La Jolla, CA

While many people become jealous of what others are able to do, I take what they can do as suggestions of what I myself could actually do.

I think inspiration is a far better emotion than jealousy.

Downtown at Seaport Village, there are often people who can balance rocks. Now I'm not talking about one rock, I'm talking about a big rock on top of a little rock on top of a big rock on top of a medium rock, etc. Seaport Village gets quite windy, but the wind doesn't seem to affect their ability to balance those dadgum (dadgum?) rocks.

Recently I was strolling the La Jolla Cove beach admiring the beach houses when I found one home surrounded by a sea wall with balanced rocks. La Jolla Cove beach also gets windy, as it was this day, but it just doesn't seem to affect balanced rocks. Here are two of them:

While these aren't the most magnificent balanced rocks, with the way the wind was blowing here, I could probably put a rock down on the ground and the wind would have blown it away down the beack.

I think the person who did this is well on his or her way to being able to do something that I cannot. I think I'll just be jealous in this one instance, if that's okay with my readers.

So if you have something mundane to do, like remove all those rocks from your back yard in preparation for doing some landscaping this summer, well, see if you can balance them. Your friends will be impressed, and if you send me some pictures, I'll be jealous of YOU, too!

*****

This week's blog posts (they will open in a new window)

1. Life series - 57 posts, various dates, most recently on 6/22/09
2. Guerrilla Marketing series - 7 posts, various dates, most recently on 6/22/09
3. Getting business from home and garden shows, fairs, and carnivals - 6/24/09
4. Is ActiveRain the new USA Today? - 6/24/09
5. WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): Teach them to help while they're young - 6/24/09
   
6. If you need help, don't be afraid to ask.... - 6/23/09

Last week's blog posts (they will open in a new window)

1. It's getting tough out here.... - 6/21/09
2. SST (Speechless Sunday with Text): Cotton candy tree - 6/21/09
3. Realtors, why do you compare this year's sales and prices to a year ago? - 6/21/09
4. Did President Obama let me down? - 6/19/09
5. San Diego Zoo slide show for the brave and courageous - 6/19/09
6. Foto Friday: Things aren't always what they seem - 6/19/09
7. The Flying Seagulls (slide show) - 6/18/09
8. The inspirational story of Capt. Wesley Moore - 6/17/09
9. WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): Let me help you.... - 6/17/09
10. Guerrilla Marketing series - 6 posts, various dates, most recently on 6/15/09

Previous week's blog posts (they will open in a new window)

1. How to effectively use anonymous/semi-anonymous testimonials - 6/14/09
2. Free Windows 2000, XP, and Vista programs for reducing the size of your pictures - 6/12/09
3. Foto Friday: Don't blow your top! - 6/12/09
4. It's okay to be personal (slide show included) - 6/11/09
5. WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): Anyone you know? - 6/10/09
6. Where do you get your energy? - 6/9/09
7. Is someone you know slithering? Help them out! - 6/9/09
8. Is everything you try being blocked by someone? - 6/8/09

Helpful posts for ActiveRain newbies (Yep. They'll open in a new window)

1. How the system works and working the system, or Active Rain point values that I know about
2. How to get 500 points with your ActiveRain success story
3. Do you have some commercials for your business?
4. Free help for Active Rain newbies
5. 10 ways to get a featured post at ActiveRain
6. How to keep people from reading your Active Rain blog
7. How do you get people to comment on your blog?
8. Using Active Rain more effectively by finding Power Partners
9. Quit putting huge, gigantic, monster pictures in your blog. Now! (Help on resizing them)
10. Using YouTube videos without slowing down page loading
11. Don't forget to remember how Active Rain supports you indirectly
12. How to use the Active Rain system more efficiently
13. How do you choose a subject for your blog posts?

Need help with marketing? Join the Guerrilla Marketing Tactics

Inspired by nature? Join the Inspired By Nature

Classical music lover? Join the Classical Music Group.

Want to share a good book? Join the Active Rain Book Club

As I said in a previous post, this past week seemed to have been travel week, either to cities far, far away in another galaxy -- 45 or more miles away -- or to the American outback, also known as the boondocks.

One of my inspections was up in La Jolla, where the Pacific Harbor Seals have taken up residence (pictures to come; no I don't inspect seals).

