The Blind Confidential Archive

By Gonz Blinko

“Hello, “I said as I picked up the telephone’s receiver.

“I haven’t figured out how to decode it yet,” said Clebsch Molotovski,
a blind Polish immigrant, MIT graduate student and hacker
extraordinaire.

“Huh?” I had answered the phone and recognized Molotovski’s voice but
I had no idea what he was talking about.

The subliminable messages, of course,” he replied.

“Of course? What subliminable messages might you be talking about?”

“The ones in that spooky, science fictiony tune that it plays at
start-up.” Stated Molotovski as if this statement had been self
explanatory.

“When what starts up?” I responded curiously.

“RIM, RAM, SAM, all of the stuff from SerenityTech.”

“What?” I asked somewhat exasperated with Molotovski’s assumption
that I should know what the hell he was talking about.

“How quickly can you get to Cambridge?”

“Clebsch, why do I need to go up to Cambridge,” I said sitting on my
sofa in my condo on Joey Ramone Place in the Village.

“BC, his dog and wife are already here,” he stated as if my joining
them up north might have some value.

“So what?”

“We’ve got to get working to crack the code in the subliminable messages.”

“Will you please explain what the hell you’re talking about?”

After finishing the call with Molotovski, I called Samhara to tell her
to meet me at LaGuardia near the USAirways counter. I told her we
would fly to Boston for a project and that I would most definitely
need a lot of legal advice.

“There’s a code we need to crack,” I told Samhara as our plane left the ground.

“What sort of code and when did you become an expert in cryptography?”

“Molotovski seems to believe that subliminable messages hidden in the
start-up tune that plays when Any SerenityTech product launches. He
says it takes control of people’s minds and that some of our friends
have turned into pod people.”

“Pod people?”

“Like in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They seem to have lost
control of their will and have handed it over to Mickey Bald.”

“Ok, let me get this straight, Mickey Bald and Soupy Campbell have
devised a subliminable algorithm that takes control of the minds of
their users? Sounds pretty pretty damned unlikely. I want to go back
to New York; Allie is tossing a party tomorrow for just us girls.”

“Let’s see what Molotovski has to say and decide whether we want to
fly back tonight or actually work on solving this problem.”

Molotovski’s subterranean office sat off of MIT’s infinite corridor.
Samhara, the X-Dog and I had to walk the equivalent of 20 city blocks
through the bowels of the great university. Upon arriving at
Molotovski’s space, we walked right in as he had left his door open
and we assumed he expected visitors to enter without knocking.

“Hey Clebsch,” said Samhara announcing our presence.

He either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore the greeting so I said,
“Molotovski, wake up, you summoned us here and we want to know why.”
He remained silent.

Samhara slapped the hacker on his back and Clebsch Molotovski jumped
out of his chair. “What the fuck do you think you are doing?” He
yelled loudly. “Oh… Hi guys, I was lost in thought, trying to get to
the bottom of the subliminable messages. I’m also trying to find a
way to immunize other blinks from the intense draw of the hypnotic
tune that, if they hear it enough, they lose control of their minds.”

Samhara asked the obvious question, “What evidence do you have that
leads you to believe that RIM, RAM and SAM can take control of a
user’s mind and turn their will over to Mickey Bald?

“A few months back, I noticed that some of our friends had started
behaving strangely.” Stated Clebsch in a matter of fact manner.

“In what way?” I asked.

“Well, it seemed to start with BC,” added Molotovski.

“What started with BC?” Asked Samhara.

“Well, you guys know how BC loved JAWS. You guys must remember how he
would write articles and tell people that, if he only had one screen
reader to use he would always choose JAWS.”

“Right, so what?” I inquired.

“Well, a few months back, he started making public statements about
how much he loves SAM.”

“Sam who?” Asked Samhara.

“Not a who,” explained Molotovski, “more like a what.”

“A what what? I interjected.

“SAM, Serenity Adaptation Module, the program Bald insists will
conquer the world of people with vision impairment,” he explained.
“He and Soupy seem to do much more than innovate, they take control of
their user’s computers and, over time, their minds. So, people who
once would advocate on behalf of JAWS or Window-Eyes now sing praise
to SAM.”

“How do you know that BC doesn’t think the software is really great?”
Asked Samhara.

“At first I thought that might be possible but then I noticed this
plague spreading.”

