true. “All advice is autobiographical”. So very true.

Sounds like an interesting collection. I like the idea of casting off the expected canon in favour of one more personal. I’ll keep an eye out for this.

After exploring the Keen Canada website, I have to say that it is one of the best footwear websites I’ve ever used. Products are easy to find and the interface is excellent. Kudos to the design team.

Excellent piece from Mandy Brown on the future of gathering news, reading news, and paying for news.

We are no longer monogamous readers, loyal to a single source; rather, we read voraciously, looking for patterns, teasing out the things that matter to us, making connections, and then (often) writing about them ourselves. We are consumers of news, not “The News”.

Again, there are no answers yet.

An absolutely incredible encore at a recent Dropkick Murphys gig in Boston. Bruce joins the boys for a three song encore including Peg O My Heart and an incendiary version of Badlands. Wow.