I remember back in 2001 I was working at military contract firm with Josh Mondragon. Back then, I got all my news and did all my web searches from my.yahoo.com. One day, looking over Josh’s shoulder I saw Google.com for the first time.

What value could that site possibly be? There’s nothing on it! There’s no information, no news, no weather, no cute customizable layout. Just a dorky logo and a search form. How worthless is that?!

Then, I started using Google when my searches on Yahoo didn’t find what I was looking for. Then I noticed how remarkablly fast Google was. Within a week, “google” had become a new verb in my lexicon. Within a month, Google was my new default home page.

There’s more to Google than fast searches. There’s something that draws people to simple design. I found an article a while back that compared Yahoo and Google over time, as Google moved from a garage company to the internet powerhouse. There’s a great image of the screen shot progression over the years. (Click here to see it.)

Now, given that simple, boring layout, and given the fact that Google’s profits are now bigger than the GNP of most 3rd world countries, which layout would you prefer on your web site?

Yeah, me too. (But blogs don’t count. I’m sticking with the silly 50’s theme, thank you very much.)

Read the complete article here.

Did you ever have one of those dreams where you’re falling?

You know, the one where you’re falling through big white clouds…

In a skimpy bathing suit…

And bouncing off the clouds…

And when you get stuck, someone uses their mouse to lift you up and drop you again…

Ever?

No. Me neither, but if you ever wondered what it would be like, check this out.

Falling chick.

Is it any wonder why people like me despise advertising? It completely insults my intelligence. Now, it’s one thing to entertain. I get a huge laugh out of those employment commercials where the guy works in an office full of chimps. That’s fun. But it’s another thing entirely to expect me to believe nine out of ten doctors agree on anything. And if you know anyone who actually believes drinking a particular brand of beer will attract super models please do the gene pool a favor and run them over with your SUV.

Internet advertising is even more aggravating than ads on TV. (Don’t even get me started on pop-up ads.) Keyword based advertising is supposed to connect ads with the people interested in them. But what it really does is show just how stupid advertisers think the people are.

Case in point, I was reading an article about the mold problem along the flooded gulf coast. The keyword ad engine saw “mold” on the page and chose to display this ad for mold test kits. Now click on the thumbnail and see if your intelligence is not insulted.

It is always flattering when you see a design very much like your own published by someone else. (Insert some inane quip about plagery and flattery here.) But, recently, someone used a similar 50’s design with a very non-50’s color scheme over at CSS Zen Garden. The end result… Happy Days meets Monkey Hurlage. Peeeee Yeeww!!

See it if you dare.

Check out CSS Zen Garden.

No this time, I really mean it. In the last few days I have run across some new technologies that just plain rock (or RAWK or r0XX0r or whatever linguistic mutilation you prefer).

For starters, you know how bloggers (like me) are always posting links to news stories or funny pictures or whatever and the URLs that they post are often three miles long and don’t come out right when you try to copy and paste them into an email to every friggin’ person in your address book (usually with a subject like “check out this funny link”) that people like me delete without even opening because we think it’s spam or some virus from that distant relative that we never talk to but that still sends us stupid forwards of funny pictures that we saw back in 1998 but they just found for the first time and they think it’s some new hilarity that they must share with the world? (Whew. Got carried away there.)

Well, there’s a web site out called TinyURL.com. You can go there and copy an above described URL into a form. TinyURL will turn that big behemoth of slashes and ampersands into a tiny URL… literally. Then all you have to put in your soon to be ignored email or blog post is something like http://tinyurl.com/7aods instead of its equivalent…
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2005018313812.gif

Is that cool or what?!

Second… I’m a late to catch on to this (as usual), so if you’ve already heard about out, just smile and nod the same way you do when your dad tells you a joke you’ve already heard him tell three times.

You’ve probably heard of flickr, an image hosting web site that makes it easy for the huddled masses (who don’t have their own web site) to share images with family and friends. Well, flickr has a feature called “Tags”. When you upload your picture to your flickr account, you can give it multiple “tags” which are basically key words associated with the image. Then, you can search for tags on the site, and find all sorts of pictures that have the same tag. It’s a pretty simple concept, but a powerful way to find content that you would not normally be able to find. It’s also a great way to waste the morning! (Such as trying to think of weird words and see what pictures are thus tagged, like “spork” for example.)

Finally, you have most likely heard of “widgets” (and I’m not talking about the abstract economics term). If not, let’s just say that they’re cool little programs that run on your computer and inform or entertain you while you work. If you are a Mac junky, you’ve lived with widgets for some time now.

Widgets have made the jump to the PC mainstream and with a quick download from Konfabulator.com you can get all sorts of cool widgets running on your machine. My current favorite is called Scribbler. It saves your last twenty copies (as in copy and paste) and allows you to paste things that you may have copied a while back. There are also widgets for tracking the weather, stocks, news, etc., or even silly ones like a little bug that wanders around your screen while you work.