“Continue,” I said.

“Captain Capcha fell prey to the tune shortly after BC,” stated
Clebsch in a matter of fact tune, “He started kissing The Cardinal’s
toes under the dark Desert Skies. Soon, the Cardinal gave up his knee
jerk support for Window-Eyes and also started singing the praises of
Mickey Bald and the SerenityTech software.”

“Again, how do you know that they all had lost control of their will
and didn’t just actually like the software,” I asked.

“They don’t just like or even love SAM, they evangelize for it, they
tell everyone they can about it, they are acting like a bunch of
junkies on a serious run. So, I started investigating and found the
subliminable messages in the SerenityTech science fiction tune.”

“What do the messages say? I asked.

“Eat Campbell’s soup, Mickey Bald loves you, embrace change, come into
the world of serenity, JAWS will eat you alive, Geoffray Giraffe is
dangerous and one or two others.”

“I’ve heard the tune and never heard any words in it,” I said.

“That’s the trick, they speed up the phrases to a point that they
sound like they are part of the tune and the subliminable messages
slowly infect the user’s mind and the next thing you know, they are
wandering around with a vacant look on their face giving SerenityTech
as much free advertising as they possibly can.”

“How did you find the messages?” Asked Samhara.

“First, I inspected the wave form of the tune when played backwards,
kind of looking for a Paul is dead statement embedded in the sound.
That didn’t give me anything useful so I generated a wave form from
the beginning and sped it up, still nothing. Next, I took a guess and
tried slowing it down and I found some anomalies in the curve. I
clipped these out and slowed them down even more and found that they
contained the messages.”

“Shit,” I added, “What can we do to stop the madness?”

“We need to figure out how to get the messages out of the tune,” said
Clebsch. “They have embedded some kind of scheme that causes one’s
system to download a fresh copy of the tune if they detect it has been
tampered with.”

“So, why exactly did you need a journalist and lawyer to help you?”
Asked Samhara somewhat miffed.

“I thought you were a doctor,” said Clebsch.

“Yes, a doctor of journalism, not a medical doctor or psychologist,” I
explained.

“Close enough!” Proclaimed Molotovski.

Samhara and I checked into the Charles hotel in Harvard Square and
walked to a Starbucks as our caffeine levels seemed to be dropping.
Our task was to find as many blinks infected with the SerenityTech
mind control virus.

“How can we find them all?” I wondered aloud.

“Let’s start with BC,” answered Samhara.

“Do you know where he might be hiding out?”

“Yes, I do,” added Samhara confidently. “He’s sitting a couple of
tables away from us pounding shots of espresso as fast as he can get
his hands on them.”

“Hey BC,” I shouted.

“Yes,” he responded. And then, “Hi Gonz, what brings you to town?”
He sounded as if he was talking in his sleep. I cannot recall ever
hearing BC sound so dream-like without opiates involved.

Samhara went to his table and asked him to join us. As soon as he sat
down at our table he started talking. “Have you tried Freeman Crate
Serenity Adaptation yet?”

“Once,” I responded.

“Don’t you think that it is the greatest screen access program ever?”

“I didn’t really spend much time with it.”

“Why not?” Asked BC as if I told him I had decided to be celibate for
the rest of my life. “It is incredibly innovative, easy to use and
crashes less frequently than most any other screen reader.”

“I’m pretty happy with orca these days.”

“Linux? Have you gone mad? What would entice you to even try such a
thing? Linux people are like those damned pod people from that old
science fiction movie. They walk around praising Stallman and Linus
as if they would provide answers to all of their prayers. They are
worse than the weirdo Macintosh freaks.”

“I think it works great,” I added.

“See, you have fallen into their trap. Let me take a guess, you are
using Ubuntu?”

“Yes,” I replied, “How did you know?”

“I’ve been doing some research into its start up tune. I’ve found
that it contains subliminable messages.”

“Huh?”

“If you really slow it down it repeats phrases like, eat corn at every
meal, Mike Pedestrian loves you, Sun will always shine, Mickey Bald is
the devil and so on. I advise you to get as far away from Linux as
possible lest you turn into another pod person.

“We’re here to save you from a similar fate.”

“I haven’t been infected with the Linux mind control virus.”

“No, you’ve been taken over by the SerenityTech mind control virus.”

