Time for a personal post. I play Call of Duty 4. I was elated to find out that it actually beat out Halo 3 in popularity (yes, I know Halo came back on top, just let me revel) for Xbox Live in the month of January. It was also the best selling game for 2007. In honor such wonderful news, I will share this video mash-up taken from the WOW Southpark Episode, now revamped for the COD4 peeps.

I am all googly over the HD capabilities from Vimeo. Not only is is it great to watch, but they’ve made their embed/share code customizable so I can color some of the titles, etc to match my site. If only I had an HD camera…here’s a taste.

Now, I was hoping that when I embedded the video here in my post you would be able to preview it in HD without going to the site, but it looks like they restrict the HD feature to their site. It showed up all artifacted etc, so I took it off. I guess that’s my only complaint.

Update: Welcome to the world of copy & paste, here’s the player in it’s original HD form…enjoy …forget it.

Chalk this one right up there with the prohibition in the “laws that utterly fail” category. An old baseball document from 1897 has been dug up and it’s intention was to outlaw foul language (pun intended) amongst the players. It cites specific phrases used by players of that era. I won’t repeat any of them for you, just know that I did laugh out loud when I read them. Amazing how bad language seems to have not aged a bit…yes, after a couple weeks of no posts, this is what I came up with.

You can now text your pizza orders to Papa Johns. Interesting idea, and I am sure Domino’s & Pizza Hut will follow suit shortly. Basically, create up to 4 “favorite orders” in your Papa Johns online account, and text the string “FAV1″ etc. You will receive a confirmation back on your phone, and your delivery & payment info is stored online. Never again will you have to talk to a living person to order pizza. Now, if only they could get moving on building the army of robot pizza delivery guys.

A great list of mock taglines from Guardedly Optimistic. For example, “McDonald’s: Always a good idea. Until afterwards.” I’ve found myself craving a quarter pounder all too often and regretting it later on.

Looks like Jon beat me to it, but I’ll just tell you that Vector Magic is a great resource for converting your pixel images to vector, especially if you don’t have access to some of the expensive Adobe Suite tools.

It was bound to come up sooner or later, someone asked me to make a change to their web site which included the infamous “…blah blah blah, Click here” linked text. In my scramble to find the best counter, I stumbled upon this article from Dey Alexander Consulting. I thought the arguments were well articulated and straight to the point.

It’ s amazing that this is still as prevalent as it is. It would be pretty funny if we went shopping, and inside every store at the cash register you saw a sign that said “Pay Here” (Wait, I think I have seen that). Do we need that sign? I’m hoping the idea of underlined text colored differently than it’s surrounding paragraph is as common as the cash register one day. Oh, I almost forgot, if you are expecting your site to be accessed considerably from any mobile device the idea of “click” is non-existent, there isn’t even a mouse.

Makemylogobiggercream has to be one of the best parodies I have seen in a while. Comes from the folks at Agency Fusion. It’s a little long, but well, there’s a lot it covers. A particularly enjoyed the emotionator rub down scene, and the resulting design enhancements. Why do people associate bigger logo’s with a successful design?

Talented designer Jeff Croft & Life’s Charlie Crews look surprisingly alike. Feel free to create your own details.

Luke Wroblewski has written a concise 2 part article on form design at User Interface Engineering. I recommend reading the entire thing, but the 15 main points are useful enough to include here. Use them as a filter whenever you are going to create forms for your site or application.

1. Don’t hide forms when you want people to complete them.
2. Be explicit about what each form is for.
3. Use smart defaults whenever possible.
4. Don’t treat customers like records in a database.
5. Always present messages in context.
6. Make sure key messages are prioritized visually on each form.
7. Always give people a way to easily recover from errors.
8. Be vigilant about keeping the data people enter into your forms.
9. Explain why you are asking for data that may not seem relevant.
10. When input fields have a high potential for errors, consider providing inline validation.
11. Visually distinguish errors from the rest of a form.
12. Remove any unnecessary inputs.
13. Illuminate a clear path to form completion.
14. Remove secondary actions whenever possible.
15. Emphasize calls to action that lead to success (form completion.).