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Moving: The Aftermath

So, on Monday I moved into a new apartment with my sister. Geographically we didn’t move far, but I’ve learned over the years it isn’t the distance that determines the difficulty of the move, it’s the poundage.

I have way too much stuff.

My old apartment was huge, in retrospect, especially for just one person. There was a lot of storage space, so I never considered not buying something because it wouldn’t fit in my apartment.

This has led to my current situation of trying to move into a new place with at least 33% too much stuff.

Anybody want a coffee table?

A great quote from Michael J. Fox

Two plus two equals four every time… so what good is it?

An interesting ad.

An interesting ad.Man, I suck at blogging.

Anyway, this is, at least, interesting, I think.

This is a bus stop ad for the bank Washington Mutual, which, has, of late, been on a marketing blitz to grab consumer-level customers.

This ad is very interesting to me for two reasons:

1. Notice the names of the account holders on this particular check — Kim Yeats & Katie Glick. It seems clear to me that WaMu (as they like to call themselves) is trying to establish themselves as gay-friendly. Need a joint checking account with your same-gender non-spouse? No problem at WaMu.

I think that’s great and it’s to be applauded.

2. Notice the names again — Kim Yeats & Katie Glick.

Kim is a perfectly acceptable name for a man, which leads me to believe that, although WaMu is trying to get in with the gay crowd, they don’t want to piss off the homophobes. Using a gender-neutral name allows those observers who may be uncomfortable with same sex joint checking.

In order to avoid being uncomfortable, all you have to do is not want it. It’s pretty clever, if slightly cowardly.

My Newest Pet Peeve: Focus-Stealing Banner Ads

I’ve seen this guy a few times, and it irks me each and every time, and I’ll tell you why.

When the ad loads, it uses Javascript to grab your cursor and put it into the first field in the form. This has two negative effects (one of which I can’t believe the hosting sites put up with):


  1. It means I can’t use the keyboard to navigate the page — to scroll down, I most often use the space bar to scroll a page at a time, but since the ad has put the cursor in a text field, I’m just entering spaces into it, and it’s quite disorienting when my browser stops behaving the way I expect it to.
  2. If the ad is part of the way down the page, when the focus is captured, the page scrolls with it. This happens on MSNBC articles — the page automatically scrolls to the point of the ad (since that’s where the focus is), so I have to scroll back up to see the headline and the first few paragraphs.

Comment Spam == Managed?

Ok, so I’ve disabled the registration requirement for now — I found Spam Karma 2, a WordPress plugin that sounds great. We’ll see what happens.