“No such thing!” Shouted BC as he jumped from his chair.

Samhara picked up BC’s chair from the floor and suggested, in the sort
of tone one reserves for small children, elders suffering from
dementia and those with downs syndrome. BC obeyed. Samhara then said
in her soft tone, “You have been acting strangely lately.”

“What do you mean?” Asked BC.

“In a blog post you wrote recently you pronounced that you believed
that Soupy Campbell had eclipsed Gore Glendon as the premier screen
reader hacker out there these days.” She said softly.

“Well, that’s the truth,” responded BC.

“Maybe so, but, you have also announced that you absolutely love SAM.”

“SAM who…”

— End

Most of the post I wrote yesterday contained corrections to the item I
had written the previous day. I apologized to Joe Clark and to the
author of the post I had quoted the day before for crediting the wrong
person for writing the terrific article that started this thread.
Nonetheless, Joe Clark felt it necessary to post a comment attacking
me and the work I’ve done in the past.

I do not know Mike Davies and when I looked around the Isolani web
page (link in yesterday’s post) before writing, I didn’t see a name
anywhere. I checked a number of links on the page including the the
one labeled “Contact” and found no reference to an individual. Thus,
I wrote the piece with a reference to the web site as, anyone who
reads BC with any regularity knows that it tends to come off the top
of my head and that I don’t spend a lot of time doing research for
these posts as I need to spend my time doing the research for which I
am paid.

Next, Joe Clark accused me of not knowing how to put a link in my blog
post. He wrote this after I had sent him a private email in which I
described the process I use to write BC while on the road and needing
to use web mail for anything I wish to send. Specifically, I write
the articles in Microsoft Word, as I do when I am at home, the major
difference being that when at home, I use the Word “Send” feature to
email the post to blogger which I cannot do here. So, after spell
checking, I did a select all, copy and then paste the entire item into
the text editor google provides for making blog posts. In the MS Word
version of the post, I had links to Jeff Bishop’s Desert Skies blog
and to the Isolani article as well. What I didn’t know was that the
links would get stripped out in the copy and paste and that they
wouldn’t appear in the blog post. So, go ahead, crucify me, I was
using a technique with which I was unfamiliar and made a boo boo.

Next, Mr. Clark states, “You’re one of the managers responsible for
inflicting Jaws on an unsuspecting blind public…” I am quite proud of
the work I did on JAWS for the six years in which I worked for HJ/FS.
I cannot recall the name of the Canadian researcher who published a
web accessibility scorecard comparing screen readers for a number of
consecutive years at CSUN. In the first year, the current version of
JAWS came in a close second place to IBM Home Page Reader and in
subsequent years, JAWS and HPR were either tied or JAWS held the top
position. At FS, while I had any influence, we worked hard to come as
close to the user agent guidelines as we could. It’s true that we
never reached a perfect score but JAWS came substantially closer than
any other general purpose screen reader and any web accessibility
expert should have known this little fact.

Finally, Joe Clark says, “I reiterate: You are always eager to put
words in my mouth.” I wish he would provide a reference to anything I
said that attributed statements to him that either he didn’t make or
for which I did not post a correction. When I accidentally attributed
the item Mike Davies wrote to Mr. Clark, I did so with glowing
commentary about the article so, quite obviously, I had not intended
any malice toward Mr. Clark. And, after receiving more of his anger,
I wrote a correction and even included a link to the page he uses to
raise money for his research, clearly not something an antagonist
would do but Joe Clark simply cannot accept that I am not an enemy and
that while we might really dislike each other, we are on the same team
and both are trying in our own way to promote accessibility on the web
and elsewhere.

— End

When I wrote yesterday’s BC entry, I had made the erroneous assumption
that Joe Clark wrote the blog that Jeff Bishop pointed to in Desert
Skies (link above) about accessibility being more a failure of web
developers than the AT companies. I made this assumption because this
blog has a link near the top that says, “Support Joe Clark, support
accessible media research.” I did not know that other people try to
help Joe raise money for his web accessibility projects.

So, when I received an angry email from Joe Clark suggesting that I
had “put words into his mouth,” I got confused and replied with a
number of quotes from the blog post at
http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/ScreenReadersAWebDeveloperFailure.

