Flooded Lizard Kingdom

Let me show you it.

A recent post on Movable Tweak listed a few things the author would like to see changed in Movable Type. All well and good, until I read the following comment by Su:

Ajax: Meh. It's possible to avoid buzzwords while still buying into the hype, you know. AJAX has serious usability(and accessibility) issues that haven't even all been discovered yet. While I wouldn't particularly object(actually, even care) if more software made use of it, I can think of many reasons to avoid it for the time being.

And the follow-up by Jesse Gardner:

Su, I completely I agree that accessibility is important! That's one of the mantras of my design business. And I am familiar with many of the AJAX accessibility issues, but we're talking about using it to power an application. Perhaps others would disagree with me, but I think sacraficing accessibility in an application for the sake of enhancing the UI is an acceptable loss. For instance, have you ever tried to use MT with javascript off? Many of it's features depend on javascript (try to rebuild!) but I would consider than an acceptable risk, considering all of the benefits we draw from it. Also, keep in mind, AJAX accessibility problems are usually issues like working with screen readers, using the back button and clean urls, most of which don't really matter as much in an application setting (again, see Google Maps).

I get the distinct impression that in this comment, accessibility is treated as an important consideration only in OUTPUT, and not in the TOOLS that are used to create that output.

Do people with disabilities not want to create content? Would they consider it an acceptable loss to sacrifice accessibility and render the tool unusable for them just so the rest of us could have an enhanced UI? Would they think it "doesn't really matter"?

Do you?

(I've never given much thought to whether people with disabilities would be able to use Movable Type to create websites, and that reflects poorly on me since I have often promoted its virtues to others. Time to ask more questions.)

C-Man: In the interview they asked me what kind of things I did with my Macintosh, y'know back when I was 8, and I said "Oh, y'know, draw little pictures of stuff for my D&D characters and try to teach myself Motorola 68000 series assembly language with absolutely no context for it."

The Princess: I am blogging that. From now on, my blog is things C-Man says. I'm going to have to move it to thingsc-mansays.blogspot.com.

Just go see it.

Make sure you also read the rebuttal, if for no other reason than to enjoy the phrase "deflector beanie technology."

The Princess: I wish everyone had trackback.

C-Man: You mean like built into their skulls?

This might not appear strange to you, unless you knew that I had never used the sentence that appears in the image above. I believe that description of my blog was created in the dmoz open directory project. At least, that's where I saw it first. It has now propagated around the web, including to the Google Directory.

I have always believed that Google search results show a selection from the page itself, usually a selection with some words or phrases in bold that indicate why the item came back as a search result. Perhaps I was wrong, and it has always combined third party content with search results.

C-Man, reading website: What?! I think I need to go to this guy's blog and tell him some shit.

The Princess: Please don't tell people things on the internet. It never goes well.

I wrote about my efforts to reduce junk mail - now about my efforts to track spam.

Imitating a friend's husband, I have been using customized email addresses for everyone I do business with by email. For example, if I purchased from amazon (which I don't), I would use amazon@lizardkingdom.org as my email address. All of these addresses go straight into my inbox - it can come in handy to own your own domains. So it's all like regular email, except with a "fingerprint" I thought would allow me to figure out where all the spam comes from. Nasty companies who sell my name, j'accuse!

Surprise! I have received only one spam email traceable to a business I have a relationship with. Except one, from Playcentric. I no longer do business with them. But all the other spam I have received over the last year has been addressed to my normal email address. My suspicions about unauthorized email giveaways were unfounded.

This practice has come in helpful, though, in a way I hadn't anticipated.

I don't always check the unsubscription process before I sign up on an e-mail list. And I am often unpleasantly surprised to find that for many lists, there is no process. No instructions at the bottom of the emails. No contact person. No response to inquiries.

So I just block those addresses. Whether or not they remove it from the list when it starts bouncing, I don't care. The email no longer arrives.

I leave you with some spam subject lines from the past few weeks:

• present for Martinlizarraga [oh thank god, I didn't know what to get him! her? it? i'm so naming a dog that.]
• Don't tell anyone please schroeder pantomimic
• Re: Which clean at chassis neckwear ['cause the re: tricks me into thinking it's a response, see?]
• But find it fictionalisation faulty
• The spend go unhallowed [hallelujah]

Just don't view this site in Internet Explorer. I beg you.

