Google Calendar, Firebug, Simplenote, Notational Velocity, Google Reader, TextMate, Synergy. I’ve written about most of these. And then there’s Xmarks, the cross-platform, cross-browser, cloud-based bookmarks synchronization app we’ve all come to know and love. It’ll be discontinued as of January 10th, 2011. Awesome.

Citing budget issues and a lack of any viable business model in his blog post, Xmarks CTO Todd Agulnick cites the difficulty of competing with native sync features in Firefox and Google Chrome:

[W]ith the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs.

Which, you know, sounds understandable and all, but man…

The really unfortunate thing for me is that their competition doesn’t compete all the way. There isn’t currently another good way for me to handle bookmarks synchronization between Chrome, Firefox, and my iPhone–and 90 days is not a lot of time to get one up and running.

But all may not totally be lost! From the Xmarks shutdown FAQ:

Q: What about open source? Would you consider releasing the client?
A: We are still considering this option and may release one or more clients as open source in the future if we can identify a maintainer.

Is that you? If so, please save my Xmarks. Seriously.

Yeah! I tore my rotator cuff¹ doing extreme sports.

“It’s a good thing you wore your loosest possible jeans to work then, isn’t it? Really tight ones would make going to the bathroom really, really difficult.”

It sure would. Dammit.

1. Yes, again.

This particular BC Liquor Store is located in Vancouver’s classiest shopping establishment, Kingsgate Mall. Home to the Worst Washroom in Canada,¹ Kingsgate also features stores that sell knockoff swords, hooker boots and hospital scrubs, as well as a Shoppers Drug Mart, which is usually the sole reason I go in there.² Also, sometimes Payless stocks Catherine-sized shoes. Mostly not.

On a side note, I was just buying a replacement bottle of vodka–my previous one having gone to a good cause: lowering the collective IQ of Vancouver’s Twitter community by about 2%. So this was more of an errand than anything likely to get my 2-day chip taken away.³

Being a smart shopper, I generally avoid buying alcohol in the evening because, well, who wants to be waiting in line for 15 minutes? Exactly: bored people.

While standing there, being told by a variety of drunk, jonesing, toothless and urine-smelling people that my hair, hat, paintbrush case and eyes were pretty, I noticed a display in the “impulse purchase” rack promoting Woodbridge cabernet.

The first thing that struck me about this display was not that it was positioned where the gum and Archie comics are supposed to be, but rather that it appeared that some of the other people in line with me had been given a copy of CorelDraw and hired to make wine ads.

I’m actually not really sure where to start. At some point, I’m sure there was a designer, art director, photographer, the whole deal. Sadly, it appears something happened on the way to the printers’. (“I said ‘creative’! Throw some more fonts in there!”)

Possibly the stock photo of the man and woman enjoying ham and pineapple with root beer floats is not the most representative image of “any evening” with “6 friends”, but hey, it looks like a really good ham, yeah?

I do like the fact that the inexplicably wordy “Enter to Win” bubble communicates its relation to the prizes mentioned in the ad’s footer by totally overlapping some of the text with its drop shadow. Pretty effective, right?

In fairness to Woodbridge, Robert Mondavi, and their staff of talented media professionals, the “ENTER TO WIN the following prizes!” bubble does implicate the importer, Vincor Canada. I do also get that $11.50 wine that comes with a chance to win prizes is unlikely to have its reputation besmirched too unduly by some bad drop shadows. However, I don’t think I can forgive the “yes, we’re using Arial” copy:

6 friends
any evening
2 hours enjoying the conversation
1 bottle of Woodridge BY ROBERT MONDAVI

You know, it’s not terrible. That sounds like a pretty good evening, actually. Fun times, am I right? Er, wait, what? One bottle? How big is it? Are we sure this wine actually comes in a bottle?

750mL, 13.0% alcohol.

I see: 750mL. Not being a huge wine drinker, I was a little confused, as this sounds to me like a fairly small amount. In fact, I can recall sharing a single bottle of wine with only one other person. Maybe I am an alcoholic. Is that one of the definitions?

