I have Marcus Meier’s CD One Spirit available to the first person who contacts me with his/her mailing address. It’s actually not a bad album — all instrumentals, very acoustic-driven, and reminds me of something you’d want to play in an antique store or boutique. It was recorded, mixed and mastered at Dwelling Place Studios. Players include Dave Wiens, Luke Hendrickson, Josh Davis, Anna Brinkman, Art Lindholm, and Steve Freeman. Tracks: “His Light on my face”, “One Spirit”, “New Beginnings”, “Waiting”, “Classic C”, “Interlude”, and “Leaping Over the Mountains.” Total time: 46:09.

Marcus is also a member of Merchant Band, a group with Brit-pop and American rock sounds.

One annoying aspect of B&N’S search bar is that the default search category is “Books”. In comparison, Amazon’s default search category is everything — “Amazon.com”. B&N users are automatically restricted in their searching. Amazon has left the default search at a broad level, and lets the user restrict the search as necessary. Amazon’s search is more versatile — it allows you to search by ALL categories at once. B&N doesn’t even let you do that — as far as I know. It may be a minor point, but it amounts to obfuscation on the part of the seller. The quicker customers can find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are actually stay and purchase and not surf away to other sites. Amazon knows this. Barnes and Noble is beginning to find this out.

Krauthhammer: Withdraw this nominee.

There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvie Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous.

Sadly, what qualifies Miers is her sex — if she were a man, Bush wouldn’t have given her a second thought. When O’Connor retired, it’s as if Bush were required to maintain a Supreme Court that is 22% female.

I took off the entire day today to oversee the installation of new ceramic tile in my kitchen and bathroom. Over the weekend, my dad and Annie came over and helped me scrape up the old vinyl flooring. What a pain! It was worth it though, because it was old, yellowed, stained, and ugly. Good riddance.

The workers are coming back on Tuesday to do the grouting, put the bathroom door back on, move the appliances, et cetera.

I know this article is a bit old, but for some reason it’s remained in my mind as the epitome of The Onion‘s peculiar brand of humor. An excerpt:

As a patriot and true American, my heart sings at the thought of the Pentagon, and the zealous, calculating measures undertaken by the proud military bureaucracy of this great superpower. I feel a surge of pride when I think about our high-tech GBU laser-guided bombs, capable of carrying a 2,000-pound warhead. I tied a ribbon around my tree for the safe return of our nation’s F-16s, because our military aircraft are instrumental to finishing our work in Iraq.

Source: I Support The Occupation Of Iraq, But I Don’t Support Our Troops

I was sitting quietly at work last Tuesday afternoon when Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” came on the radio (a “classic rock” station, if you can believe it). I had somewhat of an epiphany, as if I were hearing it for the first time. It had probably been in the back of my mind since the mid-eighties, but Bon Jovi was never a band that I was really attached to.

I really didn’t listen to pop radio in my grade school years (mostly just oldies), and I have never been that big of a fan of eighties music. I was a teenager in the nineties — it was that decade’s music that provided the soundtrack to my life growing up. Hearing Bon Jovi again on Tuesday forced me to reconsider the cold shoulder I’ve been giving eighties music.

When endeavoring to develop and create an interactive system, one must consider the diversity of people who may potentially interface with said system. All too typically, developers of interactive systems design for themselves. Their designs may seem perfectly logical to them, but may appear cumbersome — or even downright unusable — to certain segments of the population. Developers must be perpetually cognizant of the diverse needs, skill levels, handicaps, and mindsets of potential users.

When undertaking something as vast and complicated as, for instance, an operating system, the developers must consider the lowest common denominator — not in a strict numerical sense, but in terms of the skill-levels and competencies of a potential user base. Developers must leverage coding for this lowest common denominator with meeting — and even surpassing — the needs of experienced “power” users. A novice user shouldn’t have to spend minutes wading through documentation in order to accomplish simple tasks. The functions of an interactive system should be intuitive and fundamentally logical.

In addition to developing to a potential user base’s levels of expertise, systems developers must consider the physical and mental handicaps of users. As the Baby Boomers age, a growing number of computer users find themselves with less-than optimal vision. Crucial applications, such as web browsers and operating systems must be accessible to people with poor vision.

Correlatively, software programs and Internet content must also be accessible. In creating web content, web developers can ensure accessibility by 1.) Using relative (as apposed to fixed) font sizes, 2.) Using plain text instead of image-based text when possible, 3.) Providing alternate text for images, which is crucial for audible screen readers. (Screen readers cannot reliably determine the content of an image and must fall back to alternate text.), and 4.) Being cognizant of the contrast ratios of text color(s) and their corresponding background color(s).

