For those of you that may not know A Million Little Pieces is a book that was written by James Frey and an honorary member of the oh so glorious Oprah book club. As of late this book has been all the buzz in the news. Apparently Mr. Frey wrote a book and called it nonfiction when instead parts of the story were in fact embellished…WHO CARES! Well apparently every news station in the country cares. Now in a time of $3.00 per gallon gas prices and our government screwing up all the time, a book (not real life) rules the news. If that is not enough, a short time later Mr. Frey was invited on Oprah’s show to face her all mighty wrath for being “duped,” and we all know you do not mess with the mighty O. On her show today Oprah hammered Frey and questioned him on everything he wrote about in his book. Is this news? Apparently it is because now Frey is back in the news and every news station from MSNBC to FOX is reporting on the trivial bullshit that was discovered on Oprah’s show.

There are real important things happening every day around the world. Can someone please report on them? Just cut the fluff and spare us from all that is insignificant and just give us the friggin news. Soldiers are dying every day in Iraq… that is news. What I want are things like information from every single possible factor that has anything to do with this war, and what is going on over there in Iraq. If the media can do this correctly they may just have a few minutes left over for a couple of other news worthy stories.

I know this isn’t exactly news as Howard took this deal at the end of 2004. But it just hit me while I was listening to Howard’s channel on my new Sirius Sportster (It’s amazing I have not listened to FM since Christmas) just how much $500 million is. Now when you think $500 million you think that is an unbelievable amount of money, but I think when you actually break it down you begin to see just how much it really is.

• 1 Year = $100 Million
• 1 Month = $8.33 Million
• 1 Week = $2.08 Million
• 1 Day = $297,619

Now lets just assume Howard works a 12 hour day, that work out to be around $24,801 per/hr. Isn’t this country great? Only in America can the leader of the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth make $400,000 per year while a shock jock can make the same amount in less than 2 days!

President Bush said that we were going to invade Iraq because of Sadams weapons of mass destruction and that we were doing so “reluctantly” but that “our purpose was clear”. We are supposed to believe that this is the only reason for invading Iraq, but that is another story. Just yesterday he said he would have invaded even if he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. You can check out the video for yourself here.

You know what bothers me most about this whole situation? The fact that they didn’t just plant some damn evidence. The only thing dumber than saying the war was about weapons of mass destruction not finding any WMD’s is the fact that they didn’t just make some out of construction paper and egg cartons and then capture it on film with one of those fuzzy satellite feed cameras to keep everyone happy. I mean if you are going to lie then why not go all the way with it. They could have taken pictures of piles of their own bombs painted them a nice beige sand like color and no one would have been he wiser.

Sue from OldeTowne Real Estate hired a monkey to develop a way for her to send html e-mail thank you cards to her customers. As a solution I built her an easily accessible web based form to fill out with her customers information and a thank you type message to them. Upon completion of the form I set up a confirmation web page to show her exactly what had been sent, and a link to go back and send another email. I also designed the system to BCC her so she could have a copy of the email sent to her own inbox to keep a record of what exactly had been sent. Below you will find images of the web form, confirmation page, and the final result sent to the customer. To view the screenshots of the completed design please view the full post.

Why is it that people insist on paying top dollar for regular unleaded gasoline? I can not even count how many times I have been filling up at the cheapest local “no name” FULL SERVE gas station only to look across the street to see twice as many people filling up their own tanks with gas that costs them .15 per gallon more only to do it themselves. Do people think that “brand name” gas is better than any other gas station? Do they enjoy throwing their money away? Maybe they like grabbing that dirty gas covered trigger and doing it themselves? I can not seem to wrap my head around this. For those of you who do not know… gas is gas. Now a days cars are made to run on low octane crappy gasoline, in some cases higher octanes cause economical automobiles to actually run worse. So next time you need to fill up just stop and think for a second then ask yourself, what am I paying extra for?

When you are out on your Sunday drive this week do us all a favor and find the cheapest gas station near you. We all need to do our part and seek out the cheapest places to get gas now more than ever and reward these stations with our business. Competition is what makes America great and it is also what drives the cost of goods down in this country. Check out GasBuddy and search for or report on the best place to fill up in your area. With gas prices as high as they are today why spend more when you don’t have to?

Just because you are good at something in life does not mean that you are exempt from rules. Who do you know that can go to work, hit a coworker, then tell their boss to pound sand, and expect to still have their job at the end of the day? Apparently Terrell Owens thinks he is in fact that special. I just finished watching Terrell’s latest press conference on ESPN, where he apologizes up and down to everyone in the Philadelphia Eagles organization… it was weak. This guy was reading off a piece of paper and it could have not looked more phony, robotic, and insincere. We know you are not sorry, so why even try to apologize? You didn’t fool anyone.

