How come vegetarians and vegans eat fruit? Where are the fruitarians and fruitons? And what do you call a person who doesn’t eat vegetables?

A couple of months ago, Google launched a new trends tool that allows you to compare search trends for keywords. I neglected to post about this launch because, well, Google launches a lot of products. This one seemed somewhat minor. Sure, there’s been some interesting comparisons of words like “the” and “and”, but it didn’t seem like something to use everyday.

My opinion changed about a week ago when I was writing a title for a page involving t-shirts. I wanted to know whether I should focus on “tshirts” or “t-shirts”. As you can see from the graph, “t-shirts” is the more popular keyword. I found it interesting that people had that hyphen so ingrained in them that they typed it in despite human nature to be lazy.

I should have kept digging though, because as the above graph shows, people also prefer the singular “t-shirt” to “t-shirts”.

I’ve never had a real good method for deciding which keywords were the best to optimize towards, but now I have at least one tool to settle some of those debates.

New versions of Monopoly won’t have paper money anymore. Instead, they’ll have a plastic Visa credit card, with a calculator style reader.

I’m game; I always hated dolling out the money and then having to make sure it gets put back into the right bin. But what am I going to throw in the air when I win? Oh, who am I kidding, I never win!

I can only think of one word to describe this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle trailer… Badass! They’re sleeker, darker, and just plain cooler.

I’ve alwasy been a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan, and I always will be. Cowabunga!

Here’s a great interview with website usability king Jakob Nielsen. I used to think Nielsen was a crazy crack, but I’ve since learned that this guy really, really knows what he’s talking about. A lot of web designers don’t like to listen to him because his ideas aren’t very exciting. Good web design shouldn’t be very exciting. When’s the last time you opened a novel and thought, “Hey, there’s nothing but text on white pages!”

This interview was filled with nuggets of valuable knowledge. Concerning AJAX, Nielsen says, “[It is] irrelevant for the vast majority of business web sites…A business site will profit much more from writing better headlines than from sticking a programming trick on its pages….when we tested a large number of investor relations sites, we found that advanced tools for plotting stock trends and financial numbers only confused most individual investors. A better alternative is to show the most important information in a static plot that’s been optimized by a good designer.”

Comparing AJAX with Flash, Neilsen added, “The very nerdiness of the name “AJAX” gives me hope that it will be used for causes more worthwhile than those now characteristic of Flash. Doomed by its own name, Flash had similar potential but was so grossly abused for “flashy” design that it never succeeded in adding much useful functionality to the Web.”

Later the interviewer poses the following question:

When visitors do finally arrive on a web page, you’ve noted a huge disjoint in the number of users who will scroll on a content page (42%) or a SERP (47%) vs. the homepage (23%). Why do you think this is?

Neilsen answers, “…users don’t want to engage with a homepage. They’re on a web site for a reason, and that reason doesn’t include finding out about all the site’s offerings.” I’ve been trying to sell everyone on making their page header as small as possible (think 50-70 pixels tall). I feel like these stats somewhat vindicate this idea. For the most part, small page headers have not been well received by anyone I’ve mentioned it to. The usual response is, “Everyone’s got higher resolution monitors, and this giant pic looks so good.” True, higher resolutions are more common, but we should be filling it up with more content instead. Here’s a novel idea. Perhaps, the home page should be the shortest page on the website, not the longest.

Finally, the interviewer addresses something that I wrote about recently, intrasite search:

In your scale of usability misery on the Web today, site searching is now the worst offender. What’s the easiest solution for an overworked and overburdened Web Developer who wants to improve his or her site’s search usability?

The easiest solution is to subscribe to an outsourced search, and delegate the problem to somebody else. I don’t necessarily think that this is the best solution, but it’s definitely easier than installing high-end search software, and then tweaking it to suit your circumstances. If you don’t customize the search software, you’ll end up with a miserable search, in which case it’s better to use an optimized solution from a company that specializes in site search.

Site search is almost completely ignored when designing websites, yet it is the most useful functionality that you could provide. Site search should be more prominent than navigation; however, it is necessary that the search works.

Have you ever heard this statement before:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result

I’ve heard it time to time from different sources. Sometimes, people will begin it with “The definition of insanity is…” Well, I just read it on a popular blog, and I can’t help but think that it’s the dumbest statement in history. It doesn’t even almost make sense.

Let’s look at the actual definition of insanity (from Answers.com):

1. Mental illness or derangement. No longer in scientific use.
2. Law.
   1. Unsoundness of mind sufficient in the judgment of a civil court to render a person unfit to maintain a contractual or other legal relationship or to warrant commitment to a mental health facility.
   2. In most criminal jurisdictions, a degree of mental malfunctioning sufficient to relieve the accused of legal responsibility for the act committed.
3. 1. Extreme foolishness; folly.
   2. Something that is extremely foolish.

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, that’s called PRACTICE, and practice certainly doesn’t sound nearly as bad as insanity.

