I don’t ‘forward’!

I get a lot of things sent to me by the people I know, and that have my e-mail address. Some (many) annoy me, but at times I get sent stuff that I actually like, or find amusing, or some such.

Going through and cleaning up my hard drive after upgrading my system, I figured that a blog would be good way to keep all these things around in a central place…so, that’s what I’ve done! There’s only a couple things up there now (and they’re both pretty long), but more will appear as I keep digging through all the stuff I’ve got scattered around my drives.

So without further ado — I don’t ‘forward’!

Wag the dog, Bushie

I know Dick Cheney finds it “reprehensible” that anyone could think the White House’s timing on Iraq is politically inspired, but the administration has exhibited a pattern of behavior that (as Cheney rightly warns with Saddam) creates a context that raises extra concerns. What else should reasonable people make of these facts?

  • In June a floppy disk found in Lafayette Park across from the White House turned out to contain a Powerpoint presentation used by Karl Rove to detail the White House’s strategy for the midterm elections. “Focus on war” was a key point in a talk that centered on the White House’s desire to “maintain a positive issue environment.”

  • Around this time Rove was upbraided (at least for PR reasons) after he told a Republican gathering that the war and terror themes and the associated military buildup could and should play to the Republicans’ advantage in the midterm elections.

  • When White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was asked why the administration waited until after Labor Day to launch its campaign to convince the American people that military action against Iraq was necessary, Card replied: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

— Matthew Miller, My ‘reprehensible’ suspicions on Iraq

(via Kirsten — hopefully she won’t mind that I snarfed her idea for the title!)

Even cops get to play sometimes

Every morning on my way to work, I walk out my door and head about five blocks down 8th avenue to my usual bus stop. Once a week, when I need to pick up my paycheck, I cut through the Freeway Park next to the Convention Center and head into downtown to the Today’s offices.

Since I had a paycheck waiting for me today, that was my route. Once I turned into the park entrance, though, I was a little concerned, as there was a small group of five police officers, all on their patrol bikes, grouped around the top of the staircase I normally head down. It didn’t look like anything was really happening, though, so I just kept going on my merry little way. Just before I got to the top of the stairs, one of the officers turned his bike around, carefully took aim — and started to attempt to ride his bike down the staircase, egged on by the other four officers he’d just been talking with, and another officer already at the bottom of the staircase.

He paused at the first landing long enough for me to walk by, then started working his way down again, only to take a tumble off his bike about halfway down. Fortunately, the next officer, already starting to ride down the stairs on his bike, managed to both avoid the one who’d just fallen off his bike and was laughing and trying to disentangle himself from the spokes, and keep going down without taking a spill. “It’s not as easy as it looks!” said the officer waiting at the bottom of the stairs, as we watched a couple more start to bump their way down.

Must’ve been a slow morning.

Man I wish I’d had my camera with me.

:-)

Everything’s gotta start somewhere, right?

Back in 1982, this post showed up on the CMU CS general bboard…

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(

And the world has never been the same!

Mike Jones has the full story.

Good kitty…nice kitty…

Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar)Long story short — after two weeks of waiting, and a good few hours of ‘puter work, I’ve just upgraded my main mac (and webserver) to the newest version of Mac OS X, ‘Jaguar’ (v10.2).

What does this mean for you, the end-user? Um…nothing.

For me, though, it’s definitely a good thing. Even on my rapidly aging 350 MHz G3, the system is noticeably faster than prior versions of OS X were. Man, do I wish I could afford a newer machine that can actually take advantage of some of the optimizations built into this! Ah, well. Someday.

(Also, many thanks to two articles that helped me make sure I had everything up and running correctly under the new system: Apache Web Serving with Mac OS X and Setting up a site server with Jaguar, both from the MacDevCenter.)

Accessibility statement

I’d done this once before, but as it got lost in my site crash, I took a few minutes to go through Dive Into Accessibility and make sure that my site was up to spec. I’m good to go, so here’s the official babble:

Note: This accessibility statement was written for my old site at djwudi.com. While the majority of it will still correspond to michaelhanscom.com, I’ve yet to go through and double-check everything. Please bear that in mind. Thanks!


Accessibility statement

This is the official accessibility statement for www.michaelhanscom.com. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at djwudi@myrealbox.com.

Access keys

Most browsers support jumping to specific links by typing keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on Macintosh, you can press Control + an access key.

All pages on this site define the following access keys:

  • Access key 1 – Home page
  • Access key 4 – Search
  • Access key 9 – Feedback
  • Access key 0 – Accessibility statement

Standards compliance

  1. All pages on this site are at least Bobby and WCAG A approved, AA and AAA when possible. This is always a judgement call; many accessibility features can be measured, but many can not.