My apartment is so small that this really isn't necessary, and I don't even have cable or caller ID. But oh, how I want it...

From the New York Times (a while back): MEDIA NETWORKING; Ingenuity Can Pay When Wiring The Home, and Cost Less, Too

When an estimate for running the skeins of wire needed to network Michael Spilo's 21-room Connecticut house for audio, video, phone and computers came in at $60,000, he did what any software engineer and entrepreneur would do: develop a system at a much lower cost.

The result is SkipJam, hardware devices connected by a single wire that let you run music, television, phone, security cameras and PC's anywhere in a building from anywhere in the world with Internet access.

The setup requires one $799 iMedia center that attaches to each device. It routes signals to a $499 iMedia player, which has outputs and built-in amplifiers that connect to speakers, TV's and computers.

The system has a built-in TiVo function and ties phone, PC and TV together, so your television and PC screen can display caller ID. You can watch your computer's video files on the big screen, and the TV remote doubles as a phone handset and an intercom, so parents can call their children to dinner and turn off their television from another room.

Mr. Spilo's installation of audio and video for 6 rooms and audio for 10 more costs about $6,000. The units are available at skipjam.com and at home networking and automation dealers.

Of course, it would probably run amok and destroy Tokyo...but that's a small price to pay.

Two of my favorite passages from Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World:

Several years ago Microsoft made a big deal about Windows NT getting a C2 security rating. They were much less forthcoming with the fact that this rating only applied if the computer was not attached to a network and had no network card, had its floppy drive epoxied shut, and was running on a Compaq 386.

Large gaping security holes are okay if the probability of attack is zero. (Tokyo is still vulnerable to attacks by giant fire-breathing lizards, for example.)

ACEEE Legislative Alerts

To get email alerts from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, you print out a page of their website, fill out the form that breaks across page 1 and page 2, and mail it to them.

Really.

ITunes is keeping me company, on random. I often think it's trying to tell me something with its "random" choices, but this time I have no clue. I feel that with 1659 songs to choose from, it's overrepresenting Tori, the Church, TMBG, and Yves Duteil a bit - are they connected in some way? Part of an international plot to brainwash me with subliminal messages?

I started it on:
Alpha Beta Gaga (Mark Ronson Vocal remix) - Air

"Random" output:

Like Upstairs Downstairs, except not a British television show.

Eating Dinner Out of a Measuring Cup (4C, Pyrex)
Upside: Know exactly how much macaroni and cheese was consumed (2C).
Downside: Makes it difficult to maintain pretense that hiding dirty dishes in non-functional dishwasher is elegant solution, no matter what B. said on the phone last night.

Using Ice Cream Scoop to Remove Macaroni and Cheese From Cooking Pot
Upside: Fun.
Downside: See Above.

Dating Humans of Either Gender
Upside: Fun, mostly. Kissing and stuff.
Downside: They suck, and I whine about it constantly to my friends, thus alienating them. Plus, expensive to eat out this much.

I-Tunes
Upside: IT TOTALLY ROCKS!!!!!
Downside: None. Nada. Unless there is a product identical to ITunes that reports out statistics like "Artist With Most Songs Marked With Five Stars." 'Cause I thought it would be Soul Coughing, but now I'm not sure, and I don't want to count by hand. I want ITunes crossbred with SAS.

Yahoo tells me "There are no messages in your Fish folder."

This New York Times article on the growing resentment that techno-savvy people feel about helping the techno-ignorant - and the irritation they feel when worms like MyDoom spread because people are still clicking on attachments from strangers - made me feel bad about asking my friend I-ROCK for help whenever my wireless networking arrangement goes bonk.

However, their examples of the true techno-ignorant made me feel a little better:

...Miriam Tauber, 24, makes no apologies for her lack of computer knowledge. To her, computers are like "moody people" who behave illogically. If people like Mr. Rubenstein expect her to understand them, she suggests, perhaps they should learn to speak in a language she can understand, rather than ridiculous acronyms and suffixes.

