Television is the most trusted news media. Year after year people who are polled say that they think TV is more reliable than newspapers.

And with insightful interviews like this from Chai’s blog, who can argue.

overheard on television

lady interviewer: so, denzel, it’s kinda like dejavu, but like if you could what part of history would you change?

denzel: oh wow, that’s a tough question.

lady interviewer: (haha)

denzel: well, the first thing that comes to mind is not having slavery.

lady interviewer: oh, wow, deep.

man interviewer: yeah, that is deep.

denzel: well, come on, it’s slavery. it’s our history.

lady interviewer: yeah, you took it to a different level. i thought you would say wearing a different pair of shoes three days ago.

denzel: (haha) no, slavery is pretty much the biggest thing i would change. re-route the boats, you know.

lady interviewer: yeah. well, we will be right back after this break.

– 106 & Park, BET

Went today to the Simply Accounting website, a division of a company called Sage, who are perhaps best known for AccPac, another accounting package.

I found Simply Accounting, and was about to price it for a group with which I work. The fastest way to do that was to click on the “Buy Online” button which appears on every page.

Except that the page that opens in Firefox, on the Mac and the PC, is empty.

Usually my next step would be to e-mail them telling them that the web site is broken.

Except that there appears to be no place on the site that lists any sort of e-mail address, even for the web master. None whatsoever.

So, do I really want to spend a half hour calling an 800 number and navigating though voice menus? Or will I just go check out their competitor Quickbooks?

Flash Fleetwood arrived at his house.
His father was outside. He was punishing the chickens.

“You chickens will stand facing the corner,” Flash Fleetwood’s father said, “until you learn it is wrong to make fun of humans.”

A classic for anyone aged seven to fifty-seven, I heartily recommend “Second-Grade Ape ” by Daniel Pinkwater. Follow the adventures of Flash Fleetwood, Bullets Birkenstock, and their teacher Mrs. Hotdogbuns when Flash discovers a gorilla named Phil in the woods next to his house.

Last week I threw out four surge protected power bars. All gave their life the previous Thursday to protect my printer, computers, router and other electronics.

A contractor working outside my apartment building hit the overhead power lines, causing 600 volts to blast though every apartment, burning out light bulbs and fuses, and causing two small fires and a unknown amount of damage.

The one major casualty was my trusty Brother fax machine, now dead as a doornail. It was not surge protected.

Please folks, if you have not done so, spend the extra money on good heavy surge protected power bars for all of your electronics. It is possibly the cheapest insurance you can imagine.

It is worth noting that the cheaper surge protectors are stone dead. The more expensive Belkin power bar still feeds power, although I suspect that the surge protection is history.

Our landlord InvestPro Realty, they of the locked garbage rooms, have steadfastly trued to avoid accepting any responsibility. Never mind that the fire alarms and most emergency lighting didn’t work, and that everyone was moved out of the building for two days, and that the landlord provided no security of any sort while a darkened building sat with doors open for two nights.

At this point the tenants have banded together and are planning to hire lawyer rather than being shunted off to the contractor, and then the contractor’s insurance company.

Once again the City of Hamilton’s myhamilton.ca web site proves useless.

I wanted to find out where I could vote in the upcoming municipal election.

I went here to the page labeled “Voting Locations”

1. I chose “Hamilton” as my community from the drop down menu.

2. I entered “325″ and “James Street South” in the boxes labeled “Street Number” and “Street Name”.

Result:

No properties were found matching your search criteria.
Check that you have entered the information correctly.

I then figured out that the box labeled “Street Number” didn’t mean the street number of my address, but the digits of a numbered street, such as “12th Avenue”

That is very unclear, and unlike any set of address entry fields that I have encountered.

So I deleted “325″ and searched on just “James Street South”. The result:

No properties were found matching your search criteria.
Check that you have entered the information correctly.

I then went to the “Search Tips” page and based on what was there tried “James St. S”. Result:

No properties were found matching your search criteria.
Check that you have entered the information correctly.

I then eliminated the “.” after “St” and tried “James St S”.

FINALLY! A result!

This is really horrible useless design. Seriously, I can’t imagine why anyone would set this up in this manner. The chances of someone guessing the right formatting on the first try are almost zero.

What’s worse is that the included instructions aren’t accurate.

On the original search page it says:

“Street name can be the full street name (e.g. King St W) or partial street name (e.g. King). Street name must be at least 3 characters.”

That is not even close to describing how specifically a search item must be formatted. It is terribly misleading. A “full street name” would be “James Street South,” not one with abbreviations.

There is no excuse for such bad design. It’s obvious that this wasn’t even tested on real users.

Then again, the leading mayoral candidate has just been convicted of accepting illegal election campaign contributions during the last election.