I got this list in an email and while I normally don't pass these things along, this one tickled my funny bone. And it's Friday, so what the heck. :-)

1. Does a clean house indicate that there is a broken computer in it?
2. Why is it that no matter what color of bubble bath you use the bubbles are always white?
3. Is there ever a day that mattresses are not on sale?
4. Why do people constantly return to the refrigerator with hopes that something new to eat will have materialized?
5. On electric toasters, why do they engrave the message "one slice"? How many pieces of bread do they think people are really gonna try to stuff in that slot?
6. Why do people keep running over a string a dozen times with their vacuum cleaner, then reach down, pick it up, examine it, then put it down to give the vacuum one more chance?
7. Why is it that no plastic garbage bag will open from the end you first try?
8. How do those dead bugs get into those closed light fixtures?
9. Considering all the lint you get in your dryer, if you kept drying your clothes would they eventually just disappear?
10. When we are in the supermarket and someone rams our ankle with a shopping cart than apologizes for doing so, why do we say, "It's all right?" Well, it isn't all right so why don't we say, "That hurt, you stupid idiot?"
11. Why is it that whenever you attempt to catch something that's falling off the table you always manage to knock something else over?
12. Is it true that the only difference between a yard sale and a trash pickup is how close to the road the stuff is placed?
13. In winter why do we try to keep the house as warm as it was in summer when we complained about the heat?
14. How come we never hear father-in-law jokes?
15. If at first you don't succeed, shouldn't you try doing it like your wife told you to do it?
16. The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from sort of mental illness. Think of your three best friends, if they're okay, then it's you.

Have a great weekend folks!

They said on the news this morning that anyone who chooses to ride out this storm on a sailboat faces serious threat of loss of life or death.

Sounds about right...

One of the things I like about following blogs is how frequently I find new sites and new writers discussing things that interest me. When your focus tends to be more tool-specific, like many of us who work with Macromedia products can be, it's good to get outside of the Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Flash box and have a look at the bigger issues of design and usability.

One of my favorite blogs that looks at the bigger design picture is Design by Fire, which is promintently listed in my Bloglines blogroll. Design by Fire had a nice pointer today to yet another design blog that I hadn't known about. (See how this works?)

Over at Asterisk* I found a nice little blog about design with some timely articles, including one that I thought was a good checklist for design usability: The Big Web Design Details List. There are some excellent points in that article, and more goodies down in the comments section.

There comes a time when you will need to open an external application, whether it be to just have that app open for the user to work with, as is the case with my Open Studio Apps toolbar, or to have processing on files done by the external app. For such a task, I've been using dreamweaver.openWithApp(), or more accurately, the shortcut, dw.openWithApp().

This function accepts two parameters, a file path for the file to open in the external app, and the file path to the external app. While the docs say that you must pass in a file:/// URL, you can actually get away with using a "regular" file path, as long as you escape the \s properly because you're passing a string.

For example, the following two snippets of code work the same:

Snippet 1:
var myFilePath = 'file:///C|/Danilo.jpg';
var appPath = 'file:///C|/Program Files/Macromedia/Fireworks MX 2004/Fireworks.exe';

dw.openWithApp(myFilePath,appPath);

Snippet 2:
var myFilePath = 'C:\\Danilo.jpg';
var appPath = 'C:\\Program Files\\Macromedia\\Fireworks MX 2004\\Fireworks.exe';

dw.openWithApp(myFilePath,appPath);

Depending on the application, you can even pass in an empty string, to open your app without a starting file. As in the snippet below:

Snippet 3:
var appPath = 'C:\\Program Files\\Macromedia\\Fireworks MX 2004\\Fireworks.exe';

dw.openWithApp("",appPath);