Maybe Jakob Nielsen put his finger on one of the reasons why it is so difficult to convince clients of the importance of usability when it comes to their websites:

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The local paper has a place for anyone who feels like it to call in and, without leaving a name, venting on their favorite subject. The pick of the crop is printed in the paper under Trib Talk, and it sometimes makes for fascinating reading, giving insights into the mood of Missouri. Recently, one of the Trib Talk themes has been the debate of nurture vs. nature in homosexual orientation – breathtaking reading. Today’s edition brought us this gem:

I just wanted to comment about all these things I’m seeing lately about whether being gay is a choice. Of course it’s a choice. You can choose to be with someone of the same sex, or you can choose to be with someone of the opposite sex. If you are choosing to be with someone of the same sex, you are going against everything that God created us to be. Men cannot procreate with men; women cannot procreate with women. And I don’t know if you can print this, but frankly I haven’t figured out how women even have sexual intercourse with each other. Women don’t have the correct parts for sexual intercourse, which means it’s not natural.

Ten bucks says the caller was a man.

Working on some usability issues for a medical insurance website, I am reading Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity by Jakob Nielsen. It is published in 2000 and the examples are a bit too dated to wow the client, but the conclusions and lessons are as valid today as they were then. Interesting to see where predictions were spot on and where they were way off. Here a nice quote, from the year 2000:

Electronic mail is getting to be an immense productivity sink. In some companies it is a full day’s job simply to go through your inbox and reply to that day’s email. People have to fight to retain time to do something real outside of email.

SpOn:

…der abgeführte Verdächtige sei mittel-östlicher Herkunft gewesen.

Mittel-östlich?

Unconfirmed Sources about the Bush-Putin summit in Maine:

Following dinner, a formal, serious discussion was held in an effort to return to the friendly relations that previously existed between the two heads of state. Unfortunately the State Department, in error, sent a Russian-to-Swahili translator…

Don’t they know the difference between a translator and an interpreter?