The subjunctive mood is not limited to the hypothetical. For instance, the clauses “it is important that you tell the truth” and “I suggest that we open the windows” express the subjunctive mood in the subordinate clauses. The subjunctive mood is still used frequently, albeit obliviously.

Hypothetical subjunctives are necessary to delineate from the past tenses of verbs. For instance, the If-clause “if I were a carpenter” expresses the hypothetical, while the If-clause “if I was a carpenter” expresses uncertainty about the past.

The Bedford Handbook notes that “in the subjunctive mood, there is only one past-tense form of be: were (never was).” (342) Bedford also acknowledges that the subjunctive “causes problems for writers” (342) (because at first, they don’t appear grammatical), is used less often than indicative or imperative moods (341), and was “once more widely used.” (343)

Examples of subjunctive mood

Source: Hacker, Diana. The Bedford Handbook – sixth edition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002.

Derek Powazek‘s article “Embrace your bottom!” brings up some good points regarding the usage of sidebars that “compete” with a page’s main content.

Some designers prefer sidebars that “compete” with main content for attention because 1). it reduces the need for additional vertical scrolling and 2). it may have something to do with the mindset that the web is not linear, i.e. there typically does not have to be a proper sequence to pages — disparate or not. Derek said that

Those sidebar items are great for readers who just aren’t engaged in whatever they’re reading. They can skim down a paragraph or two and then link away to the next thing.

But sidebar items aren’t the only places for readers to “link away”. Contextual links in main content also serve to distract the reader and encourage linking away to other content. Don’t get me wrong — one-column layouts can be effective. But well-written content that “competes” with sidebars often wins out over said sidebars. Added to the mix are browsers with tabbing capabilities, which enable users to “link away” to sidebar content without taking their eyes off main content.

Derek has a good eye for design — I especially like his 19th century German-looking font he uses in his header images.

Wow. John Roberts totally cleaned Senator Kennedy’s clock this morning. Says Will Malven from Men’s News Daily:

On one side we have the soon to be new Chief Justice Roberts sitting with no notes or props and on the other side we have eighteen Senators the various staff members, and all of their accumulated paper work, notes, letters and the like. The results, no contest. For two days now Judge Roberts has taken the Senate Committee to law school.

Listening to excerpts of Roberts over the past four days has made my jaw drop on numerous occasions. Consider Kennedy’s pathetic excuse for a question, and Robert’s answer:

KENNEDY: You mentioned in your memoranda that we should — you’re familiar, I think, with these words. They’ve been written up in the journals and you can probably recognize them. “We should ignore the assertion that the EEOC is unAmerican, the truth of the matter notwithstanding.” Is there anything — is there some reason that you would make a comment like that..

ROBERTS: Well, Senator, you do have to read the memo, I think, in its entirety to put it in context. That was not my language. That was the language — the unAmerican reference was the language that was employed by an individual who had a case before the EEOC. He actually won his case before the EEOC but he didn’t like the difficulty and the time involved.

He wrote to the president. He said two things: one, that his treatment at the hands of the EEOC was unAmerican; and, two, that the president had promised in the campaign to abolish the EEOC, and he wanted to hold the president to that promise. It was my responsibility to figure out how to respond to this complaint that had been received. And how we responded was by protecting the EEOC from interference by the president in any political way, by protecting the EEOC from this sort of complaint.
. . .
And the point of the letter — when you read the whole memorandum, you see two points. The first is that I was unable to determine, in the short time I had to respond, whether or not the president had made such a pledge to abolish the EEOC. I simply didn’t know. And I said that in the paragraph, if you read it. And that’s what the truth of the matter notwithstanding is referring to: the question of whether or not the president had promised to abolish the EEOC.

I say right in the memo that we cannot determine that. And whether his treatment was unAmerican or not is beside the point; we don’t interfere with the activities of the EEOC. That was the conclusion and that’s what we did in that case.

I couldn’t have come up with a better answer had I had months to research and prepare! Totally astounding. Later, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked a question which amounted to “Will you do anything to extend freedoms and correct injustices?” The slam-dunk answer from Roberts:

I had someone ask me in this process — I don’t remember who it was, but somebody asked me, you know, Are you going to be on the side of the little guy?

And you obviously want to give an immediate answer, but, as you reflect on it, if the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy’s going to win in court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well, then the big guy’s going to win, because my obligation is to the Constitution. That’s the oath.

The oath that a judge takes is not that, “I’ll look out for particular interests, I’ll be on the side of particular interests.” The oath is to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. And that’s what I would do.

Be still my beating heart! The Supreme Court will be in good hands when Roberts in confirmed.