Joe responded with the link pointing to his fundraising efforts
quoted from my message and the statement, “Chris, get a fucking clue.”
When I replied to Joe asking exactly which clue he wanted me to
fucking get, he neglected to respond.

The blogger who wrote the excellent article only identifies himself or
herself as isolani and poking around the web page to find the identity
of this person did not result in my finding a name to credit for the
item. The closest thing to an identity for this provocative blogger
sits on the blog’s home page and says, “I am a web developer for Yahoo
Europe, based in London, United Kingdom, with a focus on web
accessibility.” Whoever this person is in real life, I will
definitely keep track of the blog posts in the future as the articles
are well written and presented in a logical manner.

As soon as I complete writing and posting this item, I will go back
and remove Mr. Clark’s name and any reference to him in yesterday’s
article. I did not know that he was trying to raise money to support
him while he performs his research. While Joe Clark and I have
completely incompatible personalities and cannot seem to communicate
with each other without clashing, I do respect his work and think BC
readers should visit http://joeclark.org/micro/ and decide for
themselves if they want to donate some money to help Joe pay his bills
while performing what I believe is important research.

So, whoever isolani is, I apologize to you for having given credit for
your terrific article to Joe Clark and I encourage you to keep writing
articles for your blog as you have excellent insights to complex
problems.

On Comments

Redux posted a comment to yesterday’s entry saying the AT companies
don’t always support the entire set of WAI guidelines and, therefore,
web developers who do try to make their work as accessible as possible
will often find that some of their effort had no real value because
the screen reader companies chose not to support some portion of the
guidelines.

I agree entirely with this statement and in yesterday’s post, I did
mention that I felt that the screen reader companies should work
together to present an industry wide set of rules that a web developer
can use to understand a baseline for how her content will be presented
to people who use screen readers to access information on the web.

I do not believe that creating a catalogue of what web developers can
expect as the minimal level of support for web content with a screen
reader would damage the competition in this market sector. I do
believe that such a document would go a long way to encourage web
developers to follow accessibility guidelines who, in the past, might
have been burned by the inconsistent results from one screen reader to
another and, in some cases, where no screen reader worked as they
expected. The individual screen reader companies can publish a
product specific addition to the industry wide document so, web
developers who only care that their development efforts works with
screen readers that go beyond the minimum can code to the additional
information provided by the individual screen reader companies and
place an statement on their site that says something like, “For the
best results using a screen reader we suggest you read this site with
.”

— End

Recently, Jeff Bishop has been blogging regarding a post made by a
sighted person that criticized how JAWS presented web pages. A blogger called isolani wrote an excellent article about such on his blog and here are
my comments about the matter.

I strongly agree with isolani’s assessment of the state of web
accessibility and that the responsibility for most web content issues
falls solidly into the lap of the web developers and the hacks they
have used to make web sites work while the standards for accessibility
have been fairly fluid over the years.

I, however, also believe that the screen reader authors/publishers
deserve some of the blame for one specific reason: namely, while most
if not all of the screen reader companies are members of ATIA and show
up at the industry association’s annual convention in Orlando, there
has been virtually no meetings between Freedom Scientific, GW Micro,
Dolphin, AI^2 and Serotek to discuss how web content should be
presented to their users in a way that web developers, even those good
guys who follow the WAI guidelines, so they can expect reasonably
consistent results no matter what AT the user with a vision impairment
might be using.

As isolani discusses his guilt for having crafted web pages in a
manner that works poorly with screen readers, I must also apologize
for my role in causing different screen readers to produce
inconsistent results on the same web page.

During my six years at HJ/FS, I strongly held the opinion that “it’s
accessible if it works with JAWS” and my input into design issues for
our Internet support actually promoted a user experience that, while I
thought it would be superior to our competition, it would, until the
competition caught up, be unique to JAWS. Today, almost three years
since I worked a day for FS, I use four different screen readers
(JAWS, Window-Eyes, System Access and orca) and each of these have
their own idiosyncratic ways of delivering web content. At FS, we
tried to follow the WAI User Agent Guidelines and would tell web
developers to read the WAI Web Content Guidelines if they wanted to be
accessible. If they wanted to be very accessible with JAWS, though,
they might do something differently in order to really shine. I would
say something similar to teams that built web browsers, steering them
away from an MSAA solution and into one that exposes a DOM which, at
that time, would only work with JAWS.

