Chausse.org

Many thanks to my friend Adam for introducting me to Zillow.com. Zillow.com lets you browse a U.S. map, Google-Maps-style, to find house values in a given zip code, neighborhood, county, or what have you - all the way down to individual houses. This is an awesome tool for anyone trying to figure out where to live. Their gimmick of naming all the features with z’s (Zestimate, Zindex) makes me think the creators drank a little too much Zima back in the 90’s, though.

Filed under Personal Notes, Web 2.0 2 Comments »

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, there is an awful lot going on in the Chausse household right now, one item being a plan to buy a house. While researching possible communities in which to build Chausse World Headquarters, it took me forever to find a list of 2006 property tax rates for communities in Massachusetts. Incredibly valuable info, but really hard to find. The right site (The Massachusetts DOR site) actually came up as the second result on Google, but Google’s summary didn’t really make it stand out. Anyway, here’s the list as a PDF:

Massachusetts Fiscal Year 2006 Community Property Tax Rates (.PDF)

I have one gripe about this list. It’s sorted in the absolute least useful way possible (to the average Joe). Not by community name, not by any particular tax rate, but rather by the date that the tax rate was approved by the state Department of Revenue! Now, I’m sure that’s useful info to someone, but not really to anyone thinking of buying property!

Note that I didn’t find this on some obscure archive of DOR meeting presentations or something, it’s a link on the main DOR page that says “Fiscal Year Tax Rates”. Also (OK, two gripes), there is no legend to explain what the tax rate for a given town — say, “$13.96″ — actually means (I have to rely on experience to tell me that that’s what you pay per year, per $1000 of assessed home value — and $13.96 really sucks, incidentally).

And since the list is in PDF format (OK, three gripes), I have a lot of cutting and pasting ahead of me to put the data into Excel and make something useful out of it (which I will post).

Obligatory usability lesson: When presenting internal data to the public, publish it in a format useful to them, not to you! I’ve seen worse examples of this problem on web sites where search results show only product model numbers - a useful format to someone who works in the company and knows the model numbers like the back of their hand, but absolutely worthless to a customer who is trying to figure out what they need.

Update: Here is my Excel version - it only lists the residential rates:

Massachusetts Residential Property Tax Rates by Community for Fiscal Year 2006 (.XLS format)

Filed under Personal Notes, The User Experience 21 Comments »

Even though I work at Microsoft, I really don’t know much more about the mysterious “Origami” project than anyone else. So, I’m just as impressed with this brilliant virtual keyboard UI as anyone else. I hope it works as well as it looks.

Filed under Gear and Gadgets 1 Comment »

The more i run into them, the more I get obsessed with rounded corners in web design. I’ll let Rich Ziade of Basement.org explain why for me.

In my quest to find the best technique to implement these beasties, I found a fantastic trick which enables you to create rounded corners without using any graphics whatsoever. Dubbed “Nifty Corners” by their creator, this technique is great not only because it saves bandwidth and helps with semantic clarity, it enables you to experiment with different colors without having to create a new graphic every time.

The magic lies in creating a stack of one-pixel high “divs” of varying width above and below a given div. But, to avoid a pile of non-semantic markup, these are added dynamically via JavaScript. Brilliant!

Not content with his original Nifty Corners article, creator Alessandro Fulciniti created an updated version with even more features, including anti-aliasing! (with no images! It’s crazy!)

Filed under Web Development No Comments »

Google recently had Marketing maven Seth Godin come in and talk to their people, and put the whole thing on video for the world to see. It’s a fascinating presentation. His story about Little Miss Matched was a real eye-opener to me. The message there is that there is great money to be made from “boring” products via pure marketing genius. If you think you can’t succeed because you’re stuck marketing a commodity product, take the approach they took:

• Consider the assumptions people make about the type of product you sell (socks always come in matched pairs)
• Violate those assumptions (sell socks in mismatched sets of three!)
• Find the right niche (11 year old girls)
• Profit!

A commodity product + the right packaging can equal huge success.

Filed under Marketing No Comments »

I bought this mousepad from the “company store” of a company that shall remain nameless. Why? Because it has four built-in USB ports - providing a very handy location for plugging in various gadgets. I Googled around for other mousepads like this, but they were all a lot uglier, so I went with the company store version. See if you can take a wild guess as to why I’m not such a big fan of it, now that it has arrived…

I guess it makes a decent USB hub/drink coaster.

Filed under General Computing 2 Comments »