Since it's only natural that I wind up in La Jolla during rush hour -- and rush hour leaving La Jolla has to be the worst in San Diego County -- I took the opportunity to put on my walking shoes and take a long stroll down the beach, way past the Harbor Seals, to see some magnificent beach houses. This was my favorite one:

At first glance, you might think that the wall around this house is the foundation, but it's not. It's the sea wall. If you look carefully, you can see that this house is sitting smack dab (smack dab?) on the beach.

Here are the beach floor entrances for three other beach homes:

During an El Niño year storm, these beach houses sometimes have their first floors flooded (duh). I suspect that their insurance policies have an El Niño rider attached to them, with a pretty good premium, too. After all, if you can get in, so can Mother and Father Nature and their rowdy son, El Niño.

*****

This week's posts (they'll open in a new window)

1. How to easily help your house burn down - 6/27/09
2. I don't inspect heliports - 6/26/09
3. ActiveRain commenting etiquette: HELP! - 6/26/09 (Featured)
4. How to make the most of your day - 6/25/09
5. WWW (Wordless Wednesday With Words): It's nice to be taken care of - 6/24/09
6. Why we need tort reform - 6/23/09
7. Your electrical panel is not there to cause problems, it's there to prevent them - 6/22/09
8. Unsolvable problems? Look at it differently. The answer is there. - 6/22/09

Last week's posts (they'll open in a new window)

1. Is this not the most beautiful lizard you have ever seen in your life? - 6/21/09
2. A California home inspection first for me - 6/21/09
3. SST (Speechless Sunday with Text): You take my chair, I take your pillow.... - 6/21/09
4. ActiveRain brings us back together after a six-year split - 6/20/09
5. Balboa Park water lily slide show - 6/20/09
6. Viking Range refrigerator recall - 6/20/09
7. Foto Friday: It just takes a little balance. I know I can do it. - 6/19/09
8. Camera review: Canon EOS Rebel XSi - 6/18/09
9. WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): Takin' it easy - 6/17/09
10. How to have fun when the Realtor is late.... - 6/16/09
11. Do you have a yellow thingy? - 6/15/09

Previous week's posts (they'll open in a new window)

1. Happy Flag Day! (flags included) - 6/14/09
2. The air conditioner is still hibernating - 6/13/09
3. How does a cat know? - 6/13/09
4. "There were rodents in the attic...." - 6/12/09
5. Foto Friday: Ground squirrel invasion slide show - 6/12/09
6. It's only a fix depending on your viewpoint - 6/11/09
7. WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): One-month old flamingo at the San Diego Zoo - 6/10/09
8. WWW (Wordless Wednesday with Words): Bottoms up! - 6/10/09
9. Refrigerator recall - Admiral, Amana, Crosley, Jenn-Air, Magic Chef, Maytag, Performa - 6/9/09
10. The house I want to inspect, but I'm not qualified - 6/8/09

Need help with marketing? Join the Guerrilla Marketing Tactics Group.

Inspired by nature? Join the Inspired By Nature Group.

Classical music lover? Join the Classical Music Group.

Want to share a good book? Join the Active Rain Book Club.

Companies like Rentec Direct property management software are innovating the web with the latest technology to make online applications more usable.

Done properly, like in a typical windows or macintosh appliation, right click menus can make an online application far more useable and more feature rich. It comes down to managing screen realestate. Web browsers only have so much screen realestate to display and therefore online applications are typically limited in their feature sets by the amount of space on the screen.

Right click menus, in our use case, replace the need to display options right within the different pages of the application. It's a rare occassion that when using property management software do you move-out a tenant, so that functionality is then built into the right-click menu because it's an infrequently used function. Same goes for deleting properties, and other less frequently used clicks.

On top of the other benefits, a right click menu allows for less mouse movement. It may not seem like "a lot" of work to move a mouse from one side of the screen to the other; however, when using an online application frequently, or perhaps for hours a day if you manage a lot of properties, those milliseconds saved for each click do actually make a noticeable improvement in productivity. Every improvement in efficiency helps when an application is used frequently. Especially for nested options that may have earlier taken 2 or 3 clicks, which can be displayed and made available right from the front page via the right click menu.

For an experienced web application designer, this functionality is easy to integrate. It doesn't have to be done by scratch because the programming has already been done. Tools such as the jQuery plugin called contextMenu make it very easy to add right-click functionality to any website.

Opinions? How do AR members feel about having right-click functionality on web apps?