  2. All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, a judgement call.

  3. All pages on this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This is not a judgement call; a program can determine with 100% accuracy whether a page is valid XHTML. For example, check this page for XHTML validity.

  4. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for the header, H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles, etc. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+4.

Navigation aids

  1. All pages have rel=previous, next, up, and home links to aid navigation in text-only browsers. Netscape 6 and Mozilla users can also take advantage of this feature by selecting the View menu, Show/Hide, Site Navigation Bar, Show Only As Needed (or Show Always).

  2. The home page and all archive pages include a search box (access key 4). Advanced search options are available at the advanced search page.

Links

  1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).

  2. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

  1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes.

Visual design

  1. This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.

  2. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers.

  3. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

  1. W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.

  2. W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.

  3. W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.

  4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

  5. Dive Into Accessibility, a comprehensive guide to implementing these guidelines in websites, with a focus on the most popular blogging software.

Accessibility software

  1. JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.

  2. Home Page Reader, a screen reader for Windows. A downloadable demo is available.

  3. Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.

  4. Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.

  5. Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.

Accessibility services

  1. Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.

  2. HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.

  3. Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.

  4. Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

  1. WebAIM, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving accessibility to online learning materials.

  2. Designing More Usable Web Sites, a large list of additional resources.

Recommended reading

  1. Joe Clark: Building Accessible Websites. Comprehensive but not overwhelming.

  2. Jim Thatcher and others: Constructing Accessible Web Sites. Less comprehensive than Joe’s book, but goes into greater depth in the topics it covers. Gives screenshots of how various screen readers and alternative browsers interpret various tags and markup. Also has an amazing chapter on the current state of legal accessibility requirements.

Thanks to Dive Into Accessibility for the template for this Accessibility statment.

Oingo Boingo

Y’know, I wish I had an excuse for not discovering Oingo Boingo years ago…but I don’t.

However, somewhere along the line I ended up with the Best O’ Boingo CD. I don’t know that I’d ever even listened to it before, but ever since I got my iPod whenever an Oingo Boingo track shows up in the random playlist I use, I end up thinking it’s really cool, checking to see who it is, and kicking myself for never having gotten into this group before. I really should have — I’ve liked their song ‘Dead Man’s Party’ for years, and have thought for a while now that Danny Elfman creates some of the best movie scores I’ve heard, but I still didn’t ever bother investigating them.

Ah, well. Better late than never!

So it’s been a year

I’d like to come up with something amazingly deep and profound to say, but for one reason or another, it’s just not in me. Besides, plenty of other people have worthwhile things to say.

I think part of my little bout of writer’s block is just that the entire situation is frustrating. One year ago, something huge and immensely terrifying happened. In the year since then, however, a multitude of other, smaller, less immediately noticeable things have happened (usually in the name of ‘patriotism’), that added up scare me as much as (and quite possibly more than) the attacks themselves. It’s a different kind of scare, but it’s a scare, nothenless. Awareness of this side of things does seem to be growing, though, which is good.

I guess, most of what I’d really want to say I’ve said already, either in some of my rants over the past year or in the links I’ve chosen to highlight in this blog (the majority of which, unfortunately, still reside in limbo).

I dunno. I’m rambling. Caught between wanting to say something, and not really having anything of real import to say.

Portland protest

Bill of Rights, R.I.P.An interesting and nicely even-handed writeup of an anti-Bush protest in Portland that went wrong — from a peaceful protest march to conflicts with the police, including pepper spray and rubber bullets. What happened? Murphy’s law…

…I felt that the police and the protestors were, behaviorally, mirrors of each other. The police officers were mostly acting within decent bounds, and the protestors were mostly peacefully making their views known. However, just as the police had a few unprofessional punks who felt compelled to spray and shoot at protestors, so did our side have its share of adolescent morons who thought it was a good idea to spit at the cops, throw things at them, try and force their way past them, and generally try to provoke violence. As some of the asinine “kill a cop” “they are subhuman” sentiments one hears clearly show, our side cannot claim to be free of infantile, violent cretins, much as we might like to believe it.

It is time to be serious-minded, friends. All the best things about this nation are under assault, and we have lost a great deal of ground already. We have mostly lost it through shortsightedness, internal bickering, and an annoying habit of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need to stop acting as though “smash the state, stick it to the Man” is anything other than a child’s point of view. We need to take actions that will have a real effect, supporting candidates who can win even if they’re not 100% ideologically perfect, forming alliances with people who might not share every one of our pet issues, and generally approaching this problem as adults in the real world approach problems. Our freedoms will not be won back in the streets by dashing young revolutionaries. Get that image out of your mind. Our freedoms will be won back by dull people at city council meetings, by policy wonks in congressional office buildings, by months and years of painful, uninteresting, and EFFECTIVE work.

(via Boing Boing)