I sometimes shop at Chapters Indigo. But only when I have too … like when I get a gift certificate from IDC Canada for participating in one of their research studies.
I hate shopping there, because the site is always, without exception, slow. I have never had it respond quickly. Double plus annoying. Plus, the selection […]

Last Sunday Teresa and I had dinner with her family … including her uncle Cal Koat, who is the creative spark behind Worldbeat Canada, “Canada’s home for contemporary global music.”
Cal does a weekly radio show on Vancouver radio station CJVB, does the Celt in a Twist top 10 list of Celtic music, and interviews world […]

What’s wrong with table based web design? Well, nothing, obviously:

Yum.
Of course, I realize that even if you’re using tables, you don’t have to turn the border feature on, but still … it’s not cool.
(The person whose site this is may be an incredibly wonderful “product coach,” for all I know. Just don’t go to him […]

I’m wondering why Wordpress can import blog entries from:

Blogger
Dotclear
LiveJournal
Movable Type
RSS
Textpattern

but not from a Wordpress blog ….
Maybe it’s just me, but this seems odd, seriously odd. I mean, all the import options (except RSS) will ask you for some configuration information, go out and grab all your articles, suck them down, and insert them into your […]

You may copy and use this image (”Link Whore”) in any non-prurient publication, as long as you give proper attribution.

OK, so the term web 2.0 sucks, for the exact same reason any other label sucks: it over-generalizes, freezes reality into a limited confine, and means different things to different people.
But if we’re going to have a term (and we do) and we’re going to define it (and we are), then this ought to be […]

I’ve been waiting for this for a while. Today I finally got my Google Analytics invite.
Installed, collecting data, and we’ll see what we see tomorrow! Right now, of course, having installed it literally a minute or two ago, I’m completely flatlining:

Astute observers of sparkplug9.com will have noticed that Zoomclouds, announced with such frisson merely a week ago, is toast.

As I posted quite a while ago, I re-evaluted using Google AdWords on this site when the whole Google China thing came out.
I did eventually take AdWords off, for that reason as well as out of a desire to simplify this blog (see what I had on the site and also what I took […]

You may have noticed the snazzy new tag cloud adorning the right-hand side of this page.
(I’m trying to be trendy and web 2-ish, and possibly get acquired by Google or Yahoo for mad money.)
I noticed the Zoomclouds link at Guy Kawasaki’s blog - he just got a new tag cloud as well. I thought […]

The Guardian is reporting on a BBC show about how to get smarter.
How do you get smarter?

THE GET SMARTER GUIDE
Saturday
Brush your teeth with your ‘wrong’ hand and take a shower with your eyes closed.
Sunday
Do the crossword or Sudoku puzzle in your Sunday paper and take a brisk walk.
Monday
Have oily fish for dinner, and either cycle, […]

Can someone please tell me why Americans are obsessed with race?
I happened to be searching for quite a few schools online today - double-checking a small subset of some contact data that we had received to gain some assurance that all of it was good - and all the school info aggregators had a high […]

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been looking for ways to simplify this site.
It’s a truism, but more is not always more.
And I was really starting to feel that more was less. So I’ve been getting rid of stuff:

time of posting
related posts
Google AdWords
Chitika MiniMalls
all the “add to Google,” “add to feedburner,” “add to My Yahoo,” etc. […]

This BBC story says that “former senior Communist party officials” have written and published a public letter denouncing at least one form of government censorship in China.
The officials include:

. . . Chairman Mao’s former secretary, Li Rui; the former editor of the Communist party’s own mouthpiece, People’s Daily, Hu Jiwei; and ex-propaganda boss, Zhu […]

I’ve recently been considering re-doing my blog skin, and wondering about all the pieces, chunks, and components of a modern, integrated blog.
There’s a ton, at least on my site. At least 13:

header with “station identification:” name and so on
introduction to the site and author
list of categories
list of recent posts
RSS paraphernalia
[…]

Wow I’ve hit the big time now … A-list here I come!

I’m currently thinking of redoing my blog design, and just started another, Fish Crackers.
And I want it to be usable and cool and web 2ish and wonderful and aesthetically impressive, of course.
Here’s a great start for seeing what kind of design is hot right now. But not just hot - also good. Even great.
Here […]

Fine. I admit it. I’ve finally gone and done it - started a new blog.
On this blog, I haven’t hid that I’m a Christian. Quite the opposite.
But it hasn’t been quite the right place to develop a number of projects that I’m feeling called to work on. One, for instance, is a “translation” of the […]