Bill Maher has espoused hundreds of New Rules to live by on his cable show. I’ve culled through the whole series of them to come up with this short list of gems — well, at least a short list of those that actually made me snort when I read them!

• New Rule: Not everything is a conspiracy — Black History Month is in February because Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born in February, not because it’s the shortest month. So here’s the deal: you accept that on faith, and we’ll pretend you didn’t completely make up Kwanzaa.
• New Rule: After the plane lands, airlines must stop saying, “Thank you for choosing us!” — There is no choosing anymore. I took the only flight that left within eight hours of when I wanted to go by the only airline that went there. Choosing?! Nobody chooses Southwest. Southwest chooses you! If I need to be in Spokane, Washington, by tomorrow morning, I either take the flight I’m given or I mail myself in a FedEx box!
• New Rule: Let TV shows die a natural death — Fans of the canceled TV series, “Star Trek: Enterprise,” are trying to raise enough money on their own to pay for another season! It’s either that or go outside. So far, they’ve raised $3 million largely by not dating.
• New Rule: Stop saying anybody or anything is like the Nazis — Republicans aren’t like the Nazis. Even Neo-Nazis aren’t like the Nazis. Nothing is like the Nazis…except for Wal-Mart.
• New Rule: Parents have to stop coddling their children — The latest is, schools have stopped grading papers with red ink because of complaints that a big, mean, red X is too negative. Why, a kid might even think he got it wrong and learn something. These parents today are so fixated on protection, it’s amazing they ever got pregnant in the first place.
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  Photo © iStockPhoto.com / Olga Shelegeda

  New Rule: The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the åsshølë — If you walk into a Starbucks and order a “decaf grande half-soy, half-low-fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n’-Low and one NutraSweet,” ooh, you’re a huge åsshølë.

• New Rule: Someone must stop the Cirque du Soleil — If we hate the French so much, how come we gave them Las Vegas? There are now six Cirque du Soleil-related shows on The Strip. Six! Who wants to spend two hours watching a bunch of French chicks fold themselves in half? You know what? Scratch that. New Rule: We need more Cirque du Soleil!
• New Rule: If you’re going to insist on making movies based on crappy, old television shows, then you have to give everyone in the Cineplex a remote so we can see what’s playing on the other screens — Let’s remember that the reason something was a television show in the first place is the idea wasn’t good enough to be a movie.
• New Rule: Oil companies must stop with the advertisements implying they’re friends of the environment — “At ExxonMobil, we care about a thriving wildlife.” Please! The only thing an oil executive has in common with a seagull is that they would both steal French fries from a baby.
• New Rule: The fortunes in fortune cookies have to be fortunes — “You surround yourself with good friends” is not a prediction. It’s a compliment. Quit kissing my åss, cookie! If I’m going to sit through a plate of MSG-laden, twice-cooked kitty-cat, I want a real fortune like, “That meal you just ate is going to give you cancer.”
• New Rule: I don’t need a reminder at the bottom of the TV screen to tell me “You’re watching ‘Lost.'” — Somehow, we got through the first 50 years of television knowing what show we were watching by looking at it! If Lucy is on, it’s “Lucy.” If it’s some guys playing football, it’s probably football. Here’s how I know I’m watching “Lost.” I’m bored.

Ever wanted audiobooks you’ve personally ripped from CDs to show up properly in your iPod? It’s frustrating to lose your bookmark after playing other music, and it’s annoying to have audiobooks mixed among your favorite tunes. After some painstaking trial and error, I’ve found a way to fix them. This procedure has been tested on iTunes for Windows (v5.0.1.4 and v6.0.1.3) and iPod Photo 30GB v1.2. As always, I am not responsible for the use or the misuse of this information; use at your own risk.

1. Set iTunes to import using AAC encoder, optimized for Spoken Podcasts. (I normally have mine set to MP3 at 160kbps for importing music.)
2. View the CD in iTunes, but don’t import the tracks right away.
3. Select all the tracks on the CD, and choose Join CD Tracks from the Advanced menu.
4. Click the Import CD icon.
5. Find the track in your library, and do a Get Info to verify the information. It is a good idea to use a naming convention that makes it easy to choose the right audiobook and the order of the audio CDs on the iPod, i.e. “Harry Potter Year 1 Disc 7”.
6. Through My Computer or Windows Explorer, change the extension of the song from “.m4a” to “.m4b”.
7. Go back to iTunes and attempt to play the song. When it tells you it can’t find the song, tell it to look for it, then select the filename with the new extension.
8. An optional step, I recommend setting the Equalizer Preset for the track to Spoken Word (found under Get Info / Options).
9. Repeat for the rest of the CDs of the audiobook.

Once you sync up, the audiobook CDs will be properly accessible through the Audiobooks menu on the iPod! Woohoo!

Java applets are bad.

Repeat the previous sentence 10 times, hopefully out loud in a crowded room of web designers and developers drinking their grande half-soy, half-low-fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread decaf cappuccinos. Applets create confusion for users. Applets are slow to load. Applets are usually frivolous and unnecessary. Don’t use an applet just because you can! Applets are bad. Applets are bad. Applets are bad. Say it another 10 times just to make sure it sticks.

Don’t believe me, some random guy on the Internet? Then listen to these experts:

“One of the ten new mistakes of Web design is using applets where plain or Dynamic HTML would have done the trick.” — Jakob Nielsen (the authority on web design)

“Java applets: They take forever to download and contribute nothing in the way of actual content. Sometimes they offer the added bonus of crashing your browser or providing a mouse hole for malicious content (i.e., viruses).” — Information Today

“Applets are usually inaccessible and sometimes unsupported.” — Microsoft Usability Research Department

“Java applets are bad news, and have always been bad news. They were a hack that awkwardly solved a temporary problem with Web client dynamics, a problem that has since been more elegantly solved by DHTML scripting.” — JavaWorld

“If you can avoid using Java Applets, do so.” — J.P. Thiel (Computer Security Analyst)

“All applets from all sources, whether signed or not, can read and write files in /usr/tmp.” — Attacks from Outside the Operating System, Prentice Hall

“You should consider removing all applets from your websites.” — IBM Accessibility Center

“Avoid using applets.” — University of California, Berkeley

“Applets introduce usability and deployment issues.” — Apple Computer Developer Connection

Developers often use Java applets just because they can, or because they don’t know how to do it any other way. Don’t fall into the uneducated and unprofessional trap of using applets when some well-thought-out DHTML will do. Spread the word.

Applets are bad.

Author’s Note:

This article was spawned by a series of discussions and arguments with a roomful of various-level developers and junior management. Being only one month new to the company and therefore not having had enough time to prove my expertise, my extensive experience was often somewhat disregarded when my recommendations vehemently conflicted with the current path of development.

Almost seven years later, I am still working at the same company, having outlasted all but one of the above-mentioned developers and management. Apparently, I was able to stem the tide — to this day we have avoided any production use of Java applets. What a relief!

Prior to the reorganziation, this was the 400th article on Richard’s Ramblings — an obsolete and meanginless statistic.