The Jehovah’s Witnesses near here (rural Southern Oregon) are great people — at least the ones we know are. They support each other and come around about once a month to proselytize. In this area they are well organized, well respected, and stubborn. They travel in a group — at least 3 or 4 adults in a car. One one of them gets out and socializes, usually — the others are there “just in case”. One of the guys on our road has been put on a “do not visit” list, we are told, for profanity and consistent rudeness.

I …

I’ve recently been working on a site where the owner wanted to put an audio clip on the site, and solicit questions from the visitors so he could answer them in an audio clip (podcast). The site’s coming along fine. The place to go to set up an audio clip is Audio Generator. It’s a fairly inexpensive monthly service. They also host the audio clips and provide the code to play them with various start/stop/fast forward/rewind buttons. There are probably programs that would let someone do this for free, but this is quite a clever system that the “non-technical” …

Every once in a while, this deeply politically divided state of Oregon comes up with a winner. This article on the UPI wire service about a Federal case here in Oregon caught my attention as one such win. U.S. District Judge Garr King is quoted as telling the US attorneys:

“To the extent it can be done without compromising national security interests, a litigant has a right to know the legal and factual positions being taken by the government so they can respond to them.”

Maybe he is just grandstanding, but he won’t let the Feds keep …

Last night, magically, while walking along a ranch road lit only by the starlight trying to retrieve a lost kitty, we discovered that our ranch has glow-worms. There were so many it was like discovering a whole new set of constellations under our feet.

The kitty was waiting for us when we got home.

In

Normally I don’t put a lot of credence in Jakob Nielsen’s studies and observations about the web. Most of them strike me as academic or utterly impractical. Today’s article, F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) however, has some useful info. People looking at web pages, according to this article, scan them in an F-shaped pattern, first two horizontal stripes, then one vertical stripe down left side. About what you’d expect. I’ll need to use this when designing sites, by putting the main info on the page in that pattern..

CATS (Citizens for an Alternative Tax Service) is another group working to abolish the IRS. They have been at it sine 1990. There are about 300 local chapters of CATS across the US. If you are American and resent our unfair, insane and unweildy tax system, they are the group for you.

Well, if yesterday were not a holiday (Good Friday) and today were not the weekend (Saturday) today would be tax day. Instead we have until Monday to pay our annual tax bill.

If you think you’ve got it bad (and you do!) then consider the case of two well-to-do Texans, a husband and wife, who made $735,180 and paid federal income tax of $187,768. That’s a hefty chunk of change (about 25% of their actual income) coming out of their pocket as tax. And who are these two Texans? George W and Laura Bush, as reported by the NY …

I have been seeking to implement this policy: “Look, don’t think”. It generally takes longer to look than it does to think. It requires (for me) more effort to go look something up, to check it, to find the reference I need. Thinking (among other things) is an effort to confront something without actually looking at it.

So I’ve been looking harder at what we do for our clients at Words in a Row when we build and optimize websites, or perform marketing of one kind or another, so that we aren’t doing things just for the sake …

The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order – New York Times. So much for “Home Fries” — MacDonalds Restaurants are initiating a program to have a remote call center field your request for a Big Mac. It won’t be too long before those minimum wages McJobs disappear overseas. Coming soon? Thick Indian accent: “Hello? And how may we be helping you today? … Will you be wanting fries with that? Now we will be thanking you very much…”