This Monday Sucks a Little Less

Some times Mondays just suck, don't they? Probably where they expression "Having a case of the Mondays" comes from. As a "fun" exercise, if you type in "mondays sucks" into Google you get about 130 000 000 (130 million) results. No try typing in "fridays sucks" and you're presented with a measly 5 370 000 results.

In fact...

Because I love statistics and will take any excuse to make a chart of any kind, here's a handy chart depicting the amount of "sucks" for every day of the week, so illustrate how much Mondays suck more than any other day of the week.

Fun fact, Monday is pretty tightly followed by Thursday.. I didn't expect that but I suppose it makes sense in a Western work week sort of way.

I wonder if xkcd has ever done this joke?

So why am I bringing this up? Well, because despite the fact that Mondays clearly "statistically" speaking sucks more than any other day, this Monday sucks significantly less. Why? Because of coffee of course, my dear readers.

Today my "long" — and by "long" I mean it got blended/roasted/shipped last Wednesday, but I am a very impatient man — awaited coffee arrived in our mailbox. Many thanks to everyone at eightpointnine, and more so to Kris and Jess. Now I want to make some things clear right of the bat. I am a single estate kind of coffee drinker. I don't want my delicious beans blended and diluted to form an incoherent drink that lacks character. That hasn't changed one tiny bit, it's just how I like my coffee not to say that there's anything wrong with liking blends or anything. It's just a personal preference.

But if I were to prefer blends over single estate coffee, by God I would order it from eightpointnine.com. The reason I felt the need to point out my liking of single estate isn't because I am a pompous buffoon, it's because I have tried many blends and never liked a single one. It's always been something too wrong with them to make me want to include them in my repertoire of beans. I think I'm inclined to change my mind now, or at the very least, consider the fact that "Yeah, I could add a blend to my repertoire".

Itella however should really get their shit together.

The verdict: Wonderful sweetness. Excellent mouth-feel. Appropriate acidity (I like mine less). The figs had more of a side role, which is where I like my figs. The caramel-y butterscotch-y-ness was quite present through and through, very nice. The only drawback is the lack of character that I suspect is a bit of a curse and blessing with blends, for comparison I can easily recall the flavour profile of Monsooned Malabar even though it's been months since I drank any. I can imagine "forgetting" the profile of this coffee because it doesn't give me a tangible note to hang on to. But at the same time I am already wanting to have another cup of it. So maybe the lack of character is balanced out by it's stability in flavour instead. Because this feels like a consistent coffee. Having said all of that I am giving this a 4+ out of 5.

For those interested, my personal blend — You can design your own blend — consists of 96% Colombian, 2% Brazilian and 2% Costa Rican and packs a rich mouth-feel and sweetness to it. Eightpointnine recommends having a coffee-to-water ratio of .055 when brewing coffee, which is definitely a good ratio but I like mine at .066. Which means instead of 16,5 grams to 300 grams of water I use 19,8 grams. But out of curiosity I am going to try their ratio too.

Eightpointnine doesn't ship internationally.. yet. But as soon as they do, you owe it to yourself to try them out. You can even get the first box for free using either of these codes (8PT9FREE or GQ94BTN) so you what are you waiting for?

...right.. international shipping. Unless you live in the UK, in which case. Go! Order now! Let me know, what you thought?

Sssh, They Might See Me

Journal, part I

I'm preparing for night two in this foreign land. I feel pretty confident at this stage that the local population had been made aware of my presence, despite my best efforts to conceal it. Fear not though dear readers as I have figured out the patterns by which they move and with the secret to blendning in.

It appears many of them use a sort of sub terrainial form of transportation, referred to by the local population as "ndrgrnd". And when using this transportation they all appear very.. well.. bored for lack of a better word, trying all forms of entertainment whilst in "transit" such as reading newspapers or listening to "music". It is in these observations that I have made my discovery, which I shall call "Carlosian Stealth", after it's great inventor.. me.

By appearing as indifferent as the local population I have managed to blend in, become one of them. Or so I hope because I can only imagine what would happen to me should they ever find out that I am not truly one of them. I may have tasted their local cuisine (an odd sausage looking thing with beans on the side, that I hope to never have to endure again) and walked amongst them but I have not yet become as they seem to call a... "Lndner".

As night falls I have taken refuge in my temporary shelter for I dare not try to walk amongst them at night. With time I will most likely be forced to venture out at night as well, but for now I have managed to make due with the supplies at hand.

Only time will tell... only time.

