Check out this story from CNN.com:
Lawsuit Claims McDonald’s Burgers and Fries are Making Kids Fat
(Link removed because it no longer works. Sorry!)

The plaintiffs include a Bronx teen who ate every meal at McDonald’s for three years while living in a homeless shelter. Another is a 13-year-old boy from Staten Island who says he ate at McDonald’s food three to four times a week and is now 5-foot-4 and 278 pounds.

I will be fair and grant that there may be another side to this which I’m not hearing; I know that was the case with the woman who sued McDonald’s because her coffee was too hot. (According to former employees, McDonald’s keeps its coffee superheated; hence, when the woman–a passenger in a parked car–spilled it on herself, it burned her badly enough that she needed skin grafts.) However, on the surface, this seems awfully… Well, I just don’t get it, that’s all.

The kid who ate at McDonald’s while living in a shelter may, I’ll admit, not have had much of a choice in the way of food. However, I question what he (arbitrary pronoun choice here, since gender is not given) was doing eating McDonald’s so much while living in a shelter. Did the shelter not offer healthier food? Perhaps it didn’t. In that case, if he had enough money to get McDonald’s, did he not have enough money to get something healthier to eat? And, at the risk of sounding callous–if his food choice was forced on him by circumstances… Is McDonald’s to blame for his situation in life? I don’t think that they are. And if they were, I doubt he’d be suing over the food; there would be larger issues to address. I’m not saying he’s necessarily to blame either, just that I don’t see how McDonald’s is responsible here.

As for the boy from Staten Island, how exactly did he get fast food so often? Who bought it for him? If he used his allowance or something, how did he get to the restaurant? There are other far more likely candidates for responsibility, not the least of which being the boy himself. I mean, no one forced him to eat this stuff, right? I could maybe kind of sort of see pushing the angle that McDonald’s markets this kind of food in such a way that kids will want it, but… uh… How else are they supposed to market Happy Meals? And it’s not like this is some drug (like, oh, say, nicotine); this is food, and food that is most certainly not meant to be eaten on a regular basis.

Based on the little information I’ve got right now–my first instinct is to roll my eyes and do my best Valley Girl impression: “Puh-leeease.”

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OK. I know people have to pay for their web pages somehow, and that people tend to ignore banner ads and popups, so (presumably) advertisers are less eager to rent those spaces than they once were. But did we HAVE to move on to these Flash ads (or whatever they are) that you CAN’T get rid of until they’ve run through? I have to consider these counterproductive, at least for people like me. An ad like that is actually not only not going to sell me the product, it’s going to influence me to NOT revisit the site and NOT buy the product advertised, out of sheer irritation. (Yeah, I could use a popup killer, and I think–I think–those catch the Flash ads too, but they also kill things that pop up legitimately.) There must be some other way to fulfill the advertising requirement without doing this.While I’m on this rant, please allow me to vent about a few recurring problems on the Web. Should anyone notice any of these problems on my page, I invite you to e-mail me at star@qnarf.com and let me know, so I can fix them. I don’t have as much control over the blogs as I do my actual home page, but e-mail me if you find problems with it and I’ll try to fix those too.

First off–the differences between your computer and someone else’s. For people like me who run on a 1.5 Mbps DSL connection with a screen big enough to do 1024×768 resolution, it can be difficult to remember that some people still have 28.8 dialup connections and 800×600 screens–or worse. Try, once in a while, to remember this. Don’t use excessive graphics. Do test your page on low-res screens. Do turn the brightness and contrast down and see if it still looks good; some people do actually have to do this because, gee, not everyone’s eyes are perfect. Do put height and width tags in for images, so that slower connections won’t lock up so badly while waiting for the pictures themselves. Do not, DO NOT, use unnecessary Java. (I’ll get to that in a sec.)

Secondly, visual appearance. (I’ve been guilty of some violations in this section “because it’s my page and I feel like it”, but I hope I have them all fixed now.) Want people to like your page? Make it look good. Don’t animate. Anything. There are tasteful animations out there, and there are places where they can be used to good effect, but mostly–animation is cheesy. Similarly, don’t use sound. Ever. There may be an exception to this rule, but if so, I haven’t found it yet. Sound is annoying. Black backgrounds are not, in fact, cool; they make almost any color (except possibly a very pale grey) difficult to read. Use them sparingly. Stay away from “busy” background graphics, too, as they will make all text difficult to read. And don’t get me started on mouse trailers. I’ll wrap this rant up with one really good rule: KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Simplicity will draw and retain far more visitors than flashy gimmicks.