I loves me some cool tech!

If you know me, you know I’m into web design, CSS, and the standards compliance trend. And if you’ve been to this site a few times, I hope you will have taken the time to visit the CSS Zen Garden.

To really understand CZG and all it represents, you have to notice a couple of things on that site. First, click on any number of the “Select a Design” links. Then, you have to understand that the HTML code that generates all those design pages is exactly the same. Yes. The code is exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the style sheet or CSS file. That’s the point of the page. Pretty cool, huh?

Now, imagine taking this really cool concept and wicked awesome technology to the absolute end of the WRONG end of the spectrum. Exhibit A: The Really Bad CSS Zen Garden Page.

As you can see, standards compliant CSS design is not, by default, good design. This was just a really good jab at design elitists and I had to share.

I have a couple of email addresses that I use whenever I’m required to enter such information on a web form. I also have a nasty habit of putting my favorite stage name and old mailing addresses in these forms. My imaginary web surfing fellow is named JoBob Humperdink and he lives in Amarillo at the address I inhabited back in 1993.

I don’t know why everyone and their dog wants your email address before they let you see their news article or post a comment on their blog. Regardless, I call these my spam accounts. Inevitablly, someone will sell their collection of email addresses to the scummy underbelly of the internet and that address will begin receiving hundreds of spam messages. Thank the Lord for spam filters. On these two email addresses, the spam folders are always full.

But what’s so funny about that?

Well, I have come to enjoy spending a few minutes perusing my spam folders to see the oh so clever ways that the scummy underbelly tries to get my attention. Allow me to share a few subject lines from this weeks compost heap.

Jobob: Forget About Those Garage Bills

Your confirmation Jobob Humperdink …

Jobob Humperdink 11/10/2004-2:13:05 PM (This one is from the “IRS”. Gee that sounds important… not.)

Shop in AMARILLO

Jobob: Re-finance Today & Save

Confirmation for Jobob Humperdink

Egyptian Peanuts (Wha…?)

RE :Jobob Humperdink 1:10:19 AM 11/14/200… (Oh, now your getting clever… *roll eyes*)

Just do her! (Ah, yes. The subtlties of romance in the age of Viagra.)

Are You Overwhelmed With Credit Card Debt (Why, yes, I am. Thanks for asking. Why don’t you pour some lemon juice on my paper cut while your at it.)

Private urgent message from SunTrust Bank (Please oh please, my gentle readers, do not fall for these things!)

Have you ever heard a joke or story that implied that Macintosh users were stupid? They’re not, but sometimes they make it hard to know that for sure.

Here is an actual Support Article on Apple’s web site.

How to pick up and carry your iMac G5

---

Don’t know how to pick up and carry your iMac G5? It’s easy.

Before moving your computer, make sure all cables and cords are disconnected.

Pick up the iMac G5 by grasping both sides of the computer. Carry it to wherever you wish.

Ohhh! And here I was trying to pick it up with my teeth.

What happens when you use a WYSIWYG editor to build your web page, and then you click one of the format buttons over and over? You get code that looks something like this:

<BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><BIG><B><BIG><BIG>
Home Building Manual
</BIG></BIG></B></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG></BIG>

Nice, huh? Well, what happens when you view it? IE incorrectly ignores the extra tags, thus encouraging bad code. Here’s the page in a 1024 x 768 window in IE.

But view the same page in FireFox, which correctly and dutifully obeys the rotten HTML code, in the same 1024 x 768 window, and you get something like this.

To be precise, that’s 814 px font. Now, THAT is BIG!

Here is the actual page. See for yourself.

(Link via Randy Pants.)

Once upon a time I interned at Hewlett Packard. Toward the end of my stay there, the company split in two with the HP moniker going to the public facing PC, printer, scanner market; and the companies foundation of testing and medical equipment was renamed Agilent. New logo, new name, and new attitude, or so we were told.

Once upon a yesterday I was talking to my current boss about our company’s new logo and how much it reminded me of Agilent’s logo.

With the tender memories all afresh, I decided to pay the old neighborhood a visit. A quick google search took me to a site that I was quite sure was not the official Agilent site. Oh, but I was wrong. It IS the official Agilent site. This horrible mash of text links; slow loading and slower reading; is in fact the face that Agilent offers the world. “Hey! Look at us! We suck at making web sites, but our network testing tools are great!”

And don’t make the mistake I did and try out the Japanese version of the site. It seems they set a cookie (or fortune cookie) on your browser and after you load the page with all the squiggle marks instead of letters, you CAN’t GET OUT! Their home page reads the cookie and says, “Oh, you silly user. You meant to go to the Japanese site! Here let me take you there without asking.”

GAH!! How does a billion-dollar company end up with a web site that looks like it was done by a college intern?! Oh yeah… here come those tender memories again.