So what gives? The LCBO, Ontario’s counterpart to BC Liquor Stores, describes a “standard” glass of wine as being 5 US fluid ounces (147.9mL) and a 750mL bottle as containing 5 glasses of wine. In fact, the LCBO goes further, providing a handy “Party Calculator” that estimates a more reasonable volume of wine for “6 friends” to chug back whilst “enjoying the conversation for 2 hours” is four bottles.

Sweet. I knew I wasn’t some kind of insane lush. Ad writers: you’re clearly there anyway. Make sure you run your marketing copy by the line at your local liquor or wine store. It’s important.

1. During my sole visit, I was able to accurately discern the height of one of the previous visitors to the stall. Think about that.
2. Shoppers Drug Mart is awesome.
3. Intervention averted!

Frankly, in a thousand years, when Pride has become all mixed up with St Patrick’s Day and everyone carries a genetically engineered blue cucumber because that’s traditional, the origin of the day’s name–whatever that may be by then–is just going to be a weird bit of trivia mentioned on the news on years when they need holiday filler.

So there.

While otherwise a competent, irritatingly underfunded news organization, the CBC sucks at infographics. Most of their “interactive features” are just text that requires a lot of clicking and scrolling to read. That’s not “interactive”, guys. That’s “broken”. (In fairness, a lot of these come from the Canadian Press, which presumably also supplies these horrible clicky things to the two other^[1] Canadian news organizations.)

But I digress. A tad.

Yeah, that’s a shame.

This graph of the depressing failure that is Northern Telecom is pretty good because it ties news and events to stock price over time. There’s still ridiculous amounts of clicking on tiny little dots though. Mouseover, anyone?

(In fairness, there are at least forward/back buttons.)

I find it really bizarre that the two most effective “interactive” features on CBC’s website are both incredibly morbid: a “where did people find feet washed up on beaches?” map, and a map of gang hits in Metro Vancouver. (Wow, that map certainly makes the Downtown East Side look quiet. “DTES: Too poor for gang-bangers.”)

Both of these, predictably, use Google Maps, and colour-code the different categories of event at that location. (“Raccoon paw hoax” or “stabbing”, for example.) This conveys a decent amount of information without having to select the icon to view additional details. However, you still do have to click the thing to find out anything more.

I will say, though, that the effectiveness of both of these horrible death maps could be improved by taking time and date into account: personally, I want to see how long ago those people down the street got murdered in their attic. I mean, really, now. (I remember seeing a Google Maps mashup that did this, with a slider at the bottom. Can anyone help me out with a URL?)

The New York Times, on the other hand, takes online infographics to a whole new level, rivaling the quality of their print features. I’ll explain more about this in 30 minutes.

[1] Yes, seriously. (Stupid Conrad Black. Stupid CRTC.)

I know a few of my neighbours:

• There’s the autistic tween two doors down who throws extremely loud temper tantrums.
• There’s the students on the other side of my house, one of whom once dated a guy who was extremely emotional during sex, to her irritation: “I just love you so much.” “Yeah, whatever.”
• My upstairs neighbour and her teenage son, whom I do see and speak to regularly, are nice: she plays golf, he likes video games. Their (great-) uncle lives down the street in what I suspect is the first house to be built on that lot. Vancouver is an extremely new city, remember.
• I don’t know the guys next door, but they always have very entertaining conversations in Mandarin. One of them frequently sings commercial jingles and Frank Sinatra medleys. They then argue about them. Once, he was playing a flute!

But this all brings me to my point. Today I was thinking about the fact that it’s actually kind of weird that I do know any of my neighbours’ names. Most of us don’t. We live in apartment buildings, or commute from the suburbs. My street definitely has more in common with the latter, with its stupid wasted space and identical “technically it’s a detached home” houses.

It’s not much, but the view’s amazing.

But worse, we all buy into it. Between my house and my neighbours’, identical to my own and built at the same time, there lies approximately 6 feet of space, more than half the width of my weird, narrow apartment. So what do we do with it? On my half, there’s a two-foot-wide path from the front of the house to the back, a foot of cedar chips, ending at a terrible, rusty chain-link fence. On theirs, the inverse. Only they have gravel instead of cedar chips.

