Want a big, techy, pixelated fireplace for your bedroom or office? Maybe your kitchen? Doesn’t matter. Nothing says winter like 8-bit warmth.

Take my word for it: go download Fireplace now. It’s available for Mac OSX or Windows. You can type words to interact with your new fireplace, or you can just chill and watch the logs burn to ashes (which takes about a half hour). My suggestion, however, is to play with the commands. Try these:

log
match
marshmallow
smore
eat
hotdog
fireworks
photo
paper
water

Nerdtastic fun. If you don’t agree, you might be broken.

Have a safe and happy new year, everyone!

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

Let’s be very clear: what makes this video funny isn’t the incident involving Gerard Depardieu on a plane, it’s how Anderson Cooper can’t stop laughing at his show notes and reaction from his production crew.

Impossible to watch this and not laugh yourself.

(Thx IdentityPR)

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

InFocus Labs recently ran a contest in which it asked its social community to send in the worst PPT slides they’ve ever seen:

Our “What Not to Present” contest was epic! Many thanks to all of you kind folks that submitted entries and spread the word about it. Many amazingly horrendous slides were sent in from all around the world. We laughed. We cried. We cringed.

Some of these are just awesome, if only for their sheer degree of obfuscation, complexity and nightmarish design.  Here are two examples (click each to enlarge):

Be sure to see all the submissions here.

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

Simple question for you today:  when typing, how many spaces do you put between sentences?

If you’re like me, you said two.  However, Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has a nice rant about the topic, and it’s sure to spark some debate.

Or maybe there’s really not much to debate?

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It’s one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men’s shirt buttons on the right and women’s on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period.

So technically speaking, and as far as the style guides are concerned, one space is the correct method.  So why in the world I did I learn two spaces after a period (and colon)?

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read.

Oh.  That explains it.  Back in typing class in 9th grade, we learned on archaic, heavy, industrial typewriters tucked away in the coldest, grayest classroom in my school.  Everything, naturally, was monospaced Courier.  So if you wanted your paper to look halfway readable, you double-spaced after periods and colons.  And you also didn’t get hit by the mean nuns patrolling the aisles.

But even if the modern rule is one space, here’s the problem: at 41 years old, some 27 years into my official typing habits, typing one space after a period is nearly impossible.  I habitually use two spaces.  There.  I just did it again – two times! – after my last two periods.  It’s a muscle memory thing.

The fact is it would take me longer to unlearn the two space rule than it’s worth.  Many modern applications – browsers, etc. – remove extra spaces automatically.  Bad habits are accounted for and quietly censored.

A few times a year, an article like Manjoo’s comes along and preaches the purity and correctness of the one-space rule.  And I get religion.  Then, after trying to type something using only one space between sentences, I find myself going back and removing the extra spaces my highly-trained, mildly spastic thumbs automatically put in.  Then everything starts getting confusing, I get frustrated, and I have to play a quick game of Z-Type before I settle down and admit maybe I can’t unring my two-space bell.

Is it OK to be wrong if you’ve been taught to be wrong by mean Catholic nuns who brandished rulers like swords?

I hope so, because that’s the only excuse I have.  Space space.  Do you get what I’m saying?

(Thx to Jim P. for the link)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More opinion posts.

If you’re looking out the window and seeing the same winter mess I am, you’re probably thinking that now would be a great time for a nice typographic animation with a positive message.

Funny you should mention that.

Make it better from Sebastianbap on Vimeo.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More oddity posts.

The BBC’s The One Ronnie channels Monty Python’s cheese shop sketch and succeeds wildly:

(Thx Jim)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More humor posts.

Here’s a time-lapse video of a 20-hour blizzard compressed into 40 seconds. How quickly the snow accumulates on the tabletop is surreal. Also, I love the way the videographer takes the time to keep the clock face unobstructed as the snow piles up.

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

When you attach a small GoPro Hero camera to the tip of a sword and then swing it around a bunch, it’s bizarre.  Here, bizarre means it looks as if the sword is swinging the world around it’s axis: the swordsman, the room, everything.

Amazing.

(Via kottke)

Here is the greatest letter ever printed on NFL letterhead, written by the Cleveland Browns in response a fan who was angry about the then-popular paper airplane craze and threatened litigation.  This was in 1974.

Just read it.

Those were the days when  you said what you meant.  Can you imagine this happening today?  Answer: no, you cannot.

Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners has updated his perfect martini recipe.  Why is this important?  Because he considers this recipe scripture and does not tinker with it unless the change is of utmost importance.

Read the original, then read the modification.

And the kicker?  You have nearly a whole week before debuting this at your New Year’s Eve party.  Win.

(Via Gruber)