Remember how everyone was so worried about people rising against Muslims after 9/11? Regular Americans were well behaved…unlike this Muslim American guy.

Some pictures of really hot girls who almost all look the same. I would rank them: Puerto Rico, China, Japan, Singapore, Korea, Israel.

Aside: what’s the the Israeli girl’s picture? She looks like she took a Hezbollah rocket to the stomach.

It is critical humanity understands issues like DHMO. We must study what underlies the DHMO problem and use what we learn to address other environmental issues.

Great for simple, commodity solutions, but terrible for end users. The plain fact of the matter is that software is not expensive considering all the design, testing and usability refinement that goes into a professional product.

There is no burning desire for open-source TVs. The same holds true for desktop operating systems. Goodbye OpenDarwin.

Mickey Kaus derides social elitism. Encouraging people to seek a greater number of skills leads to increased social inequality–the upper echelons can sacrifice time to gain skills and education.

Japan’s apparent version of the discovery channel pits a bullet against a Katana:

Somehow, I don’t think terrorists will start abandoning their rockets for swords…

Americans have grown accustomed to loose purses and low interest rates. We buy houses with no money down, interest only and on adjustable rates. We put thousands of dollars on our credit cards buying every toy we never needed. This will change.

The world is shifting away from the dollar hegemony. China un-pegged its currency to the dollar. Japan is finally overcoming deflation. Both are buying fewer dollars–and more Euros.

What will this mean? Inflation. A hard dollar. High interest rates. Repossessed homes. Bad times. Start saving now.

How many babies can you see?
If you ask me,
I see…three.

ht. Alas, the sad reality in which we live.

I agree with Slate: HeadOn has the best advertisement< I have ever seen. Listening to their sledgehammer sales pitch, I just laughed and laughed and laughed. Then I laughed some more reading the article. A+ indeed!

HeadOn: Apply Directly to the Forehead.

Usability is very important to me. It is something I harp about all day long at work, much to the malign of my coworkers. I am sure they know a few of Tog’s Pandemic Bugs by heart; I throw them around enough.

I am a firm believer that:

1. All designs have a correct user interface.
2. People who create software have the responsibility to argue about what that correct user interface is.
3. Preferences are what result when people do not think things through, or cannot clearly articulate why a solution is correct

Germans researchers meekly concluded that navigation bars belong on the right side of the page. They actually didn’t conclude that, but the evidence is right there. This study, done in 2003, shows that–once acquainted with the change–users perform better when content is on the left, structure on the right (I assume this would be reversed for Arabic and Hebrew).

Why is this better? Because we read from left to right. When menus are on the right, the content can be left-aligned, the start of each line unaltered by meta-data. A user can scan the data using a constant for the start of each line. With menus and other meta-content on the left, the starting point of each line varies; the user has to scan for the location of each line’s start point. Edge detection, although humans are incredibly adept at this, is geometrically more complicated than using a constant.

Compounding this, putting menus on the left increases the amount of data near the start of each line. All of this data (menus, logos, pictures, advertisements…) displayed next to the desired content increases the noise of the visual field. The user must actively ignore all this extra content to separate out the wheat from the chaff; this takes time.

Although this is the first time I have thought consciously about why contextual information belongs on the left side of the screen, I felt this way from the very beginning of my blogging. My first customization: moving the calendar to the right side of the page.