End of Journal, part I

Up, Up And Away

Next week will be very exciting. On Wednesday evening I am flying to the UK for an interview on Thursday. Obviously I don't know how things will go yet, but I am very (very) excited about the prospect of landing a job in the UK before we move there. Oh, right, I don't remember if I mentioned that. We are moving to the UK regardless of my employment status. Besides, so far most of the rejections I have received have been based purely on the fact that I (and we) don't already live in the UK. Which tells me it shouldn't be that hard to get a job, aside for the recession and high unemployment, for me it's mostly been about geographical location. Which is easily rectified. Which is why we (as the collective whole) have decided that we will move regardless, according to our own schedule were are "out of here!" by the end of April, but obviously if I get a job before that, we will move before that.

I have never before noticed how many of my sentences start with "Which", I wonder if I do that a lot or if it's just a fluke that the three previous sentences started like that. Hmm.. maybe I  could research that with a word scanning algorithm of some sort? Oh, the things I do.. "For Science!".

Ahem, the side-stepping aside, point of this post is that I am excited, and whilst I am going for a casual and cool "Orlando Bloom"-ish excited look I am pretty certain I come across as more of a "Small Randomly Googled Giddy Girl with Crudely Photoshopped Rainbow Shooting Out Of Brain".. ish.. look. You get the point, right?

Interesting side fact, both of these pictures were a result of me typing in "excited" into Google's Image search. I use the term "interesting" very loosely, it's more of a "interesting" in the same manner as observing the current weather is interesting.. as opposed to "Oh, my god, this hot-dog is the awesome-est hot-dog I have ever eaten! I can't breath for how awesome this hot-dog is"^[1] -interesting.

[1]. Eddie Izzard in his Stand Up Special "Circle".

Continue?

The short teaser for the musical "Continue", a dear friend of mine is in it so of course I have to make a quick post about it. I hadn't actually been that excited about the musical — despite my general love for theatre — but now I am feeling like I should arrange time to go see it. And hey, maybe you should too?




Check out their blog for more information about schedules and purchasing tickets.. or just because you're curious.

Footnote: This post is not endorsed by anyone associated with the musical "Continue". I just write about things because I think they're kewl.

Three Point Three

I just finished updating our NHL Stats website to 3.3. What does that mean I hear you ask? Awesomeness a plenty, that's what.. and to shed some light on the matter here's a couple of new features (long awaited mind you) that has managed to finally become a part of our intricate obsessive statistical analysis.

 - "All Stats" added, including (not available anywhere else) statistics like e.g. Away/Home Win Ratios and Shots Against/Game. All of them displayed nicely in sortable tables, made possible by Stuart Langridge's sorttable.js.

 - "Edit Match" added

 - "In the Zone" indicator added. The player's avatar becomes entangled with mathematical symbols one hour every day to signal that this is the hour when the player has won most of their games. Edit: Thanks to beije for guiding me in the right direction when I was trying to extrapolate the new data (number of wins correlating to time stamp) from our db, GROUP BY is the shit in this case!

 - Rank symbol "Unranked" added

Imagine That My Rank Is Higher

Today I thought I would talk to you about ranks.. and more specifically about rank symbols, like the ones used by the army and many games that feature an online multiplayer competitive component. Is this relevant to my thoughts on the subject matter? Well, for the most part it's not but both of them did serve as inspiration when redesigning our ranks and their respective symbols.

But first for a little back story for those who don't know the back story. Back in September when we launched our NHL Statistics Website (we still haven't figured out a catchy name) there were 17 ranks with Titles, divided over 5 classes. They, in turn, were visualized by different shield colours for classes and Roman numerals and letters to signify specific ranks. I won't list all of the titles but here's some examples and a complementary picture to better illustrate my example.

As "Drafting Potential", the rank you start at, you would have a Silver shield and a rank "symbol" of IV-A, fourth (IV) class from the top, and first (A) within that class. As "Defensive Leader" III-C you would have a Gold shield and of course third (III) class from the top and third (C) within that class.

You get the idea I hope?

Problem with this was, mostly, was that although very clear and to the point, it was boring and too reminiscent of Finnish beer's tax classes.

So, for update 3.1 the "symbols" were rethought into actual (non quotation required) symbols. So instead of D you get 1 chevron (insignia), C becomes 2 chevrons, B becomes 3 chevrons and A becomes a star. The colour of the shield tells which class you are in.

Now this seems pretty fine doesn't it? Assuming you are accustomed to the basic in military ranks, it makes a lot of sense that 3 chevrons are better than 1, but a star triumphs them both. There is one glaring problem though as one of our more active players commented on and rightfully so. In the picture above it's pretty cut-and-dry... in the picture above, everyone is in the same class. In reality we're not all in the same class. And as the previously mentioned player commented, "One might not necessarily know that the reddish-brown shade represents Bronze, and if one doesn't understand the relationship between e.g. the colours Bronze and Silver (reddish-brown and medium grey) then you have now way of telling which is better."