The other group of AT users and developers whom I feel own some of the
blame is those folks who insist on a lowest common denominator
solution to web sites. These people often push for alternate, “text
only” pages that a screen reader user can read without requiring their
AT to be smart enough to handle pages that, if coded to the content
guidelines, should work with all access technology products. I feel
strongly that text only, blind guy ghetto solutions are at best a
quick fix and at worst an incomplete version of the main web site.

I believe that because amazon.com added their text only interface
rather than making their entire web site comply with the guidelines
they contributed greatly to the perception that people with vision
impairments need a ghetto to live in that will shelter us from nasty
things like advertisements, long lists of information and many of the
features that people without a disability can use on the main amazon
site.

I know there are still a number of people who use SpeakUp or some
other text console based screen reader on GNU/Linux systems. They
will make the claim that because they use text only browsers that all
web sites should have some way to make a reduction of themselves so as
to work properly with ancient technology. My answer to this criticism
is that such people have access to the source code for their browsers
and that they should fix the compliance problems in the text browsers
and stop whining about progress in web standards.

As I started, I strongly agree that the majority of web accessibility
issues are the fault of web developers using odd hacks and writing
code that doesn’t comply with the guidelines. The issues with AT
companies and users above are relatively minor when compared to the
overwhelmingly huge number of poorly crafted web sites out there
today.

–End

“Love that dirty water,
Boston, you’re my home”

On August 25, Susan and I, both of our dogs (1 guide, 1 pet) piled
into our Toyota with luggage, computers and a few other things that we
thought we might need on our journey to Massachusetts.

The ride started in St. Petersburg and, on the first day, we got all
of the way to Florence, South Carolina. We had no idea that it would
take so long to drive through Georgia from south to north, we
definitely underestimated its size by a lot.

While they share a name, Florence, Italy may be culturally as far as
possible from its South Carolina namesake. We stayed at the Red Roof
Inn as we would every night on the road because they allow pet dogs at
all of their motels. From our hotel, we had a few options for a place
to eat, Waffle House, Omelet House and a very scary looking place that
also had “house” in its name. We only stayed one night there so the
culinary aspects of this town didn’t really matter much. As far as I
could tell, the only Florence, SC exists is to offer food from cheap
southern chains and to sell fireworks.

I would have thought all of this homeland security stuff would have
cut down on selling explosives to random customers but, alas, I
suppose they figure the rednecks who frequent such places do not have
the intellectual capacity to organize an assault on anything of
importance and real terrorists must not believe that they can buy some
pretty serious inflammatory and concussion products from a ton of road
side stands.

Day two we drove from lovely Florence to Virginia. As we approached
the North Carolina border, we found that a whole lot of billboards
advertised a place called south of the Border, a Mexican theme place
that, according to a leaflet in our room claimed to be exactly half
way from New York to Miami. It gave no explanation for its Mexican
theme in the middle of the Carolinas and I chose not to ask. As we
passed it, Sue described a really huge sombrero and a statue of a
Mexican guy that also seemed huge. From one of the billboards, we
learned that the complex housed “Rocket City” which claimed to be the
“largest fireworks store in North America.” This in no way made me
feel safe.

Upon reaching Virginia, we followed our MapQuest directions to
Virginia Beach. We checked into the Red Roof Inn, took a quick nap
and then went to visit my friend and guide dog school classmate and
her Shotsi, a lovely goldador. As guide dog school gave us assigned
seats for all of our meals, Misty and I sat beside each other for the
entire month and our dogs sat on the floor together and became
friends. As we started down the hallway to Misty’s apartment,
X-Celerator saw Shotsi and growled a little and then recognized his
old friend and practically dragged me to the apartment.

At Misty’s, the two guide dogs enjoyed a lot of play time. They did
some doggie boxing, had a tug of war with some toys and generally
jumped around making doggie sounds. Baby, our 20 pound pet dog, found
the behavior of the two bigger animals a bit disturbing and insisted
on barking at them and trying to herd them as he finds such displays
of joy unbecoming of a sophisticated dog.

The following day, we drove north from Virginia, like Georgia, much
larger than we thought. We finally got to Maryland, Delaware and
finally Edison, New Jersey named for Thomas Edison whose famous
laboratory remains preserved in Menlo Park, one town away from the
town that bears his name. I grew up a few miles from Menlo Park in a
town called Westfield, New Jersey and we visited Edison’s laboratory,
now a museum, on numerous field trips over the years.