It is clear that this guy is a great football player, no one is questioning that. The problem I have is that these prima donna dickwads think they can act up and cry anytime they do not like something that is going on. When players act up like this the stress caused and attention it draws from the media has an amazingly negative affect on the teams that they play for. Terrell is a great wide receiver, but there is absolutely no question that since the preseason this man has caused more harm than good for this team. Keep him suspended and let him go, hurt him in the wallet. He stands to lose 2 million in signing bonuses and another million in game play salary over his suspension. Keep him off the field Philadelphia, then give him his walking papers, we will see who wants to pick him up and deal with his whiney ass, and then we can all laugh at how little they have to pay him in the future. Kudos TO you are the most hated player in sports right now, and you have lost the respect of all your fans.

This is something that has bothered me for a long time, and the case of the missing girl in Aruba gives me a good example to tell you exactly what I mean. In this world filled with vanity the media is more concerned with ratings than they are with giving people equal time in the spotlight based on their situation. Case in point Natalee Holloway. This 18 year old that went missing in Aruba has been one of the top stories on the news rivaling the total devastation in New Orleans. While thousands of people lay dead in New Orleans, Natalee was still top news. This girl has been missing since JUNE! Why is her situation still news worthy? We all know why. It is because she was a beautiful, young, blonde haired, sparkling eyed woman. This and this reason alone is why this one girl has received the media coverage she has.

I am not saying that her life is not important and that she didn’t deserve coverage, what I am saying is that if she gets media coverage than so should everyone. Children go missing every day in America and yet only a few make it on the news, while the elite make headlines month after month. It is a sad situation really, that no one cares about the less physically beautiful. All I have to say is if you are not famous or ugly you better not get yourself murdered or kidnapped. Why? Because no one is going to care about your ugly ass. You will not get the media rolling to aid in your investigation nor will you get hundreds of people to organize a search party for you. If in fact your face resembles Quasi Moto you will be lucky to end up on a flyer in the mail or on the back of a milk carton.

In continuation of my last post I thought I would point out a great example of a Federal website that is not accessible to all web surfers. Supposedly the United States has strict regulations for the accessibility of publicly funded websites, yet apparently those regulations do not concern the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Not only does the individual assistance registration page require JavaScript to work, but it will also only work in the almighty Internet Explorer browser for Windows. Effectively saying that if you do not own Microsoft Windows and IE, you can not sign up for Federal Assistance.

When attempting to sign up for registration in Firefox or other Mozilla-based browsers, users must pass a test, and then after doing so receive this message:

In order to use this site, you must have JavaScript Enabled and Internet Explorer version 6.
Download it from Microsoft or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) to register.

Now I know this is not a life or death situation. If someone really needed assistance they could just call the number, or show up in person. The fact remains that if the web site was built using modern standards, there would never be this problem to begin with. The time that was spent to construct that error message could have just as easily been spent on coding the web site correctly.

The Tsunami is another great example of this same problem, however this time we all were affected and not just those seeking aid. In the following months, anyone trying to donate money to the relief fund in a browser other than IE received a very similar message. You would think with a cause as important as trying to collect donations they would properly set up their website to accept money from anyone.

I have been designing websites for 5 years now, so I take this matter personally. Although I have designed for myself most of the time until now, I am venturing into small business web design. In more recent years friends and family knowing my background in design, have shown me their companies’ websites to see what I think of them. I would say that 90% of the time I see minor but serious flaws, the kind that will hurt them immensely, but would only have taken 5 or so minutes to do properly.

I would love to give you all examples of these sites and the specific problems, but I feel it would be unjust to point out these company website flaws when it was their own simple ignorance in hiring a designer that caused them. I do not mean these people were stupid, I simply mean they did not have enough background on the topic to ask for the right things at the time of negotiation. So here are a few simple tips about things you should make sure your potential web designer understands that you want upon completion of your new website.

1. Make sure your website design is properly accessible in all browsers. All too often I see websites that look amazing in Internet Explorer, but in FireFox they are a disaster. A common comment from an inexperienced web designer would be something like; “80%-90% of web users use IE, so that is what we optimize for.” This is complete nonsense. For one, if you design correctly, then your site should look perfect in any browser. Secondly, even if only 10% of your users are running a browser other than IE, are you willing to not reach those users? If you company can produce 10,000 visitors a day are you willing to lose 1,000 potential customers?

2. Make sure your website will be entirely valid code upon completion. If your designer knows what he/she is doing, then in the end your design should validate no problem. There are many online resources to check to see if your XHTML and CSS is valid, such as w3c and jigsaw. Although this may not be totally necessary in your website displaying correctly now, it very may well be a problem in the future. With all the browser providers leaning towards these new founded web standards, it is a good idea to make sure you company is prepared to look good today, tomorrow, next week, and next year.

3. Make sure your designer understands basic search engine optimization. What good is your amazingly designed online presence if no one can reach it? Even if you are looking for a redesign after a few years with an old version of coding, make sure your designer updates your heading tags. What was good for Google and other search engines a year ago is not necessarily good today. Just the other day I was pointed to a great new design that was totally state of the art 2005, but the heading tags were something straight out of 1998, full of repeated words (spam), too many characters, and unrecognized characters. It was sad to see that this site ranked around 10-15th for its targeted keywords knowing that one minute of time could have made it 1st or 2nd. Simple overlooked coding like this could easily be costing you thousands of potential customers and even more in lost revenues.