Obviously Silver is better than than Bronze, but it's not obvious through the colours alone. Never mind the fact that people usually don't have calibrated displays anyway and as such there's no way to ensure the colours come out right.

So.. back to the drawing board for update 3.2. The chevrons were and are a good way to visualize various ranks, but they needed to be expanded so that every rank had its own symbol, rather than reusing the same four symbols over and over again. Taking much more inspiration from the Halo series ranks and various military ranks we (me and Mr. Cruise) threw some ideas around and ended up with this.

A very quick sketch, but an outline of our ideas nonetheless. The basic concept being that of a linear progression in rank symbols. Some element needs to be reoccurring so that one can compare any rank within a class to any other rank within another class. One should be able to tell the relationship between symbols without shield colours. We also expanded the original 17 ranks to 24 ranks, to even out the lower end of the spectrum which was sorely lacking in ranks and added a new class under Bronze called Blood. Blood is meant to symbolize that everyone is making you bleed through defeat as well as serve as a warning colour that your rank is very low.

After this sketch I jumped to Illustrator and started tinkering with various symbols, one including a 7-point star that got scrapped later on. In the end, this is what we ended up with.

Much better wouldn't you agree? And because we also calculate statistics for some recent activities such as "recent win ratio" and "recent passing average", recent based on the 13 latest games I also designed a symbol for "Unranked" players, that is, player who have less than a total of 13 games. The rank symbols and shields are all designed in Illustrator for that vector-y goodness, then imported into Photoshop for final adjustments and preparing them for web use.

 Before this it was too easy to confuse an intermediately ranked player with a new player, because both are likely to be titled "Drafting Potential". A limitation in part because of how the Elo rating system is designed and because we decided against having two systems, one rank rating and one experience rating. Although we have three slots for Career Trophies, trophies which can only be achieved through active playing. So I suppose that's something.

I think that will be all of my rank-ramblings for this time. Any questions? Don't hesitate to comment. And in the meantime I will grace you with a preview of update 3.3, adding the much requested, sortable statistics tables. Featuring statistics that aren't available anywhere else, mostly because of lack of space. The cards are pretty crammed with information already.

The Frustrations of Web Design

Yes, it's been quite a while. And this will alas not be a very long post. So basically here's the short long story..

Got some very nice feedback on my website, and some not so nice.. well actually.. the feedback was still nice, the website, not so much. Yes, it was a bit rushed — coincidently the revised version turned a bit rushed at the end too — and so I it didn't scale very well. In fact, it didn't scale at all. Browsing on pretty much anything smaller than 1680x1050 cut parts of the content of and you couldn't scroll. A pretty piss poor web design job from a web designer in other words. So what did I learn from that? A lot as it turns out. But mostly the importance of planning, as always. So I decided to revise my website, which in this case meant, more or less starting over from scratch, as far as coding was concerned. So I did, with a clear goal in mind. I had to be responsive — a bit of a buzzword I know — and it had to be more awesome. So what was my glorious battle plan you ask? Simple.

Re-design it so that Fiinix Design will scale and flow from the smallest of handheld (but mostly smart phones) to the largest of FullHD desktop displays.

Design it so it will also scale in that particular order.. from small to large. Many responsive design advocates show you how to add media-queries so that a website will scale down and re-position itself, hiding elements as the viewport shrinks. My idea (but I am not alone in this idea) was to design a website that scales up instead. Add things, like a huge background image whenever the viewport is so big that the added http request is negligible.

If you can't see it, you shouldn't have to load it. I forbade myself from using display: none anywhere.
Use as much semantic HTML as possible. Use things like Adjacent Sibling Selectors to target elements instead of classes and id's.

I also considered using SVG images wherever possible, but the size difference was minimal^[1] and at least my smart phones browser doesn't seem to support SVG. But I will keep my eyes open for it anyway. If there's support enough for it, the increased quality is reason alone to make the transition.

A part of the base grid was built from the foundation of the work of Andy Taylor, kudos to him, although not much remains of his code.

So, how did my plan pan out? Pretty nicely actually, apart from the IE's refusal to work with min-width's and such, rectified using Scott Jehl's awesomely light respond.js and some minor hiccups I still have to resolve like my hosts iframe versus something. I'm going to test it on other mobiles too, like Windows Phone 7 (please, beije?) and Iphone 4 but.. well.. so far, so good.

For those of you how are curious, the address is as usual fiinixdesign.eu, but for mobile users you are going to have to go straight to http://asphinx.danmed.co.uk/ until I have resolved whatever the issue is.

1. 43.3 KB for an SVG image versus 47.4 KB for a web-optimized PNG. SVGZ clocked in at a minuscule 17.6 KB but I couldn't even get it to show up in Firefox.