"There are these MP3's and PDF's and a million other things that you don't even know what they are," Ms. Tauber said. "I don't feel like I need to figure out computers, because my instinct is there's just no way."

[...]
David Hale, 25, a lawyer in St. Louis, said he had rebuilt his parents' virus-ridden computer from scratch several times in recent months before he learned that his father, Dale, was replying to every piece of his spam e-mail, asking to be taken off the spammers' mailing lists. Dale Hale, 47, also frequently clicked on pop-up ads that appeared to be messages from Microsoft telling him to upgrade his computer.

"It would cause fights between my parents because they would argue about whether a particular one was legitimate and I'm like, 'It is NEVER legitimate,'" said Mr. Hale, who explained as patiently as he could that answering spam and clicking on pop-ups only invite more of the same.

How can these examples not lead you to the conclusion that the geeks are right to be mad? ;) Even my boss makes more of an effort than this to understand the rules and learn from her mistakes - when I answer a question for her, she accepts the information, then makes a serious effort to remember the answer and apply the knowledge in future interactions with the dread machine.

I know at least one person reading this is a sales/marketing professional, and undoubtedly a few more of you spend more time thinking about business than I do. So will someone please explain to me why comment spam on blogs is a good marketing strategy for casinos?

I'd like to know that the 90 "comments" I just spent an hour cleaning out of my blog at least would have had the potential to create a job or two if I'd been inclined to leave them there.

My faithful readers are already aware that I used my time wisely on my recent trip to New England, researching excellent gift-giving ideas in the SkyMall catalog. I was not as impressed by the quality of a particular article in Delta Sky Magazine, in the November 2003 issue.

Guess who gets a new computer?

The folks at Laboratory Computers are now responsible for bringing my machine back to life. Replacing the power supply resulted in nothing but a burning smell and a deep fear for the CPU. *sigh*.

The only upside is that I got a lot of quilting done this weekend because all my other hobbies are apparently dependent on the computer. It was just the sewing machine and me...and the DVD player going through about 15 episodes of Farscape in a row. ;) What *would* I do with my time if there were no electricity?

I ditched the cell phone, changed from cable to DSL, got a perfect hosting plan with Cornerhost, switched from Blogger to MT, imported all my blog entries with no hassle, and then I made the mistake of believing that I had all my telecommunications needs decomplicated and firmly under control.

Now my computer won't power up.

The first evening without it was fine. I decided the universe was sending me a message about repetitive stress injuries and people who aggravate them through overuse of keyboards and mice. Those people would be me, by the way.

Last night was the second night, and it was not fine. Without television or an internet connection I felt completely disconnected from the universe. When I took The Dog for a walk, I was mildly shocked that the world continued to exist beyond my front door.

I-ROCK is fixing the computer tonight, because he is awesome. If it were not for his generosity, I would have to start dating again just to have tech support available.

In other news, the Windows XP setup on the pitiful laptop here at work now says:

Setup will complete
in approximately:
after you're dead

Really.

Yesterday I learned how to use Dreamweaver's Test Site functionality. I love it when I learn a new DWW trick, and I wish I could get one of the people who wrote it to come sit next to me and point out whenever I'm doing something the hard way. I promise I would learn quickly, so they would only have to be here for a couple of days, and I would make macaroni and cheese and tostadas for them in return. Then the Photoshop person would come by, and then I would know many useful things for the making of web pages.

My initial thought about the web, when I heard of it at Macalester, was "Interesting. Don't see why I would ever use it." Now I crave personal tutoring from programmers. Who would have thought?

Today I got every single thing done that I needed to do while I was out. The only bad thing was that I accidentally wrote on my hat again. It wasn't on my head at the time, so it was not quite as bad as it could have been. But this is the third time ballpoint has met this particular bit of canvas, and it's unnecessary. Luckily, the hat is quite washable.

Back to doing stuff, which also leads to complaining. ;) This time, about cleaning up code in stuff people write for the research project website.

Me: "God!!!!"
K.: "Yes?"
Me: "If you were really God, you could get rid of all these span tags for me."
K.: "When a man is given span tags, he has them forever. When they are taken away without any work on his part...he's...an ungrateful...(pause)...fuck!"
Me: "You have no idea where you're going with that, do you?"
K.: "Nope."