This is a sad commentary on religion.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed,

Pew Research Center Survey

Do you ever get a word or phrase in your head you just want to keep saying over and over again? Mine today is “fiddy cent”.

You know how time seems to just fly by as you get older? I think the reality is we just think slower. I am not as impatient as I used to be; but mostly it’s because I just take longer to get my mind to the point of impatience.

I’ve tried for decades it seems to boil the perfect egg. I usually wound up over cooking, cracking the shell, or winding up with the green skin on the yoke. The perfect boiled egg is surprisingly simple. Take a push pin (like the kind from a cork board), poke a hole in the large end of the egg. There is an air pocket here which is largely responsible for the cracked egg when boiling. Cover the eggs with cool tap water. Place the pot on the stove and set to high. Once the eggs come to a full boil set your timer for 7 minutes. Turn off the heat at the end of 7 minutes and let them set for another minute. Place the pot in the sink and replace the hot water with cool tap water a few times and peel. Voila, perfect egg.

I haven’t posted anything since December.  You’d think I’d have more to say.

We received our Census form today.  It’s a very thick package considering everyone is supposedly getting the short form this year.  I haven’t opened it and I probably won’t for several more days.

Article I, Section 2 of the US Constitution gives Congress the right to ENUMERATE the number of citizens in order to apportion members of congress: “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct.”

This really means the census is legally only able to require you to account for yourself and members of your household.   Enumerate means “: to ascertain the number of”.   Congress is allowed to count you, but this is all that is provisioned for in the Constitution.

According to the U.S. Code though:

Title 13, Section 221 (Census, Refusal or neglect to answer questions; false answers) of the United States Code reads:

• (a) Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I, II, IV, and V of chapter of this title, applying to himself or to the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not more than $100.

• (b) Whoever, when answering questions described in subsection (a) of this section, and under the conditions or circumstances described in such subsection, willfully gives any answer that is false, shall be fined not more than $500.

• (c) Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no person shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.

So basically you can be fined $100 for not filling out the Census form.  Many people will say the government has no right to the questions asked on the Census.  However, I sometimes think privacy advocates go a little overboard.  I can understand how getting reasonable demographic data can be helpful to our government.  As per the Census website:

• Census affects funding in your community
  Census data directly affect how more than $300 billion per year in federal and state funding is allocated to communities for neighborhood improvements, public health, education, transportation and much more. That’s more than $3 trillion over a 10-year period. Spending just a few minutes to fill out your census form will help ensure your community gets its fair share of federal and state funding.
• Census affects your voice in Congress
  Mandated by the U.S. Constitution, the census is also used to apportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and to redistrict state legislatures.
• Census affects your representation in state and local government
  Census data are used to define legislature districts, school district assignment areas and other important functional areas of government.
• Census informs your community’s decisions
  The census is like a snapshot that helps define who we are as a nation. Data about changes in your community are crucial to many planning decisions, such as where to provide services for the elderly, where to build new roads and schools, or where to locate job training centers.

Having said all that; yes I plan on filling out the Census Form.  *sigh*

It turns out that marinating your steak in beer or wine reduces cancer causing compounds in steak.  Just make sure you don’t drink the marinaide after it’s done soaking

Marinate your steak!

As of last night the automobile manufacturer bailout has flopped.  It’s amazing to me that our government is willing to spend trillions bailing out financial institutions with little or no oversight.  These financial institutions that gambled on crazy schemes like interest only loans and credit default swaps.  Yet, the brick and mortar manufacturers, their suppliers, advertisers, and hundreds of small businesses that support all of that overhead are being left in the cold.  They are at fault to be sure, for not responding fast enough to the future needs of the end users.  However, I believe the price of oil, the declining value of the dollar, two ongoing armed conflicts, dropping interest rates and printing money we don’t have has done more damage than lack of foresight on the part of auto manufacturers.

GM alone spent over $1B in advertising in the first half of 2008.  These manufacturers do more than just produce cars, they drive the economy.  They are too big to let fail.  If in the worse case senario one major manufacturer falls, it is very likely that Ford and Chrysler will be the next.  All of that will amount to nearly 2 million jobs lost. Most of these people will no longer be able to pay their mortgages and rent.  So we fall back to the financial institutions once again faltering.  If we think our economy is bad now just wait and see what happens next.

We often are asked by clients about search engine optimization.  More specifically they usually state they want to be on the first page of Google.  Don’t we all?  After I take a deep breath I try to explain there are good ways and bad ways to get search engine rankings.  If an SEO company is trying to sell them position on a search engine, I’m immediately confident it’s either a scam or a company that uses dubious means of achieving goals; goals that often will get a website blacklisted and cause them to completely disappear from search engine rankings.

Search engine optimization in basic terms is pretty simple.  There are simple steps every web designer and web builder should take when designing and building a website.

Page Title:  This is the <title> tag that displays in the title bar of a browser window.  The title should be a basic description of the page content with keywords that are relavant to the content of the page.  These keywords should be the most important terms relative to the page.

Page Filenames:  Here is where search engines often tie some importance of the filename of the page to the content.  That’s one of the reason for permalinks on blogs.  The page filename should contain the strongest keyword of the title of the page. Names like my_dog_kayla.html actually lend some weight to keyword importance on the page

Meta Data:  Keywords and description in the meta data is less important than it used to be - but it should not be discounted.  The description should be a simple one or two sentances that summarize what the content of the page represents.  The keywords on the page should match up with those defined on the page with the title, header tags and bold tags.

Alt Tags:  Always use alt tags on images.  Search engines cannot read text in images, nor can they determine what an image represents.  The alt tag is intended for browsers or readers that are unable to display or view images.  This is helpful for vision impaired readers too.

Title Tags:  These are often confused with alt tags.  The title tag should be used to add text inside of links, not repeat it.   Title should be more descriptive than the link text it represents.  This shouldn’t be a paragraph, just a simple description.

Header Tags:  These are used by search engines to determine the importance of words.  Instead of using CSS style classes to create headings on text, use the header tags (h1,h2 etc) and simply redefine them in CSS.

Bold Tags: Bold tags are used to make keywords stand out in sentences or in places where a block level tag (such as header tags) are not appropirate for the layout of the page.

Probably one of the most important aspects of good search engine ranking is quality content.  A good content page shouldn’t consist of dozens of links, images, or specialized layout.  Search engines are looking for text to search and index.  The content should be representative of the title, keywords, headings and all combined.

I cannot say enough about quality incoming links.  These are external websites that point to your site, or pages on your site.  This should be QUALITY links.  Link farms do not count and aren’t recommended.

In summary, search engine optimization is really about common sense and remembering that search engine spiders are trying to make sense of the content on your pages.  Try to use the simplest and most obvious techniques to help the search engine spider do it’s job.