Today, Edison is home to an enormous number of immigrants from South
Asia. I had hoped to eat in a South Indian restaurant which also has
a franchise in Cunard Place, New Delhi. Unfortunately, they stay
closed on Mondays and we had no intention of staying an extra day in
Jersey just to enjoy a meal.

The following day, we left on the final leg of our trip. This took us
north on the New Jersey Turnpike and we made our first stop at the
Vince Lombardi rest area to offer the dogs a time to relieve
themselves, for the humans to also relieve ourselves and to get gas.
At the pumps, a young man with a thick Latino accent asked us what we
wanted and it occurred to me that perhaps Lou Dobbs argument that
foreigners displace Americans from jobs must have some truth. What
person growing up in this country doesn’t envy any immigrant with a
job pumping gas at the famous New Jersey Turnpike rest area named for
a giant of football history. I also wondered why New Jersey had a
rest area named for Lombardi as the great coach didn’t come from
Jersey and he most famously coached the Green Bay Packers, a team
located in Wisconsin.

The rest of the ride from Jersey to Natick, Massachusetts went without
anything eventful. We stopped for lunch in Connecticut where I
enjoyed a turkey sandwich. From there it was smooth sailing all the
way to Susan’s mom’s house.

We arrived last Tuesday and have gotten into Cambridge most of the
days since. We’ve seen old friends and enjoyed the general
strangeness that is Harvard Square. We’ve eaten in a number of really
excellent places without analogue in our part of Florida. We’ve
gotten tickets to a number of jazz performances for later this month
and have enjoyed almost everything we’ve done so far.

X-Celerator, my guide dog, has performed excellently. On this past
Saturday, he got his first subway ride. We rode from the Riverside
station, the furthest west in the MBTA system to Park Street where we
changed to the Red Line that would bring us to Harvard Square. Before
heading down the stairs to the platform for the Red line, I slapped
some red tiles on a wall to the staircase. I told X-Celerator “watch
red.” Yesterday, three days when we arrived at Park Street station, a
chaotic and very noisy place for people, I said, “find red” and, on
his first time leading me in that station, he confidently walked
directly to the same set of stairs I showed him three days earlier.
The doggie has constantly impressed me in a series of challenging
situations in Cambridge and on the trains in and out of the city.

We’re having fun here in the north, enjoying the early fall weather
and the great restaurants.

— End

Hi Everyone.

Well, the last day or so has been quite eventful. I went out for coffee with friends yesterday afternoon, and returned to find a large pool of water on my laundry room floor. When Jason came home, he discovered that one of our pipes was cracked, and that whenever anyone used the water, it sprayed out the pipe. We had a Plummer come out first thing this morning, and after cutting into our wall, he replaced the defective part. The good news is that we can use our water again. The bad news is that now I have no excuse not to do the laundry.

We are continuing to get rain in the area. Parts of Southern Minnesota got as much as 17 inches of rain in one day last weekend. There is a lot of flood damage, and some people have even lost their houses. It’s still raining as we speak. Luckily Kaylor, who was trained in Oregon, doesn’t mind getting wet. It’s a definite change to the couple of dogs I’ve had who refused to pee in the rain.

I just downloaded the latest version of Skype. I actually haven’t used it much at all in the past, so I’m looking forward to learning how it works.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I’m in the process of trying to construct an IPE for my voc rehab counselor. This hasn’t been easy for me, as I need to write it with a particular goal in mind, and I’m not sure what I want that goal to be. I’ve been reading various career development books for insight and ideas. One of these is the famous “What Color is Your Parachute?” book. Part of this book includes something called “The Flower Exercise,” which has you identify ideal jobs/careers for yourself based on 7 factors: particular skills, preferred environments, preferred interests, ideal working conditions, preferred locations, wage requirements, and specific values. I haven’t finished it yet, but the first couple of exercises have been interesting. One had me think about a series of things I’ve done in my life, simply because I wanted to (whether to accomplish something or to fill some other personal need). I then had to think about all of the steps involved in those things, and what skills I had to use in order to complete them. Doing this made me realize that sometimes we achieve things without enjoying the process, and that sometimes we are good at things we don’t like to do. Conversely, there are adventures we decide to take that don’t end up giving us much to show for, except our delight in the journey, itself. There are also things we love to do, even though we’re not especially good at doing them.