Bravo, architects. Instead of having access to a fairly nice shared patio, allowing us to sit out in the cool breeze between the two houses, to barbeque, fix a bike, or do some windowbox gardening, we have an ugly fence dividing the space, forcing the addition of a buffer zone in the middle, lest we brush up against it and totally get rust particles all over our spiffy new bike’s handlebar tape. (Not that this happened to me recently or anything.)

By putting up a barrier and maintaining the fiction that we can’t actually smell each other’s dinner, we’ve wasted what amounts to an entire laneway. In some cities, there would be an actual street sign along a gap that wide between two buildings.

This is ridiculous, honestly. It’s time to stop catering to the idea that enclosing a chunk of lawn with a fence is a status symbol. Nobody is helped by this fence remaining here. The owners of our two houses don’t even live here. It’s not helping resale values. Anyone wanting to buy one of the properties and return it to a single-family home would incur tens of thousands of dollars of construction costs, only to be left at a disadvantage paying the mortgage. (Seriously, is there anyone in Vancouver who can afford to own a detached home and not rent out a suite?)

Without the fence, both units would have an extra amenity, appealing to renters. As tenants, we’d have more usable space. I could turn my bike around without having to lift it above my head or pick it up on the back wheel.

And most of all, maybe I’d actually talk to the guys across the fence sometime and ask them if they want any help settling the argument over the Sleep Country Canada jingle.

Other times, it’s due to my trademark life planning.

Consider the following scenario:

I stand in line for the self-checkout station at the Real Canadian Superstore in Metrotown^[2], holding a $4 bag of chips and nothing else. Superstore shoppers will note that this bag is going to end up weighing somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1-2kg. In my defense, I’m not allergic to potatoes. So it’s healthy.

Upon actually stepping up to the machine, I am prompted to enter the number of bags desired. Superstore shoppers will recall that part of their no-frills policy, they have a suckass website and charge 3 cents per plastic bag.

I select zero bags, pleased to see that whatever circulatory problem that prevents me from using touchscreen kiosks has temporarily reversed itself. Prompted to scan my item, I do so.

“Please place the item in the bag,” instructs the machine. I do not.

Instead, I toss my chips onto the bag-filling platform, triggering the weight sensor which tells the computer that an item has been added to… nothing, in this case. The machine prompts me to either scan my next item or to complete the sale. I briefly speculate about the number of people who bring their own reusuable bags to Superstore compared to the number of people who don’t want shopping bags because they’re buying the biggest possible bag of potato chips before deciding that it probably isn’t worth attempting to guess whether or not someone is living entirely on carbs and trans fats, just to see if they’re more likely to want to complete the transaction. Besides, I can’t immediately think of a way to make the “I am done and want to pay now” option any clearer.

Fortunately, the “paying” part goes well and only a modicum of grumbling and frowning is required.

[1] (Dude, please stop being offended that I won’t sit in the bus seat next to you. My legs don’t fit in there.)

[2] I am not afraid of Metrotown crowds because I can just push everyone out of my way and they’re usually too bewildered to do anything. Tragedy of the commons, bitches!

Firstly, I want to assure you I have nothing less than the utmost sympathy for what you are going through. I can certainly appreciate the sheer number of emotional and logistical challenges inherent in caring for a dog as large and as gravely ill as yours appears to be. On a more optimistic note, we can probably take your pet’s hearty appetite as a good sign.

However, I would like to remind you of the proportionate relationship between the height of very tall people (e.g. yours truly) and the size of one’s foot. This naturally corresponds to the area of the sole that contacts the ground. Also consider that height has a bearing on other values: weight, momentum, sprinting ability, fist size, et cetera.

Additionally, you may not be aware of the well-established correlation between time spent cleaning shoes (t) and emotional irritability (i). i increases exponentially as the value of t rises. I’m just saying.

In conclusion, please buy a snow shovel and clean up after your dog, jerkface.