Archive: June 2004
Elephants, Motorcycles, and a Pale Pink Feather
From the braintalk MS forum, on what to say when asked why you use a wheelchair:
It was a tragic circus accident involving elephants and a spinning motorcycle act. The worst part was they had to cut off my pale pink feather and sequined tank outfit at the hospital.
I really loved that costume.
Re-working the WordPress admin interface for Opera
DenkZEIT :: Umgebautes admin-Interface für Wordpress (Rebuilt administrative interface for WordPress)
Steffan has provided most of the workaround for the messy appearance of the default admin interface for Wordpress.
The problem is that the posting interface uses fieldset to position the page elements, and Opera won’t position fieldsets, just stacks them up one after the other. Steffan’s [...]
Firefox vs Opera
I’m getting a little annoyed with Opera (just a little). The main driver is the fact that it doesn’t display the WordPress admin screens properly.
I played with Firefox when it was Firebird, but wasn’t very motivated, so now I’m checking out Firefox again.
Opera things that I miss:
One letter keyboard shortcuts, specifically Back (Z) and Forward [...]
Bus Accessibility tally
Latest trip bus tally: DIA’s regular parking lots, both garage and economy, were full (!), so I had to park in the Podunk parking. Bus driver number one pressed his ramp deployment button repeatedly with no effect, and told me, so sorry, but there’s a bus right after me. Bus driver number two was more [...]
Wheelchair Tools and Airport Security
I had so little luggage for last week’s two day trip to Albuquerque, I decided to carry it on, including my folding hex wrenches. I allowed enough time to check the bag if security wouldn’t let it through.
On the outbound leg, the screener ran my bag through x-ray three times, then took it aside for [...]
What the …
Man in wheelchair asked to leave historic store - unbelievable.
Edited to add text, since the original has disappeared:
Man in wheelchair asked to leave historic store, may sue
The Associated Press
6/25/2004, 4:35 p.m. CT
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — A Toney man is considering legal action after he was asked to leave a hardware store museum because [...]
Restroom Stall Doors
Let’s have a little restroom rant.
The ADAAG (ADA Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities) talks about clear floor space, grab bars, fixture height, size and doors (they swing out), and these things are all good. What’s missing? You pull open the door and roll into your roomy, compliant stall, turn around (because there’s enough room, [...]
The Statistics Defense
Why the ’statistics defence’ doesn’t stand up - so few of my users [use Netscape 4|are visually impaired|browse from a cell phone], why should I make my website accessible to that minority?
iBook!
Eldest Son’s graduation present has arrived. It is an iBook, the first Mac at our house. We are amazed and confused. Soon we hope to be elucidated.
Unexpectedly easy
The nameserver change went much better than I expected. The only way it could have been better is if the previous host had allowed me to hang on to the old account for a few days while the nameserver change propagates.
Rearranging, 2
I’ve spent a lot of the weekend getting rmvr.com ready to move to a new host. Two of the reasons I don’t like the current host are 1) no shell access, and 2) no CVS.*
I’ve copied everything to the new host, and have spent a lot of time just cleaning things up - re-validating everything, [...]
Rearranging
I have discovered the joy of subdomains. I’ve been moving everything around, and so it’s probably broken. Mostly, I’ve created a subdomain for things in development, which has really cleaned out my root directory.
Beyond visitability
Taking visitability to new heights: Wheelchair Accessible Dock Open For Summer:
Cynthia’s friend Sue Hoffman bought the four acres of land about three years ago and got the idea to make trails, a picnic area and a fishing dock all wheelchair accessible.
Search strings
Some days you just get really lovely search strings:
#reqs: search term
4: bathroom photos
4: james christian pfohl moravian
3: accessibility consultant
2: wedding marimba music
2: journal backgrounds
2: new scientist multiple sclerosis mother
[...]
Learning in public, for everyone to see
Learning in public can be embarrassing. I now know that having pingback enabled and sending a trackback is pretty darn redundant.
Sorry about that.
Is it blogging, or programming?
I’m tending to think that you do have to be a programmer to use WordPress effectively - which is not to say it isn’t fun. At this point (early days yet), I’d use Movable Type to set up a site for anyone else.
Smart quote fix
This is a test of my smart-quote fix.
There’s an apostrophe in this sentence.
“This sentence is surrounded by double quotes.”
‘This sentence is surrounded by single quotes.’
Here’s how I fixed it:
Create a file in wp-content/plugins called my-hacks.php. Put the following in the file:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: my-hacks
Plugin URI: #
Description: Resting place for a variety of changes. Presently includes removing
[...]
Apostrophes
WordPress apparently goes around converting perfectly good low-bit ASCII characters like the single quote into high-bit characters like the apostrophe. This is tremendously irritating - if I wanted text littered with high-bit ASCII, I’d use Microsoft Word.
Hunting for the solution to this problem, I found The apostrophe is the modern day Shibboleth, which in turn [...]
Manual Trackback
Trackbacks seem to be unnecessarily confusing. A trackback is a reference on one website (usually a blog) to another website (ditto). MovableType supports trackbacks fairly intuitively, but a lot of blogging tools don’t.
Simpletracks allows either party to create a manual trackback. To do this, you need to know two things: the permanent URI of the [...]
Eclectic Harmony
What do you get when one musician marries another? A lot of really good music at the wedding. Performing were the bride’s choir, Aster Chamber Choir (the bride did not sing), the groom’s a cappella quintet, Treble in Paradise (the groom did sing), and for dance music after the ceremony, Shungu from the Kutandara Center [...]
Backyard fox
There seems to be a little red fox living (?) in my backyard. It’s as cute as can be. The dog is going nuts.
NWF - When the Red Fox Comes to Town
The Little Foxes
Unbowed by Adversity
Unbowed by Adversity - Olympic hopeful Erika La Brie
Design guru, heal thyself!
I’ve started work on a new website and went searching for articles about choosing fonts, both for conveying a feel and readability. I’m stunned at the number of sites offering advice on usability and readability that are themselves very difficult to read. Offenses include:
using tiny sans-serif fonts for body text
inadequate line spacing (12 point arial [...]
Movable Type redirects
I figured out how redirect from Movable Type to WordPress. It was a three step process:
Get WordPress to make URLs for individual entries that make sense.
In WordPress, choose Options | Permalinks. I used the /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ permalink structure. After I clicked on “Update Permalink Structure”, WordPress returned the list of mod_rewrite rules I needed.
Create a [...]
Perl
I’ve spent the last three days hacking somebody else’s Perl scripts (oh, and learning Perl), so I haven’t had much time to think about anything else.
I’m not sure I’m crazy about a language that lets you use variables before you declare them.
Triathlon, or Mad Dogs & Englishmen
Just back from the Longmont Triathlon, which seems to get smaller every year. The husband placed second in his age group, closer to his annual nemesis than ever before. The daughter placed fourth, out of four women under 20, and is very happy to have finished in under two hours. Youngest Son is crowing about [...]
Disability films
Frank sexuality, creativity are exposed in disability films
Every year, the Superfest disability film festival gets a few entries from well-meaning filmmakers that are filled with dry statistics, patronizing case studies or clinical interviews with experts.
And each year, they get passed up in favor of real stories that are as entertaining as they are informative.
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