Today is all about virtual meetings; I’m spending most of it sitting at the home office with a headset microphone clamped to my head, bouncing from one online meeting to another, magically transporting my presence over great distances. My co-worker John Bristowe is in the same boat and quipped on Twitter: “I feel like I’m playing Live Meeting Portal”.
With that remark, and since it’s a Friday, I can’t help but post this amusing cat photo featuring Portal:
![[ani] portal kitty](http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/aniportalkitty.gif "[ani] portal kitty")
This article’s a bit more technical than the sort that usually appears here on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. However, since it’s about a technology that you, as readers of this blog, probably use every day, I thought it would be worth posting here. Enjoy!
Over at the design-oriented Smashing Magazine site, you’ll find Brad Colbow’s comic, The Life and Times of Internet Explorer 6. It’s the browser we all love to hate, even for those of us who collect a nice fortnightly deposit from Microsoft into our bank accounts. I got a great laugh at DemoCamp Toronto 21 when I said “If you got a cat when IE6 came out, it’s dead now.”
It wasn’t always this way, as the first section of the comic shows (you can click it to read the whole thing):
Once again, you can read the whole comic over at Smashing Magazine.
There’s a fair bit of history covered in the middle section of the comic, but I feel that the most important sections are the first (shown above), and the end, shown below:
That is the real question: “Can we stop supporting IE6 yet?”, followed by a real answer: You have to look at your audience. If you can drop IE6 support without ruining the experience for the majority your audience (you have to make the call on what constitutes a majority), then by all means, go for it.
Expecting people outside our industry to have as much interest in browser technology is about as fair as my insurance agent expecting me to have as much interest in the ins and outs of insurance as he does. I only care about the amount of coverage, the deductible, the slip of paper that goes into my glove compartment, and how much I have to pay a year. Everything else is just yappity-yap from some suit who’s interrupting my work day, trying to show me pages of boring legalese. That’s how we look to most end users.
…is that sometimes, what with all the things that need to be done, all the learning that goes along with them and the pace at which they need to be done, it feels like this:
Whoo!
Accordion City’s mayoral election is on October 25th, which makes mayoral candidate Adam Giambrone’s admission to an “inappropriate relationship” incredibly premature. This is the sort of thing we wanted to hear about in the summer!
I have to hand it to the Toronto Star for the photo that accompanies their article on Giambrone’s announcement. It’s wonderfully constructed, with its sly suggestions of both “Giambrone sandwich” and the Madonna-whore complex:
The local media already have already had a wild ride in reporting Giambrone’s attachment status. They’ve already erroneously reported that he was gay, and then married, rather than “long-time-partnered”. After this revelation, that final report might have to be corrected as well.
The Toronto Star’s article is an amusing read, full of fun facts, including:
I agree with Dr. Nelson Wiseman, political science prof at the University of Toronto quoted in Posted Toronto’s piece on the subject: this scandal will affect Adam’s personal life more than his campaign. As chair of the Toronto Transit Commission, the cold war between the rapid transit system’s workers and its passengers is far more likely to cost him votes.
Photo courtesy of Certified Bullshit Technician.
Perhaps you’ve seen the photo above floating about the internet. It turns out that the billboard is real and that it’s not mere Photoshoppery. You’ll find it on I-35 near Wyoming, Minnesota.
If you really miss him, you can go catch his keynote at the National Grocers Association and Supermarket Synergy Showcase, which takes place February 9th through 12th at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas.
Photo from James Fallows’ blog at The Atlantic’s site.
Yes, the yoga mats are going to be used in Port-au-Prince’s overcrowded hospitals, but this sign found in San Francisco’s Marina area (if you’re ashamed of its yuppie/douchebag factor, you call it “Cow Hollow”) just seems so delightfully San Francisco. If you’ve ever lived there – I did, back during The Bubble — you know what I mean.