Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

J'ai peur! La Rouge peut perdre.

And, then, we will not be able to live in Spain.

Naming And Shaming Sneaky Web Design Tricks Of Facebook, Yahoo And Others - Forbes

A few months ago, Harry Brignull, a user experience Web consultant living in the U.K., was pickpocketed. A stranger came up to him on the street, feigning inebriation while grabbing onto him, a ruse to get at Brignull's wallet. Immediately afterward, Brignull went home and looked on the Internet to see if others had had a similar experience. They had. It was apparently so common that he discovered a name for it, the "drunk dance."

Brignull says naming a con helps people better see a trick for what it is. Now he's going after sneaky Web interfaces designed to trick people out of their money or privacy, naming and shaming the techniques employed by companies as large as Facebook and Yahoo.

The user experience Web consultant has started a website called Dark Patterns. The site's name refers to types of web design techniques that are deliberately designed to mislead users into doing things they wouldn't normally do. Brignull not only collects and classifies his own experiences, but encourages contributions from others as well, and sees the site as a compendium for dark patterns. The idea came to him as he was preparing to give a talk at a conference on user experience in Web design.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Worked five hours this morning (yes, I arrived at the office at 7 AM on a Saturday morning), but this food (which I brought along - homemade my moi) made it all worthwhile!  Yum-de-dum-de-dum!

Full disclosure: What could get me to the office to work 5 hours on a Saturday morning?  I was actually given an enticement in the form of an electrical outage in my neighborhood -- that I understand will take numerous hours for our local electrical authority to remedy.  Sitting at home with no TV, internet and 92 degree hot hazy humid weather?  NOT!

"Beware of the man who does not talk, and the dog that does not bark." Cheyenne

A big wildfire is burning on the western boundary of Colorado Springs. The evacuation area extends to the edge of the Air Force Academy campus, and includes a number of high-end subdivisions and the Garden of the Gods park. Started at noon and by 3:00 was over 600 acres (250 hectares) and moving very fast. It's about 100 F (38 C) and windy and is very dry. Relative humidity this morning was in the single digits (by percent), and the whole area is a tinderbox...

This is one of many fires in the western part of the U.S.

http://inciweb.org/

http://www.coloradoconnection.com/news/story.aspx?id=768864#.T-ZI8Y6hDFI

So I'm hoping to close on my house this week.  Everything looks like it's ready.

Only problem, of course: There's a tropical storm out in the Gulf that may turn into a hurricane this week.

Good times.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.