Category Archives: Uncategorized

Freeze!

Went to put a credit freeze at Equifax. This is what they gave me on the last step:

I'm sure this will turn out fine.

King Offa's Coin

There resides in the British Museum in London, one of the most intriguing gold coins ever minted. It was bought in Rome about a hundred years ago and this is important when considering the purpose of the coin.

The gold coin of Offa, king of Mercia [England, 757-796 AD], is a unique object because it imitates a gold dinar of the caliph al-Mansur. Although the Arabic inscription is not copied perfectly, the declaration that ‘There is no Deity but Allah, The One, Without Equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah,’ is clear.

Panic! At The Grocery

Whatever's left of Irma isn't due our way until late next week. Stores are already out of bottled water.

That's a problem I'll take any day over what everybody on the gulf coast and in the Caribbean is dealing with.

Of Course

The wife of an ethics lawyer for the Trump Organization has been arrested after allegedly having sex with an inmate in a car.

What else would you expect to find at the intersection of "Trump" and "ethics" ?

Politics Of Identity

A woman running for mayor of Charlotte is facing a backlash after appearing to advertise her race as one of her qualifications.

"after appearing to" ?

You probably should have just gone ahead and said that's exactly what she did. Nobody would have argued with you.

“Vote for me!” Kimberley Paige Barnette, a former county magistrate judge running for office for the first time, wrote on her Facebook profile.

Then, following two lines that included her name and “Mayor of Charlotte 2017” was a description of herself, in four capitalized words: “REPUBLICAN & SMART, WHITE, TRADITIONAL”

Tell me more!

“As mayor, what I would like to discourage is assembly,” she said. “Protests are confrontational, they’re chaotic, they scare people. I believe there’s a better way to express yourselves.”

Well that doesn't sound good. Do I dare go on?

“I do not think that we should encourage more lower-income persons to move to Charlotte,” she said. “We want to attract higher-income persons to Charlotte. … They’re going to have the most money to be able to spend in our economy.”

Yipes.

[x] REPUBLICAN
[ ] SMART
[x] WHITE
[x] TRADITIONAL

Flat UI Designs Suck

I've never understood why anyone would think a button that is nothing more than a bare rectangle around some text was intuitive.

Flat designs looked "cleaner" and more "modern" (Microsoft's subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.

The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.

"On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers," the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate.

The Register

It Is As It Was

The most disturbing thing in the first ep of the new American Horror Story was the opening scene : the 2016 election night. I almost walked out of the room.