Although it was difficult to recall and sift through these various events, it definitely told me a lot about what sorts of accomplishments and activities are important to me. The other exercise I worked on had me list all of the places I’ve lived, as well as what I liked and didn’t like about them. That brought to light an interesting quandry.

As a blind person, I want to live somewhere accessible. However, since I hate winter, I also want to live somewhere warm. This made me realize that I don’t know of many warm places that are also accessible. I should add to that by saying accessible…and affordable. I say this because I have lived in Berkeley and San Francisco. These places were both accessible and mild in winter, but the cost of living in these cities was also incredibly high.

I have also lived in Toronto. I love this city, and it is probably the most accessible place I’ve ever lived. It was expensive, though not as expensive as the S.F. Bay Area. However, it had very cold winters, which is why I moved to California. Unless anyone can point me to a city that is accessible, free of frigid winters, and has a reasonable cost of living, I’ve decided that my ultimate dream would be to live somewhere like Toronto for the majority of the year, but to own a condo in a warm place, so I could escape the cold weather between about January and March. I guess I need to keep working on that million dollar idea or that New York Times best seller…

Recently, I found out that I was approved for services through our local Department of Voc Rehab. So now the questions are: What do I want my plan to look like? And: What technology do I need?

With regard to technology, it is difficult to know what to ask for. Technology changes so fast now a-days, that I’m certain once I make a choice, something amazing will hit the market the following week. In addition, many things look really cool, but I have to consider what I will actually use on a daily basis, and what I will truly benefit from. For instance, I have a bill reader, and while it’s super cool and helpful, it’s not something I carry with me all the time. If we could just get our act together, and follow the Europeans’ idea of different sized bills, bill readers would be virtually unnecessary. But who needs accessible money, right?

Sometimes, the ideas behind a piece of technology are wonderful, but the execution is poor. Then one winds up with a gadget that is supposed to work in theory, but in practice is completely impractical (either because the interface is so poor that it becomes inefficient to use it, or because it proves unreliable). I noticed this with my Plextor. While the idea of recording lecture notes onto CD is great on paper, in practice, I found that my recordings did not always turn out the way I wanted them to. I definitely have my eye on one of those Olympus recorders. They look useful and fun to work with at the same time.

Another issue with technology is that sometimes the available options seem less than appealing. I’m thinking particularly of screen readers. I could get the latest JFW upgrade, and subject myself to the continually deteriorating product quality and customer service that seem to be F.S.’ default of late, or I could purchase Window-Eyes. In the latter case, I’d have to learn a whole new screen reader from scratch, although I have heard enough good things from W.E. users to make that prospect seem worthwhile. System Access would be the other possibility, but my recent experiences with it have been frustrating at best. Something has definitely broken in MS Word 2003, and now I’m not even receiving audio feedback when I press the BACKSPACE key. While it’s still a great program on the Internet, I do need something that allows me to perform word processing-related tasks, and I’d rather not have to purchase MS Office 2007 to do it.

This whole problem with breaking old things when implementing new features seems common in many facets of assistive technology, and is particularly frustrating to me, given that so many of we blind folk cannot upgrade with the speed of sighted consumers. When upgrading to the latest and greatest, it’s not just a matter of purchasing the mainstream software–it’s also a matter of finding the $1000 + required to purchase the latest screen reader or whatever.

I’m also still struggling with the notetaker versus laptop debate. While I love using a laptop most of the time, and enjoy it’s versatility, there are some definite pluses to a notetaker like the Braille Note or Braille Wave. I like the “instant-on” functionality–especially when I’m in a hurry and it seems to take forever to boot up my computer. I also like the long battery life on the notetakers–being able to use my notetaker through an entire coast to coast flight. The final thing I like about notetakers, is that I sometimes want to be able to read and take notes with no voice output. Sometimes, just having the braille in front of me is the best option–depending on the scenario. For instance, when giving a presentation, or having to take notes in a situation when I don’t want one of my ears taken up with the nattering of digitized speech. Also, as a writer, I sometimes find that the sound of a screen reader muddles my thoughts. However, there’s no denying that many of the notetakers on the market are prohibitively expensive without funding assistance. I understand that that is largely because of the cost of manufacturing braille cells, but it is still a reality that poses a huge stumbling block for many of us. I know notetakers are available without braille displays, but in my case, that eliminates many of the things I like most about using such a device.