Speaking of retaining visitors, it’s all about content! I can’t say much here, since my “content” is pretty much some poems, a tiny bit about me, and an essay or two. Well, I don’t expect people to stick around much for that. What can I say? I don’t have much to say to the world, and what I do, I say here. The point is, people are seldom looking for lists of links when they find you. They’re looking for information. A plain-text article with good info will make people much happier than a fancyfied list of links to the same info. And happy visitors are return visitors.

Final rant for now: Java. You know the effects I mean–images that change when your mouse is over them, text scrolling in the status bar, those damned dialog boxes that pop up wanting to know your name, that sort of thing. It takes up load time that could better be used for a simple image or, gee, content, not everyone can or will run the applets that produce your fancy effects, and a lot of them are generally annoying. Take some of the examples I’ve already given. The text in the status bar irritates me because I like to be able to see the status stuff that’s supposed to display there. As for the dialog boxes–I could see using them on, say, a site dealing with alcohol, adult themes, etc. to make sure your visitor was of age, but that’s about it. What business is it of yours what my name is, especially if I have not set up an account with you and do not need to? What do you care where I’m at (with the same provisions)? It’s none of your business, generally, and I’m running out of synonyms for “annoying” to tell you how these dialogs affect me. There are legitimate uses for Java–but in general, your average Joe Schmoe creating a personal page does NOT need it. At all.

Rant, rant, rant. This is long enough to qualify for an essay, if it weren’t so, uh, ranty. Maybe someday I will clean it up and have my very own “guide to good Web pages”, if I can manage to avoid repeating what ten thousand other frustrated Web denziens are saying. You know, actual content. I may even stick in a section about why it’s good to know HTML, even if you can now find WYSIWYG editors all over the place which don’t require you to know squat about the code. And some of my most-used HTML tags for those starting out, though I’m more likely to put in a link to the Barebones Guide. (Ooooh. Maybe I can just LINK to OTHER PEOPLE’s rants about this and avoid making my own statements ENTIRELY!)

End sarcastic rant mode. Thanks.

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I’d like to officially dub this season of ER “the What The Fuck?!? Season”. Romano gets his arm cut off, Carter finds his sensitive side, Luka undergoes an amazing transormation into an insensitive pig (but only as regards his personal relations with women), Romano not-quite-flirts with Corday, Chen hooks up with Pratt (why would anyone?), and then there’s Weaver, who were thought was getting druggy but we now have discovered is (of all things for her to be) PREGNANT.

Huh?

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There are certain moments in which everything is perfect–when it is enough just to be. I experienced this last night. Tim and I had just gone to bed. I was snuggled up next to him with my head on his shoulder; he was lying on his back with a cat purring happily on his tummy. From behind my closed eyelids, the room seemed to brighten a little. I opened my eyes to see that the moon had gotten free of the clouds. For that brief instant, silvery light made the trees into a shining wonderland, and the condensation forming on the window became a soft veil between this world and the next. Under the warm quilt, I smiled and drifted off to sleep marveling over how wonderful it could feel just to be curled up beside my husband (and cat!) under warm blankets on a chilly night.

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Have I ever mentioned how I hate trying to decode the old code for this program I’m supposed to be recreating at work? Because today, I really really do. Most of it makes sense, really, even if it’s not how I personally would have coded things. This one block, though, reading in a file and putting its data into two arrays–it just makes no sense! And do you know why it doesn’t make sense? Because I don’t know what format the incoming file is in. And why don’t I know this? I don’t HAVE the file, or an example of it, at least not in any format I can look at in the same format as it would be read in. (I can convert it to Access, but that doesn’t really help.) Why? Oh, because these programs were written when a 386 was top of the line technology. Whatever they might have used to look at it at the time is SO out of date now that I’m not even sure what it is! Insert weeping and gnashing of teeth sounds here…

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