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Art21 - The Alphabet Synthesis Machine(9:45 PM) ¶

 
A List Apart: Web Standards and Tools: "If web development tools like Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Adobe's GoLive and Microsoft's FrontPage (among countless other applications) do not generate standards-compliant code, the work of convincing the browser vendors to support standards will have been wasted. The creation of content will be trapped in a shell-legible only in a handful of browsers, locking out millions worldwide."(9:42 PM) ¶

 
Don't call in sick from work and then blog that you have an infected uvula. I'm back at work and getting no end of uvula jokes. Heh, serves me right :)

One person reminded me of the old "Your Uvula and You" skit from 1975 Saturday Night Live. I'll have to go look for an mp3 of that...(10:15 AM) ¶

Thursday, March 21, 2002

 
TheMacMind - Compelling Mac Content: "10 OS X Applications you must install or I will break into your computer and install them for you
" If nothing else, it's got a great title...(4:21 PM) ¶

 
E-Scribe New Media: Mailfilter Stuff. This is a spam filter program for MacOS X. Well, for any UNIX but the site linked above has specific instructions for MacOS X.(3:43 PM) ¶

 
Yahoo tacking on fee to e-mail features. The portal's e-mail service is no longer spared from efforts to impose fees around the site: People who want to keep using certain mail features will soon have to pay up. [CNET News.com](11:44 AM) ¶

 
I've enabed the titles and links feature in Radio 8.0.7. I'm curious to see how this works with Radio Express, the Blogger bridge, and in Radio itself. So, I'll be doing some testing over the next day or so.(11:38 AM) ¶

 
Iceman "died after knife fight". The man entombed in an Alpine glacier for millennia died just after combat, say researchers - others reject the idea [New Scientist](11:14 AM) ¶

 
moreCrayons - A bigger box of crayons for the web. An excellent site with a new color palette which is MUCH more freeing than the lousy 216 "Web-safe" palette (which I have complete ignored for years in my desinging). How long until more editors and graphics programs support this?(11:08 AM) ¶

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

 
Well, the fire is starting to wind down and I need to be up to go to work in the morning. I'm hoping that I'm well enough to go in but I'm not holding my breath. I never got as much rest today as I needed to get but Ann was in worse shape than I and Jack still requires too much supervision. It will be nice when we can tell him to go downstairs and play and let us *both* sleep a bit. Oh, who am I kidding? He'll be in the room every five minutes looking for help with something, asking a question, wanting to show us stuff, etc. He's far too interested in other people and their reactions and thoughts, etc. And I love it. Even if it means I will never get a nap or be able to sleep in for another... um... 16 or so years...

Where was I? Right. Sleep. As in, I'm going to go to. Now.(11:56 PM) ¶

 
Las Vegas Mercury: Goldberg: Dear Diary...: "Apparently, there is a new and more dangerous assault to casual obsessive stalking, dating and innocent sexual misadventure: the weblog."

This is priceless! And downright scary.(11:36 PM) ¶

 
Nick Denton: "Where are the liberal weblogs?" A good list. It's a start.(11:15 PM) ¶

 
March 20, 2002 - March Madness: Has Selig Gone Too Far This Time?: "Think about that for a minute. In a multi-billion-dollar industry whose largest investors include Disney, News Corp., AOL Time Warner, and the Tribune Company, a car dealer from Milwaukee not only dictates labor policy, but forbids his employers from discussing the wisdom of his chosen course among themselves. The Iraqi Parliament has more freedom."(11:11 PM) ¶

 
YellowTimes.org: ""The 'War on Terrorism' for dummies"" Very interesting reading.(11:04 PM) ¶

 
Ruby: Productive Programming Language: "Every few years something significant happens in the land of computer programming. In my opinion the Ruby computer language is such a landmark."(10:59 PM) ¶

 
The New Yorker: "The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven't yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head."(11:40 AM) ¶

 
Leper Messiah is a new weblog I just found which is wonderful. The author (whose real name I didn't bother to find because I'm a sick, lazy, fuckhead today) has a lot of great gems and some insightful observations. I laughed, I cried, it was better than cats.

