Beast-Blog.com
Mike Cherim's Professional and Personal Web Log

I don’t usually go for doing the meme thing, but with so many around me partaking in this one — Stephen, Jack, Gill — I decided to be a lemming today and leap off the cliff with the others. In this meme I have to name three events, two births, one death, and one holiday that occur/occurred on my May 15th birthday. I also added one unofficial prehistoric event and one future prediction… to spice things up a bit. Here goes:

Continue reading “Wikipedia Birthday Meme, Plus” »

To better understand this post’s curious title, you must understand design and recognize it for what it is — what it really is. Immediately you might think of colors, images, and patterns, but design is so much more. Design is something that touches our lives continuously, day in and day out. From the subtle touches to full-out implementations that, if done properly, are unappreciated, taken for granted, and go unnoticed unless absent.

Continue reading “Usability is Design” »

Ever get one of those spam comments held in moderation that you’d love to respond to? I do. It’s tempting sometimes. Obviously approving the comment is something that simply isn’t advisable, even if you were to remove the links. Well, what I have decided to do is post some of those comments here followed by my responses, similar to Jack Pickard’s Spam Smörgåsbord. I have to warn you, though, some of their “names” are about really whacked stuff. Any way here’s a few:

Continue reading “My Responses to Spam — Literally” »

I recently read an Information Week print article by John Soat called “E-Mail: A Plague of Biblical Proportions” (view online version) and it hit home. The article had some interesting numbers such as 200 billion being the number of emails sent every day — which translates to 30 messages per person daily — 70% of which represents the conservative estimated percentage of that mail which is spam. The print title noted it was “A Plague of Biblical Proportions” and, man, there’s some truth in that little nugget.

Continue reading “Email’s Out of Control” »

I noticed others have done a year-end recap of things done and things written and I thought that was neat. I decided to do the latter here with a list of some of my more decent articles of 2006. Hopefully the Best of the Beast! I hope you have enjoyed my efforts.

Continue reading “The Best of the Beast in 2006” »

Fellow Accessites team member and good friend Jack Pickard came up with a fun and interesting idea: Namely a Blog Swap Alternative Christmas Message where participants will make guest comments in other people’s blogs related to Christmas. I will be posting Jack’s message here (keep reading), mine will go in Dan Champion’s blog, Dan’s will be posted in Stephen Lang’s blog, and Stephen’s message will be posted in Jack’s. Should be fun and interesting. Here’s Jack’s offering:

Continue reading “Alternative Christmas Message Blog Swap” »

Well, Joe Dolson tagged me and now I must spill my guts — 5 feet worth anyway. I am supposed to share with you five things you probably don’t know about me. And based on the good stuff Joe offered, I’m not supposed to share just any old crap, but to provide some good stuff as well. I don’t know how good this will be, but here goes.

Continue reading “5 things you did not know about Mike Cherim” »

Is the dialogue (dialog) class semantic? Is it proper? I don’t know, but it’ll look right when writing dialogue on the web. Stories and other works are well served with a dialogue style paragraph. It’s ubiquitous in written works and literature throughout the print world so it serves the reader well to carry this style over to the web. According to William Strunk of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style fame — which is arguably the authority on proper writing, a paragraph is a “unit of composition,” but when writing dialogue, it’s each unto its own, so to speak.

Continue reading “Writing Dialogue/Dialog on the Web” »

Here’s another short story from the old fiction department. I like writing stuff like this sometimes. Forgive me. This is a light-hearted tale and I hope you enjoy it.

I got up pretty early. I hadn’t slept well. I dreamt a lot. I dreamt of rabbit hunting for some odd reason, when actually I had never even seen a rabbit. But you know how dreams can be. The last glimpses of my dream quickly evaporated into daytime reality as they usually do. I yawned.

Continue reading “It’s Shaping up to be a Good Day” »