metaViper

Text is great. It’s one of the technologies that our species has used stretching into antiquity with the advent of the alphabet. It enables one human to express meaning to another human with a sense of permanence, and with boundaries limited only by the imagination.

Even so, sometimes an image conveys meaning more quickly than writing an entire paragraph or even pages of text. Creating a pleasant visual flow is part of good design and adding images helps do this by encouraging a shift in how the eye greets the screen.

That in mind, where can we find high quality images that add to the quality of a well designed web presence? I suggest visiting YotoPhoto. It’s an image search engine that provides results in the creative commons licensing space. That means the creator has granted use of his or her images as long as they aren’t a primary profit driver. YotoPhoto searches Flickr, Wikipedia, Stock.Xchng, Morguefile, Pixelperfect Digital and OpenPhoto all at once and provides aggregated results as linked thumbnails.

It’s also possible to search for a specific hexadecimal color using YotoPhoto. So if you’re looking for a bright green colored car, head to the advanced search page and search for car and to the lower right use color 00ff00. It’s a great way to work within color schemes and pump up how creative your pages look.

Europe, the old world — for many a trip to Europe is very high on their life goals list. Many Americans have ancestral roots in Europe and can’t wait to visit. I was among those and while on my first trip to the old world I created a notebook of tips which I’ll be sharing with you on metaViper.

The European union has made it easy to tour western Europe. Cars, planes, trains, and boats zip across open boards with few checks, and the Euro means one currency for many countries. Communication wasn’t a barrier because English seems to be the primary language of any tourist area.

That said, I spent time in Italy and Austria and was shocked at the prices, the swindles, and the complexity of a European Vacation. The Euro has made everything more expensive, from bread to Internet access. With the dollar only worth about $.70 for every Euro I met many other Americans who were finding their European vacation much more expensive than what they bargained for.

Indigenous people also are finding it harder to do business. The Italians, robbed of their local currency the Lira, (more…)

The measure of how efficiently any body operates can be measured by the smoothness of interaction between its myriad parts. Human bodies have organs that interact via signals sent through the nervous system and through packages of nutrients and waste transferred in the bloodstream. When harmful bacteria or viruses enter the body, its resources respond immediately to slow and eventually destroy the foreign particles (remember this point, it’s important).

Zooming out to view any job function as a body, the same concepts of efficacy apply. Consider a typical office worker’s day filled with e-mails, phone calls, meetings, and spontaneous conversations. Communication takes place through wires and waves, and materials shift to different locations through mail and local trash pickup :-}

With so many parallels between bodily functions it’s only right to bring some common sense through the filter:

• If a virus or bacteria continues to fight against your immune system does your body give up? Certainly not. It either shifts to a different sort of antibody or calls in more white blood cells. Don’t let bureaucracy or contract nibbling (more…)