Anyway, enough of my technology quandries for today.

This is an add-on and test following my last post. When I went to publish it, I wasn’t able to do it without dealing with one of those image verification things. I could be grateful that Google actually has an audio option, but there is so much background noise behind it, that it is virtually impossible to figure out which blobs of sound are the numbers, and which are the static. These things should be banned. And looking further down this page, I see that I have to do this every single fucking time I want to post. Pardon the explatives, but seriously… Sometimes I just want to move to a deserted technologically-free island far far away.

Hello All.

I apologize for my extended absence. In addition to putting the finishing touches on my wedding (scheduled for less than 2 months from now), and looking for consulting gigs, my fatigue has been terrible the last couple of weeks. I won’t spend this entire entry talking about fatigue, but sometimes I’d give anything to be able to take a vacation from my body. Now there’s a business idea. Rent a body. I think it has great potential.

I’d like to say I’ve just been enjoying the lazy days of summer, but the 90+ degree heat is actually starting to get on my nerves. As much as I detest winter (and believe me, that word doesn’t begin to cover it), I’m looking forward to the beautiful Minnesota fall–with day time temps in the 60’s. I have been feeling so bad for my poor little doggies–both pet and guide dog. It is nearly impossible to walk them with any regularity in this heat. I woke up at 5:30 one morning, with hopes of beating the heat. It was already over 75 degrees, with 80% humidity. I’m not sure what other dog users do when the weather is extreme, but extreme temps are an instance when I am very thankful that the Mall of America is near by. Because of it’s huge size, I am able to walk Kaylor for hours without getting bored. The work is also challenging enough, because of the crowds, noise, and food distractions, that he actually gets a good workout while we’re at it.

Several years ago, when I lived in Toronto, I used to take my GSD into what we called “The Underground City.” It sounds rather ominous–bringing to mind dingy tunnels with low ceilings and dripping water, but it’s actually a labyrinth of underground shops, offices, and immaculately kept corridors. In fact, I’ve heard that there is approximately 16 miles of twists and turns–connecting much of the downtown portion of the city. It was a great place to take my dog when the weather was too cold to do anything else–especially since she was one of those dogs that *needed* to work. If I waited too long between workouts, she would actually put her paws up on my lap, and slap me in the side of the head with one of them–all the while uttering her various Shepherd grunts of displeasure. And talk about challenging. My O&M instructor actually had to figure out how to navigate it himself, before he could show me how to get from point A to point B.

I am much more fortunate with Kaylor, in that he is an excessively patient dog. I am also lucky because he can go for several days without difficult work, and then breeze through downtown Minneapolis as though he does it all the time. Speaking of Kaylor, he celebrated his fifth birthday last Friday. He enjoyed some wonderful venison medallions in honor of the occasion. This was a special birthday for me, because my previous two dogs were both retired for health issues before the age of five. It felt good to reach that milestone with a dog again.

He also received a very nice phone call from his puppy raisers. They are the nicest couple, and they spoil him rotten every Christmas. Last Christmas they sent him a doggy bed that could easily fit two of him–from LLBean, no less.

Now, I say this with the knowledge that I have been extremely lucky in the puppy raising department, but I actually like knowing my dog’s raisers. I love hearing all those fun puppy stories, getting the puppy photos, and hearing about what my dog liked to do as a puppy. For instance, without contact with his raisers, how else would I know that Kaylor visited the historic library at Yale when he was five months old? Or that he used to like to hunt small mountain creatures with the family Newfoundland? Explains a lot about the rabbit killing incident…

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Seeing Eye is an amazing program. I have even considered trying them when it comes time to get my next dog. I only mention TSE, because I am familiar with their puppy raising policies. At the same time, the exercise of sitting through a graduation is quite tiresome. I love meeting my raisers–I only wish I could just skip graduation and go straight to the dinner or other social activities I have done with them in the past.

Well, I’ve gone on long enough for now. Barring future bouts of extreme fatigue, I will attempt to post far more regularly than I have in the last several weeks. Hope all are well, and managing to stay cool, and out of the path of storms.