Hey, I like to look good in front of the camera. So, I found this article, How to be more photogenic, to be helpful. via

Google just introduced a new meta tag.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

This tag tells search engines not to use the Open Directory Project description of your site as a snippet shown in search results. Why? Because for the most part ODP sucks way bad. Ironically, Google is the only search engine I’ve seen do this.

Did I mention that I hate the ODP? The project needs to be scrapped and started over… With NO human editors.

It’s out. It broke all records, and everyone’s seeing it. Critics are mixed, but is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest really all that? Okay, I won’t even pretend for a second that there was even a slight chance that I wouldn’t love this movie with all my movie heart. There’s two things in this world that can make a great movie: Pirates and Zombies. And Dead Man’s Chest hits the pirates thing so hard on the head that it has to die and regrow a new head to come back again. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the movie is good. Very Good. So good, I had to see it two times before I could even talk about it. I’m talking 5 out of 5, instant all-time classic good.

Pirates, More Pirates, Pirates at sea, and even Pirates under the sea
The movie’s got pirates. It’s got daring pirates. It’s got small pirates. It’s got pirates with birds. It’s even got half-dead, damned sea creature pirates. Okay, the last movie had pirates, but this one’s got more pirates. And it’s not so much that you get more pirates, but that you get to see pirates in their element and in every other element. You get a deep look into what a pirate really is (something like a bottle of rum and a barrel of fun).

There’s Depth Too
The fun sucks you in, but it’s the depth that drowns you. Characters like Will and Elizabeth that were really quite one-dimentional in the first movie spring to life in this one. They become multi-faceted and show, well, character. Even characters from the first that had tons of depth like Norrington and Gibbs reapear and show even more depth. Even Jack Sparrow is presented with more light. He’s sadder and more desparate than the last film, although you shouldn’t expect the role of Jack to steal the show this time. In fact, I found that everytime Norrington was on screen, he was stealing the show. His character was so dynamic that I gave myself tiny high fives anytime he opened his mouth.

The Little Details
The tiny details in this movie made me curl up in a ball and kick my feet high above the theater’s seat (much to the distress of those sitting around me). From the fireflies floating outside of the voodoo hut at the end of the river to the massive size of the beached Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest’s details slapped me around like a monkey handler in a running circus. From the first moment that Jack blasts his way onto screen until the very last, heartfelt “Aye,” tiny details gang together and give this movie unstoppable momentum. Honestly, I think I have to see it a third time just to feel satisfied.

Should you go see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest? Yes, at least twice and once on a weekday. In fact, while my third viewing will be to watch for details, I want go back and see it a fourth time just to say I saw it drunk on rum. I wouldn’t advise being drunk on rum the first three times you see it. To sum up the movie and my feelings in one word: Awesome.

Oh, and stay after the credits for another hat-tipper.

Here’s a great look at the six most feared but least likely causes of death (via). Dying in a plane crash is number 1. Yep, apparently you should be more afraid of eating too many hamburgers because the site also lists the actual most common ways of dying.

Most Feared Deaths

• Airplane crashes
• Shark attacks
• Being murdered
• Falling to death
• Terrorist attack
• Natural disaster

Most Common Deaths

• Tobacco (435,000 deaths, 18.1 percent of total U.S. deaths)
• Poor diet and physical inactivity (400,000 deaths, 16.6 percent)
• Alcohol consumption (85,000 deaths, 3.5 percent)
• Microbial agents (75,000)
• Toxic agents (55,000)
• Motor vehicle crashes (43,000)
• Incidents involving firearms (29,000)
• Sexual behaviors (20,000)
• Illicit use of drugs (17,000)

MSNBC has a fun little quiz with some of the more tricky questions asked of those seeking to become citizens of the US. I was suprised that I got all of them correct (yes, 100%). I guess that makes me a real American as opposed to the cheddar cheese eating type. Via

In honor of my mother who scored a Spiderman on the hero quiz, here’s the trailer for Spiderman 3. It looks very cool.

I’m not sure what today’s sound is, but I swear it’s a chainsaw. Even worse, it sounds like it’s on my floor. You get used to it after the drilling and the fire alarm.

What beats the noise of drilling from yesterday? Why, the buzz and strobe light of a twenty minute fire alarm test (the alarm is directly above my desk) on top of the drilling and the hammering from directly below my desk.

Sometimes, life is cruel. I can’t wait to go home.

This morning, I was able to further appreciate the sound of the drilling that is clearly coming from the exact spot one floor beneath my desk chair. In fact, I’m quite certain that I can feel small vibrations from the drilling. The resulting effect is very similar to those massage chairs seen in a Sharper Image catalog. Considering that those chairs, can go for almost $4,000 USD, I would consider the drilling to be quite a steal, as I paid nothing for it. It could be even argued that I’m in fact getting paid to enjoy the pleasant vibrating motions, although I would like to point out the distinct lack of a cup-holder.

Since the drilling sound is exaggerated by the headache I have this morning, I give the Drilling From the Floor Below a hearty 4 out of 5.

Oh damn, the drilling was just replaced by the hammering sound of (you guessed it) a hammer. So, much for my gentle massage chair.