Q-Page

But first a joke.

“Do you know what DNA stands for?” asks Steve Mohanan?

Scroll down . . .

“National Dyslexic Association”

Sorry.

And now, if you keep scrolling down, you will eventually come to the Q-page button near the bottom of this page. (See it?)

I tell you this for three reasons:

First, you might want to use it to get this column delivered to you on a schedule of your choosing. I wouldn’t, because I use AOL, and right now with AOL Q-page has to send the page as “an attachment.” That’s a pain. Plus, why would I want to have my own column delivered to me? But you might, and you might not use AOL.

Second, you might want to put the Q-page button on your web page, if you have one, or your company’s web page, so your visitors are sure to see it. Why make them request it “manually” each time? Why risk their forgetting to come visit? To “Q-page” your page, just click the little line just below the Q-page button and follow the instructions from there.

Third, some of you have been following the development of this small company, in which I hold an interest. This is the latest development. (Also: we’ve moved to our own dedicated server.) What I find most remarkable is that until we reached abroad and hired a 22-year-old Bangla Deshi on a contract basis — Nayeem is his name, and, no, we have naturally never met him — all of the programming for this enterprise was done by my brilliant young friend Marc and his canny canine Looe down on South Beach. (You can see Looe on the Quickbrowse website. We do not ourselves know what Nayeem looks like, but he writes clean code. And at 22, everybody looks good.)

The world has come a long way since the Seventies when a friend of mine, more into Daily Variety than Foreign Affairs, asked of “The Concert for Bagla Desh” — a record you may recall that featured a little girl on the sleeve, designed to raise money for that flood-ravaged, impoverished nation — “What’s with this Bangla?” Yes, she was an appealing little girl, he allowed. But how was it that an entire record album had been produced on her behalf? Who was this little girl? What was the angle?

Nayeem had not even been born by then; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had just about the only two personal computers in the world; and a phone call to Bangla Desh cost . . . well were there any phones in Bangla Desh?

And now Nayeem is writing code that will enable Quickbrowse and its sisters, Q-search, Q-people and Q-page, to assist millions of people around the globe to use the Internet a little more effectively. Or so Looe seems to be dreaming, as he snoozes at Marc’s feet. Looe has been working like a dog.

Tomorrow: Short-Sale Tax Treatment, and More