Anyway, my favorite (and it's damned true): "Have you ever noticed how free small children are? For example, at one point this weekend, my goddaughter took off her pants because she "didn't want to wear them". She then spent the rest of the day running around in a purple shirt & undies, without a care in the world. When do we adults lose that feeling of nonchalance? Can you imagine being at the office, in a small, confining, cookie-cutter cubicle, and just deciding to take off your pants because you didn't feel like wearing them anymore? Or running down the street (sans-pants), jumping in the air yelling "I'm a fairy princess! I'm a fairy princess!"? Oh, how I envy her that freedom.... "(9:56 AM) ¶

 
Today is the first day of spring. It's cold, rainy, and all three of us are very sick. I have Jack duty first this morning so Ann (bronchitis) can sleep in. At lunch we trade places so she can watch Jack while I (badly infected uvula, if you can believe that) sleep. Jack (general flu) will sleep this afternoon also. Ann and I are both on antibiotics and Jack is on Children's Tylenol Cold. What fun. Happy spring...(9:17 AM) ¶

Sunday, March 17, 2002

 
Question for anyone out there who knows about weblogger.com: If I wanted to do custom domain hosting (say, raggedcastle.com is hosted as a manila site) could I hook up two copies of radio so I can post my weblog to www.raggedcastle.com/andyjw/ and my wife can post to www.raggedcastle.com/ann/ ? Or can I only publish to the root level (www.raggedcastle.com/)? In other words, can you run TWO radio-managed weblogs in a single manila site?(10:47 PM) ¶

 
Business Week: Entertainment Execs, Fear Not the Net "The music and movie bigwigs' antipiracy crusade misses a key point: People are tired of those industries' old ways of business" They got it right.(10:24 PM) ¶

 
webgraphics : weblog : CSS Bookmarklet - Show divs and spans -- This is an excellent tool which is going to make my life much easier as I work on complicated CSS-based sites.(10:11 PM) ¶

 
The Wrong Way to Use CSS in Page Layouts : evolt.org, Site Development(10:09 PM) ¶

 
Chinese Outdid Columbus, Briton Says(10:04 PM) ¶

 
snowdeal.org > ex machina is linking back to me. Thanks! snowdeal.org is one of the more interesting and worthwhile sites to visit. I rarely leave without being finding something new and interesting.(9:52 PM) ¶

 
Andrew Pulrang in his apulrang.diary weblog writes very eloquently about a recent "This American Life" program about the mentally retarded and his reactions to the show (follow the link above to his site and his writing). One passage in particular stands out for me:

"What makes this worse is that the professionals charged with helping you, and even your parents, are likely to be hesitant to talk straight with you about your disability. They use euphamisms like "differently abled" or "exceptional" and act all nice, but they won't let you make decisions, don't really listen to what you think, and treat others better than they treat you ... even though you can't really tell why. You ask about it, but they hem and haw, change the subject, or else just hug you and call you "special" again. Either that, or they pull out a clipboard and make careful notes about your evey move, mood, and statement. I suppose eventually you get the idea that you were born different, that you need help with things that others don't, but still, it's got to be confusing, especially when talking plainly about it seems to be such a taboo."

I remember hearing a report on All Things Considered one night (and if I weren't so lazy right now I'd actually link to it in their archives. Maybe later) in which a group of minorities and one man in a wheelchair were discussing political correctness. The man in the wheelchair put it best (I'm paraphrasing here) when he said that using terms like "physically challenged" and "differently abled" are not there to make him feel better, but for the speaker to somehow feel better about talking about him.

Since last May I've been doing a lot of work with making websites compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In other words, making websites accessible. I've learned two key things:

1. It is fiendishly easy to make a website fully accessible without sacrificing design, style, quality; and without adding any significant effort.
   
2. Most websites are not accessible and the authors of those sites have little interest in making them accessible.
   

Where is the problem? My guess is that there is little pressure to change and and the number of people who take the time to complain are few and far between.

And, look at me, the raggedcastle.com version of this weblog is accessible. I have worked to make it compliant with both Section 508 and with the WCAG 1.0 from W3C (again, too lazy to link tonight). But the radio version of this site uses a default template which is loaded with graphics in a table layout and is likely highly annoying if not outright inaccessible. One of these days I plan on fixing this but it's low on my list. So, essentially, I'm being part of the problem. And I'm aware of the problem! So, you can see why the majority of web designers aren't doing this if people like me who know and care haven't gotten their act together.

I started writing this intending to go in a very different direction than where I ended up. I hate it when my brain takes me on a ride like that! :)(9:52 PM) ¶

 
Very cool MacOS X tool from Bergen Street Software: "CopyPath adds a Contextual Menu Item option to the Contextual Menu in the Finder. Control-click a document, application, folder, mounted volume, zip disk, anything, and easily copy the full path to that item directly to your clipboard!
"(9:21 PM) ¶

 
Pinpoint weather forecasts on horizon. Future forecasts will cover zones of just one square kilometre - enough to predict rain within 500 metres of Wimbledon's Centre Court, for example [New Scientist](9:12 PM) ¶

 
World Press Photo of the Year 2001. Check out the other winners as well.(11:52 AM) ¶